Eye on GenZ, Fastrack to spend more than 50% of ad budget on digital in remaining part of FY20

Indian fashion accessory brand Fastrack plans to spend a lion’s share of its marketing budget on digital for remaining quarters of the financial year 2020 keeping in mind the consumption habits of millennials and its new-found audience, the GenZ.

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The brand has recently expanded its TG to GenZ from millennials and is focusing on communicating with that audience via digital mediums. In June, Fastrack signed actor Ananya Pandey as its brand ambassador.

“We will clearly be spending more than 50% of our budget on digital media. In terms of the increase in the trend, it would be almost a 50% increase over last year,” said Ayushman Chiranewala, Marketing Head at Fastrack.

According to Chiranewala, GenZ spends more time on their handheld devices and on VOD platforms. Hence, the trend was already there for Fastrack to focus on digital as a medium.

“It got heightened with pandemic because of the changing media consumption habits of consumers,” he said.

The brand will continue to focus on digital with more innovative thoughts around it. “We will focus in and around our social and digital handles, be it exciting content or riding on some other chord of emotion,” he said.

The brand is doing some amount of TV advertising also, “We are there on IPL as well, but Fastrack is not the leading brand on IPL. We have Titan and Tanishq from the company but we have taken some small elements there,” Chiranewala said.

He said some of Fastrack’s investment will go for tactical tie-ups, which will possibly unfold on television and radio than just putting up a spot.

“If I go very specific on digital, we have an aggressive plan but we also had to draw a balance here with the IPL season clashing midway. We didn’t want to shift from the core audience of trying to reach the GenZ girls with this campaign, so we decided to stay off from IPL with this campaign. But we are targeting and micro-targeting the core at the places we would usually find them,” he said.

“Our mission is to continue to be the iconic youth accessory brand and the vision to achieve that is through understanding this customer segment about how the segment is, what it is seeking, be it technology or minimalism, the difference in choices when it comes to fashion and accessories,” he said.

The brand plans to answer those calls and stay ahead of trends by trying to achieve them.

He said tier II and III markets are doing well as a fair amount of people are stepping out, and marketers can look forward to spending on other mediums in those markets. But digital marketing is must as it helps in micro-target and delivers a message to whom it is intended for.

Fastrack’s core segment of GenZ evolves continuously; in every five years there are a new set of people who enter this segment with a new set of thoughts and beliefs. The definition of fashion is also very fast-changing in GenZ, “We also noticed that they are making very fluid choices in nature,” Chiranewala said. 

Fastrack is looking forward to keep up with the changing fashion trend and be known as a fast-tech brand, which is on the cusp of fashion as well as bringing in technology into a product.

When the lockdown started, the brand ran a campaign #flexwithreflex, which was more about using the reflex collection of smart-watches and telling people to stay fit in indoors.

Moving from advising people to stay in and check out the brand’s products on Instagram, Fastrack later moved on to talking about its gaming collection in lockdown.

“After unlock, our first campaign with actor Ananya Pandey happened in July, which was fit-out campaign celebrating the quirkiness in the heart of GenZ girls. We have migrated from there to the new collection with Ananya, who has just launched the Ruffles collection #RuffleItUp. The collection is co-created with Ananya and it is really about the completely different world,” he said.

The brand is expecting the ruffle collection to connect with the unconditional divas who want to make a bold statement and are looking for sophisticated and elegant flavours in their repertoire of accessories.

Chiranewala said that the collection is not just watches but the brand has included handbags too. It is quite confident beyond doubt that the offering will appeal to GenZ girls.

He said that the ruffles collection campaign is getting good reviews, the film is getting a sense of virality and a lot of people are interacting with it organically because the brand hasn’t started its marketing yet. 

The campaign will be the brand’s focus for the entire month of October and mid-November and the key platforms it will use for the campaign are social media, a lot of digital marketing, and in-store visuals.

“We are very hopeful about the festive season; the initial signs are extremely encouraging as well for us,” he said.

The brand is looking forward to creating a lot of shoulder content around the ruffles campaign. Fastrack will do fashion and styling video on its YouTube channel by Ananya Pandey.

“The next four to five weeks will see many of these things unfold on Ananya’s social handle,” Chiranewala said.

At present, the brand is focussing on the Ruffles collection for the festive season and has launch plans in the ‘Reflex’ smart collection.

The brand has planned a campaign for GenZ boys as well for this festive season. The campaign is called mettle for the mettle collection. It’s not yet out in the market and will be launched by the end of October.

Speaking on the impact of lockdown, Chiranewala said, “The recoveries were very slow in May and June in the non-essential categories. But the signs have been very encouraging; it’s almost like a V-shaped recovery in terms of demand.”

Digital has become a fast recovery channel, he said. “Both our market place partners as well as the brand’s .com sites have been a great recovery/growth coming our way. It is quite expected because people have a fear of stepping out and in the lockdown, most people have trained themselves to do a lot of shopping online.”

With the help of technology, Fastrack introduced multiple new ways of servicing customers. “We introduced video calling-activated omni-orders, we built-in appointment orders. We took multiple steps very quickly so that the customer experience becomes as organised as possible,” shared Chiranewala.

The brand has tied up with the biggest e-commerce platforms and plans some exotic launches in the festive season sale.

He said some brands are hinging slightly more on discounts but Fastrack is not using discount as a tool to gain market share. The brand is creating exciting products and focusing on giving those at a great value.

The brand has witnessed a clear shift towards technology as it is being considered as the new cool in terms of fashion. Chiranewala said minimalism and simplicity both in technology, as well as regular products, is something that is catching eyeballs today.

“We take these learnings and consolidate it with the new exciting products which are relevant for them, it’s kind of challenging but with each new collection, we are quite delighted to admit that we really address the GenZ well,” adds Chiranewala.

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