Advertisers have started relooking at print, says Amul's Jayen Mehta

At a time when all other brands were cutting down on advertising budgets during the peak of the lockdown, dairy major Amul saw it as an opportunity and increased its media spending.

Jayen Mehta, Sr. General Manager (Planning and Marketing), Amul (GCMMF) said the company’s marketing efforts were consistent right from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have been among the top 10 consistent advertisers in the last six-seven months. When the lockdown was announced, we doubled our spends in mass media and the kind of mileage we got in that time was unprecedented,” he said.

The brand associated with the Ramayana and Mahabharata TV shows while collaborating with IPL, receiving a huge growth in terms of visibility.

The company spends less than 1% of its turnover on marketing which, Mehta added, has been consistent this year and will remain the same in the upcoming year as well.

While its marketing mix is fully spread out, the brand is going big on hoardings, OTT, radio and digital as well.

“We are among the first ones to get back to print despite all the lockdown issues. Looking at the volumes from the past one month, I assume advertisers are looking at print now again,” he added.

It also leverages its Facebook activations a lot.

Garnering around 1.1bn views on the platform in the last six months, Mehta said, “We have garnered these views and audiences because of the Live show we do with chefs, creating a lot of content. It has been one of the most powerful activations in the field of Live content. Also, the return on investment is infinite here because there is no cost of creating this content.”

The Live #SimpleHomeMadeRecipes show:

It has come up with the ‘Amul Topical Quiz Content’ on Facebook, where, he said, the brand is getting huge traction already.

“We go where the customers are, so we have to keep evaluating the mediums while creating new properties as we do mass media as well. We try to have the right mix of everything and we are maintaining that balance. There will be no change in the allocation of budgets in the coming times,” he added.

Apart from this, having launched over 30-40 new products amid the pandemic, Mehta said the business has been an overdrive for Amul as compared to most other companies.

This year's festive season was no different from last year for the brand.

“Things have been good for us over the last 12 months. The pandemic didn’t affect us much since we were consumer and producer-focused. Our sales and supply chain wasn’t disrupted for a single day and by and large, business is good and normal,” he added.

Asked how the company expects to achieve the goal set for FY 2020, Mehta said, “We are well on track to achieve what we had planned for.”

He added, “Our CAGR is about 15-17% on a 10-year basis, which we will be achieving despite the lockdown.”

He shared how the sentiments in the industry will continue to remain positive in the coming times as well given now that the HoReCa segment will now be operational.

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