Spending on performance marketing as a young brand is not a great step for brand building: Sugar's Vineeta Singh

Vineeta Singh, the Co-founder and CEO of Sugar Cosmetics, gave a super talk on day one of Goafest 2022 about the importance of brand building for young and new-age brands. She was addressing the Industry Conclave presented by ABP Group.

BestMediaInfo.com caught up with her to understand more about brand building and how the brand has grown vivaciously over the past two years. The brand had around 2,000 followers on Instagram pre-pandemic and now has a base of approximately 2.1 million followers.

Singh said that she doesn’t advise performance marketing to brands as it lacks the sense of connection with the customer which is a key element of brand building and development of brand loyalty amongst consumers. She said, “Spending on performance marketing as a young brand is not a great step for brand building, because at the end of the day the relationship that you get through performance marketing with the consumer is very transactional, whereas brands get built on emotional relationships, so you need to go beyond the transaction.”

“That is why we feel the best investments are in - wooing the consumer with great product/brand experience, story communication, design, and packaging. The other factor is building community and content, especially for women because they love the feeling of belonging to a community.”

“We feel educating, informing, and entertaining, thereby empowering the consumers more than typical transactional relationships. This is why we majorly invest in content marketing and the product,” she added.

To put this in perspective, it should be understood that Sugar Cosmetics collaborates with a lot of influencers. About 1000 influencers have collaborated with the brand on various campaigns, creating content or promoting the brand.

One more interesting thing here is that the brand mostly collaborates with nano/micro-influencers even after being a popular make-up brand. Singh revealed that they don't spend on influencer marketing. They don't pay influencers for collaborations instead they go with influencers who believe in the brand and actually like the products.

Singh said, “Influencers get to feature on our page which has more than 2.1 million followers which work for both. With the help of influencers and content marketing SUGAR Cosmetics has 40 million unique customers.”

Currently, the company is also associated with many short video apps such as Moj, Chingari, and other regional apps. It is also working on using Metaverse as an important tool for live commerce.

D2C is booming with the advent of technology and affordability of the internet as well as devices, increasing the reach of brands across the country. But with many brands coming into existence, will it not create clutter and how can one distinguish themself?

Singh who has been a Shark on ‘Shark Tank India’, having invested in many start-ups, said, “It is important to remember that our population is 130 crore, we have a lot of consumers to go after. The easiest funnel to reach consumers is through social media. So, brands spend the money to kill each other thereby creating destruction which is not the essence of brand building. I feel that for young brands it is important to identify their own audience/consumer base within this huge population. And that will help young brands to distinguish themselves from the clutter.”

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