Ice cream brands increase ad spends and bet big on social media this summer
Since the summer season contributes to 40-50% of the overall sales of ice cream companies. To make the most out of it, brands are now focussing on getting more traction on social media, introducing new variants and ramping up production capacities in addition to increasing ad spends
With a comparatively prolonged and warmer summer approaching, several ice cream brands including Baskin Robbins, Natural Ice Creams and Mother Dairy, are eyeing over 20% category growth during the period. Thus the brands in this category are increasing their ad budgets and focusing marketing strategy on social media platforms for increased traction.
Mohit Khattar
According to Mohit Khattar, CEO, Graviss Foods, the parent company of Baskin Robbins, the summer season is usually very critical for all ice cream manufacturers. With regards to the same, the brand has introduced new variants and 17 new products across diverse product categories ranging from ice cream pizzas to ice cream floats and fruit cream sundaes for adults to fairytale sundaes for small kids.
“The intention is to get consumers to try something superior, something different, something more exciting and more satisfying this year. The short-term objective is to get more traction, attention and share for the brand while the longer-term objective remains to make the brand one of the most preferred in the category,” he said.
In addition to this, he also emphasised that the brand’s marketing team is trying to get its key messages out and target popular youth-centric platforms on social and digital media as well as tactical catchment-driven campaigns.
“We aim to continue to expand our network of stores and add at least another 80-100 stores over our base of 850+ parlours that we operate currently. We are targeting growth of at least 20% YoY and faster than the growth of the industry in general,” he stated.
Manish Bandlish
As per Manish Bandlish, Managing Director, Mother Dairy, too, summer is the most anticipated season for a category like ice creams as over 40% of the annual sales happen during the first quarter of the fiscal.
“With summer predictions like last year, we had anticipated the surge in demand and had adequately prepared ourselves with a holistic approach for the category. For our ice cream portfolio, apart from strengthening our cold chain infrastructure, we have ramped up our production capacities by adding new lines for ice cream bars and have also invested in asset deployment at our consumer touchpoints to ensure shelf strength,” he said.
With this, he also went on to add that in order to keep the brand’s consumers excited this summer season, Mother Dairy has introduced many new variants and flavours largely under the impulse portfolio – led by kulfis, cones and bars.
“We have recently rolled out a new ice cream campaign called #MotherPromise, to drive the brand’s salience and affinity. The six-week campaign comprises two TV commercials that seek to inspire a superlative commitment from consumers by making a ‘Mother Promise’ over a Mother Dairy ice cream, knowing that it stands for superior taste and quality,” he said.
All the more, he also emphasised that on an overall basis, this year’s summers look promising, and the brand expects the ice cream category to grow by over 20% vs last year’s summer season.
Siddhant Kamath
Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com, Siddhant Kamath, Director, Natural Ice Cream, also shared that they too are anticipating and growing at 25-30% and that looking at the trends, the brand will be able to achieve this due to the combination of new stores and markets contributing well along with summer kicking in just at the right time.
“Summer is great for launching new products and flavours- our Orange Pistachio and Butterscotch are new offerings that are working well since the launch. The key Driver is also favourable weather. Too much heat also discourages people from stepping out, and even sudden rains or early showers can impact footfalls. Though there is a rise in Delivery Sales, summer attracts good walk-in business,” he pointed out.
Commenting as to what objectives is the brand eyeing to achieve this time around, he stated that the brand is focused on seasonal offerings and has thus increased its ad budgets gradually increasing on a year-on-year basis and that more focus has been on promotion on social media and on aggregator platforms like Swiggy and Zomato as a combination of the two helps in brand recall.
“Social Media is our main vehicle for the summer seasons. We have seen our ads performing well and reels help in brand recall for seasonal flavour announcements. The strategy has always been to stick to our original proposition. We are exploring WhatsApp marketing as well where push notifications for existing customers for new flavours are working out well,” he added.
Throwing light on the brand’s marketing plans, he also shared that Naturals Ice Cream has launched a new campaign and collaborated with Filtercopy to best talk about one of their ice cream flavours- Malai.
“With the flavour, we took off the talking point about how one can eat Naturals Malai flavour ice cream and also create the best recipes out of it. Malai being a two-ingredient ice cream can be used as an ingredient itself for your kitchen experiments. It was best to collaborate with the Filter Copy team as YouTube and Instagram are primarily target audiences,” he said.
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