Playing Cupid with Buyers and Sellers
With Quikr Nxt as its latest offering, Indian online classifieds company Quikr continues to connect buyers with consumers. Vineet Sehgal, CMO, Quikr talks about introducing innovative features relevant to the Indian consumer and building the online classifieds category in India BY HENNA ACHHPAL What sets Quikr apart from other players in the online classifieds category in India? Quikr is an Indian company, so we understand the consumers intimately. As we grew over the last five years, we built everything from scratch. We don’t have a global platform that we put into play here. We have a large operations and sales team. Though we are a digital business, we have an offline presence across cities. There’s a team that goes house to house in certain neighbourhoods and educates consumers about online classifieds and helps them list their products online. We also have a large quality control team that is strong on resources just to ensure that the standards of quality are met. We curate and reject almost 30-35% of the ads we receive online. One of the things we continue to do is innovate and try new things that are relevant in the Indian context. Which are some of these initiatives? In the initial years, before the penetration of Internet and mobile, we started with the missed call campaign. Consumers would give us a missed call, we would call them back, and handhold them through the process of putting their ads online. The campaign was focused on the masses. It continues to exist but we don’t overtly advertise it as in the last couple of years, the Indian consumer and Indian digital ecosystem have undergone a big change. As consumers have become savvy with smartphones and apps, they have begun to understand the process of online classifieds themselves. Similarly, we did the MSP campaign. We understood that, not knowing whether they’re getting the right value for a product is a pain point for many consumers. We created a search engine that helped define the Maximum Selling Price one can get based on certain criteria for the products. What was the insight behind Quikr Nxt and what’s the response been like? As a company, we’re continually looking at what drives growth and what are the key concerns for consumers. While we’ve seen tremendous growth, we’ve also recognized certain barriers to adoption. Be it concerns about number privacy, interruptions in daily life, managing information or dealing with multiple calls and queries. All these insights led to the product feature called Quikr Nxt, which we believe is a relevant and important feature. It’s been over three weeks since we went live with it and already more than one in six responses of all kinds, i.e., the various means through which consumers contact each other, are happening through Quikr Nxt. Which platform witnesses the maximum traffic? Mobile web and app together account for more than 77% of our traffic. One, it’s because consumers are becoming digitally savvy and know that it’s a simple three step process, second because of the efforts we are devoting to product development. Desktop traffic still accounts for the balance and traffic through missed calls right now is less than 2%, which is good. When did Quikr start ramping up its marketing activities? It’s only in the last two years that we’ve scaled up our marketing investments. The first two-three years were more about building the platform and foundation of the business. In the early days of Quikr, we did some advertising in 2012 that was targeted at the early adopters of Internet in the country. Marketing and communications make up some of the most strategic investments we are doing to build the business. What is Quikr’s media mix like? At one level, if we break it into offline and Digital, we roughly spend in the ratio of about 60-40. Digital uses 40-45% of our spends in the form of SEM, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Digital activations and app marketing. In offline, apart from Television, we actively use OOH. We have scaled up our Outdoor activities in the top 17 cities because we want to create awareness about our category. We also use Print tactically and have done some innovations with select dailies. We’ve experimented with Radio in the past, but right now, it’s not a priority in our media mix. What are some of Quikr’s unique marketing initiatives so far? We have tied up with some of the biggest music festivals, Sunburn and Supersonic. These tie-ups were not just with the large events in Goa, but we also had access to many colleges across multiple cities and towns. Apart from the house-to-house campaigns already mentioned, we also do a donation drive called SmileXchange in partnership with Hindustan Times in select cities. We associated with Delhi Daredevils last year during IPL7 as principal sponsors and would like to continue with it. During Diwali, we integrated with three television shows on Star Plus. Mass media, especially the Star network and General Entertainment Channels, have the largest reach. While we essentially target the youth, we are also talking to households and the larger mass of the country. This association with Star Plus was the best way to reach them beyond advertising, by integrating in a subtle yet simple manner, weaving the brand in the larger context of the story. The idea was to reach them and show them how simple it is to use Quikr. What was the insight behind Quikr’s 2-minute digital film with AIB in October? We believe that our core target audience comprises digitally savvy consumers in the age group of 18 to 30. Our brand is essentially quirky, humorous and easy-going. While Television has a role to play in terms of creating awareness, we believe Digital plays a much bigger role in engaging our core audience in the context and language they understand. Advertising is often seen as ads trying to sell something and there’s only so much you can do, but a channel such as AIB is a great platform to reach our target consumer. Where do you see the Indian online classifieds category heading? In line with the overall growth of Internet in India, we’re delighted by the kind of adoption online classifieds have seen and that reflects in our numbers, engagement metrics, number of ads posted, number of visits, etc. There is clearly momentum. We now need to expand it to even larger numbers and speed up this growth. This will be driven by a couple of things. One is innovation - newer product, newer features, and more compelling reasons for consumers to go online. Second is smarter and effective marketing and communication which do not just help consumers transact online, but fundamentally change behaviour. Today, people have inertia when it comes to going online and transacting, especially on a classifieds site. The third thing is to educate them not just about a few categories, but the huge number of other things they can do, and how it can become relevant to their lives. ABOUT THE BRAND A home-grown horizontal classifieds platform, Quikr was established in 2008 and is led by Pranay Chulet. It is present in more than 1,000 cities in India and operates in over 13 categories and 170 sub-categories that include mobile phones, household goods, cars, real estate, jobs, services and education. Quikr operates across desktop, laptop and mobile phones, and allows individuals as well as small businesses to sell, buy, rent and find things across multiple categories. Quikr’s investors include Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Matrix Partners India, Omidyar Network, Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Warburg Pincus and eBay Inc. MARKETING TIP It used to be a 360-degree campaign, now it is 365 days. You have to be present and talking to your consumers always. Facts Creative Agency: McCann Erickson Media Agency: Havas Media Group PR Agency: Gutenberg PR Digital Agency: Grey Digital CMO FILE Vineet Sehgal came on board as Quikr’s CMO in September 2014. Prior to Quikr, Sehgal headed Nokia’s programmes and planning portfolio. He led large scale launches of some of the most used mobile devices in India. He founded the Nokia Money start-up team and drove its growth from conception to market roll out. He began his career in consumer marketing with Nestle. He has over 18 years of experience in marketing and business strategy across industries such as telecommunication, FMCG, banking and management consulting. Feedback: henna@exchange4media.com
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