‘Airport advertising works well for our brand'

Charu Malhotra Bhatia, Head of Marketing at Somany Ceramics Ltd talks about the brand’s outlook on airport advertising and other aspects of OOH, in an interview to Bhawana Anand.

Could you share your thoughts on how OOH fits into your brand’s marketing approach?

Our offering is primarily a commodity product which is now moving on to being an important element of home décor. Hence, organised brands like ours have started to work with the aim of creating a special place in the consumer’s mind. Earlier, this industry followed a very generic mode of communication.

For us, Out-of-Home (OOH) hasn’t been that prominent until now, but since our target audience comprises the Millennials we have started mass marketing to reach out to them. Earlier, the influencers like architects and contractors. played a significant role in promoting the brand. However, now when the consumers have started to choose specific brands, we have also started to reach out to them where the OOH marketing plays a key tactical role.

We follow two different strategies for OOH advertising— first is a tactical pan-India approach designed to support newly-launched stores or experience centres where we inform people about the locations of our showrooms. Such activities are primarily done in the Tier | & Il cities as we get a better response in those markets. And, the second strategy includes airport advertising that commands captive audiences.

We prefer airport advertising over conventional OOH in the metro cities, primarily because our target groups (TGs), i.e. middle and upper middle-class, are travelling and spotted at the airports.

How do you plan your campaigns inside the airports?