Pavan R Chawla caught up with Anup Jain, Director – Marketing, Yum! Restaurants India- Pizza Hut to find out where Radio doesn’t feature enough in the radar of his company’s marketing plans. Excerpts.
What are your target markets in India? Which cities do you primarily focus on?
As a brand, Pizza Hut is spread over 34 cities. All these are our target markets. However, we primarily focus on the Top 10 metros since our restaurant concentration is higher.
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What is your marketing Budget, and your media mix across , TV, Online, Radio, Digital & New Age Media, others?
Our annual marketing budget is Rs 15 crore, and our media mix includes advertising across print, online, TV, digital and social media. While TV is a mass medium, digital and social media are fast catching up and Pizza Hut is extremely focused on ensuring a strong digital presence for itself. We have recently appointed Hungama Digital Media Entertainment as our social media agency as well. TV is still the majority of our spends at 65%.
Why does an important medium like Radio not feature strongly or even at all on your marketing plan’s media mix? It is a strong reach builder from mornings to around 1 pm every day, and is tuned in to by your TG in a big way…
While we do understand the reach and impact of Radio, we have not yet included it in our media mix in a big way. However, we are more than willing to experiment with this exciting medium and will take a call going forward.
What would make you want to use Radio in a sustained and aggressive way?
As a brand, we are open to using Radio as an important part of our media mix. However, it does not find prominence in our present media mix. We will be more than willing to use it as and when a need arises, especially for price point and time bound promotions.
How much activation and ground promotion do you use in your media plans? How strongly does Radio feature in such plans?
We do most of our activation inside our own stores. Radio has been used from campaign to campaign basis.
Let’s talk about your views on Radio as a marketer’s medium, keeping aside how you use it for Pizza Hut.
It is an effective medium for reaching out to an audience to announce an event, generate an immediate response and provide a good surround to a TV-centric plan. It is very effective in reaching housewives and youth, especially with a time-bound message or a specific price point-related message which does not require visual support.
And you’re still not using it enough…
See, Radio is a non-visual medium. That hampers its use for our sector because we need to entice the customer visually on our products. For price-point activations and time bound promotions like lunch hour special etc, radio can be a very effective medium. Radio needs to integrate very well with other media especially digital to be used in a big way.
Radio Networks are increasingly adding interactive platforms to integrate Digital and social media, through fan pages, and opening up contest- and deferred broadcast avenues on their own web portals….
Then perhaps the clients and agencies should be made more aware of it. What happens today is that the media buying agency tells you, here’s your television plan for the target markets; for radio, just record a jingle.
So one hopes you receive strong solutions pitches from Radio Networks’ sales teams…
Insha-Allah!
What is your view on the quality of creative advertising on radio in India, today? Please give some examples of good memorable radio spots and why do you think they are memorable?
It is good in parts and depends on what the clients want. Gabbar etc have been used ad nauseum and fail to generate enthusiasm anymore – we need to move beyond that. The medium is audio and thus, jingles, tunes an even non-musical creatives need to be used effectively to leverage this medium.
Radio is a short span-of-attention medium where audio messaging is being delivered. It is important to relate with humour to catch everyone’s attention but equally important to ensure it does not get too overpowering for the product/ brand message.
