6. Dunzo’s Method for Running Brand Campaigns
- Sai Ganesh Ex-Head of Brand, Dunzo
Brand and content campaigns are always a function of the persona and the channel. That’s how you build your brand marketing campaigns.
It's not just one single thing. It includes understanding who the personas are, their problems, the channels they spend their time on, and discovering the content they are already consuming.
When I say a persona problem, it sounds surface-level, but a lot of detailed work goes into it. For example, with Dunzo Daily, the personas we identified were:
- Settlers.
- Mid-income migrant families.
- Large migrant families.
- Migrant singles and spinsters.
Going into the details means looking at their occupation, language, family size, alternate options, and what they say about the brand in this category.
Who is the decision maker? Who makes the payment? Who checks the inventory? When do they use Dunzo? What other problems do they face with Dunzo and so on?
These can keep changing. When you start off, your power users are important, but as you start to scale, it’s the new users who become critical. But knowing it is very important. Everyone should do a detailed exercise to figure out their persona, problems and pain points.
Once you have your persona figured out, you must know which channel they’re spending maximum time on and, more importantly, understand the hacks for that channel.
For example, let’s say your consumers spend the most time on Instagram. You should know that bookmarking and sharing stories are more important for discoverability on Instagram than likes and comments.
These are the hacks you need to understand about each of your channels because it doesn’t require a rocket scientist to spend more money on each channel and get engagement likes and followers.
As an early-stage startup brand, you need to hack that system and figure out ways to grow at lower costs. Each channel has hacks, whether it's LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or Twitter. The key to successful campaigns is balancing what you know about your persona and what you know about the channel.
For example, many people think that Dunzo is funny, witty, clever, and cute. But that isn’t always true.
All of that is just on social media, organic, where we are being clever, cute, and all of those things because that is where we are programming that for Dhruvs and Deepikas of the world.
If you look at our performance ads, they’re always “50% off.” They have minimal text, are fresh and fast, and no jhanjhat. It’s very, very new user language.
Same thing for product copy. When a user comes on a product, they don’t want to see clever copy. In fact, they only want to see the exact information they need to take the next action. You can create delightful moments after the order.
Another example is this Kannada startup pack that we released in Bangalore. Judging by the response we’ve received, this is probably one of the best pieces of work we’ve ever done.
Here, we are talking to migrant families and migrant singles living in Bangalore. That is our persona.
Their main problem is that they don’t know the local language even after living in Bangalore for many years. This means they find it difficult to talk to people in the city. That is the problem for the user persona here.
You will notice that we have not mentioned Grocery or Dunzo anywhere here. This is another key to brand campaigns. Don't try to fit your product or logo into everything. It makes your content less shareable.
This is how we approached creating brand campaigns at Dunzo. We created them for a detailed user persona, chose the communication and channels most relevant to the persona, and then made the content shareable.
With all of this we could create campaigns with Puneeth Rajkumar, a very well-known Kannada film actor, which directly related to our value prop of speed.
We also brought Sunny Deol out of retirement to reach his niche audience and appeal to the millennials who use his dialogues as memes.