Siddharth Singhvi, Vice President – Business Excellence and Country Head – Site Sales Representative, Wonder Cement, discusses marketing strategy and communication of the company in perspective of the present and the future market conditions.

Explain in brief the marketing strategy for Wonder Cement and its target customer base.
The tagline for Wonder Cement is ‘Ek Perfect Shuruat’. Our marketing strategy has always revolved around our tagline for our customers. We strive to provide perfect quality; we provide great service for the customers; and that is how we have been able to grow the brand and build a loyal customer base in the last 10 years and multiply the plant capacity.
We work hard on staying connected with our customers on ground. For that we conduct a lot of BTL activities and simultaneously we are heavy on television advertisements as well. Off late we have started doing a lot of site visits to individual home builders and that has been a marketing strategy that has shown that we are a transparent brand that provides high quality cement. The overall marketing strategy has helped place us amongst the top recognised cement brands of the country.

How does your organisation engage with the B2B customers?
Our brand has a lot of focus on quality. We offer a superior quality product and thus, brand acceptability with our B2B customers have been very high due to our product offering. We have been tested in India and abroad at the best laboratories in the world.
We have separate teams working on B2B business like key accounts team, non-trade business teams, regional business teams for non-trade business. We are working on sensitising our B2B customers on right construction practices with our technical services team. That is how we market cement to our B2B consumers.
The quality of our product ultimately results in lower consumption of product in construction, which is a way of making savings and deriving good results, so that becomes another selling point for our brand to B2B customers.

What role does social media or digital campaigning play in reaching your target customer?
Social media and digital marketing have picked up a lot in recent times. We are a young brand and right from the beginning we have been active on social media platforms and digital channels. We also are one of the most active and followed cement brands on these platforms. Having said that, cement as a category is not glamorous or attractive to engage customers, but post the pandemic we have seen a lot of change and traction on our digital platforms.
We are working hard on these mediums and have been doing a lot of campaigns like People of Wonder, Stories of Wonder etc. where we engage our network – architects, contractors, masons and everyone involved with the brand.
Off late we have been working on site conversion and lead procurement through digital means. That is helping the brand to grow and has started generating leads for us thus reaching new customers.

Tell us about any marketing activation that helped you break through the stereotypes of the industry?
One of the biggest activation campaigns we did were in 2015 and in 2017.
At that time, we were at a capacity of approximately 6.5MT in Rajasthan and wanted to penetrate in the minds of people and doing television at that time would be a spill over. So, we thought of doing a customer activation through cricket and named it ‘Saath 7 Cricket Mahotsav’. At that time in 2015 and 2017 we involved on ground more than 2 lakh people directly and they played with us and multiplied that with their family members coming to see the matches, so all in all we touched about 2.5 to 3 crore people across Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
This was a pathbreaking campaign that we did where we could reach a lot of people and this was a one-of-a-kind campaign done by any cement player at that time, which involved sports as an activation. At that time, it was one of the largest activations in the world, which involved cricket. Such big numbers are not easy to see anywhere.
Currently with activations, we are sending our sales representatives to visit sites and to activate them and help customers understand our quality and product offering, and do tests for them. This on-ground activation is helping us gain good traction in the market.

How did the pandemic impact marketing and branding of your product? What changes were made during those times?
The pandemic did shift the focus of the brand from typical cement advertising and inclined us to think about newer avenues in advertising. What we realised during and after the pandemic is that the footfall at the network and dealers shops has significantly reduced and most of the transactions are happening over the phone. This was a big takeaway that a tectonic shift is happening in the way in which consumers are buying cement.
This kind of shift happened a little late in cement as compared to other industries like FMCG or apparel where sales and enquiries were happening online, but cement industry did see this kind of shift soon after. People started researching about cement and searching for dealers nearest to them etc., online and then started ordering the same via phone. This made us invest in digital advertising heavily and also pump up our site sales team that I spoke about earlier.
Our technical teams and site sales representative teams started visiting customers directly and in big numbers and started getting those leads to our distributors. We were filling in the gap where customers were not going to our distributors. We were making our distributors get in touch with them. Top of the mind recall increased in a big way with this activity and it is very important to have that in today’s competitive environment.
Any brand needs to explain about its product, quality features etc. thoroughly to the customers to make sales. Previously, when one would go to the shop, dealers would do that and possibly change their mind in the selection of the brand. This interaction became less likely because customers will not give their 15 to 20 minutes over the phone to understand about the brand and the dealer finds it difficult to take that time and explain details at the risk of losing customers. So, we covered this gap by sending our people on the sites.

Customers in today’s day and age are more aware of what they are buying. How difficult does it make changing their mind to choose your brand when it comes to making sales?
Cement branding has always been more of a ‘Me Too’ branding, where every brand essentially advertised to remind its customer that it’s there in the market and to build a recall value with them. The category hasn’t been able to define a quantifiable benefit for its customers.
For example, a car can be sold on its feature that it goes from 0 to 100 in 6 seconds. One may not go from a speed of 0 to 100 in 6 seconds, but it becomes a point of sale that helps its organisation market it better. This kind of quantifiable quality or product benefit isn’t there with cement and thus, no such communication has been done like that.
Influencers like masons, contractors and architects have played a big role in influencing people to buy a particular brand. So, it becomes important to keep a good connection with them. And now, with on-site activities, we are communicating with customers how the difference in quality matters with the end result and we create a product differentiation like that.

How does automation and technology help you in optimising your marketing and branding efforts for the product and organisation?
Technology has helped us in a big way in understanding the market and curating efforts towards it. We are one of the technologically advanced cement brands amongst others. Our team, our promoters, directors all believe that technology can help us solve a lot of problems that may arise. We have been able to continuously deliver on the technological front.
In the latest events, we have built an integrated application for our teams and network to get everyone on board on the same platform. This new CRM that we have launched has changed the way our network has been looking at their business, or has been communicating with the company.
This CRM aims at resolving their basic everyday issues like downloading an invoice, looking at ledgers, new promotional schemes etc. All these details and multiple updates are available to them at the click of a button. This CRM also allows us to track leads, customers, company initiatives that have been activated across. Dealers can send requests for branding, for technical services, which are redirected to the particular teams and can be attended to immediately.
This has eased the life of the entire network of people associated with the brand and gives us a lot of data to look at the end of the day. It has increased transparency in the organisation and has allowed us to study behaviours and patterns of all concerned people across the network of people.

How do you foresee the future of cement branding in the coming years?
The future of cement branding will be shaped from how we overcome challenges of product differentiation in the market. It will also depend on how much we educate and make our customers aware of the quality and benefits of the product we have on offer. Quality plays a very important role in cement. We believe that we offer one of the best quality products across brands and that would be a key factor in our strategy for the future.
Decision makers are changing. Young people are playing bigger roles in buying houses and thus, I believe that digital marketing is going to play a big role in setting up brand positioning with them. Cement as a category has been lagging in its digital activations, but now we are catching up to the times and are digitising many processes. It is to play a pivotal role in the marketing of cement.
It is a category that you see everywhere, from movies to sports traditionally, but that will change in terms of getting to the customer directly, in getting influencers to make an impact with their customers by managing them and educating them about the quality so that they can pitch about the same. This is how I foresee change in the marketing of cement.
Besides that, application based cements are coming up in a big way. We have recently launched a high strength, high quality superior cement named Xtreme, which is especially for concrete. Such types of cement are gaining traction in the marketing and engaging customers, which is also likely to increase in the future and make cement interesting.
People have always taken cement to be a standard, one-tone product. The more we go to the ground level and on sites and explain about the product to those consuming it, the more difference it will make, and help them understand the variety we offer
and how quality and features matter, thus roping in loyal consumers.

–Kanika Mathur