Innovative Way of Marketing and Branding...Thinking Out Of The Box

onions at 1 rupee per kilo’: a startup’s growth hack

Onions are something which we Indians love, whether in curries or in the raw form. Of late, their prices have been touching stratospheric levels, adding to the woes of every household. Being a consumer-first company Ninjacart believe that there is no greater joy than serving people what they need the most. That was when they decided to come up with this campaign of onions at Re one for a kg. Through this offer, their aim was to ease the consumer’s inconvenience caused due to the unexpected rise in onion prices. Here’s how they did it and what they learned in the process:

Preparations for the big sale

This was their most challenging campaign. Right from marketing to operations everyone was involved in ensuring that the campaign is executed to perfection. Entire team spent a few sleepless nights to drive this initiative. Except for developers, everyone was either in operations or in customer support.

                                            Selecting the ‘right’ onions

For the big day, they had procured close to 10 tonnes of Grade A (high quality) onion from a big distributor in Pune. As a company believe in delivering handpicked grocery. So after procuring onions, a good amount of time and effort was spent to ensure that only the right quality was delivered to the customers. Special packing and delivery in a eco-friendly ninjacart carry bag of one kg onions was done with a thank-you note to there customers. The most important part of this entire exercise was distribution of the packed onions to general store shops they have tied up with. General store shops form a vital part of business model. They work closely with local general stores, help them in improving their quality, stock outs etc., enabling them to take their offline businesses online.

The campaign days

Campaign started on Friday, September 4, at 5 pm and went on for two more days. During this period, they acquired more than 20,000 customers and fulfilled more than 2,800 orders each day.

This campaign helped them gain a lot of traction across platforms and got us trending on app stores and various social media platforms. A lot of delighted customers tweeted about how good their experience was and they were also mentioned in some prominent Bengaluru startup groups. Overall, the campaign was a big hit and they were able to achieve a lot more than they expected. Best part, they were able to satisfy and serve the majority of our customers.

Learning from the campaign

A. Let's compare this marketing activity with any other big activity like putting up hoardings across the city. Putting up hoardings in major places for a week would easily cost more than Rs 40 lakh - 50 lakh. This would give some eye balls, but would never become viral and in very short term. The impact is less mainly because with all other marketing communications, people generally talk about what their product can do and not necessarily about what people need directly.

In comparison, we launched a very simple campaign of selling onions at Re one. The campaign worked wonders because here we were directly addressing a basic need of the consumers, as a result of which we achieved good numbers and the campaign became viral too.

-- In just 3 days, they acquired more than 20,000 customers

– Playstore organic search increased by 13 times in that week

– Play Store ranking improved drastically

– Trending on App store as well Play Store

– Cost Acquiring Customer was less than Rs 100/-

B. For pulling off this campaign, they knew delivery would be a challenge. To overcome it, they collaborated with multiple third-party delivery players and created a delivery grid system. With the help of this grid they were able to connect with various delivery networks to find the best available option at that instant. This helped them fulfill the majority of orders within two hours.

To ensure satisfaction all the orders accepted, they created a system that automated delivery slots. The shops were closed for accepting any new orders whenever the demand went higher than the maximum capacity. This was done to ensure they would serve whatever orders they got in the best possible manner.

C. This was their first big campaign and an interesting observation is that because of this campaign, a lot of other channels’ conversions have improved significantly. When they conducted a lot of below the line activities before this campaign, they saw lukewarm response. Today, many people stop by and ask them: “Are you the same guys who sold onions at Re 1?”

This kind of response reaffirms their faith that their campaign was successful in reaching out to people.