Home interior and renovation company Livspace is loosening its purse strings by spending Rs 25 crore on a 12-week advertising campaign during the upcoming Indian Premier League (IPL). The brand has onboarded cricketer Virat Kohli and Bollywood actor Anushka Sharma to amplify its marketing strategies. The campaign will mainly run on digital platforms and social media. The commercials will run in Hindi speaking markets and southern states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala.
The commercial by Mumbai-based brand and communication consultancy TILT Brand Solutions features the celebrity couple struggling with poor design and loosely fitted infrastructure in their home in the brand’s commercial. Known for its humorous tone, Livspace has kept this commercial light-hearted too. The campaign titled ‘Love the Way You Liv’ will also have two more ad films that will be released as the IPL progresses.
In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18, Kartikeya Bhandari, chief marketing officer, Livspace, says, celebrities’ credibility has a rub off effect on brands. “If done well and selected in sync with brand values, celebrities drive memorability, along with creating the right associations for the brand,” believes Bhandari.
Livspace’s ambition is to become a national brand. The company has expanded geographically from eight cities in 2019 to over 30 in 2022. Livspace plans to go to 20 more cities over the next 12 months and all of these cities have one or more of its experience centres. He tells us that this (scaling up) will ensure that Livspace is present in key Tier 1 and Tier 2 towns in the country.
To drive consideration in existing markets and build awareness in new markets, Bhandari thinks celebrities, with their popularity and strong audience connect, will help the brand create and forge stronger consumer relationships.
According to Bhandari, Kohli and Sharma accentuate the aspirational value in audiences. Not just that, they also fall into the brand’s target group - 28 years-plus, married, who started a family.
In its previous campaign ‘Don’t try this at home’ that aired both on big and small screens, the brand added much-needed humour in an otherwise dull category. The ads featured people doing everyday things like laundry and cooking, in dangerous ways, due to badly designed home furniture and spaces. However, while the brand’s advertising made the right noise, the company has been called out loud by angry customers about delayed projects and unprofessional behaviour of relationship managers, civil staff, and designers.
When asked how the brand is planning to fix and improve its customer service, Bhandari explains, “At the scale of our operations, it is inevitable that about 1 percent of the thousands of concurrent projects may experience delays for reasons beyond our control.” He added that "while anyone in the industry knows that it is impossible to eliminate all delays, particularly since there are various external factors involved, we continue to work on creating the best technology and supply chain practices to take this below 0.5 percent in the next 6-12 months. We are constantly striving to improve our business efficiency and that’s an ongoing process."
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