boAt: Proudly Sailing in India with stellar STP modelling.
The mantra behind the success of the boAt in recent times is worth knowing,
Founded in 2016 by Aman Gupta with the primary goal of becoming a lifestyle brand, boAt (Imagine Marketing Pvt Ltd) today is World’s 5th largest wearables technology company and India’s 1st audio and truly wireless and wearable technology brand.?
boAt primarily focuses on selling quality headphones, earphones, speakers, travel chargers, grooming gadgets & premium cables which has seen appreciable growth in the recent years.?
Shark Tank India Fame and the co-founder, CMO of boAt, Aman Gupta started his career by becoming one of India’s youngest CA. He continued to work in one of the Big 4 companies after completing his MBA from ISB. He realized that his current profession was not that of his interest and technology was his true passion. With that in mind, he applied to work for JBL, to help find suitable products for the Indian market, after which he resigned to start boAt with his friend Sameer Mehta.
What gave the boAT? a real push to sail in Indian? Markets?
The earwear market, which was just a few thousand units in 2017, started to become prominent from 2018 onwards. The market size in India was 1.6 million units in 2018. A year later, it exploded to 8.5 million units.
boAt was one of the early companies who identified changing lifestyle habits of the Indian millennials. For boAt, the product development played a major role.Due to the year-round humidity in India, boAt launched water-resistant and sweat-proof earbuds. Products were also modified to be dust-resistant and durable. Also, Indians enjoy the thump of bass, they brought earphones and headphones with good bass.
Soon millennials began to identify the product, and word-of-mouth spread like wildfire for this direct-to-consumer brand over the first three years.?
The expansion of the loyal customer base was of utmost importance to the firm, but financially, they couldn’t scale the company on all geographic fronts, hence, they took the D2C way of targeting urban markets.?
A perfect blend of a Good Segmentation, Better? Targeting and Best Positioning.
Their target customers are simple to define - Millennials, Age group of 18-24, mostly students, music lovers, fashionistas, fitness enthusiasts and gamers.
This age? population has something very common among them, They typically see themselves and their lives with a multitude of perspectives and value systems
Few personas and values regarded highly by millennials:
boAt doesn’t just sell its products like every other consumer durables company. Instead, it positions itself as a lifestyle product. boAt aspires for its products to be a part of everyday fashion.
For this they have targeted their customers through the subcultures which the other competitors didn’t do in the beginning.
These broad themes, sub-cultures could be: Bollywood, Cricket, Music and Fashion
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Their themes revolved around the basic frameworks:
“Sound of the Champions,' 'Glamor of the Stars,' 'Soul of the Musicians”.
They brought recognizable, loved and young brand ambassadors from Cricket, Music and the Bollywood Industry to connect with the youth through mainly social media channels where most of them are active.
They make use of funky posts, moment marketing and brand banters to engage with their audience in a language familiar to the age group.
boAt also utilized the rise of influencer culture to benefit themselves. They used influencers for promotion to penetrate the youth and target the audiences of these influencers.?
They have used events like the LAKME fashion Week, IPL, Sunburn to advertise among the masses and show how they would like to portray themselves as a cool, radial and a young brand to the larger masses.
One reason we succeeded was that we knew whom we were talking to," said Aman Gupta during a presentation in Virtual ASCENT Mixer 2021.
boAt has perfectly tapped? every STP opportunity which came their way to build their brand image as young and trustable.?
Currently they call themselves Hustlers, Jugaadus, Maniacs, and Disruptors in the Wearables and the Hearables industry.?
boAt could be an ideal brand to take marketing lessons from for every aspiring D2C brand in the Indian market about Proper Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning who want to grow faster and stronger.
Bid Manager in the CBO Retail-CPG Presales and Solutions Team at TCS
2 年Well written and insightful Saurabh Kumar. Another aspect is how they are not seen anymore as a young brand only. They have made very conscious efforts to ensure that they rope in people from the higher age groups by positioning their products to provide useful insights on health awareness through their varied trackers. A game changer for this company is also their competitive pricing which attracts and appeals to buyers from the bottom of the pyramid all the way to the top buyers as well. Creating a clear-cut distinction individually for every product without leading to a cannibalization of their luxury and affordable range is their biggest USP in the market today!