Here’s how MyGate is helping open up the doors of gated communities to brands

• Covid led to the shutting down of shops and malls and impacted the activations industry severely. Brands that relied heavily on BTL marketing suffered.
• However, community management solution MyGate has come up with a community engagement platform that will enable brands communicate with residents of gated communities both digitally and physically. The thought? 'If you can't go to the brand, we will bring the brand to your doorstep,' says Anish Anthony, Business Head, CEP, MyGate.

Last year, as we shut down our doors to the outside world to protect ourselves from the Coronavirus, we also put a stop to an important mode of marketing, which is activations. With malls and shops shut, brands that heavily relied heavily on events and activations had to completely rethink their strategies and re-distribute their marketing spends.

That was when community management solution MyGate came up with a solution to take brands to people’s homes if they could not go out. Last week, the platform formally launched its Community Engagement Platform (CEP) which it says will give brands an opportunity to meaningfully interact with over 3 million homes in 20,000 gated communities.

The platform that was initially founded as a platform to address security issues faced by households and gated communities has now evolved into a marketplace of sorts, one that provides information for other home-related services like pest control, services from carpenters or painter, cleaning services and vehicle management, amongst others.

“In the last 18 months, the platform has become far more engaging than it was before. Initially it was more of a security-oriented platform which has now transformed into a holistic community engagement platform,” explained Anish Anthony, Business Head, CEP, MyGate. “Till 24-36 months ago, people used to interact with MyGate to either send out invites to their guests or to approve or deny entry of delivery boys or their house helps. But we realized that the community needs to be managed in itself. So we came up with offerings for people to lodge complaints, we opened discussions forums and a broadcasting service where any kind of announcement relevant for people in the society could be made. So we came up with multiple ways in which residents could communicate with each other and the management committees could interact with residents,” he added.

Owing to the fact that MyGate already has become a part of people’s lives, it opened an opportunity for the platform to become a bridge between these communities and brands wanting to target these consumers. “We understood we had a great user base on one hand and brands who are interested in interacting with this user base. So we had a lot of discussions with all our discussions where we realized even communities were eager to have these experiences within their premises. So that was the inception of the CEP,” he added.

MyGate will offer brands a few different ways of connecting with people inside these gated communities. Brands will be able to broadcast messages through the communication channel on the platform, which will be a digital engagement. They will also help brands have a physical presence in terms in-society stores & food trucks, door-to-door sampling, community contests etc. It will also offer a phygital experience to help brands make the most of a combination of a digital and physical experience.

MyGate had launched a pilot for the service in January but it started getting a lot of traction from around April. “Brands are excited about what we are offering is because the entire community activation piece has a lot of moving parts. You need to get a lot of permissions and approvals which could take between 4-6 weeks. This segment was very fragmented and no national brand could do a pan-India activation on a single day. But we have around 20,000 communities on our platform at any point of time and we can do pan-India campaigns at 200-300 communities at one go. Brands are increasingly wanting to go direct-to-consumers and our platform helps them do just that,” said Anthony.

While simplifying the entire process for brands, the platform will also help Resident Welfare Associations earn from the proceeds of the activation, contributing to maintenance expenses of the gated community. It will also help brands target consumers of particular income brackets. "For example, if an uber luxury car brand wants to open a dealership in a particular locality, we can help them reach out to premium societies in that area. So how this helps him is, if he has opened his dealership, we are helping him engage with households near his showroom where the probability of purchase is very high," he explained.

So far, MyGate has worked with around 270 brands. It has its presence in most major cities. On what his vision for the platform is, Anthony said that he wants to bring the best experiential experiences to people to their homes. “Each of my user should be able to experience the very best that every brand has to offer. Our vision therefore is to enable that,” he concluded.