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<ul><li>In our latest interview series, we talk to brands to understand how they are coping with the new normal and their strategies towards navigating these difficult times.</li><li>In today's interview, <keyword id="8869254" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="arpan-biswas">Arpan Biswas</keyword>, VP – Marketing, <keyword id="6439410" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="housejoy">Housejoy</keyword> tells us how the startup adapted to this new way of functioning and all that it has been doing to keep all its stakeholders safe and connected with the brand.</li></ul> Since the government decided to impose a <keyword id="91743" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="lockdown">lockdown</keyword> on the country to curb the spread of Covid-19, businesses and organizations across the country, and the world, have been impacted. During this time, its organizations that have managed to stay agile and open to evolving how they function have been the ones that have been less impacted. Over the past few weeks we have read of a lot of organizations and brands that have diversified their businesses, in an attempt to stay relevant to the dynamic times. Among many other examples, we saw Housejoy, a tech-driven construction, renovation, interiors, and <keyword id="9385246" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="20" keywordseo="home-maintenance-company">home maintenance company</keyword>, launching a service for the delivery of essentials. The startup was able to pull this off right at the start of the lockdown, when people were stuck at home and were struggling to get essentials delivered as supply chain had been impacted too. This was a good example of how the startup (whose core offering in the construction and maintenance space came to a complete halt) innovated quickly to make itself relevant to the consumer’s evolving needs by expanding its offerings. We caught up with Arpan Biswas, VP – Marketing, Housejoy recently, to understand how challenging diversification under the lockdown was, and what kind of reception they have seen in the past few weeks. We also ask him what his learnings as a marketer from this whole experience has been and how Housejoy, as an organization, is gearing up to function efficiently in the post-Covid world. Excerpts: Q) How has the last 2 months been for Housejoy as an organization? Were you prepared as an organization to make the transition to WFH? Just like most other startups, the pandemic did have an impact on Housejoy and our operations given that our construction and maintenance services came to a complete halt. Now, we are back on track and all our businesses across all cities have resumed, except in containment zones. Our teams are back in office and our construction services have resumed. Though we were not completely ready for WFH initially, our tech and HR teams facilitated the transition and top management ensured the teams are well engaged with regular virtual catchups. Q) Your core offering is in the sphere of construction, renovation, interiors, and home maintenance. However, the lockdown has forced most work in the sphere to come to a complete standstill. How do you anticipate the next few months will pan out for you as an organization? Yes, construction and home maintenance do not fall under essentials. Hence, our businesses came to a standstill. During lockdown, we encouraged our construction and interiors customers to get their house designs finalized. We have also been working on building confidence among our existing customers and keeping them updated about our activities. As WFH will become a norm in the future, we foresee demand for home offices and an overhaul of how new spaces will be constructed. We anticipate a high demand for home maintenance, fumigation, and beauty services post the lockdown. Post easing of the stringent lockdowns, demand has picked up and our B2C business is getting more orders vis-a-vis pre-Covid period, partially due to the pent-up demand. We are also seeing considerable traction from construction and renovation. When our core businesses were halted, we took several initiatives like <keyword id="9385245" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="housejoy-mart">Housejoy mart</keyword> to ensure customers get super-fast grocery delivery and our idle service providers get a mode to earn. Additionally, we also collaborated with the Karnataka state government in their effort to combat the pandemic by offering free fumigation in public places. We recently joined hands with leading healthcare brands like Portea Medical, SRL Diagnostics, Biognosys and BAF to set up mobile COVID-19 testing camps across Bengaluru to arrest the spread of the virus. Q) How have you been communicating with your consumers during this time? As a marketer, what has your priority been, in terms of the marketing communications going out? Our external communication is focused on the essentials and customer’s needs like fumigation, grocery delivery, etc. We have stopped all spends on traditional mediums and primarily focusing on digital as a medium to generate demand and educate customers of our offerings. Within digital, the focus is on intent-based searches and quirky content to engage with our consumers. Additionally, we have reached out to all our existing construction customers on the delays and provided them assurance on their investments. A large chunk of our content is dedicated towards informing our customers about the measures our service providers have taken to keep themselves and our customer’s safe. Internally, we are trying to keep the team’s morale high by sharing all the media buzz we have received, the deals we have cracked. These are testing times for all employees and it’s important to assure them about the financial health of their organization. Q) What was your media mix pre-COVID and how did that change during the lockdown? Do you think you will tweak your media mix even after the lockdown is called off? Has digital seen most of your marketing investments? Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was a mix of traditional and digital. However, during the lockdown, digital marketing and PR have been our go-to medium. We are implementing and leaning toward strengthening our digital marketing strategies. Our strategy has been to engage customers with quirky and interesting themes and messaging, and we will continue to do this going forward. Q) Did content marketing play a big role for you during the lockdown? Content marketing is one of our focus areas and our single-minded objective on digital is to improve the shareability of our content. We wish to keep our construction and interiors customers updated with newest technologies, trendy designs, and latest ways to upgrade their lifestyles. For our on-demand customers, the focus is to educate them of the WHO-suggested safety measures we have implemented and keep them aligned to our new offerings like car sanitization and labor on hire. Q) You recently entered the grocery-delivery space. Was it a natural extension for the brand? What kind of uptake has this service seen during the lockdown? How have you been marketing this offering? Expansion to grocery-delivery was a natural extension as we have the necessary tech and supply for the same. Our primary focus through this initiative has been to ensure work continuity for our teams and helping our customers in this hour of crisis. We partnered with various Kirana stores and helped them in expanding their business. This is a very new field for us, and we are evaluating the business model currently. Once that is set, we plan to invest in marketing. Q) What have your key learnings from the COVID-19 experience been, both as a marketer and as an organization? As an organization, we have learnt that flexibility is one of the biggest virtues and we have exhibited the same. We entered two new categories – healthcare and delivery services – keeping in mind the growing demand. We have also realized that great companies are built when people stick together in such times of crisis. Our employees have exhibited immense character, took complete ownership and executed some tough projects. As marketers, we have learnt that marketing is not about big budgets. Focus should be on improving quality of content and adding value to our customer’s lives. The distribution is taken care of by customers. Q) While the lockdown might be lifted soon, things might still take a few more months to settle down. How are you going to cope with the post-COVID world? How are you preparing as an organization? Though the lockdown will be lifted, the fear of transmission will still loom large. There will be some permanent changes in customer’s behavior and way of consumption. We are trying to keep our eyes and ears open to understand and validate the changes and work on ways to connect with them better. There is no denying the fact that we must adapt to this new normal and we are doing everything possible to ensure things run smoothly.

Marketing in the times of Covid-19: Housejoy

<ul><li>While we all are watching, worrying about everything that’s happening outside from behind the closed doors, delivery personnels from Dunzo, Medlife and Housejoy are risking their lives everyday to make sure we get our daily essentials and stay safe.</li><li>We reached out to their marketing heads of these brands to understand the challenges these players have faced in the past 21 days, from delivering products to communicating with consumers and here is how they are functioning in the new normal. </li></ul>While we are all scared and anxious to step out even for a few minutes, brands like Dunzo, Medlife and Housejoy are making sure that we are all safely cooped at home. From catering to the ever-increasing demand to coming up with creative solutions like contact-less delivery that ensure the safety of their consumers, as well as their delivery partners, these brands have embraced the challenges—as and when they come—with open arms. To prepare for the long haul, they are welcoming new delivery personnel, introducing fresh HR policies, sanitising their storing facilities, and reminding their consumers to take good care of themselves by washing their hands and maintaining safe physical distance -- on social media every day. However, things haven’t been simple for these players on the ground. In the first few days of the lockdown, owing to confusion and lack of clarity around guidelines, it was difficult for a lot of these players to function smoothly. Telling us what kind of challenges Medlife faced during the first few days of the lockdown, Meera Iyer, CMO, Medlife, said, “The lockdown has been quite a difficult time for Medlife. In terms of business, our traffic and demand has more than doubled. Organically, a lot of people have been coming online and wanting to order medicines as well as use our e-consultation service. But unfortunately, on the other side, the lockdown has meant total disruption on the ground for our operations team. The supply chain particularly was severely impacted in the first 2 weeks. Things are better now and slowly coming back to normal but it was the case of 2X the number of orders and pretty much 50% capacity on the ground, thereby allowing us to service around 25% of our customers. So customer experience went for a toss during this period.” Despite the limitations that the lockdown brought, it also brought with it a lot of growth opportunities for brands like Dunzo. Elaborating, Sai Ganesh, Head Marketing &amp; Creative, Dunzo said, “Groceries used to be our main category earlier and demand in that category has gone through the roof. We have seen significant organic growth, especially in grocery, medicine, meat and fish. That’s been the biggest opportunity where we are seeing a lot of organic traffic and new users coming in. Housejoy, which is a tech-driven construction, renovation, interiors and Home Maintenance company, rose to the occasion and started delivering essentials. Telling us how they arrived at it, Arpan Biswas, Vice President - Marketing, Housejay, said, “We saw an opportunity as the big players, who deliver essential services, have seen a growth of 6X. However, a lot of their delivery personnel left for their hometowns. So we have internally we offer home services and some of them don’t fall in essentials, so we have supply and tech in place. We just had to add groceries to it. We took a couple of weeks to take a call -- we saw an opportunity and thought this might make sense for us! From there, it was quite easy for us. Also, we wanted to make sure our internal delivery guys get to earn a bit and keep their households running. We have seen good growth so far. If it continues, we will think of approaching this category seriously.” In sensitive times such as today, there's always a chance that if brands come out with marketing communications, their intent will be frowned upon. Telling us how Dunzo is treading that line between communicating what’s required and being opportunistic, Ganesh said, “Our marketing communications in the past 45 days is very rarely focusing on selling the value proposition of Dunzo. We have also tried to use what guidelines WHO released for brands to incorporate social distancing, wearing masks, washing hands regularly, etc, so we have tried to use that. After the first lockdown was announced for two weeks, there was a period when users did not care about what your brand had to say. We saw very little engagement in those two weeks. The first two weeks were spent on informing the audience about what's happening, right things to the users and what precautions we are taking. Right now, they are looking for lighter, humourous content. There is a lot of stress right now and social media is a comic relief for them. So, we have moved to lighter content and none of it sells our product.” To help maintain a positive environment on social media and reach out to a wider audience, Dunzo is also looking at exploring TikTok, which, as Ganesh said, is a great way to connect with their delivery partners. Biswas, on the other hand, reminded us that this situation might not end very soon even if the lockdown opens. Therefore, as a marketer, you need to remind your consumers about the do’s and don’ts they need to follow. He further said, “We should think of ourselves as customers, not marketers. When I think of what is my need v/s want, as a customer, it is the essentials. So I would rather stick to delivering essentials and making sure that consumers get the necessary information. You also need to be very patient and see how things turn out in the next two-three months. We should save cash, not burn it in the media. We should rather create content that adds value to our customer’s life.” Moreover, taking care of the health, wellness and hygiene of their delivery partners is also a priority for most of these brands. Talking about all that Medlife has been doing to take care of its partners, Iyer said, “All our fulfillment centres across 15 cities have a doctor. We have thermal scanning for allowing people to come in. Use of masks and periodic sanitizing is mandatory. And we are doing everything to ensure that their commute to the warehouses and back home is also made safe.”

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