Ideas and ability to spot best content are challenges, says Nerolac's Peeyush Bachlaus

Kansai Nerolac Paints' Marketing Head tells BuzzInContent.com that the explosion of mediums has offered marketers different ways to connect with audiences and differentiate themselves, which was not the case earlier

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Akansha Srivastava
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Peeyush Bachlaus

In an otherwise boring category, paint brands have found content as the real differentiator with the evolution of mediums. Despite the fact that there is no dearth of ideas, Peeyush Bachlaus, Head of Marketing, Kansai Nerolac Paints, a leading Indian paint brand, sees ideas and the ability to spot the right content as the main challenge when it comes to creating content.

“Marketers are constantly facing the challenge in cracking an idea which is unique and differentiated and yet connecting back with what the brand needs to achieve. Also, it is not very cheap to create content. With a constrained budget, people will have to make smart choices. So, the main challenge, according to me, is the idea and ability to spot the best content which would fly on its own,” Bachlaus told BuzzInContent.com.

Speaking on how content is helping the paint category make its communications exciting and engaging, Bachlaus said, “When I got into this category, I thought it was so boring. How can somebody get excited watching or reading about putty, primer and emulsion? Perhaps that is why the consumer engagement was not very high. But a beautiful solution is to make it visually rich and offer content which consumer is happy to consume, and then making it available in regional languages to talk to the consumer in their own language. These are the two things that we have been doing very successfully and hoping to continue to focus upon.”

Nerolac recently recreated its popular jingle ‘Jab ghar ki raunak badhani ho’ into a song sung in eight regional languages: Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada.

On the objective behind recreating the jingle into a song, Bachlaus said, “Brand asset remains the objective which continues to engage and improve the brand love that is associated with the audiences and stakeholders. Because of the longevity of this brand asset, this needs revitalising from time to time which warrants that it stays contextual and contemporary with the changing times.”

Although the brand has been relying on visually led content to enhance engagement, it has increased focus on content with the recently launched blog and ‘Nerolac colour trails’.

“Because of the visual aesthetics involved in making a choice of paints, ours is a very strong visual-led category. So, curating ideas, inspiration and concepts are required for consumers to continue to strive. Hence, blog and our user-generated initiative ‘Nerolac colour trails’ are primarily helping the consumers with the ideas, which is the core need for any consumer in home decoration,” said Bachlaus.

Connecting the consumers both offline and online, ‘Nerolac colour trails’ aims to offer customised walls and generate sales lead. It is available on Instagram, Facebook and microsite. Through this initiative, the brand invites consumers along with an influencer to come and join for a photo walk where they visit places of interest. The brand encourages people to click pictures of various hues surrounding them, which later gets converted into a colour palette and gets translated on the wall. The entire initiative creates a lot of online content, including the video. Bachlaus claimed that the seven-month-old initiative has already connected more than 1,000 people on ground and generated more than 5 million impressions.

Talking about the increased focus on content, Bachlaus said, “Being in consumer space, we have always been a content disseminator. It’s just that we are now talking about content and repurposing of content and then content curated for specific mediums because of the explosion of mediums that has happened in the last decade. I really do not see it as a very new addition to our strategy. What has changed for us is that specific platforms for specific messaging have started evolving as we move along.”

Bachlaus calls the explosion of mediums a happy challenge, as it has offered the marketers so many different ways to connect with audiences and differentiate themselves, which was not the case earlier.

“While the brand is working hard to make content available, consumers are also the generators of the content. This is also one critical aspect of how the content strategy is actually at play and is evolving,” he said.

But the increased focus does not mean increased budget towards content. It’s just that the number of mediums has increased and the budgets are getting divided across the mediums, according to Bachlaus.

“You have got new mediums under your belt on which you have started spending, so you would need to manage your budget distribution accordingly. Whether to invest more or not is purely a function of what the brand is chasing as an objective,” he said.

Besides advertiser-funded programmes (AFP) on television in the past, Nerolac had done a web series integration with TVF production called Aam Aadmi Family.

“We have tried and placed the brand into a narrative, which is interesting and consumable. What we have done is a lot of integrations but not pure-play content production. I’m open to creating something which is pure play, branded content, web series or AFP. If there is a good idea that is fitting into something which the brand is pursuing, then definitely we are on for it,” concluded Bachlaus.

Peeyush Bachlaus Kansai Nerolac Paints Nerolac