Discovery is not just a problem for small brands but for larger ones too, says Suchita Salwan of LBB

Starting off in 2013 as a discovery and recommendation platform of places and things to do in Delhi, content-led commerce platform Little Black is gradually becoming more appealing for businesses that want to connect with consumers looking for different brand experiences.

Suchita Salwan, Co-Founder and CEO, believes the kind of audience one can find on LBB is every marketer’s dream. “The audience is between 22 and 25 years old with a disposable income — all either professionally employed or self-employed. And because they have disposable income, marketers want to reach out to them,” added Salwan.

Salwan told BuzzInContent.com that LBB only works with brands that match its ethos. LBB has various formats of integrations beyond banner ads.

In a free-wheeling interview with BuzzInContent.com, Salwan talks about the platform’s offerings for brands and how it stands out.

Excerpts:

LBB is more like a discovery platform for local retail brands. But nowadays, we see a lot of bigger brands attaching with LBB. What is the idea behind collaborating with bigger brands?

We realised that discovery is not just a small businesses’ problem. It's to a large extent even becoming a large businesses’ problem. Even larger brands with a lot of money and distribution have a discovery problem. They might be having one product category that will drive 60% of their business, but what about the rest of the brands? For example, Fabindia. People think Fabindia is just block-printed kurtas. But they have a fantastic collection of decor, which is actually super affordable. They have a great cafe called Fabcafe that serves fabulous food at fairly reasonable prices. They may not have to promote their kurtas on LBB but they would definitely want to push their home decor selection and Fabcafe. They would want to promote their message that Fabindia is a place for handcrafted artisanal products.

The kind of audience one can find on LBB is a marketers' dream. Between 22 and 25 years old, they have a disposable income. They are all either professionally employed or self-employed. Marketers want to reach out to this audience. Brands like One Plus, Cadbury and Fabindia would like to reach out to people who can afford their brand. The brands work with us as they get to talk to this young millennial, trend-setting and trend adopting audience who will become their first point evangelists. These millennials will, in turn, be able to help distribute the brand further to other markets, cities and other regions.

Wouldn’t partnering with larger brands negate or subdue your original idea—of people come on the platform to discover unique products and not much-explored places. Why would they want to see brands on LBB which they already know?

We recently worked with Amazon Prime Video when they launched Comicstaan 2, and created an offline property for them. People had to sign up for their event and get a chance to experience ‘Comicstaan’ and meet the stand-up comedians. One can say everyone knows Amazon Prime Video and Comicstaan, but no one knows how or where one can experience Comicstaan and meet their comics at a secret event. Like this, with larger brands, we create concepts for them, which align with the ethos of LBB but also help them get their point across to users, which in APV’s case was ‘Watch Comicstaan 2’.

Does that mean you do a lot of experiential marketing for brands?

One of the most popular ad units on LBB is O2O (Online to Offline), which is essentially a tool that marketers and brands can use to drive footfall to that offline stores through experiences.

How focussed are you on smaller brands versus the bigger ones?

The fun fact is that 70% of the brands that spend on LBB are small businesses. One tends to notice a Cadbury because it is well-known but misses a small lesser-known brand.

Do you still want to continue your focus on small to medium-sized businesses?

It will always be a blend of the two. It will always be a blend of the large corporates as well as SMBs (Small and medium-sized businesses). Consumers come to our platform for SMBs. They also come to see what the large brands are doing.

Was working with bigger brands in the plan or it just happened?

After a platform hits a certain number of users, brands want to work with it. Brands can reach out to 16 million users on LBB. These are the people who are on the go and are up to date with all trends. Educating these users isn't the biggest challenge. The challenge is how do you get them to choose a particular product? We only work with big brands when their campaign has to do with our platform. We don't work with them just because they're running a campaign which they want to distribute through our platform, which may not be relevant to the use case of our product.

What opportunities are available on the platform for brands?

The way we define an ad is not traditional banner ads. We help brands from content to native videos. They can partner with us on video series. They can also generate leads. If a brand sells bags, it can get inquiries through our platform. One can even get a footfall towards the stores. It’s not just restricted to content. It's open to everything from footfall to generating leads to creating IPs (Intellectual property). We can help brands create video text and photo content. We provide full-stack solutions. We have enough insights in terms of what consumers like.

Platforms often offer makeover of places, creating offline events, brand experiences for consumers through sampling and tests, etc. What unique offering do you bring to the table for brands?

Some concepts are evergreen and always do well. Some concepts such as recipe videos, whether LBB does them or 300 other people create them, it will always get eyeballs. There are some concepts where you have to think about how to integrate the brand into LBB’s character. We did the evergreen recipe videos with Nestle. We created the city's most popular dessert. We showed how one could make Theobroma brownies using Nestle or how you could make standard ‘Halwai kheer’ using Nestle Milkmaid. It depends from brand to brand.

How much content do you monetise?

Over 99% of the content on LBB is not monetised and that's good for us because that's why users come back to us. We put promoted tag on the content that we monetise.

How do you make sure LBB remains on top of the mind?

Our direct traffic is a good 30-40%. Our app sees 20 sessions per user per month. We don’t have an issue around brand recall. We have our own communities on Facebook and Instagram. We built a fairly strong brand in the eight cities where we are present. Even if SEO is a decent contributor to traffic, we see fairly high repeat rates of 55 to 65% of users every month.

Our users are pretty actively using our platform. Not only when they need things, but even when they want to just casually browse. We get a lot of engagement through live streams. We do a lot to keep our community engaged. We have a lot of offline experiences. The information you find on LBB, you actually won't find it anywhere else.

What are your expansion plans in branded content?

Video will be a fairly significant piece. In the past, we have created well-produced videos for Pepperfry. We have this fun series called ‘Shop Hatke’ and ‘Eat Hatke’ where a host or an influencer goes to different and unique stores and create videos out of it. We are launching series where the brands can come and participate.

Would you venture into fictional content?


Fictional doesn’t work for us. People come to us to go to real places.

How do brands pay you?

For smaller brands, it is usually a flat fee with a guarantee of a certain number of leads. We will not stop the campaign until we have delivered those many leads. For the larger brands, if the objective is awareness, consideration and transaction, they pay more for impressions, content creation, page views, etc. There are some brands that pay for footfalls. Then again there is a flat fee, but they would back-calculate.

When did you actually realise LBB is gaining a lot of popularity?

In 2014, we started on Rs 80,000 of my personal savings, which I blew up on the wall paint when we moved into a small office in Jangpura in Delhi. For me, the biggest unlocker was that we really got to see from zero to hundred thousand monthly active users on our website with zero marketing and monthly active user base was repeating 60% (MoM). We had about five people on payroll and we were paying them reasonably competitive salaries.

No matter how big or small business is, one has to do two things: Figure out where the customers will come from and how to monetise the business.

Then I met my co-founder Dhruv Mathur. He has the technical knowhow. He has previously worked with Deloitte in San Francisco, moved back to India and started his own platform in the payment space. They were basically doing exactly what LBB was doing but were handling the payment part of the funnel. If your funnel is awareness, consideration and transaction, LBB sits in the top part, which is awareness and consideration. His was at bottom of the funnel, which is transactions. So when he said he would be interested in moving his team and working with me on LBB, it was a trigger for us to take LBB to its next heights.

How did you decide on the name?

The Little Black Book colloquially means a book of secrets. The beauty of our platform is that it helps you find things that otherwise are really difficult to find. And in helping you find things that are really difficult to find. It is actually helping merchants who honestly cannot afford Facebook, Google, TV and print. It helps them get discovered and it helps them make more money.