Praveen Krishnamurthy – AVP (Platform Marketing), HipBar
What we actually see nowadays is a shift from just brands to experiential drinking. It’s not much about the alcohol anymore. It’s actually about what is the experience we are actually going through while drinking. Let me take wine as an example. We were talking about seasonal drinks. That is what I have seen in Tamil Nadu.We have taken the effort to distinguish between
summer wines and winter wines. Basically we have crisp whites and sparkling in summer and then we move on to light reds in the winter or what you can define as the Chennai winter. You
can’t handle the heavy Cabernet because it is too hot; it will not be a pleasurable experience. But definitely you can have a pinot noir or a merlot, something more light.
People have desire to differentiate and they have been able to create experience around it. A lot of emotional experience linked to new-age drinking as compared to the past when it was just about consumption.
In new-age drinking, trade also needs to be given a different focus. So far, brand promotion has concentrated on the supply side of business. We have always worked about the system, the infrastructure and excise. But we lose sight of the person who is actually consuming our product. There is no promotion effort focused on the demand side. If you look at your promotions, everything has actually gone to the bottle shop, towards the retailer side and the outlets. But none of them is actually working with the consumer.
So I think the new age has to be different.We should move from the demand side rather than from the supply side. If we decide to change that then the new age is going to come. But if you are sticking to the same platform and you keep doing exactly the same thing you used to do, you are going to get probably the same results.
Let’s look at the experiential way of getting your brand out and look at the demand side rather than the supply side.