Mirza, the Managing Director & CEO for Dr.Oetker in India & SAARC countries, tells us how the brand connected with consumers and encouraged them to don the apron and wield the ladle during the lockdown period. The efforts of the company to adapt to the changing market. Analysis post lockdown has shown an increase in the consumption of packed food items and in-home cooking necessities.
The three-month-long lockdown witnessed a rise in home cooking and dining. This definitely led to a surge in the demand for products like mayonnaise, pizza sauces, and sandwich spreads. Dr.Oetker, a known brand in this category also saw a greater demand for its products. Mr. Oliver Mirza, tells us how the company adopted its new working model and how it connected with consumers. Also encouraging them to don the apron and wield the ladle during the lockdown episode.
Though initially, the brand had to face the disruptions in business caused by the coming of the pandemic Covid-19, slowly it witnessed an increase in the demand for some of their retail products. Since customers are shutdown indoors they have enough time to experiment with cooking. As in, home cooking and dining area on the hike, and more and more customers are demanding for retail packs of mayonnaise, pizza sauces and sandwich spreads.
Since Dr.Oetker is a trusted brand since 1891, in this time of uncertainty consumers tend to rely on them. So now it becomes their responsibility to make their products available to the customers. Among the highly demanded products were retail packs of mayonnaise, sandwich spreads, and pizza sauces. The demand for mayonnaise was doubled and that of pizza sauce grew by 80 percent.
With the restaurants shutting down for months, home dining and cooking have had a massive surge during the lockdown episode. Since we always tend to choose the easy pathway, consumers wish to prepare tasty dishes like pasta, sandwiches, wraps, etc as we get it in restaurants, by using retails products like sauces and spreads. These dishes are loved by everyone. Thus more customers started experimenting with Indo Western and western dishes at homes which reflected an increase in the demand for the brand’s range of mayonnaise, sauces, and spreads.
Initially, when the demand increased it was a challenge to serve the orders but they managed it by the workforce working from home and took orders on the phone.
During this unprecedented time, social media played a very important role in the brand’s consumer engagement strategy. The strategy was to engage and connect more with the audience through ‘easy to do recipes’. Thus they rolled out an Instagram campaign ” what’s in your fridge?” to help customers with easy and convenient tasty recipes with the items available in their fridge. The audience received the campaign very well with an engagement rate of over 90 percent.
