‘Our first principle is to build a brand that has a purpose’

Apratim Majumder, chief marketing officer at Good Glamm Group, believes direct-to-consumer brands must build brands with a purpose. That’s what he has set out to do for the company he joined last June. Born in July 2020 as a beauty products company selling the MyGlamm brand online, it recently acquired the digital content platform POPxo and Baby Chakra. The company intends to enter the male grooming and baby products categories. In an interview, Majumder said building great brands requires discipline and consistency. Edited excerpts:

How has the company evolved since you joined less than a year ago?

A lot has happened since. When I joined, it was a $100 million valuation company. We have now expanded and created The Good Glamm Group. We also have The Good Glamm Data company. There have been many acquisitions (Baby Chakra, ScoopWhoop, MissMalini). One of the major changes has been the scale that we’ve been able to achieve in the last several months.

How do you plan to build brands like MyGlamm or St Botanica?

The first thing that we needed to do, and we are still doing it, is to define the purpose of each brand that we have. It’s an evolving process. It’s about answering why these brands exist and how they can improve the lives of the consumers that they are serving. It’s about defining what the brand standards are.

Is this any different from building brands for traditional FMCG firms?

The basics of building brands obviously don’t change, though the medium can change. So, we have to build brand awareness, standards for what the brand’s purpose is. And for that to happen, we have to tell people a story that needs to be consistently built over time. People are being bombarded with so many different brands and stories all the time online. We haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to D2C in this country. There is only one way from here, which is up.

Consumers of D2C brands are fickle. So how do you build brand loyalty in that case?

Loyalty is difficult to build in the D2C platform, and our first principle is that you have to build a brand or start trying to build a brand with a purpose. There is enough evidence to prove that brands with purpose are solving for particular consumer angst. If we are rooted in that, it becomes a lot easier for us to gain the consumer’s attention because we are more relevant and solving real problems. That is how we define big brands, brands with loyalty and with strong equity. The online medium makes it a little bit more difficult because of the number of messages that brands are sending out. The key here is to be consistent. If you look at big brands, most have built themselves over consistency. We have to be exceptionally disciplined to ensure that we build the brands with consistency. That will eventually lead to loyalty.

Of course, products play a massive role. Most people today switch brands because of the product experience. So that’s again something we are exceptionally focused on. We have to have products that are the best in the market.

Are there plans to expand your offline presence, too?

We also have a strong focus on offline. At present, we have 30,000 points of sale, and by March 2022, we are looking at having 100,000. One way to build trust with our customers is through the MyGlamm website with things like Tell MyGlamm what you want. And that’s where we actually make products that are customized, and it’s not just marketing. We use data and technology and reach out to customers to tell us their needs and we solve them through their inputs. If I am able to solve a problem that a consumer has with regard to beauty, then I think that the chances of my loyalty being more are higher.

How does the acquisition of so many little content sites by Good Glamm help you as a marketer?

It is a marketer’s dream because it just gives us the opportunity of interacting with consumers when they are reading what they love to read, so it’s not interruptive advertising in that sense anymore. Advertising fundamentally is interruptive when you’re consuming content, and then an ad comes right in. From a business point of view, we are the largest content to commerce company, which means we also have the lowest consumer acquisition costs because of the content that we have consumers for already.