Medikabazaar the B2B online marketplace for medical equipment and supplies in India has recently released its new campaign that aims at spreading awareness about the safety norms people must adhere to while getting back to life in the Unlock from the Covid-19 lockdown.
With a digital catalogue of 500,000 products Medikabazaar’s online platform has almost everything that a hospital or a medical establishment would need.
In an exclusive conversation with Medianews4u Manish Rai, Vice President, Marketing, Medikabazaar shared details about the campaign – Unlock Rules and a lot more.
About the Campaign – Unlock Rules
The campaign ‘Unlock Rules’ is our endeavour to make everyone aware about the importance of adopting superior or right quality COVID-19 Essentials that can help unlock the economy after a long hiatus with minimal worries and risks about Corona infection.
Campaign Objectives
The entire purpose is to highlight the boundaries people need to stay within, even as they travel to work from office post lockdown. The campaign is all about the intention to create awareness and educate people about the safety norms which need to be followed in the Unlocking phase. We took it upon ourselves to educate the masses about the ‘dos and don’ts’ they must adhere to as they increase external engagements from a macro perspective. This will enable a deeper understanding of the ripple effect individuals and businesses can have regarding each action they do, and also make them understand about their responsibility to not let the cases rise in the first phase itself.
Insights used while conceptualizing and creating the campaign
Since we are under lockdown, there was a very limited scope of doing primary research on this topic. A lot of market insights about consumer behaviour was picked up basis feedback from our own sales, delivery and fulfilment teams which have been going out and have been visiting customer premises for sales and deliveries. Being in Healthcare business, we have been watching the daily corona cases by geography, by age groups, where it is increasing, where it is coming in control and then triangulate the secondary data with the primary data collected from our field force. The key insights were that while authorities were trying to force stringent lockdown, a large segment of people were not ready to follow the guidelines in true spirit. This is in line with the general lack of hygiene practices in our country and lackadaisical approach towards health and safety.
Talking about consumer behaviour, we also picked up the fact that under lockdown conditions, there were many changes in the way families were spending times together. The surge of ‘multiplayer’ online games like Ludo King, Tambola, board game being one of the most popular searches on google, the popularity of offline family games like Cards, Scrabble, TicTacToe also soared. We gathered that many childhood games have become ‘age and gender’ agnostic and these had become a strong bonding element in families.
Latching on to the core awareness objective and combining it with insights about what’s top of mind for most families, to build a strong emotional connect, we came with Unlock rules campaign wherein various creatives for the campaign were built around the common theme of gamification as a communication method.
Expectations from the campaign
We wanted to lead a mass awareness initiative through this campaign, which will benefit the audience at large and also encourage people and businesses to approach us for solutions we are able to offer. We are at the helm of things since the start of this pandemic, and are delivering COVID safety product ranges across India. This is also one of our initial steps to embark on a long journey to cement our position as one of the thought leaders in this industry.
Media plan for this campaign
We wanted to make this campaign extremely consumable for all types of audiences, since demographics should not really matter when it comes to matters of safety. At the same time, the messaging should not be lost in the creativity, such that people ignore the gravity of the situation for the shallowness of the design.
And so we settled on a gamification approach, wherein we presented a slew of messaging with an overarching theme of ‘Let’s defeat corona together’. All of the sub-messaging was tied up to this theme and presented various simulated scenarios which would enable a viewer to understand the simple yet all-important guidelines they must adhere to in order for our nation to defeat this virus together.
We let out the campaign over a few days in succession on all our social media platforms, the same is interlinked with many other campaigns on our website. By virtue of our business model, we are not only able to tell you what to do but actually enable you to do that through customised product offerings designed for various demographics like corporate and individual households. Our latest offering, the COVID LIFE KITS, are an example of the latter.
Learnings from this campaign
Yes. With regard to this campaign, we experimented with gamification, which is a powerful communication method, and it garnered positive results even in a B2B scenario. We also realized the need to engage with audiences on current matters that they are concerned about, and seek solutions to.
We spoke to our audiences and let them know that we understand their concerns. Solution-oriented, we always have been and this one was no different. Simple concepts are the best, aren’t they?
Business growth during Covid-19
Medikabazaar has been exempted from the lockdown under the umbrella of ‘Essential Service Providers’, wherein we have been able to procure and deliver essential COVID supplies to medical establishments in metros and remoter, Tier II, III regions. We have continued to operate at full capacity, thanks to strategic decisions taken early on in the year.
Although businesses in the healthcare domain have suffered too, we have been fortunate to have witnessed a manifold increase in revenue while providing valuable services. We have managed to achieve a 4X increase in revenue, first quarter this year.
Partnerships
We are proud to have tied up with US-based Zipline to deliver medical supplies through drone delivery. The supplies will be shipped over an area of up to 85 kilometres from our Fulfilment Centres in Pune and Nandurbar to start with, in the pilot phase.
These pilot tests will let us calculate the delivery times, the error rate of flight operations and efficiency of the cold chain. The pandemic has proven that our existing supply chains aren’t robust enough, and we can usher in an era of better accessibility and timely delivery to hospitals.
We hope to get the formal approvals from various authorities like DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) and others in the next few quarters. We believe this will have a tremendous impact on saving lives in rural areas, especially those which are crippled with bad connectivity or tough terrains.
What’s next?
We have huge expansion plans. We will double our current number of Fulfilment Centres (FCs) and Central Distribution Centres (CDCs) to 44 locations across India. Some of the finalized regions are Madurai, Coimbatore, Ranchi, Kochi, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur. We plan to complete this by the end of December 2021. We are ramping up our last-mile delivery business unit in a substantial manner.
We are looking at multiple GMV growth in the current financial year, with increased focus in Tier II, III cities.
