Owned and operated by Bloombay Enterprises Pvt Ltd., The Belgian Waffle Co was founded in India in 2015. The brand serves Belgian-style waffles in India. It claims to be the largest waffle brand in India, with over 570 stores across 190+ cities, the brand embarks on a delightful journey of taste and texture, tantalising your senses with every bite.
The brand’s reputation rests on three distinctive pillars: being the pioneers of The Original Waff-wich in India, holding the title of India’s largest waffle chain with a network of 570+ stores, and being 100% Veg, catering to an audience of waffle enthusiasts.
The brand operates in different types of store formats like café modes, kiosks, takeaway set ups and mall stores. Driven by innovation and an intuitive understanding of consumer preferences, the brand has always embraced modern trends and digital marketing, effortlessly connecting with a new generation of food enthusiasts, particularly the vibrant and tech-savvy GenZ audience
Medianew4u.com caught up with Vrushali Parab, Marketing Head at The Belgian Waffle Co
Q. What marketing strategies have proven effective in making waffles seen by consumers as being a meal and not just a dessert?
We are yet to establish waffles as a meal option as it’s still getting mainstream slowly in India. The objective is to position waffles as ‘anytime indulgence’ and content plays an important role in driving that narrative. Tapping into day-to-day occasions in consumers’ life and focusing on how Waffles play an important role in those occasions help enhance its appeal beyond just ‘dessert’. The drool-worthiness of the content helps in inducing cravings and instant urge to have their favourite waffles at any time of the day and not necessarily just as a post-meal dessert.
Q. Since the TG is below 30 does most of the marketing focus rest on digital?
Yes, most campaigns and communication is digital-first. We strive to strike a good balance between digital, local area marketing and utilisation of the store infrastructure as the biggest marketing real-estate for us. Visibility and promotions on aggregator platforms play a huge role as well, as they are one of the biggest discovery platforms for consumers when it comes to food brands. Within digital platforms, Instagram is our primary channel of communication considering the young target audience of the brand.
Q. How important is Moment Marketing within the marketing mix?
In today’s time, discerning consumers value smart communication over mundane posts, and that kind of communication also gets picked up quickly on social channels, which proves to be a great promotional lever. Moment Marketing is the perfect opportunity to put the brand out there, capitalising on an existing trend or event. It drives consumer perception about the brand and helps in communicating any campaign-specific narrative more effectively.
During the pre-buzz of National Waffle Day promotions, we tried to capitalize on the craze of ‘Bad Newz’ movie with a huge digital billboard on WEH talking about ‘Good News on 19th July’ playing right after the ‘Bad Newz’ movie poster which released on the same day of the event. Recreated from some of the actual promotional posters of the movie, this poster had people enjoying waffles in their hands, with a subtle integration of the offer.
The infamous Microsoft outage also happened on the same day of the event on 19th July, and we were quick to capitalise onto it with a social post, inviting people to visit our stores during the downtime.
Q. How important is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing plays an important role in driving brand narratives and perceptions. While it’s an important lever in the whole communication mix, we at The Belgian Waffle Co believe in the right fit and quality collaborations over mass bombarding of any promotion or narrative. It’s an extremely cluttered space, especially within the food and beverage sector. We try to get an edge through meaningful, original content that resonates with our target group. And, that has been the forte of the brand when it comes to influencer marketing.
For the promotion of the National Waffle Day, we collaborated with select influencers with a very specific campaign theme of #Everyoneknows and rolled out content that hit an instant cord with our young audience. In less than 24 hours, our first influencer collaboration went viral and had reached 6M+ views and ~400K engagement purely on the back of relatable content
Q. How did the idea of celebrating National Waffle Day come about?
It was the brain-child of our CEO, Ankit Patel. The date 19th July was chosen as it happens to be the birthday of Shrey Aggarwal, founder of The Belgian Waffle Co. We decided to celebrate it by offering waffles at just Rs.100 and called it ‘The National Waffle Day’. Being the pioneer and leader in the waffle space in India, we could establish the importance of this day as a national day and since then there has been no looking back.
Today, every dessert player having waffles in their menu celebrates it across the length and breadth of the country and consumers believe it to be a red-letter day. For us, this day, year-on-year, has been the pinnacle of success across various measures including reach, engagement, footfall, sales and above all consumer love.
Q. What role has ‘Hunt For The Coolest Fan’ played in building a closer connect with Gen Z?
The ‘Hunt for The Coolest Fan’ campaign was aimed at connecting with our GenZ consumers at a deeper level to drive engagement and reward them handsomely for the love they shower us with, as their favourite brand. The campaign led to a huge digital outreach for the brand, drove 2 lakh+ consumers to register for our loyalty programme and had 700+ unique contest entries on Instagram. All of this helped in driving great consumer awareness as well as stickiness for the brand.
