- What is the one factor that took your brand from good to great?
Customer experience is the cornerstone on which Swiggy was built. From day one of our inception, the core value that we have followed is ‘consumer comes first’. We put the consumers in the centre and build around them. During our early days, when we were growing 3-4x per month, our customer experience began slipping because our focus temporarily shifted to maximizing the number of transactions. We decided to not scale up until we had our delivery systems (delivery app) in place and we put our growth on pause. To take a decision like that as an early stage startup at that point was difficult but we took a call which was centred on the consumer.
This deep consumer understanding has been the most important factor in Swiggy’s exhilarating growth as a brand and as a business. Knowing who the customer is, their current habits and practices, their tensions and problems have been critical in our process of creating the brand. Having created the foundation of strong consumer experience and the aid of our technology and operations, we’ve managed to create a lot of positive sentiments towards the brand through innovative and iconic advertising campaigns and communications that fuelled brand awareness, love, loyalty, and growth.
- What role does technology play in making and keeping a brand hot?
Being a technology-driven brand gives us a huge advantage in brand building and understanding our customers. Real-time access to consumer interactions with the product provides a rich understanding of their past behaviour. This allows us to gain a holistic view of them and helps predict how they will respond to potential interventions, be it in the form of a new product or a piece of communication. This combined with technology has helped us create new ways of reaching consumers and has been critical in keeping the brand relevant.
For example, we had created a feature on Valentine’s Day where we Swiggy played Cupid and matched consumers basis on their food interests. This was made possible through various technologies coming together.
- How has data become the essence of business/marketing?
Data has allowed us to get to know our consumer better than ever before and leverage that for better decision making and personalization. We use a combination of data-based intelligence and human intelligence to gauge how consumers will react to products, features or communication and make informed decisions, accordingly.
From a business & marketing perspective, one of the advantages of being a brand created in the modern digital economy is access to a wealth of data. This data allows us to precisely measure the performance of a campaign, brand, and business and campaign performance and identify the responses to various inputs. We are able to understand which mediums and channels work in driving different types of key marketing and business metrics and use that to constantly refine, improve and improve the efficiency of future activities, initiatives and campaigns.
- What are your thoughts on the need for digital transformation?
Digital transformation is critical and paramount for a business or brand to succeed in today’s digital-first environment. Some of the most important marketing levers such as content marketing, automation, CRM, attribution and more are all dependent on your business being structured and set-up in a digital-first way. Your platform needs to be able to interface with various other digital platforms and tools across business intelligence, marketing automation, CRM, attribution, and analytics to leverage the larger digital ecosystem. Digital transformation enables increased operational efficiency and growth for a business.
