Case Study- Royal Oak - How The Brand Used Non-Traditional Advertising To Increase Awareness

Product/Service

Founded in 2002, Royaloak Furniture is one of the leading organized furniture distributors & retailers in India.

With an international standard of quality & excellence, the brand brings the biggest collection of furniture in the country – sofas, living room furniture, Office Furniture, Bedroom Furniture, Utility Furniture, and Outdoor Furniture- all in unbeatable quality and ultimate comfort. Their products are imported from all around the globe but mainly from Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey, hence, giving the customers authentic, beautiful designs at an incredible price range.

Objective

The objective of Royaloak’s campaign was to increase brand awareness and promote their summer sale offer.

Target Audience

Royaloak, being a modern furniture distributor & retailer has positioned itself as a brand that caters mostly to urban consumers who fall under the mid and high income group. The target audience of this campaign was hence, kept the same with some specifications- people who prefer modern organized furniture, and who fall under the bracket of mid and high income group.

Geography

The campaign was run in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

Approach

A campaign’s approach can be adopted by analyzing some specific details like:

The objective of the campaign
The campaign’s target audience
Geography that needs to be covered in the campaign

Analyzing the above information would help in underlining the brand’s requirements/need behind running the campaign, which will then propel us towards the direction of adopting the most suitable approach.

The objective of Royaloak’s campaign was brand awareness and promoting their summer sale offer in Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad. The target audience for this campaign was consumers belonging to mid and high income levels who prefer modern furniture.

For this particular campaign, Royaloak took the approach of creating a buzz around their summer sale, which was reflected in their ads. The brand wanted to position itself as an online retail store that offers organized furniture of unbeatable quality. Hence the target audience belonged to urban mid and high income groups.

The campaign was run in tier 1 cities like Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad with the aim to increase their overall brand awareness and promote their summer sale. Hence, targeting a mass audience in these cities was a good approach to reach out to people from mid and high income groups.

Solution

Keeping the campaign’s approach in mind, we can conclude that non-traditional advertising could prove to be the most effective media for this campaign.

Why?

Considering that the campaign’s target audience was spread across a variety of income groups- middle and high, the requirement was for a media option that could target people in both the categories simultaneously.

The brand needed to run the campaign in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad. The people who fall in the middle and high income group of these cities can be put under the category of working professionals and hence, an advertising medium was required which had a higher probability of being consumed by this category of audience.

The strategy behind selecting non-traditional ad options that included bus branding, metro advertising and mobile van was the fact that, since the brand’s target audience was always on the move, commuting to work or meetings, they would spend a significant amount of time on public transport. By targeting these non-traditional ad options, the brand would capture its audience’s attention during their daily commute, creating a strong impression and recall value.

Metro and Bus Branding:

In particular, bus branding and metro advertising were highly effective media options as they offered high visibility in crowded public spaces.

Since the target audience of this campaign were mostly urban working professionals, bus and metro branding was the top choice, considering the fact that these two media options target the cosmopolitan as well as local public of these major metro cities. Working professionals in tier 1 cities have a tendency to take public transport while commuting to and from work. Placing the ads in these media would have hence resulted in an increased exposure to the Royaloak ads.

Metro branding also proved to be useful for the brand since they had their physical stores in areas which had metro stations. Since the objective was to create brand awareness, repeated exposure to these ads (once in the metro and then in the physical stores in those areas when the commuter gets down from the metro) would have helped establish the brand in the consumers’ mind.

Mobile Van: Mobile van ads were used in areas in and around the physical stores of the brand, again, to increase the frequency of ad exposure and in turn creating brand awareness and more importantly, promoting their summer sale offer. The mobile van ads provided a more personalized touch by reaching out to potential customers directly in their neighborhoods. This approach helped the brand increase its visibility and resulted in a significant uptick in their sales, proving the effectiveness of non-traditional advertising methods in targeting a specific audience.

What made the campaign unique and hard hitting?

The approach to use non-traditional media like bus and metro advertising (which provided high visibility in crowded spaces) combined with mobile vans (provided a more personalized touch by reaching out to potential customers directly) proved to be a strong strategy in the case of Royaloak’s campaign. The repeated exposure to the ads in these media resulted in increasing brand retention in the consumers’ minds.

The attractive and great message delivery of the ads also succeeded in reeling in the audiences’ attention while they crossed them and hence effectively established the campaign’s objective and at the same time stressing on their summer sale offer.