KOLKATA: Air conditioning and commercial refrigeration company, Blue Star, aims to spend Rs 35 crore during this summer on advertising and brand communication. The company has earmarked an investment of around Rs 41 crore as marketing spend for the entire next fiscal (2015-16).
The company also intends to continue investing in its digital marketing efforts in social media as well as the internet, considering that most Blue Star buyers belong to the highest socio-economic category (SEC A), who are active on the internet.
“Blue Star achieves around 40 per cent of its sale during summer season, so for our summer campaign, we aim to spend around Rs 35 crore,” said Blue Star executive director and president - AC&R Products Business B Thiagarajan.
The company unveiled a new range of contemporary, stylish and energy-efficient room air conditioners on Wednesday in Kolkata.
“Our company has identified a new value proposition of ‘Nobody Cools Better’ and soon this will be used widely with a set of TV commercials supported by advertisements in mainline dailies, cinema and hoardings. Since we are now well entrenched in the residential segment, we plan to aggressively promote this new proposition in TV, print ad hoarding,” informed Thiagarajan.
It should be noted that last year for the summer campaign, the company had earmarked Rs 25 crore in marketing spends. This summer, the company is looking at vibrant TVCs like its previous campaign ‘Daddy Cool.’ The company’s ad agency Interface has already been roped in to assist Blue Star for the TVC.
The company also plans to enhance investments on new product development and research and design initiatives in order to develop modern and sophisticated products.
Talking about the business and growth, Thiagarajan said that Blue Star is eyeing to triple the share of inverter ACs in its room air conditioner sales by 2015 as the company is underpinning its hopes on increasing preference for energy efficiency products among the buyers and falling prices of inverter ACs.
Thiagarajan also said that the room AC business was a strong focus area for the company and it would be the primary growth driver of its revenues in the coming years. “We have been encouraged by the growth in market share in this business despite the strong presence of global brands. So we have decided to invest in R&D, manufacturing and marketing to boost room AC business,” he added.
Thiagarajan further said that countries like Japan and China are moving towards inverter ACs to help save power consumption. The company plans to sell 3.4 lakh units of ACs by 2015-16 of which seven per cent would be inverter.
Last year the room air-conditioners industry grew by 10 per cent in volume terms and in value terms it was 19 per cent.
Thiagarajan also said that the company is likely to finalize a manufacturing location by July or September next fiscal as it is looking to expand its manufacturing base. “We have a capacity to manufacture four lakh AC units at present,” he concluded.
