Inexpensive & effective: These startups help brands reach their target audience in exciting new ways

Marketing is a worldwide form of exposing a brand which requires a significant amount of money and time. While big companies enjoy the liberty to spend liberally on their marketing campaigns, budget constraints often limit the marketing options for small businesses.
The need of the hour is out-of-the box marketing methods, usually referred to as guerrilla marketing strategies - strategies that can help a business reach its target audience for a fraction of the usual cost.

Startups have now come up with innovative marketing ideas that can help other small businesses in the marketing endeavours. By venturing into the non-traditional advertising space with an aim to create a unique medium of marketing, these strategies have proven to be very impactful in the current age of advertising clutter, short attention span and many distractions

Cupshup: Brewing Innovation
For Indians, tea is a language in itself. In fact, science may never come up with a communication system better than a tea break. That was the idea behind CupShup, an innovative non-traditional marketing startup which provides paper cups with exciting art works of brands printed on it to office cafeterias, tea stalls and college canteens.

"How would you like brands to enjoy a cup of hot tea with your target audience? Our network of over 1000 offices, two Airlines, over 300 colleges and over 4000 retail tea vendors enables you to do just that. Our unique model is helping brands gain access to cubicles and classroom of this country," says Sanil Jain, who cofounded Cupshup with Sidharth Singh. CupShup aims to convert the tea stalls and tea breaks of the country into discussion joints for brands by advertising on the paper tea/coffee cups.

Jain says that, contrary to other advertising media such as TV and radio, which often involve one way flow of information and are almost always flipped over by the customer, advertising over paper tea cups is bound to make an impression in their mind. "This medium is as effectual as it is crude, provides a five to seven-minute-long exposure and triggers conversations over tea-breaks which are organic, hence making deeper impressions in customers' minds," he adds.


Cupshup has a clientele of over 70 clients and worked with over 50 startups. The startup has completed campaigns for biggies like Google, ViaComm, YRF, ZEE, &Pictures, Uber, Ola, Coke, Zomato, Snapdeal, ShopClues and Zoomcar among others. Jain informs that all of these campaigns were characterized by over 90 percent brand recall and 70 percent offer recall.

Talking about their target market space, Jain said, "The Indian advertising market is Rs. 60,000 crore, out of which OOOH (Out of Home) is about Rs. 3000 crore. Since acquiring our first client (Ola Cabs), and having worked with over 50 plus startups we have realized that small businesses have been far more open to embrace and experiment with fresh marketing ideas compared to traditional companies."

Jain adds that his company has distributed close to two crore cups since inception and have expanded its reach to 24 cities with a reach of over 5000 touchpoints.

The cost of the cups is borne by advertisers and the ultimate benefits are passed on to CupShup's partner vendors as they provide them cups for free. "We charge our clients on a per unit basis for the end-to-end services right from getting the cups manufactured to distribution, tracking, monitoring and post campaign surveys to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. We have developed our own location enabled mobile app which captures live tracking of every single cup getting distributed at various touch points. This data is monitored live on our web-application, reports of which are then shared with our clients to ensure transparency in cups distribution and usage. The tracking will be done in real time soon. Through regular campaigns, we have analytics in place about the consumption pattern of cups at different touch points," says Jain, explaining their business model.

No brand would like to see the cups of its brand littering on the sides of the road. To manage this problem, the CupShup founders decided to supply brand new dustbins to all of the tea vendors wherever they we run campaigns.

CupShup is completely Bootstrapped. "We had put all our savings to seed the start-up and turned profitable within a few months of inception," he informs.

CASHurDRIVE
It was unusual how a slogan behind a truck and a small sticker on a police jeep stuck in traffic kept Raghu Khanna, an engineer from Indian Institute of Technology, busy throughout the ride. At the end of the day, the only lasting impression on him was to somehow convert this into a business opportunity. This is when the idea to charge advertisers to put their messages on privately owned vehicles clicked, which led to Khanna starting CASHurDRIVE in the year 2009.

CASHurDRIVE holds pan India presence with exclusive marketing rights for major taxi aggregators like Meru, Mega, Easy, Tab, Wings, Fast track cabs and many more. "Currently we are driving major government and PSU's campaigns like Clean India drive. Also, we were roped in as the official outdoor partner for Kings XI Punjab 4 times in a row (IPL Season 7, 8, 9 & 10) and Twice for Gujarat Lions in (Season 9 & 10)," informs Khanna.


The market is really diverse for CASHurDRIVE. "We have performed campaigns for almost every sector, such as FMCG, health, pharmacy, bank & PSU's, services, ecommerce etc. In our case, the company aimed to provide non-traditional mode of advertisement to brands in order to create a source of revenue for drivers as well as the vehicle owners. We have tried to bring both advertisers and vehicle owners together on the same platform so as to ensure that vehicles are monitored and the right advertisement reaches the right set of customers," says Khanna.

Khanna says the main reason for brands to opt for non-traditional advertising can be because of dense market rivalry. "Today, every brand is willing to experiment something unique and innovative. They crave for such media that is economical, but at the same time should stand out. Therefore, that's the market space everyone wants to tap," he says.

The startup has been bootstrapped with Khanna investing about Rs 20,000 that he borrowed from his my parents. Already present in 23 plus cities in India , CASHurDRIVE is looking forward to establish its setup in major locations of South East Asia.

AdMyBin
Founded by Joy Pansari, an automobile engineer from Bengaluru and Ankit Agarwal, a chartered accountant, the Kolkata-based AdMyBin is another promising startup in the non- traditional advertising space. AdMyBin combines advertising with waste management by installing waste bins with stands for marketing.

AdMyBin started its journey of keeping society clean and placing dustbins in November 2014 and as the Swachh Bharat Mission had already created a mind space amongst people to keep the city clean, but the resource (dustbins) was missing. The idea was to fill this gap by building a self-sustainable model. "Thus, with this idea we started putting up dustbins and advertising on top of it to cover up the cost of the same," says Pansari.


AdMyBin currently has more than 200 installations across different complexes, roads, schools, colleges and parks in Kolkata and looking for expansion on metro, railways and everywhere in the country where bins are required. The target customers are advertisers of local brands to big MNC in the private space to even PSUs. "We have branded for more than 20 clients across sectors including banks, hotel chains, film production houses, online supermarkets, textile houses, healthcare, travel, online learning portals among others," says Pansari.

AdMyBin has a subscription based model wherein an advertiser can select an area for advertising for a period of three months to one year. "The rates for advertising range from Rs 4500-Rs 18000 per bin depending on the duration," he informs.

AdMyBin not only provides a free of cost dustbins, but also takes the responsibility of maintaining the bins.

AdMyBin has been bootstrapped with an initial investment of Rs 30,000, but the founders have put in around Rs 5 lakh in the venture since the start. In future the startup plans to expand to Jaipur and Guwahati.

"We are also developing a Smart Bin, in which we would be able to track the waste level inside the bin, along with the count of people crossing the adbins. The pilot testing for this is done and will launch this very soon. Also, we are developing a WiFi Bin which would be an app based reward program for the public at large. The technology will make our adbins the gateway to free Wifi access," informs Pansari.