Mamaearth founder Ghazal Alagh shed light on the marketing strategy the personal care brand pursued in its early days, following the launch in 2016, when it still identified as a baby care company. Alagh was part of the panel, which included online mattress retailer Wakefit co-founder Chaitanya Ramalingegowda and founder-CEO of women activewear brand Blissclub, in comedian and adman Tanmay Bhat’s new podcast ‘The NextLevel’.
Being middle class when they started off meant husband Varun Alagh, who is the co-founder of Mamaearth, and Gazal Alagh were circumspect when it came to spending unless necessary in the business. “Hum log itni middle class family se aatein hai, humse paise diye hi nahi jaatein bina baat ke (We come from such a middle class family, we can’t give away money without a reason),” Ghazal Alagh said on a light note.
She added that they did not need a lot of money in the first few months of launching the company. “I think very early on we realised that not a lot of businesses need a lot of cash. Especially in our industry – beauty and personal care – you could manufacture as small as 10 pieces per product, handmade batches, and test it out with consumers or take it out and do a PMF (product market fit),” she said.
The duo felt word-of-mouth would be the best marketing strategy in the initial stage and they tailored it accordingly.
“We were doing a lot of consumer surveys. What we realised was that word of mouth in the category is actually very, very strong. When a mother uses it and recommends it to another mother, from experience, that has the most trust,” she said.
“Marketing ke liye paise nahi they, jo paise they (didn’t have money for marketing, the money we had) we were using it to build product. [Coming from a] Middle class background, you always want to have a war chest. You’re always rationing how much money do I spend and how much money do I always have because this is my runway for the next 6 months.”
Alagh revealed that as a couple they invested Rs 30 lakh and raised twice that amount from friends and family to start Mamaearth.
“We had put in Rs 30 lakh of our own money and had raised about Rs 60 lakh from friends and family. That was the war chest that we had for the first four months. Even from that money, we used very little. We used a lot of it to acquire consumers. On marketing, we went by word of mouth. We said ‘the cheapest form of marketing our product is making consumers experience our product’,” she recounted.
Ghazal, who had started the company to create quality baby care items in India, said she would give away products to woman bloggers for free to try them out. In exchange, she would request them to talk about the product if they liked it.
“We sent it out to as many people as we could and I created this ‘Board of Moms’. There used to be bloggers who used to write articles around parenting. I made friends with them. Coldly reached out to them. Had a conversation. Because they were also new moms, they were easily able to understand what I was talking about. One of the moms said that you know what ‘you are a company who’s by the parents for the parents’ and we stole that line from her and I’m still very grateful,” she said.
This round of Mamaearth’s marketing was done with “no money spent”, according to Ghazal. But, as the company scaled, they decided to rope in influencers and popular figures. In 2017, the most popular personality to join team Mamaearth was actor and influencer Shilpa Shetty, who also decided to become an investor.
“This [word of mouth marketing] is the first five-six months of it, and after that we raised Series A. Money started flowing in. That’s when we started targeting some of the influential people. That’s how we got Shilpa [Shetty] on board.”
“The set of consumers that we were reaching out to had a strong trust in Shilpa because of the life that she was leading. She was also a new mother, she believed in everything natural, organic. We had multiple other celebrity names on the list but she just shined out so bright. We reached out to her.”
“I still remember she had come for the shoot in Delhi, she said I would love to come onboard as an investor. That did add a lot of credibility to a new brand who was operating in a segment where earning trust was really difficult. Shilpa helped build a lot of trust because people already knew her for her way of life.”
Beyond marketing, Mamaearth also introduced an external source of certification of safety on its products which further helped build trust, Ghazal said.
“We worked with this not for-profit organization called Made Safe, who tested each and every product to be safe. So, that worked in our favour. That helped build a lot of trust,” she said.
Seven years after the launch, Varun Alagh and Ghazal Alagh took the company public in November 2023. Mamaearth’s parent company Honasa Consumer listed in the stock market at Rs 330 per share on 7 November 2023. The stock is currently (20 February 2024) trading at Rs 427.50. The company boasts a market cap of Rs 13,745 crore.
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