Godrej L’Affaire: An Enabler Platform For Lifestyle Brands
Godrej L’Affaire is a lifestyle experiential platform from conglomerate Godrej Group, which forays into social commerce
By Rachit Juneja
March 23, 2021
“Using influencers as affiliates to sell products, works well, provided influencers are mapped correctly and brands leverage the USP and uniqueness of influencers very wisely, and from a long term perspective.” - Michelle Francis, General Manager, Godrej
Godrej, as a brand has been here for years, and has touched the lives of thousands of Indians on a regular basis. Godrej is known to be synonymous with trust, legacy, and value for money products. Godrej L’Affaire is a lifestyle experiential platform from conglomerate Godrej Group, which forays into social commerce, through which lifestyle brands are plugged in the content on its social media assets enabling consumers to make direct purchases from brands. For this, L’Affaire lists over 40 lifestyle brands including Godrej as well as external non-competing ones.
The social commerce initiative by Godrej is a pilot project where Godrej L’Affaire became an enabler platform for lifestyle brands. It facilitated meaningful engagement of Godrej and external lifestyle brands with consumers through live streaming sessions, exclusive web content featuring prominent personalities, user-generated content (UGC) through unboxing experience, flash contest, and sales. In doing so, the brands offered the most exclusive digital deals to patrons across categories of food, fashion, beauty, retail, footwear, home décor and interiors, appliances, baby care, personal care, hair care, health and hygiene, wellness, jewelry, among others.
We got in touch with Ms. Michelle Francis, General Manager, Godrej, to find out more about the #LiveItUp2021 campaign for L'Affaire, and here’s what we found out:
On the objective of the campaign:
“We launched Godrej L’Affaire in the lifestyle vertical. L’Affaire is a community of lifestyle enthusiasts. It was started with the purpose of making a digital safety net for the group. When a brand associates with different kinds of influencers and celebrities throughout the year and your digital safety net is so strong and well-networked that your loyalists and enthusiasts always stand by you because your digital footprint is so strong. So, to create a safety net, create content, and help provide experiences. Gratification-driven communication is what we aimed to achieve. Also, in order to establish ourselves as a luxury lifestyle brand, and create conversations about the same, we came up with our own owner-media property. This year, for #LiveItUp2021, we created a very interesting campaign, including nine webisodes, which were 59-second videos.”
On the choice of influencers and celebrities for the campaign:
“First, we identify influencers that connect with the brand according to their genres and our requirements. We have a very structured system. We check their engagement scores, and we don't rely on the number of followers because that can be deceiving. Their conversations have to be very authentic and genuine. We ensure the same by using tools to analyze every influencer’s page in order to check their following and authenticity. Everything is done in-house - from identifying influencers to cracking the deal with them and getting them on board. For #LiveItUp2021, we associated with over 250 influencers, out of which 9 influencers contributed to our webisodes, so they were paid associations. Apart from these, 90% of other influencer associations were done on a pro-bono basis.”
How do you measure the RoI?
“At Godrej, we don't believe in ROI. We follow a system of measuring ROO, which stands for Return On Objective. No influencer activity guarantees sales, so it is incorrect to map it against investment. For our PR and Influencer initiatives, we set objectives. So, for #LiveItUp, we had 3 objectives - increase in the number of followers, influencer engagement rate should be between 3-4%, and comments and interaction on each of the posts should be a certain percentage. So, all these objectives are met, it will lead to sales. So, at the end of the campaign, we map our results with our set ROO.”
How do you leverage the uniqueness of each influencer?
“Each influencer is unique. We map influencers according to their niche and position them with the kind of brand ethos their profile matches. We also make sure that each influencer piece on our page is engaging, and not forced. The uniqueness of influencers is enforced when a brand is subtly plugged in and is done on a long-term basis. We don't believe in overtly branding our products, we rely on subtle and organic integration of brands/products while increasing the frequency and duration of our associations. Our goal is to build credibility and trust amongst our community of influencers and customers.”
On Social Commerce and using influencers are affiliates to sell products:
“This was the first year we moved into the social commerce space for Godrej L’Affaire. We are not an e-commerce platform, so for L’Affaire, consumers had to take multiple steps to reach the final product they wished to buy. This led to a few challenges for us because it might lead to fallouts, as consumers want minimum steps in such cases. But, our campaign was never based on sales generation. The campaign was done for awareness, to start our e-commerce presence, and experiment sales on Instagram. So, we will definitely figure out a way around this. As L’Affaire is a brand agnostic platform, we obviously couldn't dictate terms to other brands we had onboard, or control their landing pages.
So, overall, social commerce worked well for us, and I believe, using influencers as affiliates to sell products, works well, provided influencers are mapped correctly and brands leverage the USP and uniqueness of influencers very wisely, and from a long-term perspective.”
On how #LiveItUp2021 stands out:
“So, this year the campaign has worked very well for us. The numbers have been pleasantly surprising. When we set our objectives for this year, we did not expect too much buzz around it because it was going to be a virtual event, and it wouldn’t match the level of the on-ground event. In Season 4, we had an on-ground event and the leach was 63 million, whereas, in season 5, which was a virtual event, the numbers jumped up to 103 million. At first, we were very skeptical about our reach for the virtual event, so we kept our targets low as compared to previous years. But, to our surprise, the campaign worked really well because our content was immensely liked and shared.”
On future plans for influencer marketing:
“For L’Affaire, we are planning to engage with influencers to create reels and ensure that the brand’s communication aligns with what is in trend at the moment. We have a number of brand loyalists and influencers that we have associated with on a long-term basis, so we will ensure that we have conversions with them on the map we have prepared for the upcoming year, and create more sustained, subtle, and creative conversations with them.”
A recent trend in influencer marketing that you think is here to stay:
“Trends have to be in sync with what social media platforms are promoting. Influencers just add to the trend by creating content that social media platforms are promoting. For instance, Instagram was promoting Instagram Live Sessions during Covid times, so all brands and influencers were indulging themselves in the same. Now, the new trend Instagram is promoting is Reels, so that is a trend that I think is here to stay. Short, crisp content and engaging content is here to stay. People look forward to lighter and more humorous content, that is entertaining and light-hearted, so this is working well on social media platforms. Music and dancing are also picking up pace. In addition to that, food is a topic that people don’t seem to get tired of.”
Conclusively, as evident from Sheeko’s Activity Graph and BrandScore Ratings, Godrej has been moderately active on digital platforms in the past one year, but since the inception of the #LiveItUp2021 Campaign, there has been a significant increase in their numbers.
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