I recently came across the initiative by Parle Agro for its baked snack brand Hippo where they have utilized the social media to track inventory and replenish stocks. This post examines the initiative.
Parle Agro launched snack food brand Hippo in 400,000 stores across India. Since its launch in June 2009, the brand has operated by the philosophy of establishing itself in the US$ 1.5 billion Indian snack market with its unusual tagline, ‘Hunger is the root of all evil. Don’t be hungry.’ The package of Hippo baked munchies sported its mascot, an unusual black-coloured character named Hippo. In February 2010, Nadia Chauhan, Joint Managing Director & CMO, Parle Agro Pvt Ltd. stated that “It’s been nearly seven months since the brand was launched and by now we have a national footprint. The response has been very good following the launch and we have exceeded our expectations in these seven months. We also opened four factories since the production began”. However, the unexpected sales pressure along with a new, unsettled sales and distribution network created problems in inventory management as stocks were drying up in stores and they found it challenging to track and re-stock the empty stores quickly. The coverage of retail stores was further complicated because more than 90 % of Indian snack market was still catered through unorganised retail.
In order to reinforce its sales and distribution network, Parle Agro partnered with Creativeland Asia and turned to social media to experiment with alternative retail inventory tracking methods. The snack brand explored the possibility of using social media to crowdsource the sales and distribution network in a huge country like India and get consumers to voluntarily work on augmenting its supply chain efforts. Both the partners came up with something very special on Twitter, pushing the boundaries of what 140 characters can do for a snack food. What they have achieved, in short, can be called crowdsourced inventory tracking.
Hippo asked his Twitter followers to send a tweet whenever they couldn’t find Hippo in stores and promised to replenish stocks within hours. On February 2010, the @HelloMeHippo twitter account sent out this message: “Hippo ask you tell to Hippo when you not find Hippo in shop. Hippo come there at once and fight hunger.” The company called it ‘Hippo English,’ ostensibly straight from the mouth of the mascot itself. Parle Agro acted on the tweets by sending word to local distribution partners to get snacks into the newly empty shelve who restocked the store within hours. Hippo also reciprocated with incentives and real-time stock replenishment updates on Twitter.
As people followed the Hippo’s call, Parle Agro became beneficiaries of the first Twitter-based real-time nationwide stock checker. At negligible cost Parle Agro managed to leverage Tweeters, ‘mostly… in cities where Hippo was present but maybe temporarily unavailable,’ as an essential part of their supply lines. The company had Tweets pouring in from 45 cities across India. Thus, Parle Agro had 400 additional people helping it in its sales and distribution efforts over Twitter – equivalent to almost 45 % of the strength of its sales and distribution network itself. The company claimed that sales rose by 76 % in the first few months of its launch of the campaign.
The resulting response prompted Parle Agro to set up a core cell which instantly passes the information received as tweets to the respective area sales and distribution teams. Hippo continues to respond to the tweets with regular and meticulous updates on stock replenishment and also sends out personalised anti-hunger hampers to the most active tweeters, complete with a handwritten note. The initiative became one of the six entries from Indian agencies which were shortlisted in the Media Lions at Cannes 2010 in the Best Use of Social Media Marketing sub-category.
While the initiative focused on places where Hippo was already sold, it has potential to be much more. Parle Agro believes that they haven’t just created infrastructure to track stock, they’ve created one that can identify, gauge demand in, and prioritise new markets. Nadia Chauhan stated, “if a retailer doesn’t stock Hippo but there is a consumer demand for it, we can convince him to stock it. The initiative has also helped us to identify markets where Hippo sells out fast” While the company says that the initiative aimed to sharpen Hippo’s distribution, it can be said that it also helped in spreading up awareness, top of mind recall and demand from consumers.
Thanks to their popularity, Hippo munchies flew off the shelves; thanks to social media, they flew back on them.
