What does it take to grow a mega brand like Swiggy?

Swiggy has adapted to the fast-changing world of food delivery and quick commerce by expanding its offerings while holding on to convenience as its core value.

In this insightful conversation, Sreekant Khandekar, co-founder and CEO of afaqs!, sits down with Mayur Hola, vice president of brand for Swiggy and Instamart, to get insights into the brand's journey, the importance of distinct identities for its various services, and the strategies that keep Swiggy at the forefront of consumer minds. 

The following are excerpts from the interview. To view the complete conversation, visit YouTube.

Sreekant Khandekar: As the food delivery market has evolved over the past decade, how has the core promise of Swiggy changed? 

Mayur Hola: Looking at the new things we are doing, it can seem like we have pivoted away from our core promise. But if you talk to Harsha (Sriharsha Majety), our founder, you will quickly realise that our core promise has never changed.

Sreekant Khandekar: What is the core promise?

Mayur Hola: Our core promise for Swiggy and all of its various brands and businesses is to provide unparalleled convenience to the consumer. We have stayed true to that in everything we do—be it food delivery or quick commerce. 

We have veered in our minds from having an ideal universe where all the brands feed off Swiggy. Instead, we think each brand should have its own distinct identity.

Sreekant Khandekar: Apart from Swiggy, you have services such as Bolt, Snacc, and Instamart. How do you ensure distinct identities for each of them and yet ensure that they stay under the unified Swiggy umbrella? 

There are two forces at play here: on one hand, each of these brands is trying to create its own identity and pull away from Swiggy’s shadow, while on the other hand, there is a central force trying to keep them in Swiggy’s orbit.

Mayur Hola: We have veered in our minds from having an ideal universe where all the brands feed off Swiggy. Instead, we think each brand should have its own distinct identity. Let’s start with Swiggy itself: it is a well-recognised brand with high awareness in general, so our job is to evolve it, make it more contemporary, compete better, etc.

Now let’s take Instamart. It is also widely known in a hugely competitive segment. But if you see Instamart today, we don't even say ‘Swiggy’ ahead of it. We just plonk the ‘S pin’ because it adds some recognition and trust.

Swiggy Bolt helps us acquire people of a certain mindset rather than a certain age. It’s a mindset that has been conditioned by quick commerce.

Sreekant Khandekar: I have a specific question about your service, Bolt, which sits inside the Swiggy app and promises the delivery of popular items from partner restaurants within 10 minutes.

Your rival Zomato had a similar service called Quick. It was taken to some 400-500 towns but withdrawn, presumably because it didn’t make business sense. But you have persisted with Bolt. How does it serve the larger Swiggy cause? 

Mayur Hola: It helps us acquire a whole new generation of individuals who were born into this ‘no waiting’ era. They take to it like fish to water. It also works with older people who have themselves gotten used to not waiting. 

If you want something special, you are willing to wait for it. But 90% of the ordering process is fairly functional. I already know what I want. Why should I have to wait? Swiggy Bolt helps us acquire people of a certain mindset rather than a certain age. It’s a mindset that has been conditioned by quick commerce. The ticket size can be a little lower, but it’s a great recruitment vehicle for us. 

The challenge here is very different from almost any other multi-competitor category I have worked on. I find the way it operates strange.

Sreekant Khandekar: You and Zomato make up a duopoly in food delivery, and in quick commerce, you are part of a triopoly together with Blinkit and Zepto. You have been an ad man for a long time. Would your approach to advertising be different if your category had many players?

Mayur Hola: Does it change anything? The answer is both yes and no. 

I'll start with food, which has two such strong embedded brands and businesses. Awareness levels are high, and so is penetration. So, it becomes extremely important to differentiate yourself.

The feet on the ground are already differentiated by wearing orange and red, which aids brand awareness. It is pretty functional, but this visibility is very, very useful.

At the brand level, we try to differentiate ourselves from a very strong competitor that has been known to be quirky. But if you dig a little deeper, you might find that (Zomato) is the more wholesome brand. Everything we have done in the last couple of years helps make us the more quirky brand. We try to be as sharply differentiated and as clearly present as we can be.

In quick commerce, there are actually more than just three players. There are a number of them. The category is at a fairly early stage, and a lot of the communication is like, ‘Now we have got vacuum cleaners; now we have ACs.’

The category, almost to a fault, focuses outwards far too much and not enough inwards, on itself. The challenge here is very different from almost any other multi-competitor category I have worked on. I find the way it operates strange. My role is to define Instamart as clearly as possible without the crutch of ‘Tu janta hai mere paas kya hai?’

There are hardcore loyalists, and then there are what we call the dual-appers—they go both ways but tend to be more loyal to one. And then there are people who literally do Excel sheet-level math to figure out the best deal and just go with whoever is giving them that!

Sreekant Khandekar: In the early days of Ola and Uber, people went with the service that made the better offer. Over time, people have settled down with one of the two, or perhaps with Rapido.

Has that happened in food delivery? Are there distinct groups of Swiggy users and Zomato users, or do consumers frequently switch between the two services?

Mayur Hola: There are hardcore loyalists, and then there are what we call the dual-apers—they go both ways but tend to be more loyal to one. 

And then there are people who literally do Excel sheet-level math to figure out the best deal and just go with whoever is giving them that!

Sreekant Khandekar: Of these three cohorts, who is your advertising aimed at? 

Mayur Hola: It is aimed at the far younger audience, to be honest, because we know that the loyalists are very hard to swing. Even as a brand, we focus on the younger audience because it helps us differentiate more.

Sreekant Khandekar: There is an enormous volume of communication from the brands you oversee. How do you decide what you should personally approve and what someone else can decide on?

Mayur Hola: I think the No. 1 lesson is that you have to build a strong team. If you have a strong team, you keep a pretty close view on pretty much everything that goes out. Our brands are under the microscope most of the time—we’ve seen the smallest thing getting picked up and becoming a big issue. If you don’t have this great team, you’re dead.

Personally, I try to see anything that has investment in it and all the social stuff. 

I end up seeing maybe 85% of it. The things that I don't see, I probably don't know about. And that makes me wonder why I don't know about it!

I believe that the most innovative individuals today are engineers, rather than the traditional creatives we once recognised.

Sreekant Khandekar: You were on the agency side for 20 years, and now you’ve been on the client side for about six. Has this shift changed your view of the creative process as well as the client-agency relationship?

Mayur Hola: One big difference is that, as a marketer, you want to get more people into a room to discuss an idea as opposed to the agency business, where you want to protect what you are creating. You want to protect and nurture the idea, rather than letting someone take potshots and kill it.

I have been involved in consumer tech for some time, and I find it to be exceptionally creative. I believe that the most innovative individuals today are engineers, rather than the traditional creatives we once recognised. By involving these engineers, we can appreciate that there are far more intelligent individuals around us from whom we can learn.

So, the single biggest thing that might have changed for me is getting more people into the room.

Sreekant Khandekar: How do you divide your work between agencies that are on a retainer as opposed to those you do projects with?

Mayur Hola: We don't have a mainline agency on the roster at all. We do have a couple of social agencies on retainership, and they help us manage. 

Outside of that, we probably give out a couple of projects in particular to Moonshot (Tanmay Bhat’s agency), who we like working with. They're mad. They're probably the only people we know who are even more insane than we are. 

Barring that, we try to do most things in-house. We are pretty well stocked in that regard with an internal production team, etc. We try to be as open source as possible. When people come to us with ideas that we can pay for—we don’t want them for free—we support as many as we can. 

Sreekant Khandekar: Last question: are there some commonly accepted advertising and marketing beliefs that you rail against? Some pet peeves?

Mayur Hola: Not really, but I do believe there is no such thing as a ‘medium’ anymore. When you put stuff out there, it is meant to travel in the way the gaze of your eye travels from one screen to another screen to life around you and back onto a screen. So I really don’t get this press ad or outdoor ad or whatever. It should be amoeba-like and expand as it needs to.

What else? I try not to be too judgemental. People do all sorts of shit, and they probably have a reason to do it. The only other thing I have a view on is ourselves, and we're pretty—for lack of a better phrase—batshit crazy and very voluntarily and willingly so. We embrace everything.

One thing I perhaps rail against is this tendency to label things like ‘cringe’, etc. We don't really care where an idea comes from, whether it's regional, local, or from anywhere else. You can call it whatever. We are fine as long as the idea helps us be your friend and not be a brand trying to be salesy and stuffing ourselves in your face. We will embrace it, and you're free to judge us for that.