Cure.fit aims to make Indians holistically healthy

Do you sometimes have a rajma-chawal craving, but are too tired to cook? And are you also not in the mood to shell out big bucks for an expensive Greek salad either? Well, Eat.fit, Cure.fit's food technology arm, seems to have an option just for you and it's just one of many.

In India, health is an over $100 billion category and with time, more and more Indians are opening up to the idea of experimenting with new tech-driven approaches for better consumer experiences. Given the increased level of conversation around health and wellbeing and consumers bidding farewell to their junk-food days, Bangalore-based health and fitness startup Cure.fit sees it as a great opportunity to invest in an ecosystem of building health consciousness.

We recently spotted the creative in Delhi Times
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Cure.fit was founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal, former co-founder of fashion retailer Myntra and Ankit Nagori, ex-chief business officer at Flipkart.

We spoke to Nagori on the brand's advertising endeavour so far...

Ankit Nagori

"Cure.fit is a holistic, integrated healthcare platform offering services through its four verticals - Cult.fit, Eat.fit, Mind.fit, and Care.fit. Cult.fit focuses on physical strength and fitness, Eat.fit for healthy and nutritive food, Mind.fit for mental wellbeing, and Care.fit for primary healthcare, " he informs.

The brand chose outdoors as its lead advertising medium, given Cult.fit is a hyperlocal product. The brand also claims to be the first digital fitness company having a presence in both online and offline spaces that enables ease of access to existing and potential customers. "Leveraging digital technology across platforms, with the use of visual content, mostly covering the verticals - Cult and Eat have been our primary conversion drivers. Until recently, our geographical spread has been limited to six cities (Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai) and hence, the use of television as a medium has been the least. However, given our expansion plans, we are likely to leverage this medium as well," he shares.

The healthy food-delivery offering under Eat.fit, forms the largest user-base with over 35,000 orders being processed per day, "We just concluded a brand campaign on Fit Thali in the month of May and we've been advertising via radio as well in Delhi and Bangalore, at the same time," Nagori says. Last year, Cure.fit opened its first Eat.fit QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) in Bengaluru.

While asked to share his insights on avenues to park their media money, Nagori replies, "We calculate ROI on digital. For TV, we look at the top of the funnel metrics - installs, searches, traffic."

Globally, Nagori doesn't see any direct competitors for Cure.fit. "We are an integrated healthcare start-up engaged in propagating healthy living through our four verticals all offered under the same roof," he says. He considers the variety of services offered with an integrated package to be the real USP of the platform.

Although, as a brand, Cure.fit is accessible to everyone, however, "... our target audience is ideally from the age group of 16 years to 40+," he explains.

Throwing light on the start-up's projects in the pipeline, Nagori informs, "We have recently launched in Chennai and Jaipur and have set our footprint in the UAE market by launching our first Cult centre in Dubai. By 2020, we have plans of expanding our Cure.fit services to consumers in 50 Indian cities across 800 centres. We are looking at setting up Eat.fit cafeterias and kitchens in these markets by 2020. With respect to the UAE market, we have plans of launching ten more Cult centres and one Mind.fit centre by the end of the year."

Nikhil Rungta

Nikhil Rungta, ex-MD Intuit (former CMO - Google, Reliance, Jio, Yatra), has a rather humorous take to share, "Fit Club membership is the new 'Mumbai Dabbawala' membership. The only differences being - it is digital, you can manage it through an app and the food on offer is 'healthified'. It is an interesting promotion targeted at young working professionals."

By adding the cricket promo, Rungta feels the company is simply trying to ride the World Cup buzz. "I feel this communication will appeal to a small niche - those who are big on fitness and love cricket; the rest might give it a pass," he opines.

"Cure.fit operates in the health and fitness category which has largely been unorganised in India and it also means getting people to change their current lifestyle and habits, which is a hard problem to solve. So, they have been using a mix of celebrity endorsement and incentives to drive this change," he shares.

Karthik Srinivasan

Communications consultant Karthik Srinivasan echoes the fact that the healthy food market is a fast-growing segment in India. He sees this as a trend and a rather good one to have in a country like India. Srinivasan also adds that the new trend towards healthy and natural content drinks is gaining market share.

"There's already increased interest in consuming less sugar (sales trends of cola drinks is proof) and an increased number of variants for products like peanut butter to include 'healthier', less sugared variants," he says. He further points out that Eat.fit has a good captive base in Cure.fit - the gym chain.

"As for the print ad, it is nothing but a topical intervention for the World Cup (WC) while they don't have an official tie-up with ICC. Notice the destination (London) and the 'cric mania' and 'official India jersey' mentions... They simply want to capture topical attention during the event. WC and cricket is top of mind for people and quite a few brands are offering tickets to UK (Uber, Britannia and Coca-Cola)," he signs off.