bOAt Case Study: HOW Aman Gupta's marketing strategies made bOAt a lifestyle brand worth Rs.1500 Crore.

From an investment of 3 million in 2014 to building an Rs.1500 Crore lifestyle brand with 39.3% market share in the FY 2021, in the cutthroat competitive market of chargers, earphones, headphones, and smartwatches with top competitors like Apple, JBL, Sennheiser, BOLT, noise, SONY, and SAMSUNG.The company began its journey as a cable manufacturer and seller, which had rapidly expanded its categories to serve over 800,000 customers, as reported in 2020.

Yes, we are talking about Aman Gupta, the famous shark and investor in the Shark Tank India show and a marketing expert who skyrocketed bOAt sales and made it a lifestyle brand with 2 million customers in the FY2020 and a total sales of 14,000-15,000 units daily. Let's take an insight into his business case study and marketing strategies to implement them in our startups.

The beginning of bOAt in 2014: by Aman Gupta and         Sameer Mehta

Aman Gupta was born in 1982 in Delhi, India. Gupta belonged to a middle-class family with his father, Neeraj Gupta, a director, and his mother, Jyoti Kochar Gupta, a housewife. He completed his schooling at Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram. Later, Gupta graduated with a degree of Bachelor in Commerce from Delhi University.  From 1999 to 2000, he studied at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, where he specialized in accounting and finance. After finishing his studies, Gupta worked as an assistant manager at Citi Bank for two years. Gupta’s journey in the entrepreneurial world began in 2005 when he launched Advanced Telemedia Pvt Ltd

At Advanced Telemedia, he helped launch several global brands such as Beats Audio, Sennheiser, Telex, and others in the Indian market. Later, in 2011, Gupta worked as a senior management consultant at KPMG’s Strategy Services Group. In the same year, he completed his master’s in business administration at Kellogg School of Management. Next, he worked at HARMAN International as the director of sales, where he led the business development of brands such as Apple and Micromax in the Indian market. Finally, in 2014, he and Sameer Mehta decided to enter the electronics market because of 2 reasons--

⏺ Apple introduced AirPods in the market which increased the craze for wireless earphones among the customers.

⏺ Many phone manufacturers stopped shipping earphones with their phones, which created a demand for affordable and good-quality earwear in the market.

 Aman and Sameer detected this demand and spent 2 years on (R&D) with an initial investment of Rs. 3 million and finally launched bOAt in 2016. The first product released by boAt was an indestructible Apple charging cable and charger because Apple products were very expensive. They priced it for Rs.1,500 and the product became the highest-selling product on Amazon. In 2019, it became the leading brand in the earwear category. In 2020, Aman Gupta received the Entrepreneur of the Year award in Consumer Durables. Today, the company has around 5,000 stores all over the country. They have sold their products to approximately 20 million people so far. the bOAt has decided to call its users "boat heads" which is again a great marketing strategy to attract and stay connected to your audience.

Take Home Msg:- Marketing is all about identifying and fulfilling customer needs profitably. Aman detected the loophole in the market that people want wireless earphones, headphones with good bass, and chargers at an affordable cost and he tried to fill that loophole by launching bOAt. Thus, when the problem of customers is solved by a company's product it leads to exponential growth in their business.

 He was listed in the Top Entrepreneur India tech 25 class in 2019. His brand stood up a standard among World’s Top wearable brands. Finally, in 2021 he was listed in under 40 Economic Times.

Boat's employee strength is somewhere between 200-500 employees.

Decoding bOAt's Marketing strategies: 7 Take home Msg's 

1) Targeting the right audience:-

Aman primarily focused on the Generation z customers( born between 1997-2012) and not on the Millennials ( born between 1981-1996), because he analyzed the need of the youth of this country i.e

the major loophole in the hearing market in 2017-2018 was the unavailability of good bass at low cost which can be understood from the below table:-

Categories of Brands	Price range (in Rs.)	Brand names
Ultra-premium	15k+	Apple, Bose
Premium	10k-15k	JBL
Sub premium	5k-10k	Sennheiser
Affordable	1k-5k	Boat, Bolt, noise

 

               

Aman utilized this opportunity to provide good quality at affordable prices ranging from Rs.1k-5k which eventually contributed to the evergrowing popularity of boat products and made it a budget-friendly choice for the youth consumers.

2) Expanding product catalog:- 

 

Recently, in May 2022, Aman Gupta, the co-founder of boAt announced that the company will be focusing on growing its wearable gadgets range this year. He also talked about expanding the company’s offline market. Aman aims to reach as many customers as he can by building up the offline market of boAt. Starting from apple chargers and cables to manufacturing earphones, headphones, smart watches, speakers like boat box, and then smartwatches. This is a perfect balance of innovation and marketing which provided an edge to bOAt over its competitors.

3) Affordable price ranges and great customer care support:-

The USP (Unique selling proposition) of bOAt's products is good quality products with good bass at an affordable and low cost for which other brands are costlier.

Another USP in bOAt's marketing strategy is no questions asked warranty at the doorstep, which none of its competitors offered back in 2019. The boat stone speaker was priced at Rs.2000 and at that time it beat its competitor JBL flip worth Rs.4500 without any celebrity endorsement due to its low price.

4) Brand Ambassadors:- 

Aman says bOAt is a lifestyle brand rather than a consumer electronics brand.

Aman said the brand had signed the iconic Telugu actress Rashmika Mandanna as boAt’s brand ambassador.  Aman also discussed the upcoming products that will be available this year. He said that the brand will be launching a new range of colors and segments for women. For the launch, be collaborating with the famous Indian fashion designer Masaba Gupta to launch headphones at Lakme Fashion Week 2020. It also collaborated with Bira.

5) Brand Ambassador:-

As we analyzed earlier bOAt focussed on Generation Z i.e the youth so it used the same tactics in its advertisements and made its brand ambassadors from Cricket and Bollywood. He chooses Rishabh Pant, Sikhar Dhawan, Neha Kakkar, Kiara Advani, Kartik Aryan, and Diljeet in 2020.

6) Lifestyle brand positioning:-

Aman made bOAt a lifestyle brand that has a unique fanbase among fitness-focused individuals used in workouts, trails, and hikes. As a result of all these cumulative factors of branding and advertisements bOAt build a special connection with its consumers which played a remarkable role in its progress.

7) D2C ( Directly to Consumer ) brand marketing: B2C(Business to Consumer) model:-

Aman focused on online selling of bOAt products i.e directly to its consumers. He made bOAt a digital 1st brand with >60% of gross sales value coming from online business.

He also focussed on digital marketing to skyrocket bOAt sales with the help of various social media influencers like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google Adsense, etc. 

Future plans:-

Aman Gupta's popularity increased when he came as an investor in the Shark Tank India show, he had

signed a total of  28 deals and invested Rs.9.3 crores in season 1 of the show. In FY2020 the total valuation of his company was Rs.703 Crores which got doubled to Rs.15,310 Crores in FY2021. Aman's future plan is to launch an IPO by Imagine Marketing Private Ltd., i.e parent company of Boat.

Conclusion:-

The bottom line behind bOAt's success was its USP of providing a good bass at a low cost, its customer caring warranty policy, and factors like Digital Marketing, Brand endorsements, and Bollywood brand ambassadors created a strong influence among the Generation Z customers of bOAt. The cumulative effect of all these factors made bOAt an affordable, durable, and ultrafashionable lifestyle brand that now ranks as the no.1 wearable watch, earwear audio brand in India, and no.5 in the world as a wearable watch brand.