Mamaearth's Ghazal Alagh on word-of-mouth and influencer marketing

On Tanmay Bhat's The NextLevel Podcast, Mamaearth founder Ghazal Alagh shed light on the marketing strategy the personal care brand pursued in its early days, following the launch in 2016, when it still identified as a baby care company.

"Very early on we realized that not a lot of businesses need a lot of cash especially in the beauty and personal care industry. Upon doing consumer surveys, we realized word of mouth in the category is very strong. So, when a mother tells another mother of experience, that has the most trust," said Alagh.

For the first four months, Alagh and her husband invested 30 lakhs on their own and the rest of the 60 lakhs they got from friends and family. "Even from that money, we used a lot of it to acquire consumers, on marketing we went with a word of mouth. The cheapest way to market a product is to make our consumers experience the product. So, we rolled it out to as many people as we could. At that time, there was no Instagram but bloggers, I made friends with them and these new moms easily understood me," shares Alagh.

While addressing influencer marketing, Alagh said, "Parents trust other parents. As we got into larger categories it moved to millennials trust other millennials more than they trust brands. When your fellow friend or the person you look up to talks about a product you like, you are prone to trust them more. During Covid, people were consuming a lot more content because then they had time, hence the influencer helped us build the right kind of content to engage the audience with."