Deccan Healthcare Limited – India’s Transformational Brand 2019

Chosen Category: Nutraceuticals

Be Young’s deep relationships with customers, its research-driven approach to creating differentiated products and strong track record of meeting regulatory requirements and branding products are strong moats.

 

Company Vision: To help people Stay W.O.W (Wealth of Wellness), Stay Healthy.

Company Mission: Purpose unites us in a common cause and growth strategy of improving more consumers’ lives in nutritious ways each day.

Ethos of the brand: advanced solutions that are crafted to strengthen your body functions to solve and check conditions induced by present-day lifestyles.

Total Number of Employees in the Company: 200+ 10

Countries the brand is present: India

What would you define as the unique value proposition of the product: the functional, emotional and differentiating product benefits that have contributed to providing an enduring brand experience to customers?

In India, the market is fragmented and there aren’t too many players who produce at the quality and scale that Deccan Health Care does. Be Young’s deep relationships with customers, its research-driven approach to creating differentiated products and strong track record of meeting regulatory requirements and branding products are strong moats. Moreover, while contenders are positioned as a B2B players, the brand has forayed into the Indian B2C segment. “Be Young” born in 2016, offers nutritional pills for preventive health care via the e-commerce route.

What are the physical, character and personality attributes of the brand that have evoked and inspired consumers’ self-expression and personal identity?

The humble flax seed is often consumed in rural India for its fibre. Sometimes, however, those brown seed finds itself living an even more exalted life. A specially cultivated version is treated in laboratories to super-critically extract Omega 3, a valuable compound with proven health benefits. That is then encapsulated in softgels and sold as dietary supplements to consumers. Be Young Store the e-commerce platform www.beyoungstore.com serves Indian consumers’ nutritional and wellness needs. The portal has over 200,000 registered consumers, growing at a rate of 2,500-3,000 every month. It is emerging as the fastest growing and profitable wellness brand portal.

Provide an insight into the brand marketing strategies that have effectively penetrated consumers’ psyche, established a meaningful relationship with the target audiences and ensured positive brand perception.

Control over the supply chain right from the raw material stage is a key USP. Deccan Health Care has been producing scientifically validated products by the brand name Be Young in India. A bio-available form of curcumin found in turmeric formulated and branded as BE YOUNGTM – Curcumin C3 Complex PlusTM Food Pills, which supports healthy ageing, is one such popular product. In various districts of Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, growers are engaged in cultivating special variety of yields. Partnered by the Company, the farmers’ produce is shipped to state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Uttarakhand where scientific formulations are produced.

What is the level of significance the brand accords to utilizing social media as a competitive edge?

We at Be Young believe that connecting with your target audience can be easy if you are active on the channels that they use most often. If you aren’t already on social media, you could be missing out on an important chance to connect with your customers and engage new leads. Our experience shows that consumers are more receptive to our messages when marketing through social media. Typically, users are not on these channels with the expectation that they are going to be marketed to. But this does not mean that social media users aren’t following and interacting with their favorite brands. The content that we publish on these channels contributes to our brand personality and helps us demonstrate our brand voice. We have realized that, on social media, we make authentic connections with our leads and customers, rather than just delivering direct marketing messages. This is something that consumers are generally more responsive to. Social media is helping us improve our Brand visibility, and thus increasing recognition for our brand. Our social media profiles provide yet another way to get more inbound traffic to our website.

Another benefit of social media marketing is that we are able to strategically target different audiences based on the channels that our brand is active on, driving more qualified leads back to our site. The more relevant this traffic is, the more likely we boost conversion rates. By engaging with our audience through valuable, compelling content and conversation, we are working towards turning happy customers into brand advocates.

Please outline a few key marketing endeavors in the past decade that you feel have been landmark initiatives in reinforcing the legacy of the brand’s promise to influence consumer intent and enhanced the brand’s propensity to drive affirmative consumer action.

We are building a new concept of ‘preventive health care’. That is to move health care from curative medicines (treatment) to preventive supplements (prevention). When it comes to food pills and meals, we know that some people prefer to use natural ingredients, so we are innovating to provide more products with elements that are naturally sourced and organic. While natural product ingredients may be appealing, we also have to confirm they are nutritive to use in our products. Being natural alone doesn’t translate to being “nutritional”—even water and sunshine have safety limits. The reality is that the sustainable features of any product ingredient depend on the use, context, and energy consumption—in creating or harvesting it, as well as making or using it. Ultimately, we seek to source the best ingredients for our products so that consumers can use them with confidence. And we’re also doing the legwork to ensure we use the most sustainable and earth-friendly solutions. Operating on the “Farm to Food Pill” system has led to an immediate realization on the metrics commonly used to measure success in quality and trust. The clearest evidence came from a notable rise of wellness members to 200,000+ and Far East India geographies that we reached. We are unique because we combine “what’s needed” with “what’s possible”—making Food vitamins, minerals, proteins, nutritional meals a little more enjoyable and healthier.

How has the brand derived strength from innovation as a sustainable differentiation strategy adding to long-term brand equity? Please provide few instances of measures implemented towards this goal.

At less than 2 percent of the $198 billion global, end-user nutraceuticals market as per 2016 industry estimates, the Indian market is still young. India is a price-conscious market. That is slowly changing, but it will take a few years before it really picks up. Another reason India is a difficult market is because of age-old home remedies. Sometimes people can’t figure out why consumers are popping BE YOUNGTM – Curcumin C3 Complex PlusTM Food Pills instead of just drinking haldi doodh. It’s taking a lot of effort to make them understand that getting all of one’s nutrition needs from food is not always possible.

What is the key leadership value that drives the brand.

Be Young is built on a bedrock of innovation, creativity and quality. First, Be Young is set on strategy and young talent. Second, it operates on managers internalizing external constituents’ high expectations of the brand. Third, the brand constantly evaluates and sets course keeping in mind the external perspectives. Fourth, Be Young invests in broad-based leadership development that helps the team hone the skills needed to meet customer expectations. And finally, tracking growth at building a leadership brand over the long term.

What type of employee satisfaction programs are conducted by your brand?

We hold, Synthesis sessions in which a leader in each department discusses current challenges and successes as well as changes in market position. Additionally, we hold Be Young Customer panel. There’s nothing like bringing in the voice of the customer to help employees connect to the bigger picture. Make this voice a regular presence through inviting a panel of customers to be a part of all-hands meetings. Each customer explains how using your product or service has positively impacted their business and shares some things they wish the product or service could do.

How much does your brand emphasise on employee training & development, kindly elaborate.

Be Young has informal groups of wellness members who could share business practices and learn from each other. The Deccan Training Academy is based on nutrition science and behavior change communications is transforming the traditional approach to eradicate Micro-Nutrient Deficiency. The Be Young wellness members assess the health status of each individual and suggest a nutritional solution based on their health goals. These solutions are directly delivered to the consumer via our e-commerce website www.beyoungstore.com . Monitoring impact, we deploy resources through Be Young Bharat (INDIA) to support health needs as well as educate women, men and young adults on affordable nutritional foods they can use at home.

What are your brands’ most effective intangible motivational tools for employees.

Engage and equip all employees to build sustainability thinking and practices into their everyday work. We are driving efforts to make sustainability top-of-mind and keeping personal responsibility relevant both at work and at home. Employees often leave a meeting offering to “take the RN” (responsibility for nutrition) for a next step or action item and borrowing from this vernacular, we frame our engagement efforts around the “Take the RN for Today” programme.

Kindly elaborate on your existing & potential CSR activities.

BE YOUNG BHARAT , #beyoungbharat is driven by deep-rooted passion and belief that every individual should enjoy the full quality of life every day regardless of where they were born or live and their purchasing power. Our goal is to use every opportunity we have—no matter how small—to set change in motion. To be a force for nutrition and a force for awesome quality of life one lives. For

you, for the world, and for every generation to come. Community Impact and Environmental sustainability is a vital part of our business. To ensure that consumers can enjoy the products they love today without sacrificing tomorrow, we’ve put goals in place to help us work toward our long-term vision. Some natural and organic ingredients have proven tougher to source due to increasing demand. Organic ingredients were, and in some cases, remain more expensive. But the expense was worth it to our purpose, because Farm to Food Pill is the right thing to do. As the experts in Food pills, we feel a responsibility to bring health, hygiene, and the comforts of home to people in need. It’s when our innovations matter more than ever. We researched health and nutrition of aging adults for years. It drew to us that nutrition deficiency today leads to major health complications as we age, also a fact that population doesn’t have enough to eat. But for people who are calorie sufficient, the food they eat is less-nutrient rich, simple food isn’t enough. We Educate and create a lifestyle change- i.e. moving people from curative healthcare to preventive supplements which is an ongoing challenge.

Which area of social responsibility is more significant for your brand

We envision a world where every aging adult, sick or well, has meaningful access to information and nutritional solutions to eradicate Micro-Nutrient Deficiency. The value of BE YOUNG is not simply a question of treating severe deficiency in individuals or specific communities but of the need to reach out to Indian population to protect them against the consequences of the subclinical conditions associated with inadequate micronutrient intake and its associated consequences.