With more and more products coming in the market daily it is imperative for brands to choose innovative mediums to market their products. Consumers are burdened with hectic schedules as a result they have reduced attention span. Keeping that in mind, a Bengaluru based startup called GingerCup has come with an inventive branding which prints brand logos and taglines on paper tea cups, and distributes them across colleges, offices, hospitals and food courts. In two years, it has distributed over 35 million ‘branded’ paper cups across 23 Indian cities.
GingerCup, as a concept, began one fine afternoon in 2015 when co-founder Deepak Bansal during a tea break. An IT professional for eight years before he started GingerCup, Deepak, while enjoying his little chai time at the local stall, noticed that those gathered for tea were involved in deep conversations on topics that ranged from politics and sports to entertainment and gossip. The time spent at the tea stall was considerably less but the level of engagement was high as people drank out of plain white paper cups with no distraction what-so-ever.
After some research he and his wife who was an HR professional then found out that the concept was under-utilized in India although a considerable established medium for advertising in the west.
After their findings, the husband-wife duo bought a few thousand paper cups, printed some logos on it, and distributed them across offices, college campuses and local tea shops in Bengaluru. Shortly after, they surveyed the crowd at these places, and discovered 86 percent were able to identify the brand logo they spotted on the cup, and 70-75 percent could recall the communication displayed too.
GingerCup has done out-of-home campaigns for brands across sectors. Hotstar, Uber, Volkswagen, Huawei, NH Hospitals, Bookmyshow, Exide Life Insurance, Clovia, ISL – Delhi Dynamos, and Jet Airways are some brands that have utilised GingerCup’s services over the last two years. “Baahubali also did a major pan-India campaign with us,” says Deepak.
“I loved the idea. My vision for GingerCup is to see it as a technologically robust platform in the world of advertising. The market for innovative advertising is huge, but it is an untapped sector. I do believe the marketplace for cup branding will continue to be strong and popular and it is scalable in India as well as the global market,” said Rahul Shah, Technical Lead at Ola.
