As Managing Director and India Head at Vistaprint, a Cimpress company, Nilesh Parwani has been spearheading the attempt to empower some 14 million micro-businesses and consumers annually with affordable, professional options to make an impression.
Parwani graduated from the Kelley School of Business where he majored in Finance and Business Process Management. After graduation he worked for UBS’ Healthcare group where he was instrumental in making the biggest overseas acquisition by an Indian pharmaceutical company at that time. After that he joined Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm where he helped make investments across sectors such as hospitality and real estate.
In January 2008, Parwani launched Printbell.com with a vision to provide cost-effective printing solutions to small business owners. In July 2012, Vistaprint acquired Printbell. Excerpts from an interview with Nilesh Parwani where he dwells on how BTL is a key part of reaching out to potential customers and how most need-based services would generally work well in the BTL domain.
How critical is BTL for a service provider in terms of advertising and promotions?
Almost the backbone of the marketing strategy I would say. Direct marketing through online channels and real-time access to data enables optimizing ROI and efficiency of marketing spends.
Are there some audiences where BTL works better than ATL and vice versa? And specifically digital where Vistaprint is very strong?
Audiences which form the primary target audience set for us are best reached through BTL – these are typically classified in three buckets: (1) Business Consumers such as entrepreneurs, (2) small and medium enterprises, and (3) independent professionals such as doctors, lawyers, architects, CAs, etc. These audiences are actively searching for online service providers for better value and convenience and therefore BTL works well to drive them our platform. We primarily use digital channels given the  e-commerce and online savviness among these target groups.
Would you say that there are certain types of products and services where BTL works better, and which have a greater affinity for BTL? (eg FMCG, autos, durables, auto fuels, etc)
Most need-based services would generally work well in the BTL domain. In our case, because we are also disrupting the print industry as it has existed in the fragmented, unorganised format for years, sampling and trials become important tools for attracting new customers – again great affinity with BTL activities.
And typically what is the break-up of spends at Vistaprint…Â ATL v/s BTL?
We have just recently started doing things like TV and the reason for that is the need to communicate the ‘alternative’ in Vistaprint to help address traditional barriers in the print industry, these are typically around delayed deliveries, poor quality, lack of design options, and compulsion to order larger quantities for a particular product – we believe the story-telling format using TV as a medium is a powerful way to demonstrate the power of our platform and therefore the initiative on TV – since its early days though, ATL continues to be a minority share of our overall spends.
In terms of generating results esp from consumers and in B2B, do you find BTL a more sureshot avenue than ATL?
Balance is what is important: while BTL is easy to measure and more predictable, ATL is important for a brand like ours which is trying to disrupt an existing print industry and needs to create awareness for our offering and service/quality superlative.
While sales and salience are good indicators of its success, what are the attributes you/your clients look at to measure the success of a BTL campaign
Long-term value after the first order or sampling/trials for customer cohorts are generally a good indicator of the quality of acquisitions during a BTL campaign.
There are many organisations who often do new launches almost entirely on BTL aided with an outdoor and/or digital blitz? Your view on this. Given rising media costs, do you see BTL managing on its own, without ATL?
Really depends on how established the product and/or the market for it is. In the online/digital world specifically, BTL generally will help attract or convert the ‘low-hanging’ fruit so to speak, but ATL is very important for players like us who are trying to (a) create a new category through some product lines and (b) driving conversion of established behaviour of printing locally or offline vendors to ‘online’ through our platform
Lastly, given the rising usage of mobile devices, would you say that in times to come BTL and digital would go hand-in-hand?
We already use BTL and digital interchangeably – so it’s already happening. Given the power of real-time data analytics, this is inevitable.