Theme Ventures to drive Dinshaw Icecream into North India

Theme Ventures, a diversified BTL marketing firm, has signed up Nagpur based Dinshaw Icecream for handling the latters channels sales and product distribution for North India. The icecream giant from Nagpur is all set to launch in key markets of North India in the months of April–May after several years of hibernation. Currently distributed widely across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujrat and across parts of Deccan, Dinshaw has drawn up an ambitious launch plan across seven North Indian states which happen to be the biggest icecream consuming territory in India .

Theme Ventures with a strong sales and marketing network across North, East and Western india shall handle, on an outsourced basis, the day-to-day channel sales,dealer management, distribution and product launch. In the first phase, Theme Ventures will kickstart with Delhi NCR, arguably the most competitive among urban icecream markets.

Rajan Guha, Chief executive of Theme Ventures, said soon after signing the marketing agreement in Mumbai, “We are witnessing a new trend in India where FMCG companies have started outsourcing the entire distribution process to professional BTL marketing firms. Retail distribution has over the years become extremely complex. In addition, an acute crisis of field force and highly polarized consumer behavior has made product launches difficult, unsustainable and complicated. Theme Ventures makes it easy for FMCG brands to rapidly scale up distribution among lakhs of kirana stores without investing hugely in human resource infrastructure and management processes.“

In the first phase of launch, Theme Ventures shall appoint 3,000 retail stores across Delhi NCR during the current season. This shall be followed by cluster cities of tier 2 & 3 and submetroes. Dinshaw shall look at creating 1,500 stores in smaller cities. Theme ventures shall also undertake an extensive shop level visual merchandising activity as an alternate to mass media advertisement.

Says Rajan Guha, “Mass media advertisement doesn’t show the retailer’s door to the consumers. Desire is generated watching a TV advertisement. But where is the product available? Consumers won't search for an icecream unless the brand pops its head out of a kirana store and screams to the neighbourhood kid, "here I am ". Unfortunately few brands in India still realize that doing up the shops with Point of Purchase promotional material is more cost effective than Television advertisements!”

Theme Ventures shall also undertake an extensive neighbourhood marketing program for the icecream brand to create captive consumer base around the areas where retailers are being appointed. Besides a school contact program is also in the offing. The agency seeks to create demand through these two processes instead of resorting to large scale mass media advertisement.