Women Empowering Women: The Unique Marketing Strategies Behind Lijjat Papad’s Success

   
•     Team Digitofy
   
•     December 28, 2023

Lijjat Papad is an Indian company that has become a household name thanks to its innovative marketing and empowerment of women. In a male-dominated business world, Lijjat stands out for its unique cooperative structure that uplifts impoverished women by providing them with flexible work opportunities.

In this comprehensive blog post, we will analyze Lijjat’s ingenious marketing strategies, examining how they have strategically created a strong brand image rooted in women empowering women. While delving into the specifics of their marketing mix and competitive analysis, we will highlight the key ingredients comprising Lijjat’s secret sauce for success.

Rolling Out Quality since 1959

Lijjat Papad is a women’s cooperative based in Mumbai that produces various papad and spice products. Founded in 1959 by Gujarati housewife with a starting capital investment of just 80 rupees, it has blossomed into an enterprise of over 43,000 member-owners across India today.

Lijjat operates as a cooperative structure, with all members owning equal shares in the company. The cooperative emphasizes consensus decision-making, electing to manage committee members from its ranks every two years. Unlike other major companies, Lijjat intentionally has no professional managers or supervisors; tasks like kneading dough, rolling papads, quality control, packaging, distribution, and marketing are all conducted by the member-owners themselves.

This unique business model has brought prosperity to Lijjat’s members, providing flexible work opportunities for poor household women while delivering returns through dividends and interest-free loans for emergencies. In empowering its members through wealth creation and decision-making involvement, Lijjat sustains its loyal and motivated workforce.

Flavoring Success through Mission-Driven Marketing

While staying true to its founding principles focused on women’s empowerment, Lijjat has continued modernizing to keep up with changing consumer tastes. Understanding the time constraints facing working professionals and young people, they have expanded offerings to include quick-cooking products like instant papads and fried snacks.

Lijjat has also updated packaging with more contemporary, attractive designs. Moving with the digital age, Lijjat leverages an online presence through websites, social media ads, and e-commerce platforms to reach modern audiences. The cooperative even recently launched a mobile app to accept orders directly from customers and connect them to local Lijjat outlets.

The Papad is Mightier than the Sword

Understanding core target audiences is crucial for any marketing strategy. Lijjat primarily connects with two major buyer personas through its mission of women empowerment:

Working Women 

The first core target for Lijjat is working middle and upper-class women in urban India. This buyer persona includes young female professionals in cities juggling fast-paced corporate jobs with household duties and raising children.

Traditional Homemakers 

The second pivotal buyer group comprises traditional homemakers across socioeconomic backgrounds in both rural and urban India. This target demographic encompasses housewives managing their households and families.

Cooking up a Formula for Market Dominance

Now that we understand Lijjat’s core target audiences let’s examine the specific strategies comprising their marketing mix. This analysis of the 4 P’s of marketing will reveal the ingredients fuelling Lijjat Papad’s continued success.

Product Strategy: Tasty Traditions Over Trends 

Lijjat’s product strategy emphasizes quality derived from simplicity and tradition. They produce a variety of lentil- and rice-based papads using home-style recipes free of artificial additives. Consumers appreciate these healthy, authentic flavors.

Focusing mostly on their core papad range, Lijjat delivers quality customers expect over experimenting with trendy flavors that may disappoint. Novel products like instant papad and fried snacks complement instead of overshadowing their traditional offerings.

This product strategy attracts working women by saving them cooking efforts while reassuring traditional homemakers about healthy, homemade goodness. Consistency also fosters brand loyalty even as generations continue enjoying old favorites.

Price Strategy: Affordable for All Segments

With its foundations as an empowerment cooperative, Lijjat purposefully prices products affordable for lower-middle income segments. This explains their phenomenal penetration into mass market acceptance. Lijjat packs even provide suggested resale prices for small street-side vendors, considering marginal profits needed for distributors across complex supply chains reaching both urban and rural areas.

Intentionally pricing products reasonably but not dirt cheap, Lijjat maintains perceptions of quality. Low prices communicate care for socioeconomic struggles that resonate given India’s income disparities, winning over masses across regions and cementing domestic market dominance based on affordability and empathy.

Place Strategy: Reaching Every Kitchen Nook and Corner

Lijjat leverages an extensive direct distribution network comprising over 100 wholesalers, 5,000 direct distributors, and hundreds of thousands of retail outlets reaching India’s metros, second-tier cities, and remote villages. With members themselves owning this decentralized network, Lijjat keeps overheads low compared to large corporate intermediaries. This allows for maintaining wider margins to sustain affordable pricing strategies.

By coordinating grassroots distribution all the way to small neighborhood Kirana shops, Lijjat achieves deep market penetration with personal outreach. Maintaining relationships with the array of small retailers lets them supply traditional markets while expanding into large supermarket chains to access urban working professionals purchasing through modern trade channels. This robust distribution strategy across India’s fragmented retail landscape explains Lijjat’s scale with intimacy.

Promotional Strategy: Proud Member Ambassadors

Instead of big advertising budgets, Lijjat primarily markets through word-of-mouth based on product quality and its women empowerment mission. The products practically sell themselves based on reputation and emotional resonance. Local Lijjat members even personally engage neighborhood communities face-to-face as brand ambassadors.

This authentic, community-based promotional strategy complements Lijjat’s mass-market distribution and pricing focus. Through member-driven marketing woven into the cooperative identity, Lijjat keeps promotion costs low but deepens emotional connections with consumers – winning loyalists across income segments.

Outpapading the Competition

Despite competition from large FMCG players, Lijjat sustains dominance, capturing over 65% of India’s papad market share. Let’s examine key competitors and Lijjat’s strategies for maintaining leadership.

MTR Foods

MTR Foods sells papad under its convenience foods range and is Lijjat’s closest competitor with a 15% market share. Backed by Norwegian conglomerate Orkla, MTR offers papad in attractive packaging and taps, changing consumer tastes for flavored options like chili and black pepper.

Bikaji Foods 

Bikaji Foods has expanded from its Bikaner origins and focused on packaged sweets to gain papad market share given changing snack preferences. With wider product diversification, though, Bikaji lacks category focus. Its papad range also focuses on premium pricing and gourmet positioning, limiting mass market appeal compared to Lijjat Papad.

Unibic 

With extensive biscuit product expertise, Unibic leverages its distribution networks by extending into Papad, too. However, Lijjat has sustained a competitive advantage with sheer category focus and experience since 1959. Unibic’s papad range is also only a small part of its wider portfolio. Lijjat also contrasts positively against Unibic’s profit-hungry corporate structure.

Marketing Strategy 

Now that we have set the stage examining Lijjat’s background, buyer personas, marketing mix, and competitive positioning, let’s outline the pivotal elements comprising their overall marketing strategy that fuels success:

Laser Focus on Women Empowerment 

Everything tying together Lijjat’s marketing stems from their unwavering women empowerment mission since inception. Lijjat members themselves are the face of the brand, personally inviting neighborhood communities to purchase quality products while supporting women just like them.

This member-driven approach makes marketing intrinsic to work, keeping overheads lower compared to expensive advertising required by mass brands. With empowered members at the core weaving community connections, Lijjat sustains pull spanning socioeconomic segments despite the affordable pricing of products.

Empathy-Based Messaging 

While not explicitly calling out income disparities, Lijjat subtly acknowledges financial vulnerabilities facing women through affordable pricing and promises of fair wages. This empathetic positioning resonates with the masses struggling socioeconomically across urban slums and rural areas.

Lijjat thus contrasts the premium lifestyles depicted by brands catering mostly to high-income urban segments. By emphasizing fairness and transparency as a member-run cooperative, Lijjat conveys trust that products and systemically underserved communities finally get their due.

Traditional Brand Heritage 

Instead of radically overhauling products and chasing trends, Lijjat retains traditional recipes, ingredients, and production approaches. This signals care for heritage that contrasts against the blind modernization other brands embrace. Traditional Indian women thus find reassurance that Lijjat understands beloved homestyle tastes.

Authentic brand heritage also attracts young urban professionals valuing alignment between modern work cultures and their ethnic roots. Lijjat thus bridges tradition and contemporary lifestyles through a balanced brand identity.

The Secret Sauce is Women Powering Women

Women Powering Women While various ingredients enable Lijjat’s market leadership and mass appeal, their secret formula ultimately traces back to women empowering fellow women. This notion of the oppressed uplifting each other resonates widely given Indian social realities.

Lijjat shifting women’s identities from only domestic work to becoming economically empowered decision-makers also signals progress. Yet retaining heritage through home-style products reassures traditionalists. Lijjat, therefore, uniquely interweaves empowerment with Indian values, aiding accessibility.

With a woman-centered mission and cooperative structure, Lijjat empowers the underserved to grab their seat at the table. When such an inspiring, enterprise-wide commitment comes from a place of authenticity, the market potential remains boundless. This is the underlying force propelling Lijjat’s ascendance from 7 housewives to over 43,000 member-owners within just decades.

The fact that the cooperative still runs successfully without professional managers further validates how granting women agency channels their immense talents. When passion stemming from aligned values combines with intimate market insights, magic ensues – as witnessed through Lijjat Papad scaling empowerment and profits symbiotically.

The Sky is the Limit for This Women-Run Favourite

Through member-owned moxie, empathy, and retaining heritage nuances amidst modernization, Lijjat Papad cooperative has delivered women empowerment and quality products in one flavorful recipe. This has won over the masses by resonating deliciously with India’s diverse spectrum spanning backgrounds, geographies, and income segments.