Untying the cord
Celebrity endorsers, direct customer engagement are helping stem cell firms rapidly grow the brand footprint
company and not just a storage bank.
It helped when celebrities Aishwarya Rai, Hrithik Roshan and Lisa Ray came on board. They were all customers first and then turned into service endorsers, the company says. Following the celebrity-led campaigns, the company grew 3X, says Abhaya. Most recently, A R Rahman lent his voice for an awareness song for Jeevan Stem Cell, another player in the industry.
What has worked, industry experts point out, is a combination of factors. Having known faces as endorsers gave the practice credibility. By taking the word directly to the customer, the company was forced to simplify its messaging. Customers began explaining the process to potential customers which increased buy-in into the service. The companies spent on consumer education says Rohit M A whose hospital Cloudnine owns a five-year old stem cell banking service under the brand Cryonine, which partners with LifeCell.
The brand building strategy involved talking to pregnant women through counselling, activities and hospital programmes says Abhaya. The company worked with several gynaecologists’ societies too. The turning point was when the doctors reported that they had customers come to them asking about the stem cell facility. This was proof that the strategy to go directly to the customer was working. LifeCell says it reached out to over 10,000 gynaecologists as part of the programme. While this definitely helped build opinion in favour of the practice, conversion rates soared only after new pricing schemes were offered, Abhaya says.
More recently, companies have also taken to digital marketing, using targeting methods to reach out to couples expecting a child and special neo-natal care services. “Digital advertising acts as the largest source of leads at present,” says Abhaya. Still, the penetration levels in India are far lower than the rest of the world and Abhaya hopes to change that with a new initiative called community stem cell banking, which allows sharing of preserved umbilical cord stem cells amongst the community of parents.
Lifecell says it has around 60 per cent share of the market in India, with around 200,000 units already stored and an additional 5,000 being added to the bank every month. There are close to 15 stem cell companies including Jeevan Stem Cell, Cryoviva, Cordlife India, Million Cells, and Cryovault.