Understanding customers from start helped us in every aspect: Varun Ganjoo, Baazi Games
At the e4m Pitch CMO Summit, held in New Delhi on June 7, Varun Ganjoo, Co-founder and CMO of Baazi Games, spoke on ‘Unlocking Meaningful Growth for PokerBaazi on a Sustained Basis.’ Ganjoo started by saying that the brand was at an interesting phase in its journey because this year they are completing 10 years. “And when I got this opportunity to talk about sustainable growth, I thought it would be best to talk about the journey and the approach we have taken in the last 10 years.”
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Ganjoo said as both a co-founder and the chief marketer of the brand he has had a unique perspective on PokerBaaazi’s growth story and how the brand has been built. He also gave out some of the brand’s current stats: A 40 lakh-plus user base, with the platform ranked number one in India and eighth globally along with a 100 crore-plus poker hands dealt in the last 10 years of it operation.
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“So what worked for us? Understanding the customers from the beginning was something that has helped us in every single aspect of work that we do. And we were lucky enough to be in a place where we were the consumers ourselves. Our founding team were passionate poker players. And before we started this, we were already playing a lot of poker. So we understood what is needed in a product for poker in India, and how different we want to make a product, which is something different from what is available in the existing market.” Ganjoo went on to describe the process that went into building the brand and the learning curve the founding and then larger teams experienced as they progressed further. This meant the founding team was there to answer every customer complaint call as the tech team continued to fix, improve, and upgrade the gaming platform and experience. “And it helped us not just find our customers even with an inferior software experience, but also by spreading the word of mouth for us. Then while talking to our customers, and staying close to them, we realized how important a role product is going to play in this entire journey. Whatever big campaigns we do, whatever right channels of marketing we pick, if the product is lacking that experience, it's not going to cut through,” he said. He also pointed out that since Poker was a time-consuming game, essentially a sport, even casual gamers could end up spending up to a couple of hours in a day playing it, creating the need for a smooth off-table experience as well, which was especially necessary for a Real Money Gaming platform, which transacted with financial institutions as well as their users. All of this took time to develop. “We realized that by the time we came up with a superior upgrade of our platform, back in 2021, we had surpassed every other poker platform in the country. And by then, we were not really doing anything big in marketing. We were doing the standard performance marketing and the basic stuff that you do there. We realized then that we've reached a stage where we have a stable product. People are loving it. Now, let's do something more.” Saying that the brand decided not to just clutter up social media feeds, given the enormous number of similar poker, ludo, and other gaming and esports platforms, he added, “Globally, you see a lot of Poker content being rolled out or streamed on YouTube and other digital media. So we made a conscious call that if we have to go to the market, our campaigns should not just talk about money. It was 2022 when we launched our first big brand campaign, and we onboarded Shahid Kapoor as our brand ambassador. And we went live with our first campaign on Poker, on mainstream television, digital media as well. And it did not speak even a word of money.” “And people used to come to us and say, 'hey, you are burning so much money.' But the kind of jump we saw throughout our funnel with that kind of campaign was phenomenal. And it was again a stamp to the fact that if you figure out the right communication for you, what's the right need of the hour, I think it's going to cut you through the clutter," he concluded. For more updates, be socially connected with us on
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