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Tara Kapur of Duolingo English Test converses with Social Samosa about navigating through the rapid shifts in social media trends, emerging technologies, and establishing a global brand in the culturally strong Indian market.
Tara Kapur, Marketing Head - India, Duolingo English Test, who has had a diverse experience that traverses across journalism, studio production across brands such as Netflix India, and now Duolingo, speaks about optimising the brand presence.
Kapur joined Duolingo English Test in December 2022 and has been working on winning consumers' trust in India. She further shares Duolingo English Test's marketing focus areas as it strengthens its brand presence.
How do you approach marketing a brand with global roots in a culturally strong geography?
For us, being a global brand is actually beneficial because our core audience is looking to study abroad, and almost expects the communication of our product to have a global mindset. A lot of the students we have spoken to have even told us that they would prefer any test material that’s shared to be in English because it’s ultimately an English test. India is a very important market for the Duolingo English Test and we have seen strong growth with test takers from across the country year-on-year.
"Our core marketing strategy is to follow a funnel marketing approach - build trust and awareness at the top, build consideration, and eventually drive purchase. Building trust is a long journey and is one of the hardest things to do in a market like India. "
There are obviously cultural nuances that come into play in India - the role parents have to play in a student’s journey for example, or even building comfort for Indians with the rules around digital testing, are some of the things we are working on. Besides that, utilising local influencers in the education sector, hosting a lot of on-ground events at local colleges, and sharing real success stories of students from India will help us build our awareness and trust in the market.
The use of brand mascots in India has gradually dipped than before. Duolingo has built a strong representative factor around their mascot, please share insights on this strategy, and how it works during the time when it is not adopted by the majority of brands in India?
Having a brand mascot, like any marketing strategy, needs to have a strong connection and purpose. And that’s why you either don’t see too many brands with mascots, or you don’t see too many that are successful with using mascots. The Amul Girl would not be impactful if she didn’t have her wonderful punny commentary on pop culture that has made her iconic.
For Duolingo - Duo the Owl goes beyond being just a mascot, he’s a personality and a creator. The insights of him being this annoying, pestering owl trying to force you to do your lessons on the app or via notifications, plays into his personality on social media.
He attends pop culture events like the Barbie premiere or stanning musicians like Dua Lipa or Taylor Swift, and the idea behind that is that pop culture and language work hand in hand. We have seen the rise of Korean as a language because of the rise of K-pop, K dramas, and K-culture at large. But this can’t work for every product, for the Duolingo English Test, for example, we stay away from having a mascot because we can’t operate in the same space as Duo the Owl for our product. We have a ‘seal’ or stamp of approval as our logo, and that’s something that is seen as something more official and helps us build trust with our consumers.
How do you navigate marketing hurdles brought up by the rapid shifts in pop culture and technology advancements that affect the industry?
We rely on data-driven insights and consumer analytics to understand the changing behaviors and preferences of our audience. The recent launch of Threads is a great example of this. At Duolingo English Test, we decided to start a threads account because that’s what we saw our consumers and target audience gravitate towards, and we will continue to try and engage and speak to our audiences wherever they move.
Our test itself is a reaction to these changes happening in the world. We have used AI and technology to adapt and change the testing industry by introducing a high-stakes digital test. Students today need an English Proficiency Test that's secure, affordable, accessible, convenient, and user-friendly, and our industry itself needs to evolve to cater to that demand.
We have seen a common practice of a long-format video campaign being cut into 15-seconders for Shorts or Reels, and stills from the same video being used for static posts. Do you think this practice improves efficiency or is it important to craft content for each particular medium and format?
In an ideal world, being able to craft separate content for each medium and format is the most impactful approach for any campaign. However, it’s not practical from a budget or time efficiency standpoint. There are smarter ways of repurposing the same content to optimize for all platforms, but it requires a lot of planning at the initial stages of campaign development.
A common problem I’ve noticed is that a lot of the time, the creative and media distribution teams do not connect at the beginning of campaign development when the campaign is being conceptualized.
An example of how we have done this at the Duolingo English Test is for our brand film. We created a larger overarching campaign film featuring 16 students from around the world, but we have also managed to capture a lot of content that can be used across mediums and platforms. Each student’s story can be carved out into individual assets, we have captured stills that can be used for print. We have sound bytes in Chinese from a few students that can be utilized by the China team in the local market, there are some sequences that have been shot keeping short-form content like reels and shorts in mind.
Similarly, when I worked on the Jaldi Aao Anthem for Money Heist (during the stint with Netflix India), we had one main asset which was the Jaldi Aao anthem - a 3 min song featuring 7 celebrities, but we planned our asset distribution and had very clear clean cuts to create 20 second Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi versions of the song from a localization perspective.
We also were able to create separate talent shorties for each of the artists for them to distribute on their handles via reels. Besides that, we had a strong audio distribution strategy for the song itself - so that it was distributed on the radio, via audio streaming apps and was used for UGC content.
Ultimately, it was all the same asset which made it efficient from a time and cost perspective, but it was repurposed in ways that kept the content fresh and optimized for different distribution channels.
The key to driving successful campaigns across platforms at scale and in an efficient manner all comes down to marketing planning.
Please share insights on the creative & commercial approach towards creative, media outlook, and focus areas for the future.
We have spent a lot of time and effort in the earlier stages of our product making sure it's secure and has a strong acceptance with universities across the world, and we are now at the stage where we want to drive and increase our product awareness with students across the globe who could benefit from our test.
"Our core focus is to build trust and brand awareness where we are highlighting the 4As of the test - it’s 1) Acceptance 2) Affordability 3) Accuracy 4) Accessibility."
A lot of brand work we have done so far has focussed on the success stories of students who have already taken the DET and are studying abroad.
How has your diverse experience from a production house, OTT platform, and now a brand helped your approach to marketing? Please share a few insights from your journey and learnings from each vertical.
For me, the foundation of my approach towards advertising and marketing came from the first phase of my career, when I was a journalist. I used to cover marketing and advertising, and I often call this phase of my career ‘my crash course in marketing and advertising’.
The second aspect that I learned through this period was spending time humanizing the consumer, understanding them better, who they are as people, what their motivators are, what they like, and what would drive them to purchase different products.
I was a founding member of Supari Studios, and during my time there I really developed my creative skills - I learned the ins and outs of production, developed my writing, launched an IP from scratch, and understood the needs of a range of products and industries.
I eventually gravitated towards a career in marketing, because it marries both the business and marketing sides of my brain. During both my stints both at Netflix and now at Duolingo English Test - I have applied a lot of these learnings to the work I do - developing strong consumer insights for my product, building trusting partnerships with the people I work with, and trusting my own personal creative instincts which I think has been helpful for me so far.