“Success depends on what and how you want to call it a success”

Launch of #thehappyhomes blog in Mumbai! Dr. Fixit, the waterproofing expert, promoted by Pidilite Industries has recently launched “The Happy Home Blog” as a guiding light for home-owners to renovate, build and maintain their home on day-to-day basis. The Blog – thehappyhomes.co.in features posts, news and articles across different categories that would give an insight into different aspects of looking after their homes. The blog could be surfed or read for posts on waterproofing and insulation as well as roof-repair, tiling, décor and renovation ideas. Here you will find ‘healthy home calculator’, which poses a series of questions and determine the health of a particular home based on the answers given. Highlighting importance of the blog with Realty Plus, Sundaresan Arumbakkam, Chief Executive Officer, Retail - Construction Chemical Division, Pidilite Industries discussed about the happy homes blog launch, interactive session of the blog as its strength and varied information from different bloggers that makes the blog unique in the field. Here is the interview in detail: Tell us the concept behind launching ‘The Happy Home Blog’! Well, ‘The Happy Home Blog’ is simple yet interesting concept of putting across the idea of keeping homes waterproof, renovate and repair in a different and easy way with millions of home-owners in a planned and quick manner. We never wanted to launch a website for the same because it works one-way but this blog is more generic and more on an interactive site. Here people could post their queries and get answers for them from experts. Also, you would find articles and features from experienced bloggers and guest bloggers who would be contributing their knowledge and understanding that makes the blog rich with quality content. ...but that could be done with website platform also. Do you think a blog has a wider reach than a website? The Happy Home Blog is different and we want it to be different from other blogs and websites. One thing that makes the blog unique is its interactive feature where people can contribute their experiences, post and comment their views and discuss their issues that could not be done on websites with ease. The Blog is like a bulletin board where you can see things, put your views, contribute their feature articles and can take benefit of other people’s experiences. The emphasis is on interaction that could help in translating difficult jargons into simple language. Also, our objective is of happy home so we did not put our company’s banner on the blog. And there are various things which can contribute to it including our own little contribution of writing and there are much more than this that can come in and that’s why a blog. That means the blog features information of all sorts. So, who is your target audience? Whom you want to read the information on the blog? The blog aims to create awareness about important things we take for granted. Our home is one of them. We all want to create a happy home and thus, this blog is one-stop-shop for all useful tips and tricks. This blog would help with lot of things we can do which we have never thought of with our homes; actually it’s easy and simple to keep homes beautiful sans any leakages. Now this we call strength of a product. Are we going to see the Pidilite and Dr. Fixit’s strength on the blog? We don’t talk about our strength, we want consumers to feel it and we want them to experience it. I think what we are trying to do in the blog is continue to tell them how things are available from the stable of Pidilite as well as various other things which people have experienced or done, which they can take benefit of and that’s our objective behind this blog and that’s why we have kept branding away from it as well as we have tried to make it interesting and have various things which are not about the product but are the ingredients goes into the making of happy home. And so, that requires skilled bloggers. Tell us about the bloggers? We have some good bloggers and people as contributors whom we believe can meaningfully contribute to the blog because of their understanding of the subject or the experience that they brought in from different backgrounds. Also, we are open to everybody and anybody (masses) who want to contribute to it which is why the pegs have been created, so if they have certain experience like, how they have done the renovation - they are allowed to contribute. According to me, blogging is an art, so we are open to people who can write interesting features in a simple way that could be read by people of all strata’s. Do you think this blog will be successful in India, because a larger chunk of realtors, builders, and the people who buy homes doesn’t usually go to the blog/website to read the details! I think it should be, we believe it will be. Success depends on what and how you want to call it a success. I think for us, it would be successful if we able to really get more consumers/readers to just see or surf the blog and see what is being made available as well as contribute to it on a regular basis. If we are able to bring to the consumer consciousness for a happy home, you can do so many things, which is easy to do in your regular routine and achieve it and able to give entire repository of information and knowledge through it, we would think it would be successful. Our objective is not to drive a marketing program with the blog. It’s not a one-time update like what probably would happen with websites. It an on-going thing, it’s a regular thing, so it’s going to be live, for instance, if it’s a rainy season, we will try to see what all you might face during rainy season and how you address it. There is going to be contextual and timely relevance build into this and that’s why we feel this going to be far more powerful than the things we tried earlier.