"let's defeat diabetes":
developing a multi-layered marketing strategy

Dr. Mohan's Diabetes Specialty Centres (DMDSC)

Dr. Mohan's Diabetes Specialities Centre (DMDSC), has pioneered diabetes specialty care in India. As India's largest exclusive diabetes care provider, DMDSC operates 34 centres across the country. The company was founded in 1991 by Dr. V Mohan, a Padma Shri recipient and highly acclaimed diabetologist. Dr. Mohan's offers complete screenings of the eye, kidneys, heart and feet to treat both the disease and its complications and in accordance with their values of holistic care, Dr. Mohan's also provides counseling to families to identify high-risk individuals in the next generation. Dr. Mohan's is committed to providing continuity of care with 400,000+ diabetes patients registered, making DMDSC one of the largest databases of diabetic patients in the world. The vision of the company is to build a chain that provides high quality & comprehensive diabetes care and increase access to such care across geographies and income segments. This is of particular importance in India which has one of the largest diabetic populations in the world with an estimated 70 million patients. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimates that the number of diabetes cases in India will cross 100 million by 2030.

Since investment in April 2017, Lok has leveraged ground-level insights to help develop and crystallize Dr. Mohan's "route to market" strategy in terms of both messaging and usage of media. Based on Lok team's existing operational knowledge, led by Director, Aditya Sharma, along with detailed customer interactions during the diligence phase of investment, it became clear that diabetes, as a lifestyle disease, requires regular reinforcement and a continuous effort to build-upon customer knowledge and understanding.

prior to investment, dmdsc relied heavily on print media and lok has played a central role in transforming this existing strategy to the multi-layer marketing approach that Dr. mohan's has adopted today:

  • 01Driving initial traffic via local insights
  • 02Building overall awareness via PR and social media
  • 03Widespread brand building via multiple medias including mass media

Lok has brought in a classification system which allows Dr. Mohan's to budget and measure the outlay of marketing dollars in alignment with centre specific revenue potential. Lok has aided the Dr. Mohan's team to develop a system that accurately captures insights at a centre level through local intelligence gathering. This includes understanding the target group across a 2-3 km radius, key influencers in the region, income levels and other defining characteristics of the target group, local competitors, etc. In order to operationalize the new approach, Lok has also helped to formalize the marketing department structure and onboard external agencies for both PR and social media.

Finally, to maximize potential in the city of Bangalore, which Dr. Mohan's entered one year ago, Lok has allocated funds from its Technical Assistance program, supported by its Limited Partners, to map localities by demographics and build a comprehensive picture of how marketing dollars should be allocated moving forward.

Dr. V. Mohan
dr. v. mohan
chairman, dr. mohan's diabetes specialities centre

"We at Dr. Mohan's Diabetes Specialities Centre are extremely happy that Lok Capital has invested in our centre. What was most gratifying to us was that Lok believed in our story from the beginning. Their involvement has been at the right level. They have provided a lot of inputs which have helped to build our future plans more effectively. In the area of marketing, Mr. Aditya Sharma's inputs have been invaluable. He brought in the concept of the 'slow simmering marketing' as opposed to the big blast. This has helped us to refine our marketing strategies really well.

Overall, Lok has been best thing which has happened to our company in recent times and I wish to thank Mr. Aditya Sharma, Ms. Priyamvada Ramkumar and Mr. Venky Natarajan for all their inputs and support".