Mumbai: Wingreends Group has appointed industry veteran Pawan Sarda as its new chief marketing officer. He joins the company from Future Group, where he was working as chief marketing officer of digital, marketing and e-commerce business.
He comes with an experience of 20 years working in retail, housing, digital, e-commerce and content landscapes.
Previously, he has also worked with Tata Housing and Development Company for over three years as marketing & product development head.
NEW DELHI: Ecommerce businesses are having a field time, reaping the benefits of an otherwise massive calamity. More and more people are getting online for shopping everything from grocery to apparel, to automobile, to precious jewellery resulting in a massive jump in their numbers. However, it has also paved the way for the requirement of modifying their business models, amplifying the user experiences, and marrying the offline experiences with online shopping.
In a recent panel discussion on “Enhancing the Virtual shopping experience in the New Normal" organised by AnimationXpress.com in association with Autodesk, Indiantelevision.com founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari discussed with the leading industry experts their experiences and strategies for ushering in the new era of e-commerce and online shopping that has customer interest at the centre of it and is driven by life-like experiences. Sitting on the panel were Jio VP – advertising and innovations Mohit Kapoor, Future Group group CMO (marketing, digital, and e-commerce) Pawan Sarda, CarDekho, Gaadi & Zigwheels CMO Gaurav Mehta, Vedant Fashions Pvt.Ltd. (Manyavar) head – global ecommerce Prateek Kumar, mirrAR byStyleDotMe co-founder and CEO Meghna Saraogi, Prorigo Software Pvt. Ltd (Jewelfie) founder-CEO Surendra Karandikar, and Autodesk India sr.technical sales specialist, M&E Samit Shetty.
The Whole New World of Opportunities
All the panellists were delighted to agree that Covid-2019 has created a very positive atmosphere for the online retailers and associated businesses who are helping them in curating exciting virtual experiences.
Kumar shared that he was surprised to witness a 350-400 per cent jump in Manyavar’s online sales during the lockdown. “If I talk about pre-covid times, we were already recording a 200 per cent y.o.y growth on our brands. To my surprise, when the lockdown ensued in March and in the following months, we recorded a 400 per cent jump in our online sales. And it was all for pre-paid orders. So it was quite interesting for me to see that people are buying online during the pandemic too.”
And this growth in online retailing and shopping isn’t only limited to tier1 cities and metros but goes deep down within the nooks and corners of the country.
Saraogi noted, “We are working with around 225 jewellers across the country and I am not only talking about the big brands. There are jewellers who are sitting in tier 3-tier 4 cities, where an aeroplane won’t land, but they are digitising their shopping experience.”
Creating Immersive Experiences
All the categories which are selling online are now busy in evolving their businesses to offer immersive, real-like experiences to customers online. They agree that the fear associated with the virus is not going away anytime soon and more people are going to explore and buy products online, therefore they are trying to offer as advanced as possible AI, VR, and MR shopping experience to the consumers. Here are the few top trends that the panel highlighted:
Digitising Trials
Mehta quipped, “While auto-buying and car-buying was already a very digitised function, which we have been noticing for the past few years, in the last six months we have witnessed a number of new users coming on-board. They are looking for as real and as close to natural look and feel of a product as they can get. So, we are investing a lot of time and effort in sharing 360-degree views of the car, along with more raw experiences like how the door opens, how the engine sounds, etc. Whatever can be digitized is being digitized.”
He added that a lot of focus is put on personalisation of the vehicles for the consumers too, so one can put in place the filters regarding various aspects and functionalities of the sort of vehicle they are looking for and see in options only the relevant results. 3D imaging is also playing a big role.
Sarogi pointed out that they personally observed 3D imagery creating a lot of problems for them in terms of offering a smooth user experience, therefore for the time being they have moved to 2D images of products. However, a great emphasis is on facial recognition technology that puts the jewellery right in place and a person can experience it how they will look like wearing it in real life. “We are creating exciting co-shopping experiences too, where you can get on a video call, do screen sharing and show others what the jewellery is looking like on you.”
Kumar highlighted, “We launched our own app a few weeks ago. Apart from that, we are offering WhatsApp video call options to our customers who can get assistance for shopping just like they get into physical stories. Another thing that we tried was getting chatbots on our sites. And we are seeing around 2000 people interacting with those bots on a daily basis. In fact, 90 per cent of our queries come from those chatbots.”
WhatsApp to the rescue
While WhatsApp might be dealing with its own shares of problems when it comes to the privacy of chats, it has surely turned out to be one of the favourite tools for online businesses. Not just Manyavar, but other brands have also invested in WhatsApp video calling options and other shopping tools to ease out the process for customers.
Kapoor noted, “India has around 60-62 million SMEs and around 30-32 million Kirana stores. When we talk about real-life experiences or 3D imaging, etc., these models won’t work for them. You do not need to see the 3D image of your grocery. They require a whole different model of ecommerce. “We (Jio) have one model, in which we are working with Facebook right now; opening up shopping within WhatsApp and getting on board the small merchants.”
He added that the firm is working on a number of direct-to-consumer models wherein the focus on simplifying the experience as much as possible. “You can share a handwritten list of your grocery with us in a photo, and we will get it delivered.”
Reshaping Offline Stores
The whole going online business will not necessarily mean that offline brick-and-mortar shops will go irrelevant and non-existent. In fact, the idea is to turn them into exhibition centres for experiences and then the purchases can be made online.
Kapoor shared his personal experience of shopping a bicycle from Decathalon wherein he was allowed to test the bicycles in physical stores, but he eventually had to place the order online.
Sarda elaborated, “I think stores can really up their capacity in terms of doing businesses if we put another layer of digital on top of it. We can see stores typically as exhibition centres. It will have to be constrained in terms of the number of people who can go inside but I see it as a large opportunity.”
How Technolgy Firms Are Helping
There is as much as backend work required to create seamless online shopping experience as much as you see online. Therefore, technical firms and partners are surely playing a key role in assisting online businesses in making shopping a truly immersive and gratifying experience for consumers.
Shetty noted, “When it comes to 3D experiences, the smallest of factors like lighting impact the overall experience of a consumer. When it comes to the artist who is working on it, rendering is a big issue; it takes a lot of time. Therefore, the creator might lose patience and just give up on the project and might not try more variants. We are working on specific pain-points like that. We now have GPU rendering, which is an integral part of Autodesk that makes the job simpler, cutting the time significantly.”
It is also allowing them to make 3D models more real with more apt textures, colours, and backgrounds.
Apart from that, they are working hard on collaborative technologies like Shotgun that allows various stakeholders to interact easily on creative projects that can accelerate the approval processes as well. “All this delivers a good ROI to not just us but also to businesses.”
Karandikar added that going ahead, there is a lot of constant innovation happening in the technology industry and tools like voice are going to be the next big thing. He suggested that apparel brands can also innovate on aspects like creating life-size mannequins based on a customer’s measurement to give them a real feel of how the product will actually look on them.
NEW DELHI: It’s no new news that the impact of Covid2019 has been massive on digitisation and virtual properties. With people stuck at home, everything from studies to work, to shopping has moved online and this has given the e-commerce industry a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get new consumers on board and hook them to their apps and websites.
To discuss how the e-commerce industry is dealing with the overwhelming growth and interest in their business from all stakeholders, what are the best practices they are incorporating, how are they modifying their sales strategies, and how are they working to enhance customer experience, an excellent panel of industry experts will be getting live on Indiantelevision.com on Tuesday morning at 11:30 am, in a virtual roundtable discussion on “Enhancing the Virtual shopping experience in the New Normal” with our founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari.
The roundtable is organised by AnimationXpress.com in association with Autodesk.
The speakers for the roundtable are: Jio VP – advertising and innovations Mohit Kapoor; Future Group group CMO (marketing, digital, and e-commerce) Pawan Sarda; CarDekho, Gaadi & Zigwheels CMO Gaurav Mehta; Vedant Fashions (Manyavar) head – global e-commerce Prateek Kumar; mirrAR byStyleDotMe co-founder and CEO Meghna Saraogi; Prorigo Software (Jewelfie) founder-CEO Surendra Karandikar, and Autodesk India sr.technical sales specialist, M&E Samit Shetty.
The webinar will be simulcast live on our website and social media handles on Tuesday, 29 September, 11.30 am.
You can register here.
MUMBAI: Big Bazaar is known for its blockbuster sales which attract customers in millions. For this public holiday sale from 28 April to 2 May, it also gave an opportunity to customers to buy online. This was done with the intent to reach every nook and corner of the country where its stores were not present.
Big Bazaar created immense visibility for its public holiday sale campaign and pushed visitors to try online shopping by partnering with RVCJ Media to create a buzz on social media. The single point agenda for all communication was to crowd source, drive awareness and encourage shopping both in-stores and online.
Big Bazaar wanted to drive purchases of a variety of products like kitchen appliances, suitcases, cookware, trimmers, bedsheets, television sets, mobile phones and other electronic goods. It tried static /video memes and WhatsApp conversation videos to highlight deals and specific offers, across these categories.
The campaign went live on all social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, on 22 April, and RVCJ leveraged topical content and trends around conversations, for e.g. it created memes featuring IPL stars, and actors from the hit film Sonu KeTitu Ki Sweety, to relate with customers and create visibility for their client. Using witty pop culture references, RVCJ created funny static memes, video memes in Hindi also dubbed in variety of regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Bengali, WhatsApp conversation GIF videos and articles to craft a 360-degree campaign.
RVCJ also created a hilarious sketch based ‘hero video’ to anchor the campaign, featuring well known artists and familiar faces. The theme of the hero video was ‘Indians During Sale’ and showcased quirks and people’s eagerness to get the best discounts during an e-commerce sale and integrated bigbazaar.com cleverly, within the narrative. The ‘Indians During Sale’ video performed exceedingly well, getting 1.5 Million views on FaceBook alone, and crossing 512K views on YouTube.
Future Group India group head for digital Pawan Sarda says, “We partnered with RVCJ media for them being one of leading content aggregators when it comes to crowdsourcing, creating snacky and engaging content which cuts across geographies and age segments. Its high rate of organic engagement being another critical factor worked well for the campaign.”
A high frequency of a variety of interesting content ensured that the message reached the maximum number of people. For instance, a static meme using a picture of Ranveer Singh for a before and after effect, to push the sale of a trimmer was liked by over 51k people. And overall, the 14 static meme based campaign got a total reach of 1.59 million on Facebook, with an engagement of 21.2 per cent, and reached out to an additional 2.5 million people on Instagram and 91K people via Twitter. And nine video memes achieved a good amount of traction with 2.5 million views on Facebook and seven video memes distributed via Instagram fetched 1.2 million views.
RVCJ Media founder and CEO Shahid Javed Ansari adds, “Big Bazaar has partnered exclusively with RVCJ on all digital platforms for the past few months and this is the fourth campaign we are working on together. Our ability to tap into what is trending, our understanding of what works with Indian audiences and our pan-Indian regional language reach helped us create awareness about Big Bazaar’s e-commerce portal. In the past we have generated 48 per cent of traffic for them during a sale, using viral memes and other popular content like sketch based humorous videos. We hope to continue doing good work for them in the future.”
MUMBAI: Hypermarket chain from Future Group, Big Bazaar, has created a mobile game to promote its mega property, ‘Big Bazaar Sabse Saste 5 Din’. Designed and executed by L & K Saatchi & Saatchi, Big Bazaar’s innovative deal game is set to transform the shopping experience in India. Consumers and gamers can play the game and win shopping vouchers worth up to Rs 1 crore.
The ‘Deal Skyfall Sabse Saste 5 Din’ mobile game has the group’s iconic Chidya as a playable character. The game consists of five levels and will change from one to the other on preset scores. The speed at which the products appear on screen will keep on increasing along with the frequency of obstacles as the level increases. The game will have various deals. Each deal will have its own value/points. The user will be awarded a reward for crossing a predefined score and they can redeem the voucher code from the rewards section of the game on 23 January 2018.The game is available on the App Store, Playstore and bigbazaar
Future Group’s head of digital Pawan Sarda says, “With Deal Skyfall – Sabse Saste 5 Din game we want to reach out to the hidden consumer in everyone. Be it a gamer, a next gen consumer, mobile addicts or our huge base of loyal consumers, the game can be played by one and all. It is a simple and rewarding game, where your points in the virtual world get you a chance shop in the real world for free.”
L & K Saatchi & Saatchi Managing Partner Anil K Nair adds, “The game is a unique way in which a household brand like Big Bazaar is promoting one of its biggest properties. We have kept the game simple and it is sure to get many addicted and win as many vouchers they like.”
Revolutionising the shopping experience in India, Big Bazaar started the first ever Republic Day Sale in 2006, which has over the years come to be known as Sabse Saste Din. Celebrating the 12th successful year of Sabse Saste 5 Din, Big Bazaar has owned the period around Republic Day and has been a trendsetter.