TataCLiQ’s ‘Festober’ drive making good headway: Prathyusha Agarwal

TataCLiQ.com, Tata Group’s multi-brand phygital e-commerce player, has rolled out its ‘Festober’ initiative to leverage the ongoing festive season. As part of ‘Festober’, TataCLiQ.com has lined up a plethora of offers, deals and giveaways all through the month of October. According to industry sources, Tata CLiQ has earmarked 50 per cent of its marketing budget for the Festober celebrations.

 In conversation with Adgully, Prathyusha Agarwal, Head - Marketing, Tata CLiQ, throws more light on the e-commerce player’s festive season plans. Excerpts:

What are the marketing spends that you have allocated for this festive season? How does it compare with the spends last year?

This year, Tata CLiQ is celebrating its first festive season. Diwali is an important festival, celebrated by one and all across the country. Our focus this season is on cultivating a relationship with our customers by delighting them with CLiQtastic offers and promotions throughout the month. With multiple festivals all through the month, we are looking at making it a ‘Festober’ for consumers. We are running offers such as Festober Flash, Festober Fireworks and Festober Feast, which include flash sales featuring the best prices on apparel and electronics. Apart from best prices across an assortment of various categories at Tata CLiQ, we also have sweet price points to make it the best Festober for all our consumers.

What are some of the strategies that you are adopting to boost sales during this festive season?

As this is our first Diwali, we plan to celebrate festivities for the entire month. In line with the Diwali ritual of gifting our loved ones, customers who shop with us at Tata CLiQ get more than what they have purchased in return. There are exciting offers for everyone, be it the consumers who are shopping for best prices or the consumers who come for last minute festive shopping through our phygital partners. Our phygital partnerships are our USP. As part of our festive plans, we are running offers with our phygital partners Croma and Westside to provide exciting and exclusive gifts to consumers. We also have new launches every Friday as part of Festober CLiQbusters. We believe this step will enable us to build a strong relationship with our customers.

What is the distinguishing factor of your strategy that sets you apart from other players?

Tata CLiQ has big plans up its sleeve with bumper prizes to be given away across the electronics, apparel and footwear categories. As part of the month-long Festober celebrations, we have Festober Flash and Festober Fireworks with tempting offer deals from across categories like electronics, apparels and footwear. Consumers coming to shop with us are in for a major surprise with special lucky draws with gifts from Tanishq, Westside, Croma and Vistara.

What also sets us apart is our partnerships with stores inventories that ensures timely delivery and authenticity of product. There is always an option for customers to drop by at our phygital partner stores and pick up the products if they do not want wait for home delivery. Hence, our fulfilments will be much better than any of our competitors.

How are you planning to counter competition from other e-commerce players?

We have a month-long festive period unlike the weekly festive periods run by our competitors. Apart from the best prices on our assortment, we have surprise giveaways for our consumers. At Tata CLiQ, we deliver a phygital offering, that is, a seamless integration of online and offline stores to provide consumer a unique shopping experience. This Diwali, we will be making this experience even more exciting and rewarding for consumers because they not only get to earn big with Tata CLiQ, but also receive heaps of offers from our phygital partnering brands.

What is the sales revenue that you are targeting during this festive season?

The response to our offerings since our launch has been overwhelming. Our customers are receptive to our unique model and understand that we are here to stay and play the longer game. In the first week of the launch, we received orders from every Indian state. 50 per cent of our customers are from the metros, while the rest are from smaller cities. In terms of traffic to the website, we are witnessing a 3X growth since the launch date, with a 15 per cent repeat rate amongst customers. This Festober, we are looking at tripling our sales revenue.

Do you think there is a slight slowdown in the market sentiment this year? Why?

It has been four months since our launch and fortunately, we have not faced any slowdown. Since our launch, we have witnessed an upward and fast growth in our unique visitors and an exponential spike in GMV. We believe that the e-commerce we are experiencing now is just e-retail 1.0. As we go along, e-retail 2.0 is going to bring revolutionary change to the way we are doing e-commerce at Tata CLiQ and hence, tap into the next wave of online shoppers.

What kind of a market vibe are you getting from customers this festive season?

We are a handpicked curated market place and here to seamlessly integrate the offline and the online spaces and provide ease to our consumers. Since we are a brand forward e-commerce player, we directly partner with brands and their proposition is directly shared with our consumers and hence, we do not see this as an issue for us.

What are the implications of restrictions on deep discounting by the DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion)? How will it impact you?

Tata CLiQ is not just an e-commerce portal, we are a multi-brand phygital marketplace. We are exclusively pioneering this space in India, where our biggest differentiator is the concept of phygital (seamless integration of physical and digital. While discounting is a legitimate strategy for retailers, it creates problems at two levels in Tata CLiQ’s view:

• It is not healthy for the business as the retailer will end up burning cash
• Any player relying on heavy discounting creates certain a type of customer expectation

Some of the websites today are already in this trap. Customers who are going to these portals are actually either buying discounted stuff or buying products at the end of value chain.

Tata CLiQ, therefore, uses discounting as a tactical tool, rather than as a strategic tool. Tata CLiQ will not make any decision in which discounts become the key determinant of a purchase. We at Tata CLiQ work with brands directly – starting from popular, premium, going right up to luxury – and hence, use discounts more as a tactical rather than a strategic tool.

What steps are you taking to differentiate your offerings in the e-commerce market?

Differential offering is a good idea and consumers today are ready to pay that extra money for the value add that they receive. We are looking at the three pillars for differentiating Tata CLiQ from other players:

• We are for brand forward consumers who are looking for a unique brand experience backed by authenticity and quality of the brand. We clearly differentiate ourselves by offering our consumers a curated brand experience. It’s not a product catalogue but brands, brand merchandise and the brand proposition that brings the brand story and authenticity of brands to consumers.

• Consumers are moving from physical to digital across all walks of life. A consumer now likes to shop across website, app and in store as per his convenience. We at Tata CLiQ deliver a phygital offering, that is, seamless integration of online and offline stores to provide consumer a unique shopping experience.

• In the e-space, consumers don’t have that human touch and feel that they get by walking into a store. We at Tata CLiQ aim to be a true brand partner, where we will not try and dis-intermediate and we get the e-commerce consumer to the physical brand and get the physical retail brands to the e-consumer. This translates itself by how we create the brand store fronts, integration with sellers and control on promotion and pricing.

As a company, we are only focused on trying to perfect the customer experience. The platform is new and there will always be a few ups and downs. Our effort is only to perfect that. As a team if we deliver the good stuff to customers, they have a nice simple experience online and deliveries are faster, we have managed to do what we had set out to do.

Do you think that premium (for example, Amazon Prime) or special offerings are also going to play a significant role in getting e-commerce player an advantage?

Tata CLiQ is a multi-branded phygital marketplace. We are exclusively pioneering this space in India, where our biggest differentiator is the concept of phygital. We have integrated the physical aspect of in-store shopping and the online aspect of e-commerce seamlessly. For example, you can order a product online and collect it at a Westside store near you. If you want to return an item, you can simply walk into a store and process the return. Our experience since launch shows that customers are loving the extra convenience provided by Tata CLiQ with the phygital benefits. The exchange and return to stores benefits are becoming more convenient and time efficient for the consumers and hence increasing their preferences for shopping with us.