Nestlé’s KitKat Dessert Delight to launch online first on bigbasket.com

While mobiles launching online first has been a norm in India for a while, FMCG is also increasingly looking to do this due to quick distribution and reach, ability to experiment and fine tune marketing. 

Nestlé India’s KitKat Dessert Delight is the latest among FMCG brands to launch online first on online food and grocery store, bigbasket.com. With its wide customer base and reach across 26 major cities in the country, Bigbasket has become the preferred choice for this launch. 

Commenting on the initiative, Hari Menon, Co-Founder and CEO, bigbasket, said, “India is witnessing a paradigm shift in the way marketing is carried out for various products. This includes a change in the way products are launched. Today, many major players prefer launching their products online, thanks to the growth of e-commerce and online shopping. Our customer base spans over 5.9 million people and we operate in 26 cities across the country. Given this size and reach, we have been able to bring ourselves to the point of being the most sought-after destination for FMCG companies. This association with Nestlé India will help us in extending our reach to more customers and give us the much-needed push to scale greater heights.” 

Nikhil Chand, General Manager, Chocolates & Confectionery, Nestlé India, added here, “We recognise that e-commerce would be a key channel for FMCG players in future. To drive awareness and excitement about the all new innovation – KitKat Dessert Delight, we have decided to take an innovative approach and have partnered with Bigbasket. We look forward to seeing how e-commerce will transform shopping behaviour and consumer habits.” 

Elaborating more on what differentiates Bigbasket and makes it a great partner for FMCG launches, Hari Menon laid out the following points. 

Target Audience 

e-commerce contributes to less than 1 per cent of overall grocery retail, but look closer and in cities like Bangalore, it’s a high 5-10 per cent of grocery sales. In metro and Tier 2 cities, online is fast becoming a very large sales channel and no longer confined to niche audiences. It caters to premium quality customers who are mobile, tech savvy and relatively more affluent. This is a very sharp target audience for premium chocolates and the introduction of Kit Kat’s premium variants will be an addition to the existing portfolio of chocolates at Bigbasket, which contribute to 1.2 per cent of its overall sales. 

Quick distribution & reach 

Go-to-market has never been shorter (or easier) for FMCG products. An average distribution cycle to reach new launches across markets and sales channels would take upto a month from factory to C&FA to distributors to wholesalers and retailers. Offtake would happen post this to end consumers. With online, the whole chain is shortened after C&FA. With national sourcing from vendors directly owing to the size of operations at Bigbasket, products are available in half the time to consumers across cities. 

Cold chain & Storage 

Premium chocolates like Kit Kat dessert delights need chilled temperatures to reach consumers in the desired state. The penetration of cold storage in offline kiranas is very low. And that limits the distribution ability of brands that need temperature control. This is where Bigbasket offers manufacturers an unmatched seamless experience in delivering chilled and frozen products to customers in a very efficient manner. Bigbasket already possesses expertise in cold storage and has recently received the Centre’s nod to set-up cold chain projects across the country. So be it storing in our warehouses or delivering it in iceboxes to customers, Bigbasket is able to preserve the quality of the products that require chilled temperature. 

Co-marketing partner of choice 

Bigbasket has been very proactive in partnering, collaborating with FMCG vendors to grow their business online. It offers advertisement space on its site & app, is able to send messages to its base through app notifications & emails & tops it with business intelligence to vendors using the vast quantity of data it captures, quite akin to a household panel data. This allows companies to experiment and fine tune marketing as well as get very quick feedback on product launches, which is not possible offline. 

With a few hundred daily orders, Bigbasket had a modest beginning in December 2011 in Bangalore. In five years, with the support of its customers, it has surpassed the 50,000 daily orders mark to become India’s largest online supermarket. The company recently strengthened its B2B business by expanding to the HoReCa (Hotels, Restaurants, and Caterers) segment and partnering with SnapBizz, a retail-technology firm, in an effort to transform India’s kirana stores into technology-enabled modern retail stores. The sixth-largest grocery retailer in India, combining both physical and online players, Bigbasket closed the previous fiscal year with Rs 1,410 crore in revenue. 

Bigbasket was founded by a team of five – VS Sudhakar, Hari Menon, Vipul Parekh, VS Ramesh and Abhinay Choudhari. The team has both offline and online retail experience, as they had earlier set up India’s first e-commerce site FabMart.com in 1999, and then established the Fabmall-Trinethra chain of more than 200 grocery supermarket stores in southern India. Bigbasket today services over 5.9 million registered customers.

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