ShopClues.com unveils intensive media campaign with Enormous Brands

ShopClues.com, the fully-managed online marketplace has announced the launch of its end-to-end advertising and branding roadmap to gain top-of-the-mind recall in the Indian e-commerce segment. The brand has already carved a strong niche for itself in the Indian e-tailing space with over 65,000 merchants powering an extensive selection of 5.3 million products across 3000 listing categories. It is now ready with a full-fledged branding and mass communication campaign to further its penetration and recall in broader geographies and demographics. To achieve this objective, ShopClues.com has engaged partners across functions to lead its large-scale consumer engagement campaign.

The e-commerce platform has partnered with agencies which have a history of creating memorable creative campaigns reflecting its vision of establishing itself as a preferred brand of the Indian masses. EnormousBrands, headed by advertising veteran, Ashish Khazanchi, has been appointed as its creative partner. The Public Relations mandate has been assigned to Value 360 Communications, headed by Kunal Kishore Sinha who has a tremendous track record of scaling up several start-up brands.

A few months back, ShopClues got on board Shweta Jain as Brand Strategy Consultant to kick start the accelerated mode of branding and advertising initiatives. Shweta has extensive experience in brand and communication strategy and consumer engagement road mapping, having worked across categories earlier with Pernod Ricard, Ogilvy and Gillette. The media planning and buying activities have been assigned to Rajul Kulshrestha-headed Exposure. All these partners have bodies of work that have captured the pulse of the Indian consumer and their peculiarities.

Radhika Ghai Aggarwal, Co-Founder & CMO, said, “We observed early on that our country has millions of small merchants with interesting products and we Indians love to shop in local bazaars. This is the basic and defining essence of our product. At ShopClues, we’ve built properties like the Sunday Flea Market, Wholesale, Cash-Before-Delivery, Factory Outlet, keeping the orientation of our shoppers and their comfort zones in mind. We have an approach to merchandising which is unprecedented. Our build-up is focused on extensive unstructured products categories, offerings and unique cataloging.”

Notably, ShopClues has spent less than US $10 million to reach the status of India’s 5th largest, while every other company in the top five list has spent an over ten times the amount.

While ShopClues covers a broad range of products, prices, categories, brands, and sellers, it specialises in non-standard categories, unbranded products or less-known brands, smaller merchants, and tier II and tier III cities. Unstructured products account for over 75% of the GMV. It is thus a combination of a discovery and transaction-enabling engine. In addition to strong traction and a very well-developed marketplace ecosystem, it also has an unmatchable cost advantage and rapidly improving fundamentals – the company is close to gross margin break-even and will be operating margin positive by March 2015.