We expect the festive season to usher in economic revival: Nandita Sinha, Flipkart

Over the years, the Big Billion Days festive offer from Flipkart has evolved from a calendar event to a mega shopping fest online. Fuelled by affordability and value purchasing, the Big Billions Days has seen India pivoting to meet consumer demand that caters to the ‘new normal’. This year has witnessed the whole retail ecosystem come together to form partnerships – from kiranas to MSMEs and brands. Over 3 lakh sellers, out of which ~60 per cent come from Tier 2 and beyond, have enabled festive cheers to 250 million+ consumers across India during the Big Billion Days this year.

Also read:  Offline retailers can now be a part of Flipkart's The Big Billion Days sale

This year, Flipkart Wholesale, the digital B2B marketplace of the Flipkart Group, and the Best Price Stores joined the Big Billion Days ecosystem to bring great value for retailers and kiranas. In the first two days of the Big Billion Days 2020 (October 16 -17), both Flipkart Wholesale and the Best Price (cash-and-carry) stores witnessed over 35,000 retailers and 18,000 kiranas operating in categories such as Fashion, Fashion accessories and Grocery joining the festivities. With over 95 per cent of products locally sourced, the demand came from cities such as Agra, Mysore, Karimnagar, Kurnool, Meerut, Amravati, Bhopal, Amritsar, among others.

With regards to device/ appliance insurance, the adoption of Appliance Protection and Extended Warranty programs for brands across TV, AC, Refrigerator and Microwave Ovens has also seen an increase of 60 per cent in comparison to the Big Billion Days 2019. With smartphones becoming an essential for most people, the need for upgrading has increased and there has been over a 40 per cent increase in the number of smartphones purchased and a 50 per cent increase in people availing product exchange.

While cities such as Bangalore, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kolkata continue to lead the pack, the Tier 3+ cities made up for almost 60 per cent of the demand, this year. Customers from new cities, including Jhumri Telaiya (Jharkhand), Chamba (Himachal Pradesh), Cumbum (Andhra Pradesh), Thottiyam (Tamil Nadu) have shopped during the Big Billion Days this year.

In conversation with Adgully, Nandita Sinha, Vice President – Events, Engagement & Merchandising, Flipkart, speaks at length on the e-commerce platforms strategy for the festive season this year, how the Big Billion Days is bridging India with Bharat this festive season, and in the process bringing value to consumers beyond the metros.

The Big Billion Days is an annual feature from Flipkart. How have you strategised and planned this year amid muted market sentiments and significant changes in consumer behaviour due to the pandemic?

The pandemic has changed our lives in many ways, and when planning for the Big Billion Days this year, we had to look at the process a little differently. E-commerce has played a very important role this year in ensuring that consumers across the country had access to essentials and everything that customers needed. What constitutes ‘essentials’ has also transformed for many of us. Being a homegrown company, we have always strived to offer consumers access to the widest and best selection of products that meet their diverse needs. With the festive season officially beginning with the Big Billion Days, we expect that the season will usher in economic revival.

An increasing number of brands, customers and sellers are embracing e-commerce for new opportunities as well as business continuity. Our ecosystem collaborations and special festive launches will help various businesses make a strong comeback through e-commerce. Since the lockdown restrictions were lifted in June, we have strived to expand our offerings across categories. Consumer sentiment has been positive and we have seen this in the past few months, during and post lockdown. This includes a positive shift in the number of new customers coming to the platform, from newer cities and what they are picking up now. Besides essentials, the demand during the past few months has been driven by the growing need of kitchen, home improvement, work-from-home requirements and health and safety equipment.

Moreover, by swiftly modifying our approach in terms of scaling up the supply chain, taking precautionary measures to ensure safe delivery and providing various affordability constructs, we were able to meet our consumers’ evolving demands. Industry reports suggest that this year as we kick off the festive season, 40-50 million new users will embrace e-commerce, and majority of these will be from emerging Tier 3 and 4 towns.

Marketing experts say that smaller markets and rural areas will stimulate demand. How has Flipkart planned to address the Tier 2, 3, 4 markets to generate demand and achieve sales during this festive season? Has your supply chain been strengthened in these markets?

At Flipkart, we believe in 4 key tenets of availability, affordability, accessibility and quality to fulfil our consumers’ requirements. To cater to the growing needs of millions of consumers who are moving online and to support market access for lakhs of MSMEs, sellers, artisans and kiranas, we have significantly expanded our supply chain across the country for this festive season. We have increased our last-mile reach with more than 3,000 distribution hubs, strengthening our presence in Tier 2, 3 cities and beyond. Through this expansion we also aim to help lakhs of sellers, MSMEs and artisans from smaller towns to connect with a pan-India consumer base.

Overall, we added 3.4 million square feet space across our supply chain assets, including fulfilment centres, mother hubs and delivery centres throughout the country. These large fulfilment centres are crucial to ensuring a seamless movement of goods between sellers and buyers. These fulfilment centres along with mother hubs (or sortation centres) and delivery centres also contribute to large scale creation of direct and indirect employment across the country. This has been further strengthened with the onboarding of over 50,000 kiranas across the country, which will help manage a higher number of shipments during the festive season.

From a consumer engagement perspective, as per recent reports, people continue to spend an increasing amount of time on their smartphones and on social media platforms like Facebook. This gives us the opportunity to engage the audience meaningfully on a platform that they are seeking to spend time on, daily. In partnership with Facebook, we are not only engaging the metro audiences, but are customising campaigns in vernacular languages to reach consumers in Tier 2 regions and beyond. All this is driven through very personalised communication at scale, which drives efficiency from an engagement perspective. This year, some of the traditional brands are exploring wider market access with us. On the one hand, the new and wider selections are expected to create consumer delight, and on the other, the partnerships will be instrumental in helping the brands penetrate more markets and reach millions of new customers, not only from the metros but also from T2+ towns.

You have roped in some well-known celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Virat Kohli, Alia Bhat and Ranbir Kapoor to promote aggressively. What prompted to bring in these celebrities and how do you plan to leverage them? Will you have a separate set of celebrities for the south markets as that is a huge market with a different culture?

Over the years, the marketing campaign for The Big Billion Days has built a legend of its own. This year, we have scaled new heights in collaboration with McCann to bring India’s most-loved celebrities and influencers in a unique double role to share endearing human stories about The Big Billion Days that are sure to connect with audiences across the country. We have a long-standing association with celebrities, including Amitabh Bachchan, Virat Kohli, Alia Bhat and Ranbir Kapoor, to name a few. We have observed that the messages or even the mere presence of these celebrities has a massive positive impact on the audience.

This year, our marketing approach has hinged on rebuilding the confidence of customers, wishmasters, and sellers. We have done that through transparent communication that let the authenticity of the brand and our deep care for customer needs and wellbeing shine through across all touch points. For us, the role of marketing is to deepen our relationship with customers through hyper-personalised experience across various touch points in the customer journey.

This year’s campaign theme is designed to showcase how The Big Billion Days brings together families and friends. The campaign comprises a series of TVCs showcasing India’s most-loved celebrities in unique “double avatars”, including Virat Kohli, Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhat, Amitabh Bachchan, Sudeep Kiccha and Mahesh Babu. They are bringing to life engaging personas that the entire Indian audience can relate to, especially during a much-awaited shopping festival. The campaign leverages the underlying element of friendly competition and light-hearted rivalry between near and dear ones to get the best deals and outdo one another.

Innovative formats, interactive shows, games and ideas have been introduced by you to build excitement and increase audience engagement. Can you elaborate more on this? How will these woo the customers to visit your portal and buy more?

Over the years, The Big Billion Days has become an experience which customers eagerly look forward to and all our efforts are dedicated towards making it bigger and better every year. The country has witnessed somewhat of a seismic shift in its socio-economic situation in the past few months. We pride ourselves in being close to customers and intimately understanding their needs and expectations. The role of engagement and communication has never been more important, especially in today’s digital-first world. Here are some of the interesting engagements that are a part of this year’s Big Billion Days:

Social media engagement: We are primarily leveraging Facebook to connect with millions of users across the country and its tools to target the right customers at the right time through highly focused campaigns in regional languages.

Gamification: Another consumer engagement construct that has emerged greatly is gamification as it adds stickiness to the larger marketing campaigns. With this view, we have launched a unique gaming show, ‘BBD Muqabala’, which is hosted on the Being Indian channel on YouTube. The show has a two-pronged approach, where selected influencers will be participating in a quiz to answer questions and earn interesting deals during The Big Billion Days. The same quiz show is also available to our customers on the Flipkart app. By answering simple questions, they will be able to earn SuperCoins and use them to avail benefits on their purchases.

Flipkart Video and Games: Flipkart Video is a part of the Big Billion Days experience in a bigger way this year. For the festive season, we have an array of interactive shows and games lined up. By participating in these on-app offerings, users stand a chance to win rewards that can be redeemed by shopping on the Flipkart app itself. This way, we are giving them the best of entertainment, rewards and shopping, all on a single app.

Latest tech innovations: Besides gamification, tech innovations are the backbone of our platform. To ensure that first-time users are at ease while shopping on Flipkart, we launched two new technology features to handhold them through the purchase journey – a search and voice assistant, and regional-language interfaces. These features were launched on the back of intensive research and data-driven insights on aspects, such as e-literacy, consumer behaviour, and consumption patterns.

Besides being present in the IPL, how do you plan to work on your media strategy? Will it be digital driven or a judicious mix of traditional and social media? Within social media, will there be more emphasis towards the Influencer campaign?

This year, our agenda is to establish Flipkart as the destination for brands, sellers, ecosystem partners and customers. The strategy behind this year’s marketing efforts during the Big Billion Days is to also encourage participation from the customers, and our media mix has been designed keeping in mind this aspect. We are leveraging the traditional as well as digital platforms to ensure a deep penetration in metros as well as Tier 2 and 3 cities. With the surging popularity of social media, our strategy also ensures that consumers can remain abreast of the latest developments through a wide range of social media channels and influencer engagement.