Direct-to-home : ‘exploring emerging niches in traditional landscape’

 

Home delivery, a retail service format gaining momentum in India. Here we seek to understand and compare the purchase dynamics of making purchase decisions in an environment divorced from the physical retail environment versus those made in a regular kirana or modern store environment.

Given these differences the marketers need to consider home delivery as a separate channel that merits specific marketing strategy and resources.

Here we are putting forward thought starters in this area that can be leveraged for business development.

Need to explore emerging niches in traditional landscapes

 

“A large part of our strategy for India is unlike our strategies in other markets across the world. As a 50-year-old company, it is easy to become set in your ways. You end up trying to duplicate your other successes in new markets as well. But to believe that old successes will drive new ones and to not change your ways -- an attitude that says "this is how we will do it because this is how we've always done it" -- is wrong. We have realized that you need to adapt to the market -- the market won't adapt to you”

William S Pinckney is Managing Director and CEO, Amway India

In recent times a critical and widely acknowledged milestone in the retail landscape has been the emergence and growth of modern trade. This in turn has resulted in the spotlight coming to a hitherto insignificant participant – the shopper.

In fact given the emergence and high growth rates of the modern formats, the Indian marketer is adapting his marketing mix allocation to ensure that he participates in this growth. Hence in an effort to attract and engage the shopper, marketers are increasingly spending to improve in-shop visibility, launching specific programs to engage the shopper etc in the modern stores.

An interesting outcome of this has been the spillover of the marketer’s efforts to woo shoppers also coming to the kirana & grocery stores.

However, all these activities assume a physical shopping environment to be the corner stone of strategy to reach consumers.

This marks a departure from what is happening globally i.e. people across the globe are increasingly getting sensitive to the double edged opportunity and threat of purchase transactions being completed in a virtual environment.

In India however, limited cognizance has been taken of ‘virtual’ purchase environment by the mass marketers. This, while appropriate given the low internet accessibility coupled with lower internet based transactions, seems less than optimal in light of a recent phenomenon gradually gaining momentum - the phenomenon of home delivery.