Shoumyan Biswas, Senior Director, Marketing at Flipkart, discusses the new brand identity aimed at driving mobile adoption for the business, the insights behind it and how Flipkart is gearing up for the next innings in e-commerce in India
By SALONI DUTTA
Q] How will Flipkart’s new identity help the brand to leverage its position both at a customer acquisition stage as well as at a technology level?
Our logo marries the strength of our existing brand identity and imbibes the youthful, active and inclusive personality of the brand that we are building and moving towards. Conceptualized and designed by Flipkart’s design team and Umbrella Design, the new brand identity represents Flipkart’s vision of e-commerce in India by reinstating its focus on the mobile platform. The 3D design and contrasting colour palettes in the new logo help break the clutter and stand out on the mobile platform. Given the fact that a lot of Indians live in cities where their dominant access to the Internet is through mobiles, we believe this space is going to be hugely inspiring and liberating for people to come and experience these services of Flipkart through our mobile app and benefit from it.
Q] What was your brief to the agency for the recent campaign to make wishes come true?
The core brief was to create a product that brings alive the new brand space of fuelling and fulfilling wishes; a creative that talks to consumers across age, gender, geographies, pop-strata and social class. Our story is not just about a series of products; it doesn’t talk about the gardening tool, it talks about why does a particular person wish for a particular gardening tool? Another aspect of the brief was to also come up with something where the treatment was fresh, which would break clutter and make people find something that they would really engage with. So the campaign – where Flipkart promises to fulfil every wish - is actually a combination of a series of beautifully shot stills, there are no dialogues in the film. In less than a week, the campaign garnered around three million views on YouTube.
Q] What is the media mix and strategy that Flipkart has chosen to employ to garner maximum and effective reach?
For the ‘Ab har wish hogi poori’ campaign, we have been running a 150-second-edit of the film on digital media including YouTube, Hotstar, Facebook channels. We have also gone live with a shorter edit on television with high visibility. Our new brand identity will be visible during select movies in multiplexes and cinemas in select cities. In addition, we are also looking at a bit of Print advertising. Essentially, it is a proper 360-degree campaign. Further, we are also going to be leveraging our own touchpoints - reaching out to our own customer base through e-mailers and in-app notifications, reaching out to sellers through e-mailers. Moreover, we are also conveying the message of the new brand with the help of the IVR when people call us for customer service. The composition of media has changed over the years, and it has got to do with two things; one, the evolution of digital media and also our strategic priority on driving mobile adoption for our business. Having said that, the way we look at media deployment is actually a function of the brief, the business brief, that we are trying to address and also the kind of target audience that we are trying to talk to. If you look at the way we have been deploying media in the last few quarters, we have identified that as we are becoming big, there is a large pool of existing users that we have, who are Internet-savvy and frequently shop with Flipkart and at the same time, there is a large set of new customers we are acquiring at a very rapid pace. The way we go about it is having a simple principle of 2Ts - the first one is to make people talk about us, and the second one, is where you give reasons to consumers to transact with us.
What is the winning brand proposition that Flipkart brings to its customers vis-a-vis the competition in the e-commerce space? The preamble is that we are a very strong brand. The brand space that we have chosen for ourselves, which gets manifested in the new brand logo and film, that is the space where we want to fuel and fulfil the wishes of our customers. Life feels great when wishes come true and that is the core thought that has driven our current brand choice.
On the other hand, discounts are also important, and it will be an important factor for any retail business to provide the right value. But we believe what constitutes a delightful shopping experience about the right quality of service, reliability of service, speed of service, and having the right set of products for the right value, resulting in the right shopping experience. It is about you discovering the product through a seamless experience via the app that plays a big role. Today, e-commerce is all about seamless service.
ABOUT THE BRAND
Flipkart.com is India’s leading e-commerce marketplace offering over 30 million products across 70+ categories including Books, Media, Consumer Electronics and Lifestyle from major Indian and international brands. Flipkart is known for its path-breaking services like Cash on Delivery, and a 30-day replacement policy. It is the only online player offering services like In-a-Day Guarantee (50 cities) and Same-Day-Guarantee (13 cities) at scale. Launched in October 2007, Flipkart is currently 33,000 people strong, and has 45 million registered users clocking over 10 million daily visits. The company’s technology focus has enabled it to deliver as many as eight million shipments per month.
FACTS
CREATIVE AGENCY: LOWE LINTAS + PARTNERS & HAPPY CREATIVE SERVICES
MEDIA AGENCY: MEC
SOCIAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA MARKETING AGENCY: WEBCHUTNEY
PR AGENCY: GENESIS BURSONMARSTELLER
MARKETING TIP
Be passionate about consumers, know what are their triggers and barriers, and be obsessed about finding solutions that create a delightful experience.
CMO FILE
Shoumyan Biswas is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow and a marketing expert with more than a decade of experience. He is currently designated as Senior Director, Marketing at Flipkart. Prior to joining Flipkart, he had a long stint at Hindustan Unilever Ltd, where he worked as Senior Regional Brand Development Manager, Ponds South Asia, and Senior Brand Building Manager, Vaseline.
Feedback: saloni.dutta@exchange4media.com
