KISHORE BIYANI ROPES IN GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK TO CHART FUTURE OF RETAIL
Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group lays down ‘New Retail 3.0’ roadmap for the next 30 years for the company at launch of member-only Easyday stores, aims to open stores within a 2 km radius of every consumer in the country, with data analytics and location-mapping help from tech giants BY SAMARPITA BANERJEE Last week, Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group announced the launch of member-only Easyday stores that he believes will help turn the organization into a Rs 1.5 trillion business by 2022. For this, Future Group has partnered with technology companies Google and Facebook for data analytics and social media support. It has also roped in Deloitte as its consulting partner. Talking about the group’s 30-year vision, New Retail 3.0, Biyani also added that the group is aiming to become Asia’s largest integrated consumer retailer with revenue of around $1 trillion by 2047. Talking about New Retail 3.0, Biyani said, “With New Retail 3.0, we plan to expand our capacity of doing business. Our aim is to open stores within a 2 km radius of every consumer in the country. We are taking the help of Google to map locations based on the number of consumers we can get at each location. We plan to open around 10,000 such stores by 2022.” Future Group plans to set up around 1,100 Easyday stores by the end of the current fiscal year from the current 700. The stores will also house technologies like door counting sensors, gesture recognition, area counting sensors, etc, to make the consumer experience seamless. Easyday members will need to pay an annual fee of Rs 999. Each of the stores will be equipped to handle around 2,000 members and will see investments of around Rs 15 lakh. The primary philosophy behind the stores is ‘You Ask, We Deliver’ and the retail format has been titled ‘Tathastu’. Biyani further added that owing to the use of data analytics, consumers will get personalized experiences. “Every customer touchpoint will help generate data for us that will in turn help us profile customers. We are aiming at a scenario where every store will have 2,000 members and based on the data available to us, we will be able to know exactly what we should stock up on. Even the customer will be able to decide what they want in the store,” he said. While Google will help Future Group in identifying locations for setting up these stores, it will also aid its hyper-local member acquisition. Explaining how in today’s digital-driven ecosystem, there is a need for online and offline businesses to work together to reap maximum benefits, Rajan Anandan, MD, Google India said, “Today, Digital is helping drive offline sale. We have 300 million Indians on smartphones spending about three hours online everyday and we know exactly where they are. So we are able to take these signals that we have from all our products (Android, Maps, Search) put them together and figure out where the next Easyday store should be set up.” Future Group has also tied up with Facebook that will aid the brand with generating user-behaviour profiles. The data analytics centre for Tathastu in Kolkata will be led by Sandipan Chattopadhyay, former chief technology officer at Justdial Ltd. Ogilvy & Mather has conceptualized the first campaign for the brand and the 360-degree campaign will go live on December 1. @ FEEDBACK samarpita.banerjee@exchange4media.com
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