‘Our online to offline strategy works well for us’
Jishnu Sen, CMO, Big Bazaar talks about how the brand managed to make their marquee ‘Sabse Saste 5 din’ even bigger this year with the help of technology. BY NEETA NAIR The company’s advertising has always left viewers with a smile, be it the ‘Paper Pataka’ campaign, making way for a pollution free Diwali, to their Eid campaign which brought alive the ethos of unity. This time round, Big Bazaar went a step further, marrying creativity with technology to strike a chord with the consumer. With the help of their creative agency – Law & Kenneth Saatchi and Saatchi, it made its marquee ‘Big Bazaar Sabse Saste 5 Din’ a sale to remember. The brand began by launching a mobile game ‘Deal Skyfall’ to promote its mega sale event, wherein consumers could win shopping vouchers worth Rs 1 crore, giving them the chance to encash their virtual world (online) wins in the real world (offline). Talking about the reasoning behind this strategy, Jishnu Sen, Chief Marketing Officer, Big Bazaar said, “The insight was fairly simple. Digital is no longer static digital and the interactivity and engagement level of consumers is what determines digital success. Thus, we wanted to do something interesting to engage with our customers. As an organization, Future Retail or Big Bazaar has always pushed different goalposts on how to take sales to the next level via promotions. We started ‘Sabse Saste Din’ 12 years ago which has been a huge success ever since. And we have managed to evolve with time.” Another innovation was the ‘World’s First 24-Hour Facebook Live Shopping Entertainment Show’. The campaign broke through the shopping festival clutter and bridged the gap between a digitalfirst millennial consumer and the offline retail giant. Big Bazaar reached out to their customers with exciting exclusive deals and live entertaining content, even adding celebrities to the mix. “When we started planning for our biggest five sale days, we wanted to make it India’s biggest sale event. If there is a huge cricket match on, there will be live commentary. Thus we tried to do the same thing with Facebook live. We decided to follow the sale closely for 24 hours. We kept our stores open for 24 hours. Basically, how many people watched or how many people logged in is not as important as the fact that Big Bazaar as a brand, continues to be the pioneer of what’s trending,” explained Sen. That said, in the 24-hour period, Big Bazaar recorded over 10 million views and one lakh coupons, which translated into three lakh walk-ins with 62% redemptions and the highest-ever sale on January 26, breaking all previous records. Not surprisingly, Sen said he is open to the idea of repeating the Facebook Live idea for another sale in the future. “Sabse saste din accounts for about 4-5% of Big Bazaar’s annual revenue from sales,” according to Sen. Talking about how difficult it is for a brand in an era of quick e-shopping to ensure consumers keep shopping through offline stores, Sen says, “Even e-commerce platforms across the world are finding offline partners. For example, Amazon has Amazon Go as an offline store. We too have a strong online to offline strategy that has worked very well for us in the past and continues to do so.” Elaborating on the trends he sees in the retail sector today, Sen adds, “From a retail point of view I feel today the ‘one size fits all’ terminology doesn’t hold true any longer. The other big trend is that essentially smaller towns are experimenting a lot with their food habits. These are the two big trends in the market today and you will see us address both of them in a very big way in the next six months.” @ FEEDBACK
neeta.nair@exchange4media.com
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