It has been not more than 8-10 years that online
market place has come into picture and such is the effect of it that the
offline market place has started feeling its jitters with consumer being more
informed and smart. The trend is such that the consumer looks into the online
market place first where it finds the lowest prices and then visits the offline
market, compares the prices and then makes the buying decision. Goldman Sachs,
in a recent report, estimated India’s online market to grow nearly seven times
to $47 billion by 2020.The bargaining powers in the hands of consumers have
increased giving a major setback to the brick and mortar.
2015 saw a lot of conflicts arising from the side of
offline marketers protesting against the online sellers with respect to the
lower prices set. But at the end of the day business can’t be run on a single
strategic model, hence comes the need of online market giants to maintain a
pace with offline marketers as they need to connect physically with the
customers and create brand equity.
India’s offline market place consists of an unorganized
mix of aggressive marketing techniques making it more complex. The big mergers
between Bharti Retail and Future Retail , Aditya Birla’s acquisition of
Jubilant’s retail business all these
indicate that the customer being smart enough today prefers “the research online
and buy offline” model which can be justified by the research done by KPMG
which indicates offline market to be the crucial member of the marketing mix.
This fact has been well understood by the E-commerce
giants like Snapdeal, Paytm, Amazon and Flipkart who are pulling all stops in
2016 to get more merchants to sell on their platforms. You must be wondering
why? Well, the offline market place is the crucial member of the game which
will help online marketers to attract more buyers.
Not only this, the companies are not only helping
sellers list their products online and develop pricing strategies but they are
also ramping up financial services for merchants, increasing warehousing
capacity and unveiling technology platforms that serve as one stop shops for all merchant requirements.
In Dec, 2015 Snapdeal, headquartered in New Delhi launched
Sherpalo, a platform that provides single window access to all seller services enclosing onboarding, training, advertising, and order and returns management.
Snapdeal also launched ‘Shopo’ for its mobile
marketplace in July,2015 targeting 1
million sellers in 24-36 months.
With evolution of online market place the traditional
methods of doing business are changing at a very fast speed. It is very hard to
predict what is going to be the future of marketing where the books like Kotler,
which is considered to be the bible of marketing, would be needed to be
rewritten.
Let’s see how the new marketing principles turn out
to be and who turns out to be the boss.
Source:
· The
Economic Times
