How Consumer Durable Brand Croma is Leveraging From Ongoing Festive Season?
How Consumer Durable Brand Croma is Leveraging From Ongoing Festive Season?

Consumer durables get the highest traction during festive sales. How Croma is leveraging this?

This is one of the biggest season for any electronics retailer in the country, it’s the time of the year when refrigerators get bigger, screens get wider, phones get smarter and food gets tastier. It’s the time when brands launch their much awaited ‘new line-up of the year’ and shoppers look forward to upgrade to the latest, biggest and trendiest gadgets during the season. To ensure that Croma is the most preferred destination when it comes to festive purchases, the work begins 45 days in advance. Right from working on clutter breaking brand campaign themes, coordinating with brands to ensure festive product line-up, working on key consumer benefits, affordability options & ensuring well trained manpower at the store.

In January this year, Croma launched the first-in-market loyalty program called Croma Privileges. For this festive season, the programme has been further tuned to offer a curated range of offers to all shoppers. On boarding is easy, one needs to call 1800 22 66 99 and all the offers/ benefits exclusive to them will reach their registered mobile number.

Apart from this Croma also has a robust online digital catalogue that is used to drive traffic to the stores, which is where Croma’s expertise lies. This year, Croma is going beyond just offers or discounts and extending to customers things that matter! Croma’s unique propositions like 3 Hr delivery, assured lifetime service, complete on-boarding support, affordable EMI schemes, e-waste disposal on call are some other benefits that the customer can experience this festive season. No stone is left unturned to ensure that we put our best foot forward to welcome customers at the Croma stores and on croma.com

Have you seen any impact of sluggish economy? How’s is the consumer sentiments this time?

Despite the slowdown in economy, the onset of the festive season has been great with Croma clocking in a growth of over 40% compared to the same period last year. The festive season is the biggest window for any electronics retailer. It is special as all Indians give their homes a facelift of some sort at this time. Whether it’s painting the home or upgrading to a Smart TV, this is the time of the year when the big bucks are spent. We expect the momentum during the festive season to be even better. Compared to any other month, the festive month sees 2.5X growth in footfalls as well.

 These days people prefer to buy consumer durable via online channels because of lucrative deals offered by market places including Flipkart and Amazon, especially in the festive season. Have you witnessed any negative impact of this trend?

We have in fact experienced quite the contrary – whenever the marketplace players advertise, we see a surge in our sales. CDIT is a category where the magic of touch-feel-try as a precursor to buying continues to appeal to most shoppers, also, shoppers today look for services beyond just deals and discounts, being the only fully functional Omni-channel electronics retailer is a strong advantage that we have up our arsenal. Having more than 140+ stores in the best of retail destinations and to add to that croma.com, makes us competitive versus not only ecommerce and but also against pure brick and mortar retailers.

To add to that, we believe customers are willing to pay a “justifiable premium” to do business with a retailer they know and trust versus a nameless, faceless seller listed on an online marketplace. We realized last year that, when customer invest in our category, they look for commitment which is beyond just prices and discounts. Our last year’s campaign was about ‘assured lifetime service’, i.e. Buy from Croma and we take care of all your service needs for life, worked wonders for us. This year we are making it as a 360 degree promise right at pre purchase, purchase and post purchase phase.

Which are your uptick categories in the ongoing festive period?

The festive season is all about doing the best for your home and during this season consumer sentiments are particularly positive for indulging in home appliances and entertainment gadgets.

The smartphone and LED category sees the most number of new launches during this period, this year too that’s the trend we expect. Phones in the sub 15K category to the high end 50K+ phones are introduced in the market and like always we believe this will be one of the most lucrative category for us. Also there is a trend to upgrade to higher screen size OLED & QLED TVs for an immersive TV watching experience. The price points across the TV range are extremely attractive for consumers to consider an upgrade

 

 

 

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