"We Have Glorified the Discounts": Roch D'Souza

Brand Factory, a leading retail discount chain by Future Lifestyle & Fashions has announced the 4th edition of the ticketed-event 'Free Shopping Weekend' (FSW) which is scheduled to be held on 4th - 8th December 2019. The one-of-a kind sale offers goods worth Rs 5,000 at Rs 2,000 only and returns the entire amount by offering free merchandise, gift vouchers and cash backs.  

Brand Factory is banking on personalization leading to a large variety of user-generated content. The retail chain will be sending over 1,00,000 customized invites in the video format to the customers who once conversed with the brand, through various social media platforms. This campaign aims to achieve a turning point which will yield the highest foot traffic-people coming to the store in 4 years. In an exclusive conversation with Roch D'Souza,Chief Marketing Officer, Brand Factory talks about more about the campaign…

Interview excerpts..

Kindly elaborate us on personalization and whole marketing that is happening over free shopping weekend?

This is the fourth edition of free shopping weekend. In all these years we have managed to create a sizable base of consumers, and as marketers I am leveraging out of these data points to churn real data. Also, the way we have optimized this data in such manner, that we have realized that most of customers are our real brand ambassadors. Taking these two points in mind, we thought of merging our customer base in a way that they become the talking point for the campaign.

This is our way through which we are ensuring one-on-one relationship with our customers. As the part of strategy, We have identified one lakh customers from followers on social media who have who have shown some kind of traction either in form of comment or some feedback to be part of campaign, hoping this will yield a positive result in our endeavor of making better experience.  

How do you ensure Brand Factory remains top in game of personalization?  

The entire game of personalization is based on the intend of the brand. No doubt, brands are growing, but customers are evolving in faster way. This customer evolution is not caused by abundance of choices they have, but how they consume communication from the brand or what the brand intense to do with them. Hence, brand have to be very honest in your communication with positive intend behind the same.

Today, customers can gauge intent much clearly. Therefore, we ensured that our commitments made to our patrons are delivered exactly the same. As the part of our strategy, we ensure least terms and conditions in our offers. This approach has helped us in firming the confidence of consumers towards the brand. We don’t use personalization as gimmick.

For example, if somebody has commented negative on our social media page then we actually apologize and take all corrective measure to improve experience including allowing first access to promotional offers that we run. In fact, we have also collaborated with digital agency Ideate Labs to create video stories of our patrons. As the part of marketing and communication strategy, we picked up few valued customers from social media and thank them for being the part of journey by making one and one-half minute video customizing it as the name of the consumer and creating song out of it. Once the video is done, we put it on our social handles. So far, we have done 30 thousand such videos and received tremendous response.

What is your assessment about fashion and lifestyle market in India?

Content around fashion has just boomed. If we look at 10 years back, there were very limited avenues to understand the fashion trends. Today, fashion trends coming out of any mature market be it European/ American is easily translated real- time in developing countries like India. I see it as a big development for Indian fashion retail.

Also, earlier fashion was restricted to top eight cities, whereas , today social apps such as Tiktok, Instagram amongst others have created new dimensions in fashion content consumption and have played a crucial role in making common people believe they can be a part of ongoing fashion trends. As the ripple effected, all retailers including us have become more fashion conscious to catch those trends and deliver them in real time. Therefore, I would say consumers are driving the fashion statements and not the retailers themselves.

According to you, what are the top tech-trends driving fashion retail?

The key is, how you use your data intelligently in understanding the fashion needs of your consumers and have a regular dialog with them on social space without barging into his/her privacy. I think if these two technologies can embedded seamlessly then the result will be base of new trends and personalization and encourage brand loyalty. Technology and marketing will play a crucial role in terms of bridging the gap in these two areas.

How would you sum-up the journey of Brand Factory so far?

If you look at five years back, we hardly had any stores. Within these five years, we have broken some common myths including discounted shopping. People used to hesitate talking about shopping they did in discount period.  We have glorified the discounts, if people feel pride at shopping at store during discounts; I would consider it as our biggest achievement over last five years. Top of that, we have made brand accessible to commoners. We get customers from all strata of society right from driver to owner of the car. We are fulfilling very different brand needs to both of them. Also, we have created some very marquee properties one among them is ‘free shopping weekend’. We make customers feel winners once they step out of the stores.