The art of repositioning

Recently, we have seen a flurry of activities among the established retailers to revamp and reposition their brand’s image. Country’s top retail chains like Spencer’s Retail, Café Coffee Day, Shoppers Stop and many more are rebranding the stores, introducing new product categories, changing the interiors, creating new formats and even changing the brand identity to adapt to the cut throat competition and changing landscapes of the modern retailing.

Repositioning undertaken

Spencers Retail of RPG group had left a perception of being a high priced store in the consumers mind. Sanjay Gupta, Vice President, General Merchandising and Marketing, Spencer’s Retail Ltd says, “We changed our tag line. We moved away from ‘Taste the world’ to ‘Makes fine living affordable’ as the new tag line. We also complemented this with a strong in-store value communication on the lines of ‘Quality since 1863. Prices you can Trust’. We wanted to play this back to the consumer and reward his trust in Spencer’s by working harder on providing value for his buys. We therefore have chosen to link quality, trust and value in a more direct manner”, he added further.

Future Group, the largest retailer in India, has also repositioned its apparel and home fashion categories. The company has now rationalised assortments and has improved quality to experience better sales ticket sizes and profit margin. Recently, Bausch & Lomb, the eyecare brand, has changed its brand identity by replacing ‘&’ with a ‘+’ logo in order to make the brand more youthful, contemporary and vibrant.

“Under our previous franchise relationship we were a small premium retailer selling UK products at higher prices from smaller stores. Through our partnership with Reliance Retail we have been able to open larger stores and realign our prices by locally sourcing up to 38 per cent of our products (in the 2009/10 financial year), with an aim to reach over 60 per cent by 2012” quips Nandini Sethuraman, Head of Marketing, Marks and Spencer Reliance Retail Pvt Ltd.

Cafe Coffee Day, which runs a chain of 1,000 cafes across the country, recently rolled out a new brand identity to make the brand geographically and culturally neutral. “This is why the logo as it appears today is a ‘dialogue box’ that signifies interaction. Our cafes conduct activities that are around the most relevant and topical things for the youth today, be it in the field of music, entertainment, sports, etc. The cafes make room for activities clearly that are relevant to the young audiences”, says K Ramakrishnan, President - Marketing, Café Coffee Day.

Effects of repositioning

The after-effects of rebranding are encouraging and clearly show that there is no dearth of opportunities for retailers in India, provided the retailers understand the changing consumer behaviour and keep pace with their needs and demands. “We notice that the growth that we are observing in flipped cafes as opposed to the non-flipped is promising. Also we have noticed that there is a great relativity with the new look to our consumers”, opines Ramakrishnan. Since we are privately held organisation, therefore, information related to sales are not in the public domain, he further added. The same has been the case with Spencer’s Retail, wherein a change in the tagline has produced the desired results. “Our initial internal research corroborates the strong “quality” connotation that Spencer’s enjoys. We have improved on our score of VFM (value for money) and overall it’s great for the brand to be known for both quality and value,” informs Gupta.

Marks and Spencer, which by realigning their prices through more local sourcing were able to offer their customers great quality and importantly great value products, are now in a position to sell a Polo T-shirt for mere Rs 395. “Local sourcing also means that we have the flexibility to respond to the Indian tastes and needs. For example, in India pockets on shirts are common, as jackets are rarely worn in the heat, so we add these to locally sourced shirts”, informs Sethuraman.

Change in services provided

To replicate a business model of West in India doesn’t works well. If the retailer is looking for a long term innings, they better change the model and the products offerings that suit the Indian consumers and their habits. Sethuraman of Marks & Spencer agrees with the same citing an example that how important it was for M&S to bring a modification to the products on the shelves. She says, “We’ve found that colourful clothing is very important in India. We now offer three times the number of colour options of polo shirt compared to the UK. Also we have made changes to our pack sizes compared to the UK. Instead of offering seven pairs of men’s socks, as we do in the UK, we sell them in singles in India. But for Spencer’s Retail, as far as business is concerned, there is no impact on their format size in any way. On the merchandising front they have introduced “opening price points” in many categories and worked aggressively on the KVI (known value items) benchmarking with the market prevailing prices. For CCD, the activities that they undertake are always a two way communication with their audiences and these activities are around the latest happenings, be it a big cricketing event like the IPL, World Cup Football, Friendship Day, Valentines Day, Independence Day or occasions like Diwali, Navratri, etc.