Bata India’s Big Bet: When E-Commerce Plateaus, Experience Wins
The country’s most iconic footwear brand, Bata, is revamping from the inside-out. On one end, they’re focussing on becoming talent-magnets through Gen-Z friendly working policies and on the other, driving repeat customers through a renewed focus on retail.
In an interview with BrandSutra, Badri Beriwal, their Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer, tells us in detail about their strategy to create great experiences through micro-stories within stores, the science of lights, sounds and their effect on mood, and curating merchandise so as to not overwhelm the customers with choice.
Excerpts from the interview…
Bata is an iconic brand that has really cemented itself in the country. Tell us a bit about how the brand has had to evolve over the decades.
This is a brand with over 100 years of legacy here in India and world over. And one of the key assets of this brand is that in whichever countries it operates, people believe it is part of their own country.
In India, this brand has gone through an evolution with the population. If you zoom out and look at our country, we’ve gone from being a new, post-independence country marked by struggle and scarcity, to today, where the people have adequate resources—be it food or housing or other utilities.
Indians are demanding more from their lives. And the same sentiment extends to footwear—whether it is style, comfort or technology.
What are the key aspects that make people feel like Bata is a native or homegrown brand?
One of the keys has been making sure that the company is part of the local culture. So, for example, there was never an effort to export into India. From day one, we set up a factory here.
When the organisation went in for an IPO, locals became shareholders in Bata India Limited. Now, you’re not just seen as a trader in the country, but rather as an entity that is creating wealth for the people in the country.
While that is from a financial perspective, the next thing is to customise product offerings to the region. The idea is to think globally, but adapt locally.
Tell us about trends or changes in what people are looking for from footwear. How is Bata adapting?
Today's customer is more connected with the world due to social media and OTT exposure. Because of dubbing, global content has been democratised to the whole population of India.
So with that, it becomes very critical that we bring the right balance of global designs while locally manufacturing. Today, almost 70-80% of our designs are globally thought.
The other thing that we are working on is around infusing our products with technology. Customers are no longer in the zone of compromising on comfort for style. We have added something called EasySlide in our range of shoes, where you do not need to use your fingers to put on your shoes. You can just press your feet and they will slide into the shoes. Another example is our proprietary FloFoam in floats that adds a lot of comfort and cushioning.
Finally, keeping customer centricity in mind, we aim to give customers a fantastic experience. If you’d visited any of the Bata stores five years ago, versus today, you would see a marked difference in our store experience.
How has the store experience changed? Could you give us examples?
We find that a lot of retailers in India tend to put everything that they have in the showroom and let customers decide what they want. But the science of retailing does not work in that manner. People get confused with too much variety. So while you have to provide variety, it should be curated so that each offering is distinct from the other.
We believe that when you walk into our store, we should be able to tell you stories from our collections. One critical step in that is to declutter the store and make sure that the micro stories reach the customer.
Across our store network, we are working on creating the right ambience with lights and music. We want to ensure that our customers feel relaxed and spend more time at the store.
We also do high performance merchandising where each store is customised through AI/ML-based learning, which defines the right range for a shopping area.
What does the ratio of sales for e-com to retail look like, and tell us a little about the focus on retail expansion.
E-com is a significant portion—almost 10% of our business and continues to grow pretty aggressively. Omnichannel is also a decent contributor where customers go to our stores to try and buy products, and if a particular size is not available, we deliver it to their homes. That itself constitutes almost 4.5% of our sales.
We are also now partnering with hyperlocal retailers who drive instant deliveries within 10 and 15 minutes.
While e-commerce is important, we have noticed, especially in mature markets, that e-commerce plateaus at a certain stage. The fact is that for customers, retail is therapy. It's a pleasure for them to go out and have the experience of shopping.
It is also very essential that we drive our retail footprint, especially in tier-3 cities and beyond. Our massive network that we have gives us a huge competitive advantage in the footwear sector. We add almost 150 stores every year.
What are some growth categories in footwear?
Sneakerisation as a trend continues to grow in India, but we also believe that it will plateau at some stage.
The second category that continues to grow is open footwear that we play in with our brand Floatz. Floatz, though launched three years ago, is already a 150-crore brand. Customers today are willing to pay a little extra for comfortable footwear.
And the biggest trend we see is what we call hybrid sneakers or office sneakers. It is our range of footwear that gives you the comfort of a sneaker while looking like a formal shoe.
Lastly, what marketing methods and channels have proved most effective for the brand?
In the last few years, from being heavily TV-driven, we have completely flipped it to digital.
A year ago, 35% towards digital sounded like a good amount. Today, 60-70% of our spends are digital and the rest goes into out of home or proximity marketing at malls.
TV is now sparingly used unless we get a marquee property where we think that it is the right medium.
We are heavily focused on influencers. For example, when we launched our EasySlide collection, we collaborated with over 100 trainers on social media.
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