Jabong crunches the numbers on fashion
Customer insight drives the online fashion retailer to launch ‘mood’ stores, rethink the way it sells its wares
users and has planned for the TVC to air only on HD feeds of the IPL. The hoardings will be placed only in large metros. Jabong believes that people consider it to be a premium purchase destination.
The average customer spend on the channel is about ~2,400 and hence the need for a calibrated advertising strategy to ensure that the brand’s character is not diluted. At the same time it does not want to go down the celebrity route. “We’ve not got any celebrities (for the campaign) because Jabong is about ‘Be you’. It’s about an individual’s spirit and capturing the various moods. So you’ll see the same individual in three different avatars.The same you, many moods,” added Soni, who is also chief marketing officer at Myntra. In this way it also hopes to distinguish itself from parent Myntra, which has signed up stars such as Abhay Deol in the past.
The data show that the Jabong buyer is very different from the Myntra buyer and the brands are keen to keep their identities apart. For one, women make up the majority of Jabong’s buyers while Myntra’s is about 40 per cent. When Myntra acquired the ailing Jabong, CEO Ananth Narayanan was in for a surprise, customer overlap between the two platforms was just 30 per cent. That is now down to 27 per cent, bettering the case for Myntra and Jabong to run independently, Soni explains. “One of the things we realised is that Jabong’s core strength is the loyal consumer base and that’s why we decided that the two brands will continue to have their own identity,” said Soni.
The mood store is just the first of many innovations to come, tailored to suit its customer base. One of the things Myntra did on purpose was to not merge the sourcing teams, to ensure that each had different collections despite selling apparel from the same brands.
In the current quarter, Jabong hopes to post its first year-on-year quarterly growth in sales, signifying a comeback after Rocket Internet got rid of the failing company for $70 million. And hereon, it hopes, its fashion sense will help propel the brand forward.