Retail and FMCG industry eyes eCommerce segment in a big way

Addressing the recently held conference called ‘Massmerize 2013’, organised by FICCI with the support of Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Government of India, K V Thomas, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, u

Massmerize 2013 brought together the leading players from the retail and FMCG industry and the government. The conference discussed emerging trends and business imperatives. The theme of the conference this year was ‘Consumerism in digital era’, which highlighted the transitions observed in the industry with advent of technology and new innovations.

“I would expect Indian industry to live up to the expectations of the people who look up to them for goods and services at a price that they can afford. The consumer behavior is experiencing consumer technologies,” Thomas maintained.

Earlier, Naina Lal Kidwai, President of FICCI, said, “Increasing incomes, growing urbanisation, digitalisation and exposure to global trends are giving rise to an evolved consumer base and meeting consumer aspirations is now the key focus of the Industry. India is slowly picking up in the trend of becoming digitally active in the ways of communications to consumers, on account of increasingly growing internet penetration in both urban and rural areas.”

According to Kidwai, digitally active consumers have embraced the Internet, telecom, media, and social space, changing the way they communicate, transact, and make purchase decisions, thus giving rise to digital consumerism. Retail & FMCG companies are capitalising on these changing trends. “Across the world, the retail industry is at the center of a major shift in the way consumers shop and interact with their retailers. Against the traditional way of customers ‘going to the store’, the store is now coming to the customer. Embedded systems are changing every point in a retailer’s business, from sourcing of goods to distribution to display,” she added.

“Indian market is enormous and to cater to different consumers it needs a variety of retail models. With the opening up of retail market both in single brand and multi brand, greater interests has been generated among international players to enter the Indian retail market,” added Bijou Kurien, Chairman, FICCI Retail Committee. Sundeep Malhotra, Co-Chair, FICCI Retail Committee & Founder & CEO, HomeShop18 and Dr. Arbind Prasad, Director General, FICCI, also addressed the session.

FIccI-tcs paper on Multichannel retailing

At this conference FICCI in association with TCS released a white paper on ‘Adapting to the Multichannel Customer - A Roadmap for Integrated Multichannel Retailing’.

The FICCI-TCS paper outlined the roadmap for IMCR, it covered the current state of multi-channel retail - globally as well as in India. Global consumer indicators reveal that multi-channel consumers (consumers who shop across multiple channels, including web, mobile, offline store), spend more on brands than single channel shoppers.

Evaluating a leading retailer’s online and store initiatives in India (representing the APAC region), the research indicated that number of visitors to their online channel had grown 1.57 times, whereas there was only a 9 per cent increase in store footfalls.

The paper estimates that by 2018, the number of visitors to the retail brands’ online channel will far exceed the number of its store visitors. It is therefore important that retailers focus on becoming a truly integrated multi-channel retail entity.