Shalimar Paints
Solution Requirement
Shalimar Paints started a journey of strategic transformation to become one of the top players in the decorative paints segment. It carried out a strong brand repositioning exercise to become more consumer-centric in its approach. A strong consumer centric approach requires creating a mindshare among the end-users and creating a pull situation, as in case of any strong consumer brand. For a product such as paints, there is a community of ‘influencers’ who play a crucial role in shaping mind share and generating demand. These are typically the painters, contractors, and the architects or consultants.
The Influencer Management System sought to target three types of influencers, painters, contractors, and the consultants or architects. Each of the three is at a different level of tech eruditeness and access to tech.
One big challenge was to get the painters community. They are not too tech savvy and many of them did not have access to smart phones. Getting them on board was a challenge.
Solution Deployment
IT worked together with Marketing to create a process and corresponding system provision whereby the Shalimar Paints employees would go to them and feed their data into the system. Once their mobile number and all other relevant information was accessible, then the communication could occur over SMS and over voice call.
The base system is built by the Shalimar Paints IT team using .NET and other Microsoft technologies. The database is SQL.
The mobility system is built using Android Development Kit and the database is SQLite.
The company is building all newer modules using this system as the core using the same Microsoft technologies.
Solution Benefits
The business objective behind the whole exercise was to improve the secondary sales of the company.
While the impact on sales can be measured on a slightly longer term, the impact one operational measure explicitly targeted has been impressive.
Earlier, it was very difficult to track and monitor the regular meetings and activities—whether the meetings happen regularly or not. The system has made it possible to track that very easily.