Indian online market place Flipkart, which earlier started co-creating products in partnership with domestic manufacturers, is planning for repositioning of its brand as the India’s largest online retailer looks to capture 100 million customers, a majority of which would come from tier-II and III towns. The new brand called ‘Naye India ke Saath’, will focus on rolling out several ‘progressive India’ initiatives to create a more ‘relatable Indian brand.

View of Shoumyan Biswas

“We will come up with several solutions in the next 6-18 months to address the new wave of 100 million customers,” said Shoumyan Biswas, Vice President of marketing at Flipkart.

“For example, only 35 million people have credit cards, so we want to create credit options for the remaining population that doesn’t have credit cards.”

 Trimming Marketing and Branding Expense

Earlier, Flipkart with its branding campaign had spent large amounts of marketing dollars to create brand awareness. Since then, the company has focused on trimming marketing and branding expenses to maintain a lean profit and loss statement, and have claim spending of one third of Amazon’s marketing costs.

Flipkart’s advertising strategies have also evolved since then. “Our advertising was majorly offline around 2014-15, but now it is more targeted with a combination of offline, digital marketing, Flipkart touch points and the ecosystem.” Said Biswas.