Here On, All Of Flipkart’s Marketing Communication Will Be Themed On ‘Wishes’

Flipkart has been in the news recently after it unveiled a new logo. The company said that the new logo reflects its aggressive focus on its mobile app. While, some loved the change, some were critical about it. And some even went to the extent of foreseeing a probable pivot in Flipkart's business model. We got in touch with Shoumyan Biswas, Senior Director, Marketing, Flipkart to know what would change at Flipkart after rebranding and with the new logo. Excerpts:

Q. Walk us through the story of what prompted Flipkart to adopt a rebranding exercise?

About a year back, we realized that we have grown Flipkart as a brand that leads the eCommerce category in India. We sat back then to brainstorm how to take our brand story forward. As a part of this exercise, we reflected back to analyze what made Flipkart a brand of reckoning today. We realized that the Flipkart brand was built on superior service to the consumers and many of our consumers also told us that Flipkart is a brand, with which, many of them started their eCommerce journey with and are still stuck to the platform. Now, for a service brand, this is a great foundation, and hence, we decided that based on these fundamentals we will grow the brand further. And thus, the rebranding exercise.

Q. With the recent branding, it appears that Flipkart has adopted 'Wishes' as its central brand theme. Why?

In the course of researching about our rebranding message, we spoke to our consumers, consumers from competitions, future consumers, industry experts, sellers, brands, internal employees and many others. We found out that most of these people had one factor in common - and that was to make a 'wish'. The Indian society is changing and so are our consumers. Today, everyone dreams big, and there is a sense of optimism in every Indian, irrespective of their age, geography, sex, occupation etc. Boundaries have broken down and people are making wishes and fulfilling them.

So, we decided to dig deep and find out what fuels this optimism. We saw that the Internet has actually democratized and liberated a lot of lives, and for the youth, the mobile phone was their entire world. And ours, being the frontrunners of electronic commerce in India, was the best possible platform available for one to make and fulfill a wish.

We wanted to democratize 'commerce' in India and make everyone owning a smartphone and a pin code, shop on Flipkart. Similarly, we also wanted every seller to find a potential buyer on our platform. What that meant that our brand proposition should be able to attract both buyers and sellers on the platform and we felt that our 'wishes' theme suited the call best.

Besides, with the kind of categories we have on Flipkart, we really wanted to make sure that our new brand theme should not become a mismatch with any of them. Keeping all these things in mind, we thought that 'Ab Har Wish Hogi Poori' was our best shot as our new brand theme.

Q. Do you think you are a couple of years late to adopt a central brand theme?

I don't think so. The growth of a brand is a continuous journey and to be honest, we were not satisfied with what we had achieved so far. We wanted to take Flipkart to the next level and hence we launched this rebranding now. So, I am sure that we are not late on this, especially when we see that seller ecosystem is maturing now and we have a decent mobile user base as well.

Q. Recently, there was news about Flipkart adopting the app-only business structure. So, is the new logo a step towards that, since it is done keeping the mobile screen in mind?

Not really. We leave it on our consumers to decide which platform they want to interact with us and hence we have to be present across all platforms. Our new logo is a reflection of our new brand theme which revolves around wishes. The only thing our new logo reflects about mobile is that we wanted the icon to stand out as a mobile app and hence the color scheme has been selected so that the Flipkart app stands out in the consumer's app interface. But it is no way an indication of Flipkart becoming an app-only platform.

Q. All this while, most of Flipkart's advertising has been about 'Call-To-Action' ads. Now, since you have adopted a central brand theme, will we see more ads around the 'Wishes' theme?

I agree that we didn't have one single theme that connected all our campaigns, and therefore, since the beginning of this year, we have started to focus on the 'Wishes' theme in all our ads, irrespective of the medium they are on. For example, in the beginning of the year, we had a campaign titled 'Iss App Mein Hai Kisi Ki Khushi', which revolved around the theme of wishes. And even our last campaign 'Every Wish Fulfilled' aims to showcase how Flipkart provides the convenience of shopping from the confines of home and ensures that consumer needs are fulfilled. From now onwards, every piece of brand communication from Flipkart will be centered on the theme of 'Wishes'.

Q. The volume of ads from Flipkart has always been huge. One look at your YouTube channel suggests that Flipkart releases at least one ad each fortnight. How does this strategy help?

We have multiple business briefs and this is whythe advertising that you see from us are based on those multiple business objectives, and hence the huge volume. Most of our digital campaigns in the last one year have been anchored around our business goal of having the consumer base talk more about us, and therefore, we had to create links of engagement for the consumers, and that is why we see the number of ads growing.

Besides, we do advertising around events like the 'App Shopping Day', 'Big Billion Day' etc., end of season sale, launch of a new category and so forth. Communications of that kind drive awareness and established well the business brief that we have in mind. We live in a world of different kinds of objectives and hence we need to find content that can serve the objective and appeal to the consumers as well.

Q. Flipkart has recently signed Webchutney as its digital agency, and you already have Lowe Lintas and Happy Creative in your agency rooster. How is it working with three different agencies when the business objective might be the same?

We are doing many activities and we like to do more, because we recognize that different consumers have different aspirations and they need to be triggered with different kinds of campaigns. Besides, we also believe that all our chosen partners come with certain set of expertise who can provide the much required edge to our different business briefs.