Snapdeal, India’s largest online marketplace, revealed interesting trends from its Unbox Diwali Sale, indicating a significant evolution in consumer behaviour this festive season.
The most surprising trend was the sharp increase in willingness of customers across India to pay at the time of making the purchase instead of opting for cash on delivery. This was in part driven by Snapdeal’s partnerships with eight leading banks this Diwali including with American Express, Axis Bank, Citi Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, State Bank of India and Yes Bank.
With the highest number of card partnerships, additional instant discounts ranging from 10-25% were available every day of the month, over and above the huge festive discounts already available on the marketplace. One of the biggest card-based discounts-maximum of Rs. 10,000 off on iPhone 7 turned out to be immensely popular among consumers. Data showed that customers who bought electronics and furniture were the most likely to go for prepaid options.
Among the cities, Trivandrum had the highest share of prepaid orders, constituting a whopping 85% of the total orders from the city. The preference for prepaid transactions was the strongest in South India, followed by North, West and East in that order.
Customers also showed a clear affinity for larger, premium appliances. 60% of all LED TVs sold on Snapdeal had more than 40 inches screen size. Among refrigerators, 70% of the models bought were of more than 300 litres capacity.
Another interesting trend observed was the increase in repeat usage. More than 6.25 lakhs users ordered more than 5 products and nearly 1.1 lakhs users ordered more than 10 products during the Unbox Diwali Sale. The highest number of products that a single customer ordered during the festive season was a whopping 84.
A little more than 60% orders came from Tier 2 cities and beyond. More than 82% of overall orders were placed through mobile platforms. Highest numbers of units ordered were for the fashion category, followed by home, electronics and mobiles in that order. In the fashion category, women’s ethnic wear was the most popular purchase.
To power faster deliveries, nearly 72% orders were shipped out of Snapdeal’s fulfilment centres (SD+). Nearly 32,000 staff was deployed every day of the month to deliver the packages across India.
On the seller side, out of the more than 300,000 sellers on the platform, more than 32,000 sellers saw sales grow 7x from last Diwali season. The cities where most of these sellers are based were-Delhi NCR, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Bengaluru, Jaipur & Surat.
About Snapdeal
Snapdeal’s vision is to create India’s most reliable and frictionless commerce ecosystem that creates life-changing experiences for buyers and sellers. In February 2010, Kunal Bahl along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal. Today Snapdeal is India’s largest online marketplace, with the widest assortment of 50 million plus products across 1000+ categories from over 125,000 regional, national, and international brands and retailers. For further information please visit visit Snapdeal
In India, startups have common challenges of addressing the non-tech skills such as branding, marketing, go-to-market, public relations, etc. Thus many startups end up being just a good idea or a concept or a product and they are not able to do a commercial launch or they are certainly not able to scale up. While Pune is replete with the Spirit of Entrepreneurship that have young minds-as young as 20 year olds-who are aspiring to become Unicorns, they still don’t know where to look when it comes to hand-holding, branding and its execution.
Individual constituents of a typical startup eco-system have tried dealing with the above challenge in silos. For instance, the investor community comprising Angels, Venture Capitalists and Private Equity players have been doing their bit to hand hold startups and help them succeed. Likewise, there are advisers and mentors who provide hand-holding to startups. And then there are advertising agencies that make creatives and advertisements on case-to-case basis. But there is no one in India who is willing to take ownership of creation of the eco-system under one roof.
Brand Launch Center (BLC) under the aegis of Seagull Advertising haveannounced the launch of first-of-its-kind Startup Launch Accelerator to help consumer focused startups to go-to-market like any MNC, through a well-structured process called Wings for Profit. BLC’s expertise is designed to mitigate the risks that are commonly faced by Startups at the launch stage. The launch Accelerator offers a high intensity, hands-on, six months program to reduce product risk, technology risk, market risk and financial risk.
Sameer Desai launching Brand Launch Centre
Speaking about the need to brand-building for start-ups, Sameer Desai, Marketing veteran and Chief Strategy Officer of Brand Launch Centre, said
While working extensively with early-stage companies in the past few years, we have realized that most start-ups fail despite innovative ideas and products. They fail not because of the product/service, but because of their inability to create a strong brand image among target consumers and the absence of go-to-market strategy and execution. Brand-building and go-to-market is a major challenge for the bootstrapped Startups, whose marketing budgets and knowledge of execution are often constrained. BLC provides a 360-degree strategy to start-ups to overcome their brand-building challenges, that too in 180 days.
BLC’s Launch Accelerator program is broadly classified into 3 key segments, namely-Brand Challenge, Brand Wings and Brand Flight Map.
The Startup Accelerator program that will provide solutions ranging from mentoring, branding, working capital, advertising, digital marketing, on-ground-activations, public relations and funding, sales, marketing automation, HR, corporate finance, legal and co-working. The Startup Acceleration program is aimed at consumer-focused Startups that believe in going for a commercial launch of their product or service and achieving greater sales and marketing muscle power in a specific time frame of 180 days.
Recently launched Tork, India’s first Electric Motorbike, has been one of the early Startups that came on board BLC.
BLC has well understood our requirements and has delivered us a fantastic brand positioning. Tork is high on technology and sports a TFT screen-a first for any Indian bike. It offers a number of innovative benefits such as low noise, zero pollution, exceptional acceleration and remote trouble shooting facility through a cloud based solution.
Green Salute is another Startup that leveraged BLC’s offerings. The idea of branding waterless car wash services as Green Salute and taking it to the customer was undertaken by BLC. Ninad Dhok & Akshay Dhok, CoFounders-Green Salute said
It’s absolutely fantastic the way that our brand has been presented. It cannot get better, and the market has received this extremely well.
BLC had a very clear vision for executing the branding plan. Their idea of sabse bada rupaiya was a great success. Today, even after a year people still talk about this great idea. Tokri.com is an e-commerce business in the hyper local grocery segment. The portal offers doorstep delivery of a wide variety of food items including the freshest flowers, fruits and vegetables.
In an extremely competitive market, it is not easy to survive for all Startups. While a few succeed, a number of young individuals fail to convert their great ideas into viable and sustainable businesses due to lack of one or several components of the Startup ecosystem. While identifying promising Startups for funding, among other things, we put a significant weight-age on their go-to-market strategy – whether it is realistic and achievable. We are happy that BLC’s services will be available to the entrepreneurs in the city of Pune and we are looking forward to the next Unicorn from Pune.
About Brand Launch Centre
Brand Launch Centre (BLC) is a start-up launch accelerator to help consumer focused start-ups to go-to-market like an MNC, through a well-structured process called Wings for Profit. Founded by Sameer Desai, BLC’s expertise is designed to mitigate the risks, commonly faced by start-ups at the launch stage. It offers a high intensity, hands-on, six month program, to reduce product risk, technology risk, market risk and financial risk. For more information, please visit Branch Launch Centre
Mobility and Digital Transformation are no longer just buzz-words and it is very difficult for individuals as well as organizations to ignore them! In fact, having a long-term as well as sound Digital Strategy has become one of the key agendas’ for any organization. Existence of technologies like hyper-connectivity, IoT, smart devices, drones, VR, AR, cloud computing, etc. are acting as the key pillars of connected growth. In such a connected world, organizations are having access to huge amount of data that can then be leveraged to transform them into tangible actions.
Some of the growing challenges of Digital Transformation are below:
1. Increasingly complex environments and the growing need for efficiency
2. New cyber-security threats everyday
3. Support both existing and new apps/services/frameworks
Keeping your website’s up-time optimum, keeping data at the back-end secure and ensuring that it functions smoothly is very important in this age where information spreads like fire and can adversely affect your business if these factors are not handled with care.
VMWare, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud and virtualization software and services made a plethora of exciting announcements at the recently concluded vForum 2016 that was held in Mumbai. It aims to revolutionize and optimize businesses via it’s products in areas of Private Cloud, IoT, Enterprise mobility management (Air Watch), Network virtualization (NSX), Software defined data centers, etc.
Some of the major highlights and announcements from vForum 2016 are below:
Adopting digital route using VMWare’s Cloud infrastructure
As per a study by IDC, only 20% of traditional businesses are leading in the digital transformation and Culture & Technology are the key factors that differentiate the leaders from the laggards. From a culture perspective, leaders rewrite the rules and from the technology perspective, they consider the mobile-cloud core to their business.
Using VMWare’s Cross-Cloud Architecture, customers can run, manage, connect and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment. VMWare’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) strategy ensures that all the elements of infrastructure namely network, storage, security, etc. are abstracted from the user and are delivered as a service [Source*].
John Gilmartin, VP & GM at VMWare stressed upon advantages of Public-Private Cloud, ease of setting up a private cloud in less than two hours, reduced over-head cost and power consumption, design of Virtual SAN w.r.t high performance & scalability.
Organizations, irrespective of their size can utilize VMWare’s secure cloud infrastructure to simplify their IT infrastructure and take the digital route.
vSphere 6.5 is considered as a turning point in VMWare infrastructure security. It is built on three basic principles:
Comprehensive built-in security –This is possible via Secure access (using Audit-Quality logging), Secure Infrastructure (Secure boot) and Secure data (using VM level encryption).
Superior performance and scale – As shown in the snapshot below, vSphere 6.5 is 6x times faster than it’s predecessors.
Universal App platform – Stressing on the need for Digital work-spaces, growing focus on mobility and meeting the demands on diverse set of customers; vSphere 6.5 has a universal app platform for running any application.
It also supports new REST APIs and provides a simple method to migrate from Windows to any Appliance model.
Since the average cost of data breach is around USD 4 million [Source], security is the central focus in vSphere 6.5 due to which there is micro-segmentation level security in NSX.
Partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Skype for Business
VMWare announced that it is collaborating with Microsoft for Skype for Business where VMWare would ensure that Skype is able to deliver the best user experience using it’s Horizon platform. VMWare also announced it’s strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. This new offering will allow customers to leverage their existing investments in VMware skillsets and seamlessly take advantage of the flexibility and economics of the AWS Cloud [More].
Tech talk on NSX, PowerCLI
VMWare NSX is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center(SDDC). In NSX, entire network stack is abstracted from the user and is moved to the software level and it’s goal is to reproduce all Network and Security services in the Logical Space. It is at the core of the SDDC approach.
Below components are all moved to the logical space:
1. Switching (DHCP Server or Relay, DNS)
2. Routing/NAT (Distributed or Centralized)
3. Firewall (Distributed or Centralized)
4. Load Balancing (InLine or OneArm)
5. L2 & L3 VPN (L2VPN, Site to Site, SSL VPN)
Since, all the changes are done in the logical space hence no modifications are required in the VMs. More information about VMWare NSX can be found here
VMWare vSphere PowerCLI provides an easy to use Windows PowerShell interface for command-line access for creating executable scripts or for administration tasks. It follows the Noun-Verb structure where the Verb represents the action and Noun represents the object on which to operate. All command categories take parameters and arguments. More information about vSphere PowerCLI can be found here
More announcements
Within a span of 2+ years, VMWare Virtual SAN (Storage Area Network) is the widest deployed HCI Solution and has scaled to more than 5000+ enterprise customers!
The staggering figures of VMWare Private cloud are below
VMWare India has around 4,000 employees and has offices in six locations, with R&D centers in Bengaluru and Pune. VMWare registered revenue of USD 6.6 billion in 2015 and has over 50,000 customers and 75,000 partners worldwide [Source]
We started this article with Importance of Digital Transformation, hence if your organization aims to accelerate the Digital journey, consider using these technologies that are front-runners to drive that strategy!
Ather Energy, the smart electric two-wheeler start-up, announced a fresh round of funding of INR 180 crores from Hero MotoCorp for 26-30% stake. The funding marks the third round of investments in Ather Energy, which is building the S340-India’s first smart, electric scooter. Previous rounds of investments in the company were by Tiger Global and Sachin & Binny Bansal, promoters of Flipkart, in their personal capacity.
Speaking on the investment, Tarun Mehta, CEO and co-founder of Ather Energy said
The funding is a strong validation of our product roadmap and technology capability, endorsed by one of the biggest global automotive players. We believe smart connected electric vehicles are the future and India will be an important global player in it. Our vision is to fast forward to that future and this investment will help us leapfrog several years of automotive experience.
This new round of capital infusion will be used by Ather to sustain momentum in its journey
of building a future-ready product platform and to accelerate the infrastructure and ecosystem development around electric vehicles in the country.
The Board of Directors of Hero MotoCorp, in its meeting held on October 26, 2016, approved an investment of up to Rs. 205 crore, of which the immediate tranch is of Rs. 180 crore.
Commenting on this investment, Pawan Munjal, Chairman, Managing Director & Chief
Executive Officer, Hero MotoCorp said
As the market leader and a global automotive major, Hero takes the lead in many areas that benefit the environment, customer and industry. Adoption of environment-friendly fuel is a priority for Hero, as is propagating sustainable manufacturing through green facilities. One of our strategic priorities, therefore, is to engage with the external ecosystem, including start-ups in adjacent areas.
Hero MotoCorp intends to enhance its participation in the EV space by pursuing its internal EV program in addition to partnering with Ather. Ather is the best start-up in the two-wheeler EV space and we firmly believe that they are on the way to become one of the leaders in India, potentially even globally. They bring together a vision with high aspiration, ability to progress rapidly and the humility to learn and improve continually. We are excited to be a strategic investor and see this as an important step in building the necessary ecosystem needed to support commercialisation of EVs in the country.
About Ather Energy
Ather Energy Pvt. Ltd. is an automobile design and manufacturing company founded in the year 2013 by IIT Madras graduates – Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain. Ather is committed to building smart, connected, uncompromising vehicles and seeks to re-imagine urban commute with the help of technology. The team of about 150 employees is currently developing an electric two-wheeler, which will be completely designed and made In India. They are presently in their stage of product testing and vendor finalisation for their first product, the S340. For more information, please visit Ather Energy
As a popular file transfer and sharing application , XENDER has announced that it has reached 50% market share in India in the crowded file transfer market. XENDER has clocked in 170 million Indian users over the last three years alone with an annual growth rate of over 100%. XENDER has long maintained a leading position in mobile sharing tool market, well known for its fast transfer, convenient using and zero cost. New slogan, new concept,new logo,Let’s XENDER it!
XENDER also announced the launch of its new logo for Indian audience on the auspicious occasion of Diwali. The new logo captures the vibrant and dynamic spirit of XENDER and incorporates hues of orange; a color deeply entrenched in the Indian culture.
Commenting on the milestone, Peter Jiang, Founder of XENDER said
India is an extremely critical market for us with file transfer volume scaling 1.7 million. With maximum user base in in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata, XENDER is extremely popular in metro cities and northern India. With over 500 million cumulative global users, we target to attain 800 million global users over the next 3 years.
Unlike other apps like Flash Transfer that is not available on Play Store and needs side-loading; transfer of data over XENDER is fast & secure. XENDER recently announced a new version of its app with comprehensive functions and better user experience. It offers seamless transmission between Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Windows PC and Apple MAC system.
Download XENDER from Google Play. Let’s XENDER it!
About XENDER
Xender is a comprehensive app for all file sharing needs. It allows users to share any type of file, at any time, without using any mobile data. Xender supports Android, IOS, Windows, PC/ Mac cross-platform transferring with over 200 times Bluetooth transfer speed. Xender currently supports over 22 languages including English, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai and Bengali. For its Indian users, XENDER has added a choice of 12 kinds of India dialect. Let’s XENDER it!
With an aim to build for a largely sight and sound country that is India, Hike Messenger, India’s only home grown and second largest messaging platform, has launched video calling feature for its users.
Video calling, the beta of which was rolled out in September this year to a select set of less than a hundred thousand, will now begin to roll-out to the entire user-base starting with Android users this week.
Simple, Reliable and High Quality Video Calling Experience, Even In Challenging Network Conditions : Video calling on Hike is a simple and easy to use feature that works on a single tap that is integrated into chat threads with friends. The feature has been built for a reliable and high quality video experience that works even under challenging network conditions, including good quality 2G.
Live Caller Preview: Another interesting aspect of video calling on Hike is the ability for a user to see a live video preview of the caller before answering the call. It’s quite a neat feature and adds to the fun of video calling.
Available Immediately to All Android Users; iOS to Follow Soon: Hike video calling is available immediately on Android. If users updated their Hike Messenger in September this year, video calling would have automatically been enabled for them and will now be accessible!
The evolution of communication on Hike: Hike continues to be loved by its users for its chat experience with its 10,000+ hyper-localized stickers in 40+ languages. Hike also launched one-on-one and group (100 member) audio calls in September 2015. Introduction of video calls one year later, today, makes for an even better friction-free, sight and sound communication experience.
Commenting on the launch, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger said
This was an obvious one and we’re excited to bring it to the market so quickly. We’ve been in beta for a few months and the results have been really positive. We’re now excited to roll this out across our entire user-base. We see India as primarily a sight and sound market-and we believe video calling will have a large impact on how people communicate inside of Hike.
In January 2016, Hike had announced that it has over 100 million users. 95% of Hike users are based in India and 90% of them are young and below the age of 30. Hike users, on an average, exchange 40 billion messages per month and spend 120 minutes per user per week on the platform.
Hike has been built for these young consumers around 4 key pillars:
1. Data Constraints in India
2. Local Expressive Content
3. Deep Emphasis on Privacy
4. The Platform
To use video calling on Hike
1. Download Hike Messenger, if you don’s have it OR update Hike Messenger if you haven’t updated it since September.
2. Select the chat thread of a friend you want to connect with.
3. Just tap on the call button on the top right that prompts you to further select Voice or Video and start off your call.
Accenture, in partnership with Yahoo, announced the winners of the fifth season of #Innovation Jockeys, the hunt for India’S most ‘Innovative Minds’. This year’s Innovation Jockeys contest was focused on finding the most promising technology innovations in three categories – detecting fraud and preventing business malpractice, creating an inclusive digital India, and empowering women – which could help drive a positive change in society.
The contest was open to students pursuing undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate courses in India. The intense competition received 3,600 idea submissions from 800 campuses across India, of which the top 16 entries were evaluated in the Grand Finale round.
Accenture also conducted a fast-track selection process for eligible students at the Grand Finale round. Students selected from this process will shortly receive offers to join the Accenture workforce in India.
The Grand Prize was awarded to the team Devoted Dudes from students of BITS Pilani. The students developed an SMS-based mobile biometric authentication system to help people in rural areas securely authenticate the services offered to them by micro-finance institutions, addressing problems such as forgery and fraud, and overcoming barriers such as limited internet connectivity in rural India.
Grand Prize Winners of Accenture Innovations Jockeys Season 5, Team ‘Devoted Dudes’ from BITS Pilani felicitated by (L) Mohan Sekhar, Senior Managing Director, Technology — Delivery Centers for Technology in India, Accenture and (R) Raghavan Iyer, Managing Director, Technology Delivery and Innovation Council lead for Accenture in India. The team won the Grand Prize for their idea SMS-based Mobile Biometric Authentication System.
The award for the Innovation to detect fraud and prevent business malpractice category was given to the team IAFC from IIT Kharagpur, for their idea Crowdsourced Corruption Database with a layer of Artificial Intelligence. The idea aims to provide an open platform for sharing cases of corruptions through crowd-sourcing, and quickly predict, prevent and solve such cases through Artificial Intelligence. The idea takes crowd-sourced data as input, processes it and provides structured information as output to fight the reported case of fraud/corruption.
The award for the Innovation to create a digital India category, was given to the team AirPure from IIIT-Delhi. The team devised AirPure as a revolutionary surveillance system that monitors indoor and outdoor pollution levels. Their mobile application offers a personalized health risk assessment based on data around the user’s health, gender and age. AirPure will also provide valuable data for research to help the government form informed policies to reduce air pollution levels.
The award for the Innovation to empower women category, was given to ‘Wayne Enterprises’ from CUSAT, Kochi for their idea ‘NeuroBuds’. NeuroBuds is a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) device that acts as an interface between a user’s brain and a smartphone, and automatically detects panic in the user by analyzing brain wave data patterns and triggering an SOS call. It provides an automated and faster response time, replacing the need to manually trigger an SOS button.
The Jury’s Choice award was presented to the team Eyeluminati from students of Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad. The team’s idea ‘Griwaditi’ is an automated, non-invasive and easily accessible screening tool for Cervical Cancer. Griwaditi is a point-of-care portable imaging device which uses advanced optical techniques to produce high resolution magnified images of the cervix. It has a unique cervical cancer lesion detection algorithm to quickly screen cervical cancer. The remote diagnostic application allows images to be shared for consultation with experts around the world via a cloud-based tele-oncology platform.
The Employees’ Choice award was given to the team Warrior War, from Dronacharya College of Engineering, Delhi, for the idea Smart Farming System. This idea helps farmers who lack adequate knowledge in agriculture save water and increase crop-production by automating and digitizing farming techniques. It does this by using different sensors and techniques embedded in the application.
Members of the Grand Prize winning team each received an Apple MacBook Pro and an opportunity to visit either the Accenture Technology Labs (in Dublin or in Silicon Valley, California), or visit the Accenture Internet of Things (IoT) Center of Excellence in Singapore. Prizes for the category winners included Apple Watch, Bose SoundLink BT Speaker and Amazon e-vouchers. Participants in the Grand Finale round were assessed by a seven-member Jury panel
The entire awards ceremony was also live tweeted using #InnovationJockeys for all parents, college team mates and other contestants. For more information, please visit InnovationJockeys
Crompton has launched a new, revolutionary range of ‘Anti Dust’ ceiling fans – ‘Avancer Prime – Anti dust’ and ‘Aura Prime – Anti Dust’. Present at the announcement of the company‘s latest breakthrough innovation and technology were Shantanu Khosla, Managing Director; Mathew Job, Chief Executive Officer and Rangarajan Sriram, Vice President, Crompton Fans and Biswa Chakrabarti, Vice President, Brand and Channel.
Crompton’s latest offering, the Anti Dust ceiling fans range attracts 50% less dust compared to any regular fan. It includes the use of a nanotechnology based paint which has hydrophobic and oleophobic properties that reduces the incidence of dust and grime on the fan.
Mr. Shantanu Khosla, MD CGCEL (L) at the launch of Anti Dust Ceiling fans range
Consumers face a lot of inconvenience and discomfort in keeping their ceiling fans clean as they accumulate dirt over time and require frequent cleaning. There is also a constant fear of corrosion, wear and tear, bending and breakage of fan’s blades resulting from frequent cleaning. With Diwali just around the corner, this new range of fans provides the Indian consumers just what they have been looking for.
We laid down 5 key strategic choices for the company a year back at the time of foundation which are centered around Brand building, Innovation, Go-to-Market reach, Operational Excellence and Building organizational capabilities. On Innovation, consumer insights have been the core of our innovation engine. Moving on this we identified that, hassle of cleaning a ceiling fan has been a concern for the consumers and our new product launched today addresses this need.
We are delighted to introduce yet another breakthrough and first of its kind innovation and technology in the market. The Anti dust ceiling fans range attracts 50% less dust unlike any regular fan. Through the launch of this product range we intend to address the hassle and discomfort that consumers experience in keeping their ceiling fans clean.
‘Avancer Prime – Anti dust’ and ‘Aura Prime – Anti dust’ fans are now available in India at the price range of Rs. 2525 to Rs. 2975
About Crompton
Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals Ltd. is India’s market leader in fans, No. 1 player in residential pumps and has leading market positions in its other product categories. The business manufactures and markets a wide spectrum of consumer products, ranging from fans, lamps and luminaires to pumps and household appliances such as water heaters, Kitchen appliances etc. The consumer business has a strong dealer base across the country and a wide service network offering robust after sales service to its customers.
