Top 10 Retail Chains in India; Success Stories of Organized Retailing and Stories of Organised Retail Failure in India

The retail sector of Indian economy is categorized into two segments such as organized retail sector and unorganized retail sector.  The latter holds larger share of the retail market.

The key drives of the growth in retail consumption in India are basically

i)              Clothes, Textile & Fashion Accessories

ii)             Food, Grocery & General Merchandise

 The top 10 companies which have the most shares in organized retail market of India are

Name of holding company	Prime Banners
Pantaloon Retail	·          Pantaloons ·          Central ·          Brand Factory ·          Ezone ·          Hometown ·          Planet sports ·          Bigbazar ·          Foodbazar ·          KB’s Fair Price Shop
K Raheja Group	·          Shoppers stop ·          Crossword, ·          Inorbit ·          Hyper city
Tata Group	·          Croma   ·          Landmark  ·          Poltrona Frau Group Design Center     ·          Star Bazaar   ·          Tashi   ·          Westside
RPG Group	·          Spencer's ·          Books and Beyond ·          MusicWorld
Landmark Group	·          Centrepoint ·          Babyshop ·          Splash ·          Shoe Mart ·          Lifestyle ·          Beautybay ·          Iconic ·          Q Home Décor ·          Candelite ·          Max ·          Shoexpress ·          Emax ·          Lifestyle Department Stores ·          SPAR hypermarkets ·          Landmark International ·          Footwear Division
Parimal Group	·          Piramyd Megastore ·          Piramyd Supermarket ·          Jamin
Reliance	·          Reliance Fresh ·          Reliance Trends ·          Reliance FootPrint ·          Reliance Digital
AV Birla Group	·           More

 Organized retail that has arrived in different formats as follows;

·         Hyper markets 

·         Cash and Carry

·         Supermarkets

·         Discount Stores

·         Department Stores

·         Convenience Stores

·         Neighbourhood stores

·         MBO (Multi-Brand Outlets). 

 Organized retailing in India has been largely explored in urban or in metro cities.  It's largely successful in NCR and Mumbai Region and major parts of southern portion of India.  The entry of Malls, the largest form of organized retailing, which are located mainly in metro cities, in proximity to urban outskirts turned out to be a catalyst for organized retailing.

The following factors influenced the boom in the retail industry in urban areas.

1.    Substantial growth in purchasing power (income) of middle class people and subsequent look out for luxury items*

2.    Increase in customer aspiration 

3.  Favorable Demographics

 Favorable Demographics that stands in favor of people’s choice & their buying trends to prosper the organised retails are as follows:

1. Approximately 60 per cent of Indian population is below the age of 30.
2. Increasing instances of Double Incomes in most families coupled with the rise in spending power 3.Increasing use of plastic money for categories relating to Apparel, Consumer Durable Goods
4. Low share of organized retailing.  

It is a big paradigm that during the boom period many successful well established groups went out of business.  Subhiksha (Chennai) which was started in later 90s faced with unexpected extinct, Vishal group (Andhra Pradesh) decided to surrender, Trinethra (Hyderabad) merged with More, Fabcity opted for decent exit, and Varkeys group (Kerala) logged out unnaturally.

Further, Spencer had a closed a set of shops in Gujarat.  Food World changed ownership in between two times.

Any reasons for such failure?

Blog is written by Goutam Mukherjee, Market Research Analyst of DART Consulting

How to track Mobile Website Using Google Analytics? Mobile Website, Server Side Code Snippets, and Google Analytics

We can track mobile sites in the same way as other websites. Since we need to make changes to the tracking code in order for it to track mobile sites we need to use different tracking code. To make sure that Google Analytic Reports data from for mobile websites, paste the server-side code snippets on each page we need to track. This will result in Google Analytic creating a profile for the mobile website. Google Analytics will now report the same kind of information as in standard Analytics reports.  It includes visitor information and web site traffic sources and we can track users visiting mobile website from both smartphone (like i Phones and Android devices) and WAP devices separately.

It will work in the following server-side snippets environments:

• PHP 5
• JSP on Jetty 6
• Perl 5.10
• ASP.NET on IIS 6.0

Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics for True Webmasters. Quick glance of Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics

Google Analytic can be configured to determine the success or failure rate of visitor’s actions. To meet the objective, we need to create artificial goals and apply it to the web traffic.

Goals & Funnels

Goals are visitor tracking method which can be into different criteria on a website. We can set a goal to unlock after a visitor reaches the contact page, “/contact.html“.

If a visitor comes to a home page and leaving right away, it could be counted as a failed goal. Visitors who did happen to land onto contact page will be recorded as successfully completing the goal.  We can check the statistics through Web analytic tools, further such as total time spent on the page and total pages they visited.

Setting up Goals

If we have multiple accounts then we need to first click the parent name to start with.  In the right side of the column under “Actions” we will see links to edit and delete the profile. Click the “Edit” link to open profile settings and can see the column titled “Goals”.

 Exploring Goal Types

The user will be first prompted to enter a name and select if the goal is Active (On) or Inactive (Off).

Each goal type represents a different style of tracking completed goals.

 URL Destination

URIs type goals track when a user enters a specific page on your website.  Even though the Analytics menu uses URL it’s much easier tracking goals with only an URI component.

After selecting this type, another sub-class of the form opens up and need to choose a match type for the URI.  This determines a few different ways to match the pages requested as completed goals. There are three options here which define how Analytics will record a successful goal measurement.

Time on Site

There is an option to check their time limits.  This could also include visitors who are reading articles or blog posts or watching videos.

We can set a length of time in Hours/Minutes/Seconds and select a Condition: Greater than or Less than the time you put in.  We can check bounce rates also - how many visitors will stay for a couple of seconds before leaving.

Page/Visit

Each individual can be tracked for the amount of pages viewed per visit and will only complete the defined goal if the visitor browses above or below the number you set.

Event

With Event as goal types, there are 4 event conditions to set up the goals: Category (e.g. download), Action (e.g. icon pack, interface pack), Label (e.g. vector, non-vector) and value (e.g. 10, 20). You can configure one or more event conditions.

Besides, for Event goals you can either use the actual Event Value or a constant value which requires you to manually enter the value. 

Defining Custom Funnels

The purpose of defining a funnel system is to create a targeted map for the web site traffic to flow through. So in order for a goal to be completed (such as somebody visiting your contact page) originally the visitor would only need to land on the given URI. However with a funnel the visitor must enter your page as specified in the Goal Funnel section for the goal to be counted as complete. Funnels could include more than one page to follow through as well.

How to Set Up Goals and Funnels In Google Analytics to Track Conversions? Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to track each stage in the users visit. This tracking helps to identify bad designing and bring to the notice the area which needs improvements.

A very simple goal would just be to count every time someone filled in the inquiry form, or sent an e-mail or whatever your conversion target. This is an example of a Web Analytics Tool. However that doesn’t tell you anything about how users got to that part of your site, or tell you about the other hundred users who left before they converted (either because the site is badly designed, or your product is too expensive etc), which surly affects your Lead Generation.

Now, set the target is that a user to enter through a particular landing page such as your Business Web Page, and then click on details of a service of product, then fill out the booking form – and a goal will allow you to track each of those stages. Now click on edit next to the profile you want to add your goal to:

Did Kolaveri Satisfy all Viral Marketing Definitions?

Viral marketing is a marketing technique used by businesses of all sizes.  It includes word of mouth, but in the internet world it mainly refers to using social networking sites to increase brand awareness or increase sales in the internet world.  With growing number of Internet user every year across the world and its wide spread usage in almost all the fields including common people sharing message make internet and its usage as a medium to spread like viral fever.







In traditional marketing funnel a consumer recommends large number of products/service to limited or same group of peoples.  As a result the recommendation the network becomes limited to local group of people who are immediately reachable.  While in viral marketing, a consumer recommends the product to few groups and that few groups will recommend the same product next large group and this will keep multiplying at the every recommendation.  The pictorial representation of traditional marketing and viral marketing is as follows;





The awareness about the song Kolaveri moved from a mini group to large group with the help of social media

 Did Kolaveri exhibit the characteristics of Viral Marketing over Internet?

The basic premise of viral marketing is its ability to circulate freely on the Internet along with the author's URL.  The content must be of sufficient quality and the original author will forward/shares it to its recipients for free or as a pre-arranged joint venture payment.  The whole exercise should be cheaper and effective to generate greater sales for a period of time.

Kolaveri team used a simple video clip which broke the entire formal video album concept.  The video clip recorded in the studio actor Danush singing the song and has no film lights, professional camera.  It has the required quality and the sharing of the content was free of cost.  Overall the entire exercise was without any cost.

 Did Kolaveri follow the six Principles of Viral Marketing

• Gives away valuable products or services  - Kolaveri did give a valuable product
•  Effortless transfer to others  - It was an effortless transfer
• Easy scalability – It multiplied without killing the host
• Exploits common motivations and behaviors – Exploited human behavior and emotion
• Utilizes existing communication networks – Used the existing network and did not create even a new website/blog to promote it
• Takes advantage of others' resources – Definitely worked on other’s infrastructure like a parasite

The most important trick of the viral marketing is to create a very strong emotion.  The song used words that are used by young people everyday.  ‘Soupboys’(those who failed in love),‘bouw-u’(rejection) and ‘life rever segear’ were part of South Indians slangs. 

 Did Kolaveri Work in Three Phases?

 The three phases in Viral Marketing are Initial Phase (initial surge), Plateau (community conversation around a campaign) and Long tail Phase (huge amount of referrers created).  Kolaveri exhibited the initial surge in the first few days, followed by the wide discussion in the social networking groups and later it reached the Long tail. 

 The following data from the Google Insight Search reflects the fact that Kolaveri had undergone all the three phases.

 There was an initial surge in keyword interest index.  The first five days the index was hovering in the range of 1 – 5 which was the initial launch boost which had shown abnormal movement and reached 100 in the next ten days.  This truly revealed “community conversation” around a campaign, in blogs, community forums, social networks, etc.  As of now a search in Google exhibits more than 2,06,000 references in the internet with 191,000 documents with the title Kolaveri.

 Which Types of Viral Marketing was Kolaveri ?

There are different types of Viral Marketing adopted - Pass Along (Information is passed on from person to person in due course of conversation), Incentivized (reward as a motive), Undercover (buzz/stealth marketing), Edgy Gossip (create controversy by challenging the borders of taste or appropriateness) and User Managed Database (using own lists of contacts using a database)

Kolaveri has spread using the Pass along type of a viral marketing and it worked out very well.  Even before  it was launched officially but people found it very different from other traditional movie videos and started sharing the links to their known one and it passed on to many viewers with in short span of time.

 Dhanush known for his boy-next-door image sang the song as an innocent, heartbroken lover.  And it worked well.  As Dhanush said the song was meant for the common people and he was not intended for Pan India promotion.   According to him it was a mistake – something not intentional.  But it turned out to be a positive mistake and he realized later that nothing could stop the viral marketing once the product assumes all characteristics needed for viral marketing