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

Need More Facebook ‘Likes’ on your Facebook Business Page? Facebook and Business Page - Tips to Invite your email Contacts to Facebook Business Page and Increase Sales and Conversion

Facebook Business Page brings more visitors to your visit if you take right steps to create, fine tune and maintain your Business Page.  Facebook is a powerful platform as good as word-of-mouth marketing.

You can use your contact lists to increase or your business and convert them into customers using right tools and methodologies.  You need to build your page, connect with them to engage them further.  Per Facebook there are over 900 million people on their site.  Here, we discuss about the method to invite your email contacts to Facebook Business Page.

The first step is to Login to your Facebook Page and then visit Home Page.  A sample Business Page looks as follows

Now, click on Build Audience and invite all your email contacts.

Now, choose any one of Email Services provider by which you want to import your contacts.  Now, the screen looks as follows;

Now, import all your contacts and screen looks like as follows;

After importing all contacts save all contacts in .csv file and upload this file in given place by selecting the browse option

Thereafter, select all contacts or to whom you want to send invitation, and click on Preview Invitation.  The screenshot as follows now;

A new window will be opened, and click on Terms and Condition for you to agree and thereafter click on the button ‘Send’.  It will be viewed as follows;

Now, the selected email addresses will get invitation to ‘Like’ the Facebook Business Page.  Now, you will find that many of your friends and contacts have come to know about your Business Page in Facebook.  They start give valuable suggestions, and may share the page with their contacts further.  This will result in more activities for your Facebook page.  Ultimately, you find that you are generating more business using your contact emails without requesting them to bring more business for you.

This article is prepared by Amit Giri, Social media Consultant with DART.  He can be reached at amit@dartconsulting.co.in

Why Use Social Media for Business Promotion? Potential of Social Media to Build Brands and Promote Products and Services.

Are you just starting out with a new venture and want to promote your venture? 

In past years the answer to this was the traditional newspaper and television channels with a considerable amount spent on advertisement. But in recent years, the traditional media has taken a back seat. The reason being social media which has fragmented the market.

The effect of social media is so vibrant that having a presence on a social network is a great way to establish new business relationships. For instance, a reporter that followed me on Twitter contacted me for a quote in a story they were writing. Even though we have never met face-to-face, our online relationship is incredibly valuable. Without a strong social media presence, that reporter would have never heard of me

Social Media has shown strong presence alongside commercial internet. Social media is a means to engage with the respondent and have a conversation.

If you studied marketing in the colleges, you were taught the 4 P of marketing—Creation of a Product, Pricing of a product, Placement in the market, and Promoting it.

Product + Pricing+ Placement + Promotion

Today’s marketing approach in connivance with social media involves the 4 Cs of marketing- clean content with a context that entices  to make connections with people, products, and brands they can create a community with.

Content + Context + Connection + Community = Social Media Marketing

The ways to promote any product or venture is by posting presentations, photos, videos about your work on social networking sites with a strong content.

By posting a strong content, you will be able to create a strong base of followers. The advantages of having a strong follower base are that the customer will be able to voice his grievances thereby suggesting a right formula for the problem. This will also lead to conversing with the customers and the customers getting a quick response.

According to the study more than 90% of marketers use socialmedia and social networking in one form or the other to conduct their daily business and marketing activities. Among this high number of users, 93% of those questioned cited the “importance of social media to their business”.

Social media encompasses a lot of tools and the ones widely used are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Blogging websites

Facebook continues to enjoy the highest usage among marketers (2011 estimate). Twitter is the second most popular social media tool. The top 4 is rounded out by LinkedIn and Blogging. Video is now becoming a big part of many campaigns to promote their businesses.

The bottom line is that small brands and companies can achieve big success with the help of social media.

Posted by: Anup, Business Consultant, DART Consulting, anup@dartconsulting.co.in.

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:

How to Set Up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics? Conversion and Goal set up in Easy Steps Now.

Google Analytics has replaced the hit counter of 1990’s and made the process more professional.  Even though, still we can see hit counters which are developed by many novice web developing shops over the internet.

To collect better information, we need to customize and fine tune Google Analytics.   This includes setting up goals and funnels.From a business standpoint, we need to aim to get users to “convert” by suitable call in action.Even though we can  track phone calls down to the keyword level, we need to adopt better methods to those leads which turned out be a valuable customer.  A goal in Google Analytics is a good tool for this purpose.

First and foremost is to make sure that once a user fills out a lead form that they are taken to a unique “thank you” page.  Such page cannot be accessed anywhere else on the site. Once this specific page has been set up, move to the Analytics Settings page to start configuring goals.  For multiple profiles, choose the correct profile for this goal set and click “Edit” as shown below;