increase in ad recall
increase in purchase intent
increase in brand consideration
increase in brand awareness
Challenge
Last year, if you’d asked most Indian consumers about Flipkart, they’d likely have told you about its broad array of consumer electronics at competitive prices. Behind the scenes, however, fashion was actually one of Flipkart’s best-performing categories. In 2018, the brand set its sights on matching up reality with perception by aligning Flipkart Fashion as India’s online fashion capital. This was no easy task given the highly competitive market, but the brand recognized an opportunity ripe for the taking.
How ripe? By 2020, online sales for products including apparel and accessories in India is estimated to reach $40-45 billion. Improved infrastructure across India’s non-metro cities has opened Flipkart’s doors to a wider audience of online shoppers. But the brand was still challenged by a fundamental shopping behavior: frequent shoppers typically buy from their favorite retailers. To establish its identity as “India Ka Fashion Capital,” Flipkart knew it needed to grab the attention of new fashion shoppers before their go-to stores were set in stone.
Approach
GOALS: AWARENESS, CONSIDERATION
Flipkart is known to take experimental approaches to its campaigns, and this time was no different. Rather than steadily building up its reach over time, the brand quickly cast a wide net online from day one of the campaign, focusing on Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities where consumer growth was strong and steady. Along with immediately boosting awareness, this strategy gave Flipkart early insights from digital that helped personalize its approach in the following weeks. With Flipkart Fashion fresh on consumers’ minds, the rest of the campaign eventually drove impressive lifts in consideration and interest.
Flipkart kicked off its “India Ka Fashion Capital” campaign with a bang: the brand complemented its TV spot with a variety of YouTube ads to maximize its reach while running search and dynamic display ads in support. This ensured that Flipkart Fashion would be visible to consumers across multiple touchpoints, and using audience insights garnered in the first two weeks helped the brand hone its messaging to be more relevant at each stage of the journey.
Flipkart’s video creative played off its previous “kidults” (kids as adults) campaign with a twist: the first ads teased the addition of two leading Bollywood celebrities, Shraddha Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor. On YouTube, Flipkart was able to use affinity audiences to reach shoppers interested in fashion apparel and then follow up with bumper ads (featuring both Shraddha and Ranbir) on fashion-related content. After the 10-day blast period, the brand tailored its search and dynamic display ads throughout the rest of the campaign to reconnect with consumers who showed interest in Flipkart Fashion.
“When we experiment and break barriers with our marketing, we’ve always seen great results. This year’s Flipkart Fashion campaign was no different. Frontloading our digital spend and using our audience signals to optimize over time turned out to be more effective than we could’ve ever imagined.”
Kunal Dubey, Flipkart’s director of marketing
