Mumbai: The end is near! Or it could be said that it is time to aspire to a new beginning. Yes, that seems more appropriate. It is time to look back on what transpired this year and what to look forward to in the coming year. The theme for the coming years will be all about enhancing the customer experience. Optimising the customer journey is key to ensuring better prospects for every brand across platforms. So, let’s move on and get into what the new year holds for e-commerce businesses.
Across the e-commerce ecosystem, the start of a new year does not just change in a calendar year but is a massive opportunity to clear out stocks for the previous year and build buzz for massive new year offers and product launches. But for chocolate and gifting brands, it’s their peak sale season, which starts with an enormous Diwali sale in India and peaks globally around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year.
Let’s have a look at the sweet gifts that melt the hearts of loved ones. ‘Chocolates’ are the treat that caters to the gifting needs of a wide range of demographics with mid and premium-range chocolates being the most popular gifting option across brands.
Top chocolate brand’s product portfolio across major e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart shed light on how the upcoming season will turn out to be based on Diwali Sales insights
The holiday season scenario
Stock it up!
In terms of brands and product availability ahead of holidays or festive seasons like Diwali, Christmas, or the New Year, popular brands ensure high availability to meet the demand for their products. Popular brands like Snickers, Sapphire, Cadbury’s, and Hershey’s step up their game during this time and make sure they maintain high availability during the pre-season build-up and peak during the festive gift-shopping extravaganza.
A pocket-friendly local brand that specialises in festive gift packages increases its stock availability during the holiday season, indicating shoppers’ inclination towards pocket-friendly gifting options.
Discount offers of up to 49 per cent attract customers. The challenge is ensuring that high demand adequately meets the supply on hand.
A similar trend is followed up with the Christmas and New Year special deals across the product range and gift combos to back higher demand.
Tracking and monitoring brand stock availability across platforms play a major role in keeping up with the rise in demand during the festive season.
For example, A global chocolate brand witnessed high pre-festive sales in 2022 due to their lucrative offers but faced a sudden availability slump during the festive time, the similar trend continued post-festive season. The higher discount of around 32 per cent and reduced average selling price of Rs 466 on gift variants helped consumers pounce on them well in advance.
This suggests that chocolate brands and gifting products remain in high demand across occasions and festival periods, ensuring high discounts and a lower ASP that benefit the pre-season sale.
Set the right discount to stay ahead in the pricing war!
Most brands focus on high sales in pre-festival time by giving large discounts. These offers become milder toward the festival period, and prices rise immediately post-festival season. The cutthroat competition among brands across product categories, sub-categories, and variants is something brands should be wary of.
Setting the right price for the moment is crucial to attracting customers with the right price segment and variant.
Most successful brands like Snickers, Hershey’s, Ferrero Rocher, and Cadbury offered lower prices and greater discount offers during the pre-festive period. As the season dips, prices rise and discount offers drop across platforms. The brands then encash high demand through measured increases in ASP. Being aware of our own brand vis-à-vis the competition's average ASP and discount offers during that period proved to be the guiding light during the pre-festive season build-up.
Even in the premium segment, during the festive season, brands like Open Secret and Ferro Rocher offer heavy discounts. After the festive season, the rise in prices across all brands becomes evident, indicating that all brands returned to their usual price pattern after the festival season. Post-festive season, all brands normalised the average discount at 10 per cent.
Stay in tune with customer sentiments!
Tap into customer sentiment; knowing what they want before they want it is key to the future. Predicting consumer behaviour across platforms helps prepare product packages that ensure a seamless customer experience. The feedback measurement is what it takes to raise product performance.
For example, Cadbury’s enjoys high popularity in the Indian market, with strong positive customer opinions of around 58 per cent across platforms, suggesting the brand's high popularity in the Indian market. The brand also offers the widest range of chocolates, catering to all price segments. Consumers like the overall quality, flavour, and packaging of the chocolates.
Global brands had high acceptance; brands such as Cadbury and Ferrero Rocher enjoyed good customer reviews during the festival period and hence remained in high demand across platforms.
Indian consumers are not attracted to premium chocolates. Brands require a more streamlined approach to enhance their popularity in the Indian market and understand the demands of the consumers because poor packaging, bad delivery, and low taste increase the chances of hampering brand sales and the image of the company.
Make sure you are there!
Brand visibility across platforms remains a critical factor during the pre-festive sale. Brands need to analyse various aspects that can enhance their banner placements. Chocolate Brands focuses on its own brand value to generate traction in online searches. A very low level of banner ad visibility and generic keyword usage across platforms during the festive season is quite a challenge for major chocolate brands.
High own-brand keyword usage for visibility in the online market has been another concern. As most of these brands spend heavily on media and print advertising during the festival period, spending on digital advertising remains a low-focus area for the brands. Cadbury was the only brand running banner ads on Amazon’s homepage during the pre-festival, which turned negligible after that.
As a smart strategy, it is always better to recognise the top brands visible in the product category, sub-category, variant, etc. and act upon the insight. Also, monitoring the share of visibility on multiple eCommerce platforms vis-à-vis competition helps optimise the brand’s visibility.
Gear up with the right tools for the right job!
‘’Life is like a box of chocolate you never know what you’re gonna get’’. So true when it comes to life, but not so when you are selling chocolate gift packs for festive occasions—understanding customer needs and what they expect from the product is crucial. The mantra for encashing festive season sales is to optimise the customer journey from the moment shoppers set their eyes on the product.
Attractive images, catch-yet SEO keywords, optimised title description, enhanced banner visibility, right pricing & discount at right time are a few factors that could boost conversation rates and help acquire new customers this festive season.
The author of this article is mFilterIt founder and CEO Amit Relan.
