Titan Company, the largest seller of branded watch, is facing challenge from the rise of e-commerce firms. The company is putting in place a digital strategy, including creation of a digital horizontal, that will identify and build common capability across all the divisions and focus on increasing online influence helping fuel retail sales. It has also appointed a new chief digital officer to devise a new online strategy. S Ravi Kant, chief executive officer, Watches & Accessories Division, Titan Company, tells Mahesh Kulkarni the steps taken to exploit new opportunities emerging in e-commerce space.
Excerpts:
How do you see the competition from e-commerce companies affecting your watch sales?
We do not see e-commerce as our competitor. It is a question of working together with them. In fact, we are available on four sites including our own website. It is all about how we can leverage both the channels and the consumer will benefit finally. People are able to order something on e-commerce and pick up products somewhere else because we have a large network of our stores.
How are you addressing the new challenges emerging from e-commerce sites?
We have aggressive plans in place to develop our own website for all our brands and products, and not just watches. It is a question of working together and not seeing e-commerce as a competition. We are available on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. That is where the consumers are. We have our online channel. But people are not aware of it. We are working on a whole programme of making people aware of it and see how both brick and mortar and online space work together.
How do you plan to make it known to the customer?
We are not going to work like e-commerce sites, putting front page or full page ads on newspapers. We have various ways of reaching out to consumers. We have a fairly advanced integrated loyalty programme that itself has a large base of 8-9 million consumers, who have now shifted to our unified loyalty programme. We are constantly in touch with our consumers.
Are you looking at driving traffic to your own online sales channel or rely on other e-commerce players?
All. When our website becomes more active, we will not pull out of other sites. They will continue to be there in addition to our own website.
What is the strategy for online sales?
The brick-and-mortar space will have a larger share going forward. These are initial years of e-commerce in India. Both will co-exist. Consumers are getting exposed to online channels. It will grow up for a while and after that both will have space for each other. I don’t know where will it settle down. We look at overall numbers. It is for consumer to decide where does he want to purchase from.
What is your plans to expand the retail network?
As of now, we have 430 exclusive World of Titan stores, 150 Fastrack stores. Our Sonata brand is available in over 11,000 outlets across the country. This year, we are looking at opening 70 stores between Fastrack and World of Titan outlets. We will also open 5-6 stores of Helios, where we sell multiple brands. We are in the process of identifying cities, where we will have new Helios stores.