When N Chandrasekaran took the reins at the Tata Group, the bet on Tata Digital was meant to be his defining stroke — a single digital umbrella drawing together groceries, electronics, healthcare and financial services under one roof, one app, one flywheel. It was the kind of wager that looked obvious on a strategy slide: Tata’s brand equity, deployed at internet scale.
It has not quite worked out that way.
Tata Digital has become one of the group’s most closely watched — and most quietly debated — experiments. The gap between the scale of capital committed and the pace of returns has drawn the attention of the Tata Sons board, which reviewed the business late last month amid concerns over loss-making and capital-intensive ventures.
On paper, the assets are formidable. Tata Digital controls BigBasket, Tata 1mg, Croma and Tata Cliq — a roster that would be the envy of most digital ventures. The challenge has been something harder to buy: turning the ownership of those businesses into a cohesive digital ecosystem that consumers actually return to, week after week, as a matter of habit.
Platform Fallacy
That is a distinction that experts say the group may have underestimated. Rajendra Kumar Srivastava, Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy, ISB, says, “A portfolio is a collection of businesses; a platform requires one dominant use case that drives repeat engagement and network effects.”
Conglomerates, Srivastava argues, often approach digital businesses the way they approach physical ones — as collections of assets to be assembled and managed. Building a platform demands something different: a single high-frequency behaviour around which everything else is built.
Tata’s method was to go wide first. It assembled a broad consumer portfolio and sought to knit them together through Tata Neu. The integration, however logical in conception, did not automatically translate into the kind of habitual behaviour that makes platforms valuable.
“Tata pursued breadth before depth,” Srivastava said. “By contrast, successful peers often built a strong anchor first — payments, telecom, or mobility — and then expanded adjacently.” The playbook he is describing is well-established: Alipay grew out of payments, Grab from ride-hailing, and Jio from a cheap data network. Each had a single daily reason to open the app before it became a commerce and services platform.
Both Tata Digital and BigBasket did not respond to queries sent by FE.
There is an uncomfortable irony at the heart of Tata Digital’s challenge. The group’s greatest asset in the offline world — its brand — may be part of what makes the digital aggregation story harder to tell.
Pareekh Jain, founder and CEO, EIIRTrend, says, “Many of Tata’s consumer businesses already enjoy strong standalone identities, making it difficult for an umbrella platform to become the primary point of engagement.”
A consumer who trusts Titan buys a watch from Titan. One who wants a laptop goes to Croma. The standalone brands are already doing their job well — which means there is little friction to resolve, and therefore little reason to route those transactions through a single platform layer.
Retention, as digital businesses have learned at considerable expense, is ultimately not about brand trust. It is about convenience, speed, user experience and — most crucially — habit. Strong offline brands do not automatically beget strong digital ecosystems.
Under CEO Sajith Sivanandan, Tata Neu is undergoing a significant strategic repositioning. The original vision of a broad commerce aggregator is giving way to something narrower but potentially more defensible: a loyalty-led platform centred on payments, financial services and customer engagement.
Rather than funnelling consumers through a single digital gateway, the revised strategy focuses on shared loyalty, payments and data infrastructure to connect Tata businesses — less super-app, more connective tissue across the group’s consumer ecosystem.
It is, in its own way, an acknowledgement of the lessons of the past few years. The value Tata Digital can credibly create may lie not in becoming India’s answer to WeChat but in becoming the infrastructure layer that links the group’s vast consumer touch points.
If Tata Neu represents the platform-level challenge, BigBasket illustrates what execution difficulty looks like within the portfolio. The company entered the quick-commerce era with advantages that rivals could only dream of: an established customer base, logistics infrastructure, brand recognition and deep supply-chain relationships built over years.
Those strengths, it turned out, were also liabilities.
Incumbent Inertia
Pranav Jindal, associate professor of marketing, ISB, says “incumbents already have a working model, and a new operating model could result in a loss relative to the current model. New entrants have no such exposure — they’re only focused on the potential upside.”
While Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart were racing to reshape consumer expectations around 10-minute deliveries, BigBasket remained associated with scheduled deliveries for longer than the market was willing to wait. The delay handed rivals the time they needed to embed a new convenience standard before BigBasket had made its move.
Jain points to a related structural factor: operating within a large, well-governed conglomerate may have reduced the kind of speed and founder-led urgency that characterised BigBasket’s fast-moving competitors. Slower pivots, delayed product assortment expansion and governance processes designed for stability rather than disruption all left their mark.
None of this is to say that Tata Digital is without strategic relevance. The group still controls some of India’s most valuable consumer brands and digital assets. The question now before Tata Sons is a sharper one: whether those assets can be converted into sustained consumer engagement and returns that justify the capital committed.
After years of investment, experimentation and strategic iteration, the challenge is no longer building the ecosystem. The infrastructure exists. The brands are real. The question is whether the ecosystem can be made to work — at scale, at speed, and in a market that has not waited for anyone.