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    Snapdeal undertakes major brand overhaul; unveils new logo

    Synopsis

    The rebranding will see Snapdeal unveil a new logo, along with a new tagline, “Unbox Zindagi,” with its long-standing colour palette of red and blue.

    ET Bureau
    NEW DELHI: Online marketplace Snapdeal has undertaken a massive brand identity overhaul, its biggest repositioning since pivoting from a deals site six years ago.

    The rebranding exercise comes at a crucial point for the Gurgaon-based company when it has slipped down the pecking order in the country’s booming, yet highly attritional, ecommerce sector, having been overtaken by Amazon India earlier this year, while its larger domestic rival, Flipkart, continues to occupy pole position.

    The rebranding will see Snapdeal unveil a new logo, along with a new tagline, “Unbox Zindagi,” with its long-standing colour palette of red and blue, giving way to vermello. The SoftBank Corp, Foxconn and Alibaba Group-backed company engaged London-based DesignStudio, which undertook a similar exercise for online home rentals venture Airbnb.

    Also part of the design overhaul, which kicked off in March earlier this year, is noted ad-man Prasoon Joshi, chairman, McCann Worldgroup Asia Pacific, and music director trio Shankar Ehsaan and Loy.

    Image article boday


    “This is actually the beginning to a very long journey. This is not a destination. Being the preferred destination for enabling the achievement of consumer aspirations is something we will have to achieve over an extended period of time through consistent execution at each touch point,” Kunal Bahl, chief executive of Snapdeal, told ET.

    “We have to be ready for the next 100 million ecommerce buyers that are going to come online in next five years,” he added. Bahl, however, declined to disclose how much the company had spent on the rebranding exercise.

    The focus, clearly, is on delivering a superior delivery experience for ecommerce consumers, who have, for long, complained against the quality of service provided by the country’s ecommerce majors, bringing into the spotlight the gaps in their supply chain and logistics operations.

    In its latest report released last week, research and advisory firm RedSeer Consulting stated that Snapdeal had recorded the fastest delivery times in five of the first seven months of calendar year 2016, followed by Amazon and Flipkart.

    Snapdeal has also committed to spend about Rs 200 crore towards marketing over the next two months in the runup to, and including the country’s festival season, which, historically, has been the most lucrative period for the online commerce ventures.

    High stakes
    The stakes are extremely high for Snapdeal, given that rival Amazon India has seen its shipments market share surge to 21%-24% by the end of the last fiscal, outpacing even Flipkart, which saw its share of shipments fall to 37% in March, at a time when the country’s online retail market has been estimated to grow at a slower pace compared to its larger rival, China.

    In an report released earlier this month, Kotak Institutional Equities estimated gross sales or the value of merchandise sold on ecommerce platforms, referred to as GMV, to reach $28 billion by 2020.

    This follows earlier reports estimating the market would be worth $50 billion by 2020. Wall Street investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been the most upbeat, even upgrading the size of the market in their recent reports.

    Industry experts reacted with caution to Snapdeal’s announcement.

    “They (Snapdeal) have realised that in order to survive in this cut-throat environment, they have to revamp themselves. The last six months have been difficult for them and they have realised that while they will have to keep spending on discounts, they also have to spend on something that gives them a long-term benefit,” pointed out Satish Meena, forecast analyst, Forrester Research.

    Others have pointed out that a number of global consumer conglomerates, including, Pepsi and The Gap, have undertaken such rebranding exercises, but some of which have had mixed results.

    “Snapdeal, after all, is a startup, and maybe when the company and the original logo were created, not much thought was given to it. Therefore, if Snapdeal’s management is making this change as a result of careful introspection about what it wants to communicate to its customers (and perhaps the current branding is not), this could be a good change,” said Rishtee Batra, assistant professor - Marketing at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
    ( Originally published on Sep 11, 2016 )
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