About This Episode
Abhishek Shetty is the CMO and Head of eCommerce & Omni-channel sales of Celio, India. He has worked with leading companies across eCommerce, Retail, Media & Advertising industries. Being an alumnus of ISB Hyderabad, Abhishek has 11+ years of experience in the Sales and Marketing domain and has earned a name for himself, creating successful work-stories. He is also an advisor to early-stage start-ups, helping them scale and acquire users.
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In this episode:
Here are a few excerpts from our conversation with Abhishek.
Priyam: What impact of COVID have you witnessed on fashion and offline retail?
Abhishek: The sector is hit extremely hard. There seems to be a drastic decrease in demand. And whatever demand there is, it cannot be fulfilled. Search trend data shows a 50-70% drop in fashion search volumes.
→ User engagement is something where we are working on actively when the sales are going down.
Priyam: How has your role as a CMO evolved during this time?
Abhishek: The role has shifted drastically. Along with marketing, it is also about IT enablement and exploring the avenue of tech partnerships to help consumers have a better experience. It is highly focussed on consumer research now.
Priyam: What is the long term impact do you foresee in terms of consumer behavior in the fashion industry?
Abhishek: Social distancing has highlighted the importance of digital channels at a quick rate and the lockdown has also elevated an urgent priority across the value to be more digitally active.
→ Digital Escalation – Consumers will demand more on this front and businesses should prepare to deliver better.
→ Revenge Buying – There is a parallel school of thought with an entirely new concept of ‘Revenge Buying’ leading to a pent up demand. We have started operationalizing the website to handle the pre-orders. It will be a short term phase but eventually, it will drop to 70-80% than it was before COVID.
Priyam: How has the marketing strategy been affected overall?
Abhishek: We approached by minimizing transactional communication. This is the most appropriate time when marketers can focus on the holy grail of marketing – ‘Engagement’! We are focusing way more on building the brand instead of generating leads.
→ Good marketers will focus on humanizing communication with their users and compel them to start a conversation with the brand.
→ We are putting a lot of effort into identifying what consumers are doing in their spare time and trying to find a fitment where we can indulge in a contextual conversation.
→ We are being more empathetic instead of hard selling.
Abhishek talks about strategies to re-evaluate, re-learn, & re-target, accompanied by some crucial marketing topics. To gain actionable insights, listen to the full episode on your favorite platforms.
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