Craftsvilla.com is an online shopping site for “Unique Indian Products” including Handmade, Vintage, Ethnic, Organic and Natural, handcrafted and environment friendly products. They are among India’s largest online portals dedicated to selling handicrafts with more than 60,000 live products. They have set a target for themselves to reach a whopping one million products over the next few months.
Craftsvilla aspires to establish themselves as the leading Indian name that is famous globally in the handicraft sector. They intend to brandish the true colours and tradition of Indian culture. It is a highly popular brand among women of all ages due to the glam and glitter mixed with tradition, provided by Craftsvilla. The organisation has a reputation for fair pricing and providing fair wages to their parade of 1,000 artisans and 500 vendors.
What they needed!
Their advertising requirement was to increase the number of products to more than one Lakh on their web store within 12 months with more than 1,000 orders per day. They wanted the organisation to be portrayed as completely women centric with more female suppliers, artisans and buyers. The objective was to create awareness, help suppliers make money and assist buyers to get reasonably priced products. For Craftsvilla, the media vehicles were not limited to only online media. The media platforms included Radio which ensures a more personal touch to the messages delivered. The aim was to get maximum visibility all round the female target audience as well as the draw attention of prospective artisan vendors.
At the same time they intended to establish direct transactional relations with the customers as it helps today’s trend-setting females keep up with the latest ethnic trends without burning a hole in their pocket.
Planning the Campaign for Craftsvilla included the following research initiatives:
Identifying the Competitors
Since Craftsvilla is an online retail forum for handcrafted accessories, it has many competitors which include big names like eBay and Etsy. What they are doing is similar to Craftsvilla in their section dedicated to ethnic products, jewellery, bags and accessories. Etsy’s biggest drawback is in terms selection of media used for promotion.
Etsy has the minimum Indian market penetration among all the competitors and uses online social sites as a promotion tool. eBay on the other hand many other sections which are much more popular than the accessories and jewellery segment. These were the two main sweet spots for Craftsvilla, which could make them stand out alone in the Indian market.
Determining the Target audience
It was established that due to the nature of the products, they are much more popular among Indian Women. About 80% of the buyers were undoubtedly women. The push has been to revive handicrafts and make it conveniently accessible to today’s modern Indian woman. They are trying to keep things colourful and lively and that attracts women between the 18-35 age group of Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.
Highlighting the USP
The most essential part of the entire campaign planning was to highlight the Unique Selling Proposition of the Brand, which were as follows:
1) Mixing Indian Cultural Diversity with Technology: India is a land with amazing diversity and no attempt has been made until now to integrate this diversity on a single online or digital platform. Craftsvilla.com is the pioneer in the field of combining culture and the Internet. Their products are handmade by individual designers, artisans and sellers across India and sold online
2) E-commerce with a Social angle: They have a global customer base which has been acquired with the help of a tech-enabled platform. There is no space constraint online so they can showcase millions of products in one e-shop only for women and by women. They intend to portray that they are in support of women empowerment in the sense of enabling women artisans and
3) Strong supply chain and economical products: They work closely with more than 100 vendors and over 1000 artisans across India. Customers get all the products directly from its creators, eliminating unnecessary middlemen expenses which ensures reasonable pricing
Challenges
India is still an evolving country when it comes to the e-commerce space and many people continue to be sceptical about making online transactions. Convincing consumers to shell out money, especially online is a hard task hence we tried doing it through radio. On the business side, another challenge was how they can reach out to local Indian customers. Many of their customers are women, so they can easily collaborated through radio to enable reach in a more cost-effective way.
Solution
• A 10 Sec Ad was run for 20 times per day for 7 days on Radio City in Bangalore
• RJ mentions were added to inform listeners about the unique benefits so as to increase website traffic
• Target audience being women living in Metros, Ads were played especially from 11am-5pm, as this time span captures the highest working female listenership base
• We tried to focus more on Indian handicrafts and how the listeners or prospective clients could be a part of it through Craftsvilla.com which is why Voice-Over was aired during the show-Chow Chow Baath hosted by RJ Nethra as its is a double treat. It is because the show along with playing wonderful songs from the yesteryears endorses the Indian heritage and culture
• This show is a hit with 99% women listeners. The creative message conveyed the opportunities for prospective suppliers and the reasonably priced Indian handicraft products for the modern Indian women.
Reason for Choosing Radio
A major part of the Indian crowd accounts to habitual radio listeners which serves as the best platform to get on the minds of Indians. The site is rapidly growing in popularity. It’s now growing by 30% month-over-month in terms of revenue and ships over 5,000 products each month worldwide. They have a unique e-commerce story with a social angle which required a more personal feel which was provided with the help of radio advertising.
Personal and direct responsive advertising tool was needed and this was well catered through radio. Therefore it was inevitable for Craftsvilla to get the attention they needed with radio.
Another reason for choosing radio is that it is accessible to both urban and rural, literate and illiterate which creates a strong market presence for the company.
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