- IKEA entered India in 2018 and since then has opened one store in
Hyderabad and two in Mumbai. Its next two stops are Bangalore and Delhi. - We speak to Kavitha Rao, Country Commercial Manager, IKEA India who
walks us through the brand’s India journey so far and everything that lies
ahead.
IKEA, a Swedish furniture company, first entered the Indian market
in 2018 with its first shop in Hyderabad. After opening one major and one
modest showroom in Mumbai, the brand is currently on its way to opening a store
in Bangalore.
While shopping for furniture online or via an app would have been
difficult for many people until recently, the blockade spurred India’s
digitization, which has been beneficial to businesses like IKEA. The firm
released its app in May of last year, and online sales have allegedly more than
doubled in the previous two years, according to Peter Betzel, CEO and CSO of IKEA
India.
There is still a sizable unorganised furniture market in India. For
a company like IKEA, the challenge has been to position itself as a
cost-effective and environmentally friendly option. While IKEA has only been
able to physically grow to two locations in four years due to its huge format
showrooms, its online platform is assisting it in reaching out to new cities.
The focus for the next few years will also be on continuously increasing both
its offline and online presence.
To understand its journey in India so far and what lies ahead, we
spoke to Kavitha Rao, Country Commercial Manager, IKEA India. Here’s what she
had to say:
IKEA’s India Journey So Far
While IKEA’s formal voyage in India began in 2018 with the
inauguration of a shop in Hyderabad, the company had been present in the nation
since 2014, preparing for its entry. Even before launching, the company
conducted extensive research to determine which goods would be of interest to
Indian consumers, and the team visited over 2000 houses in various locations to
learn about their requirements and goals.
“It was about understanding the different activities people did in
their homes and how furniture and home furnishing accessories supported people
in their everyday lives. That was a very important starting point for us. And
then, at a later point, we placed IKEA products in customer homes across
different cities to really see how they got used, to understand what worked
well and what did not. In fact, in a good number of cases, we had actually placed
products for anywhere between 12-18 months in customers homes between 2015-16
to really get first-hand feedback in terms of usage. And that was great insight
for us because we also understood how our products fared in the Indian
environment,” shared Rao.
This gave the team an opportunity to work on some product design,
improve on products even before they actually started selling in the country.
Its research also helped it come up with products that are more locally
relevant. For instance, IKEA India has a much larger collection of cooking
utensils like pots and pans, considering Indians’ love for cooking, in
comparison to a lot of other markets.
When the brand launched its first showroom in Hyderabad, the
marketing communication was very local, to keep it relevant to the consumers
there. And the focus of the brand since has been on understanding the consumer
better and presenting them with products that are relevant for them.
“The starting point for us has always been the thinking that the
product range is really the right entity. The most important thing that we are
focused on is to bring well-designed functional home furnishing products that
are affordable. We believe doing that consistently will help us build the brand
in the long-term. We’re still relatively new here and have a long way to go in
terms of establishing IKEA as the top-of-mind brand for the Indian consumer.
However, we are not in India just to establishing the IKEA brand, we’re also
here to help build the home furnishing category too,” added Rao.
Navigating the Pandemic
The physical experience a customer has with a brand like IKEA, or
any other retail brand, is critical. The pandemic, on the other hand, made it
difficult to enter stores. So, how did the brand get through those months of
lockdown?
“It is always good to take a
positive spin and be optimistic and that has been our approach since the first
wave hit us. The positive out of this entire experience is that since we spent
so much time indoors, the home became so much more important. But the
challenging elements were that we worked through various lockdowns. There was a
period when store visits were restricted but that is also where IKEA, as an
omni-channel retailer, was able to leverage other customer touchpoints, be it
e-commerce or remote-selling. Most of the research reports point to the fact
that Indian consumer’s digital adoption was one of the highest across the
world. So that is been an interesting journey for us. And that also gave us the
opportunity to expand our e-commerce offering in many more cities across India.
But we also saw very quickly that not everybody was comfortable buying a
category like home furnishing online. And there we really started to look at
how to augment the experience itself, with more human interaction through
services. During the first wave, we had something called an online personal
shopper who could support a customer trying to buy home furnishing online. This
was very important in the India context because many weren’t comfortable
shopping online and also because there could be customers who did not have the
knowledge of home furnishing and the kind of product choices they needed to
make to meet their own needs. So it helped on both fronts.”
The Roadmap Ahead
IKEA is focusing on its Bangalore shop, which is anticipated to open
in April or May. It presently has three physical locations in India.
“The next stage for us is the Bangalore market, where we will
open both a large and small size store,” says the company. Following that,
the next major milestone will be in Delhi, where we have land parcels and where
work is in various stages in both Bangalore and Delhi. “Those are the next
key stages for us, and then we’ll start looking at the next set of cities in
India,” Rao said.
On what their key focus for the next few years
will be, Rao said, “It is about continuing the journey that we have started. We
want to figure out how to make home furnishing relevant for consumers in India
and how to create even more interest for the home furnishing category as a whole.
Within that, in the context of marketing, our focus will be to understand how
to make IKEA a relevant go-to brand for consumers in the India market. They see
our products as well-designed, functional, affordable and sustainable for
themselves. So at a very high level, that is really what we will focus on. And
then in the short-term, considering we are in the midst of the third wave, the
next couple of months our focus will probably be on staying agile to some of
the changes that are happening in the environment and adapt and continue to be
resilient to face the challenges of the new wave,” concluded Rao. Courtesy: www.businessinsider.in
