What's Selling on tv?
What do you do when you run short of
atta, dal, chawal, milk, eggs or bread? You pick up the phone and call your
neighbourhood kirana shop, and the stuff gets delivered to your door
free-of-cost, right? And if the milk is spoiled or the dal different from the
variety you ordered, you can have it picked back, no questions asked, right?
Tune in to HomeShop18 TV, the
country's first 24-hour home shopping channel from Network18 Group, where you
can compare brands, check prices, order and pay only on delivery or through
credit card, with guaranteed 15-day return policy. And the deals are at least
20% to 50% cheaper than those available at the physical stores.
The channel launched in April last
year and beamed to cable and satellite TV channels in 5.5 million homes deals
in 300 brands (20,000 stock keeping units) in 20 categories that can be
delivered to customers in 2,300-odd cities.
But this is because the home
shopping category is still new and nascent in India. "The dynamics of the
market were so unclear that we had no clue about the demographics or where our
sales would come from," reveals Malhotra. So the first blunder was
discovered when the channel went all out into the non-TAM (a measure of
television viewership in India that covers 23 cities) tier II and tier III
cities simply because the carriage fee there was lower than in the metros.
"Later we discovered that a
bulk of our sales were originating from the metros and not from the hinterland,
as we had hopped would be the case," says Malhotra. The data indicated
that nearly 30% of HomeShop18's sales were coming from the top 20 cities.
"This indicated that shoppers in the metros were perhaps mall-weary or
recession-hit and were now looking for an alternative shopping mode that would
fetch them more value for their money," he adds. Armed with this in-sight
and fresh funds from the investor, HomeShop18 is ramping up fast in Bangalore,
Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad.
That the home shopping business is
unique cannot be denied. Even within the broadcasting space, HomeShop18 is
different from other news channels in the sense that it combines several
business streams a buying house that identifies products that can be sold on TV;
a broadcasting arm that generates six hours of live programming; a
fully-supported logistics division to ensure undisrupted, timely deliveries to
2,300-odd cities; an IT support system to create a seamless multimedia
environment to club television, web (HomeShop18 has a vanilla shopping site
that is primarily a catalogue service) and print (brochures and other marketing
material); and last but not the least, a 24-hour customer contact centre that
has to be manned not by usual teleservice agents but by trained salesmen with
deep product knowledge, who can be spokespersons for the brands.
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