Integrated Marketing Mix Framework for Baby Care Retailing in India

Abstract

The complex nature of baby care retailing both from supply side and demand side owing to sheervast number of unique products / brands / categories the retailer mandatorily need to offer intheir stores as part of the product assortment, added with limitation in terms of opportunityavailable for the store to hold on consumers for a longer period of time just because the windowis very small, makes it furthermore important for any baby care brick-and-mortar retailer to bemore careful and efficient in ensuring adaptation of right Marketing Mix. It is observed that themajority of baby care retailers in India believe that they have adopted the right Marketing Mix and is yielding the best possible store profits. This belief / assumption always distracts them from working on their existing Marketing Mix and they spend most of their time in finding elements which are new or latent in nature to be added to the existing Marketing Mix. In this twelve months long research work we have analysed a select baby care brick-and-mortar retailer’s existing Marketing Mix designed a new Marketing Mix by just rationalizing and re-prioritizing all the elements of basic “4P’s”, applied it on a select group of experimental stores to derive insights from the experimentation. Results have demonstrated that rather working on identifying new “P’s”, “C’s”, “S’s” and “W’s” if one works on rationalizing the basic “4P’s” of existing Marketing Mix, more than 70 percent of the store profitability could be determined, most importantly in addition to few stores turning profitable for the first time all the stores in the experimental group have witnessed their highest ever revenue, store profit and repeat visit frequency of consumers