Marketing Strategy of Future Retail: Key Tactics & Insights

About Future Retail

Future Retail, which is a part of the Future Group, is one of the fastest-growing retail companies in India. It was incorporated in 2007 and is currently headquartered in Mumbai, India.

Being one of the country’s well-known brick-and-mortar retail chains, it operates approximately 1500 stores in India and has established itself under the brand names such as Big Bazaar, Hyper City, Ezone, Easyday, Foodhall, etc. 

It sells everything from household goods and groceries to apparel, electronics, toys, games, and health & beauty products.

Brand Portfolio of Future Retail

Future Retail is a listed entity on the Indian Stock Markets and is currently a subsidiary of Future Group. 

In August 2020, Reliance Industries Limited announced the acquisition of Future Group. However, the acquisition is temporarily halted and is under the scrutiny of the Indian Courts for discrepancies in the agreement details. If the agreement gets approved by the Indian courts, Future Group will be a part of Reliance Retail soon.

Now that we know a brief about Future Retail, Let us now understand further by understanding its marketing mix in the coming section.

Marketing Mix of Future Retail

The marketing mix model is designed to solve the most basic problem of marketing, which is how to influence customers. It also helps in understanding a business from a marketing point of view. This model is based on four basic parameters, i.e product, price, place, and promotion.

So let us go through the marketing mix of Future Retail by starting with the product parameter:

Product Strategy of Future Retail

Future Retail focuses on providing a complete retail experience hub. It has various stores like hypermarkets, supermarkets, convenience stores, and fashion stores:

• The Hypermarket chain includes Big Bazaar, Big Bazaar GEN NXT.
• The Supermarket chain includes HyperCity and Foodworld. 
• The Fashion Retail chain is led by Fbb
• The Convenience stores include Easy Day, Heritage Fresh, and WHSmith
• The Consumer Electronics division includes Ezone

So this is how Future Retail provides customers with a wide selection of products and services under various retail brands.

Price Strategy of Future Retail

The major Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of all the major brands of Future Retail is offering lower prices:

• The pricing on almost all of its offerings are less than the usual MRP
• It also conducts Sale Days at least 4 times a year during which the prices of the products gets even further discounted
• It also has its E-Wallet called Future Pay which is like a customer loyalty program through which customers can earn and redeem points at any of Future Group stores

Future Retail’s pricing policy has helped them attract customers which have heavily contributed to increasing its market share among its competitors.

Place Strategy of Future Retail

Future Retail has its presence almost everywhere in India, which makes it the most preferred retailer by the customers:

• It has its presence in about 400 Indian cities
• It has more than 1500 stores to serve its customers
• It also has a dedicated online portal that provides its customers with the convenience of home delivery

The place is also one such factor that has helped Future Retail to reach out to maximum customers.

Promotion Strategy of Future Retail

Future Retail has been very aggressive when it comes to the promotion of its brands. it encompasses a wide range of marketing activities for all of its events:

• It uses television and newspapers as its primary channel of offline marketing
• It uses an extensive range of social media campaigns as its main channel for online marketing
• It also ties up with various brands such as JioMart, Paytm, PhonePe and Amazon Pay to offer discounts and cashback

Future Retail incorporates various other steps to enhance the customer experience, not just in terms of just promotion but throughout all the other parameters as well.

Now that we know a little more about Future Retail as a company, let us now further understand its marketing strategies and campaigns which helped them position themselves strongly in the minds of customers.

Marketing Strategy of Future Retail

Every business wants to have an edge over its competitors, and the retail giants are not an exception. It is the marketing strategy that makes a brand reach a position of distinctiveness in the eyes of its customers. 

In this section, we will go through the marketing campaigns undertaken by Future Retail which led them to be one of the top retail giants in India.

Marketing and Campaign  Strategy of Big Bazaar

Big Bazaar is the flagship brand of Future Retail. It has been in business for more than 20 years now and has established a name for itself. Its marketing activities are moreover these days focused on creating awareness and promotion of the Sale Days.

Sabse Saste 6 Din – A Marketing Campaign of Big Bazaar

Sabse Saste 6 Din roughly translates to 6 days of lowest possible pricing at Big Bazaar. This campaign was launched to promote and create awareness regarding the Sale Day Events of Big Bazaar. 

It also related this recent Sale Day launch with the Covid-19 Vaccine launch and themed the sale as Bachat Paane Ki Vaccine. The below ad beautifully portrays the theme of the campaign with a subtle tone to entice customers to come and shop at Big Bazaar.

Big Bazaar has been working very well both, online and offline, to promote its Sale Days. It uses a very attractive tone of colours to attract customers. It also makes sure it gets the first-page advertisement from the pre-sale to the final sale day.

Marketing and Campaign Strategy of FBB

Future Group’s Fashion at Big Bazaar (fbb) is the face of its fashion division. It was established in 2008 and is usually found at various malls in popular cities and towns of the country.

Sara Ka  Sara Below 599 – A Marketing Campaign of Fbb

Fbb launched a campaign to promote its Sale Day, a marketing strategy similar to how Big Bazaar uses to promote and create awareness among the general public. 

“Sara Ka Sara Below 599” roughly translates to “Anything and everything below 599”. 

The campaign was targeted towards the general audience. However, fbb is not as popular as Big Bazaar. So to engage the general audience in a better way, it signed Varun Dhawan and Sara Ali Khan as its brand ambassadors. Sara Ali Khan’s first name Sara also acted as wordplay for the sale name “Sara Ka Sara Below 599”

Marketing and Campaign Strategy of Easyday Club

Easyday Club is an Indian retail brand owned by Future Group that runs chains of consumer retail and convenience stores. It majorly deals in providing discounts and home delivery services of Food and Grocery items.

Apnepan Ka Rang – A Marketing Campaign of Easyday

Easyday Club has launched its Holi festive campaign ‘Apnepan Ka Rang’ (Colour of Emotions). This campaign showcases how its delivery partners deliver the goods in time despite all the hustle and bustle going around them. It also highlighted the facility of online ordering via this campaign to create awareness.

These were some of the popular marketing campaign undertaken by Future Retail to promote its brands. Let us now go through the digital presence in the next section.

Digital Presence of Future Retail

Traditional marketing and advertising can still be very effective in creating demand for your product or service. However, with the incredible growth of social media, it is not enough to simply have a website with an about page or business description. There must be an online presence and interaction with social platforms.

Future Group is one of the country’s most appreciated businesses for its e-commerce plan as well as its marketing approaches. 

In Future Retail’s case, it is one of the few companies that have a very strong presence both offline and online. It always comes up with a complete marketing plan to promote its events. With that being said, let us go through its social media presence.

Social Media Presence of Future Retail

Future Retail is one of the most diversified retail companies and has a very active social media profile. Most of their brands maintain a top-notch presence on social media. 

Some are running campaigns and other brands like Big Bazaar have a subsidiary channel called Big Bazaar Foods which showcases food recipes and also brings in revenue from youtube and thus adding more to the marketing budget.

Here is a quick overview of Future Retail’s brands on Social Media:

As we previously said, It has a great reputation in the markets when it comes to social media profiles, and here are a few examples to show you how it has been successful in catering to its customers through social media:

Here are Future Retail’s Youtube numbers:

From the above table, we can interpret that Future Retail’s popular brands have a very low subscribers count compared to its followers on other social media platforms. 

At the same time, Big Bazaar Food has almost five times the number of subscribers compared to the total subscribers of all the three main channels. It is a very unique strategy implemented by Future Retail to remain connected with the homemakers with its cookery videos.

However, Future Retail should focus more on its main youtube channels as they can also increase engagement with the customers and at the same time add more to the revenue.

Website Overview of Future Retail

Currently, Future Retail is working on creating a single portal, www.shop.bigbazaar.com, under which all the Future Group’s offerings are available. 

This is done to provide customers with a rich and seamless experience of the brand they are looking for, be it their local shop or any one of their e-commerce sites.

Future Retail’s mission is to be a provider of integrated multi-channel consumer experiences through its businesses. Its strong belief is the customer should have access to quality products all under one ecosystem which will enable a frictionless shopping experience for customers.

Reliance Retail has also acquired Future Group but the deal has been halted temporarily over agreement disputes. However, once the deal gets materialized in the near future then we might see a brand new portal under Reliance Retail.

With this our case study on Future Retail comes to an end, Let us go through the final summary in the final section.

Conclusion

If you take a narrow definition of retail – just what is sold in stores – you would find Future Retail among the top 10 retailers in the country. Take a broader definition, which includes everything sold through stores and all of the supply chain associated with that, and there are only three companies of any size that do more business: Walmart, Flipkart, and Future Group.

With already strong marketing authority in place and a probable acquisition by Reliance Retail can take the company to new heights with customers being the ones who get the most benefits out of the same.

Liked our work? Interested in learning further? Do check our website for more. Also, if you’re interested in Digital Marketing, you can check out our Free Digital Marketing Masterclass by Karan Shah.

Let us know your thoughts on this case study in the comment section down below. Thank you for reading, and if you liked our then do share this in your circle. 

Until then, see you next time!