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Big Bazaar: A Review
The country wide chain, Big Bazaar is India’s answer to WalMart, by the retail savvy Kishore Biyani, CEO Future Group. A quintessentially Indian experience, it doesn’t promise more than it delivers. Basic worth allied with reasonable pricing is their USP. The store itself and the products it stocks may not be on the cutting edge of technology or sometimes even retail but the customer can be assured that he/she is getting their money’s worth. Their first store opened in Calcutta in 2001, on VIP Road, in the ground floor of a residential building. This was the first departmental store that offered regulated parking services, apparel, steel vessels and electronics under one roof, and all at the most competitive prices! The format got bigger and better with the introduction of fresh food and vegetables – Food Bazaar, introduced as a shop in shop concept, which then went on to become a very successful standalone store around India. A super quick roll out of stores across India followed with this format becoming a huge hit with the middle and lower middle class – a huge client base. Of course, now the Future Group is about many more brands and formats like Pantaloons, Central, HomeTown, eZone, Depot, LootMart, Brand Factory, Scullers, Urbana, Indigo Nation, One Mobile, Staples, Etam, Lee Cooper Sports Bar, Copper Chimney and F123. The next watershed for brand Big Bazaar was the introduction of the “Sabse Sasta Din” in January 2005, when the Indian Republic Day holiday was utilized to make sure that hordes of consumers descended on all Big Bazaars across the country to buy all kinds of household items – cheap. There were scenes of customers actually vigorously fighting over items in-store, long queues and this was followed by another unique initiative – the “Juna do aur naya lo” where customers were encouraged to bring in their old clothes, utensils, furniture and electronics, sell them at a predetermined price and receive coupons that enabled them to receive a discount on goods in store. Even with preconditions like ‘the customer has to buy four times the value of the coupon, the coupon is valid only for seven days’, the mounds of old clothes and items outside these collection centers were testimony to the success of this gambit. Big Bazaar was also the first to designate Wednesday as the ‘hafte ka sabse sasta din’ – with extra special discounts offered to lure the customer into the store midweek – with the usual result, a crowded store! This naturally has been copied by every retailer in the same bandwidth, pronto. Kishore Biyani is reported to have said that the word ‘bazaar’ was mandatory for the name as they wanted to replicate the Indian mandi or market feel, and ‘big’ came about because this was a much larger concept than just a regular market. The clarity of ideas is evidenced by the fact that they had frozen the punch line “Isse Se Sasta Aur Achha Kahi Nahi” much before any meeting with creatives to design the final logo of Big Bazaar. It was intentional then and has been kept up to date as the stores reflect India and Indianness by keeping tabs on the local culture, diversity and customs to grow with society rather than as a separate entity. Starting 2008 with six million square feet of retail space with stores in 51 cities pan India, they ended the year with over 11 million square feet of retail space and over 1,000 operational stores across 63 cities and towns and 65 rural locations in India. They opened 25 Big Bazaar stores in 2008 and carried the total store count to 104. The company saw a 52 per cent increase in its total income from Rs 33.29 billion in FY 2006-07 to Rs 50.53 billion in FY 2007-08. Of course the experience in each store varies as individual stores are treated like a small family with its own head of the family – Karta – the store manager. This is sometimes a negative thing if the influence of the head or karta cannot be perceived or counted upon and leads to vastly varied customer interactions, where one store scores over the other, within the same locality, a very confusing thing for the customer. The standardization that one expects with a multi city and store operation is somewhat lacking – whether in terms of merchandise stocked, service offered or even just the overall intangible feel of vibrancy that exists in some stores and is completely absent in others. This in spite of Kishore Biyani inculcating the habit of ‘observing and understanding customers’ behavior in every employee of the group. But this is definitely sidelined by the continuing success story of this store, where even a recession has not dented their customer base – probably because they are perceived as being ‘on the customer’s side’. Amen to that. Chillibreeze's disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article.
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