Cantabil Retail to put ad monies on digital for 2021, cuts budgets for cinema, print

Cantabil Retail has reinstated its marketing and advertising spends for the year 2021 but plans to pull back investments from traditional mediums such as cinema and print.

Deepak Bansal

“Until last year, we were doing many activities such as cinema and print ad, etc. In 2021, a larger area of focus for us would be on influencer marketing and social media marketing overall,” Deepak Bansal, Director, Cantabil Retail India, told BestMediaInfo.com.

Bansal has predicted that advertising and marketing would get further digitalised in 2021.

“The way OTT media channels have made serious inroads during the lockdown, they have a great potential to become the next best platforms for advertising. The share for these platforms in the total marketing budget is likely to increase from next year,” he said.

As there has been significant drop in the average spending of people, he said the brand is working towards building consumer confidence to avoid a long-term downward spiralling effect on the industry. So, the strategy is to focus more on personalised communication.

“We are leveraging our own stores, whether offline or online, to directly communicate with the audience. We are functioning at multiple levels to communicate with customers across online and offline channels through SMS campaigns, influencer engagements, or strategic digital campaigns, in order to maintain a connection with the target audience and inform them about our various initiatives, programmes and consumer engagement measures. We also have a key focus on automation, understanding consumer purchase patterns, and building on our brand positioning statement,” he added.

The company recently forayed into e-commerce and aims to cater to customers through both the online and offline space by offering a unified experience.

Additionally, it is in the process of adopting complete ERP solutions while strengthening its visual merchandising department and focusing on training and development needs of the front-end retail staff to provide a best customer experience.

Still a long way to achieve pre-Covid levels

While the brand witnessed better-than-expected demand and recovery in the second quarter due to the opening of the economy, Bansal said it will take a while for the retail segment to achieve pre-Covid levels.

Even after a good momentum this festive season, achieving the same growth figures vis-à-vis last year will take time, he said.

“While the supply chain and distribution network would have largely recovered and healed from the lockdown shock, public mobility and footfall are expected to remain impacted,” he said.

The brand had great plans for 2020 but those were either put on hold or were partially achieved due to the lockdown.

“We had planned to open 75 stores in 2020 across India but were able to open 30 only. Till FY 19-20, we grew at 30% CAGR and were looking to maintain the same momentum. However, the first quarter was completely stalled due to the lockdown and now we hope to achieve this figure in the next financial year, 2021-22,” he said.

He hopes that in 2021, the effect of the lockdown would subside and the consumers would be out in the markets. With demand growing in tier two and three cities and towns, it is looking forward to expanding its presence these places to meet the consumer demand and to create a strong foothold in smaller regions.

Overall, it is targeting to grow at 30% CAGR on a Y-o-Y basis, which would take its turnover to approximately Rs 750 crore in the next three years.

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