Groceries are one such product that has a daily necessity in households. Be it a nuclear family or a family of 25 members, you need a set of food & groceries every month/ week.
Tapping this market are few of the popular online grocery stores like BigBasket & Grofers– two strong runners with having unique selling points.
Welcome to season two of our series – Battle of the Brands.
For those of you who are new to this blog, in this series, we pitch two different brands of the same genre & study their marketing strategy!
Earlier we have done this with quite a few brands like Manyavar Vs Raymonds, Lux Vs Dove, Imperial Blue Vs Royal Stag, etc.
For this season it’s the battle between the two leading online food & grocery store – BigBasket Vs Grofers!
Let’s get started.
Backstory
BigBasket – rising from the failures
BigBasket is known to be one of India’s largest online food & grocery store with more than 18000+ products and 1000+ brands listed on their catalog.
Their range of products starts from rice, cereals, lentils, spices, cleaning products, oral hygiene, dairy products Packaged products, Beverages, Personal care products, Meats, and others.
BigBasket launched early around 2011 by Hari Menon along with five of his friends- VS Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh, Abhinay Choudhari and V S Ramesh.
They already had their online retail website called “Fabmart” which they sold later.
When BigBasket launched in 2011, it failed to grab on to the masses. The brick & mortar stores were still popular, the idea was way ahead of its time.
Finally, they received their first round of funding of $10 million from ChrysCapital co-founder Raj Kondur and Ascent Capital to get the boost.
Later in 2014, they got 15 rounds of funding; a worth of more than $100 million!
Grofers – an attempt to solve daily problems
With the sole motive of making grocery shopping convenient for people, Grofers started in 2013 in Gurugram.
The co-founders of Grofers Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa, got the idea by pointing out the hassles of daily grocery shopping- to look around for items from a shopping list, to stand in line to pay for said items, to lug them back to the car, etc.
Grofers has a wide range of; Fruits and Vegetables, Grocery & Staples, Beverages, Home & Kitchen, Household needs, Personal Care, Breakfast and dairy, Noodles pasta and instant food, Sauces, Jams and Condiments, Baby and Kids products, Organic and Gourmet, Pet-care and Meats and Seafood.
Just like its competition, Grofers also gets funding from money like SoftBank and Alibaba.
Marketing Strokes
BigBasket
One of the ways most retail stores use is social media marketing. And BigBasket uses this well!
#GharLeAoBigBasket on Facebook is a popular social media campaign by the company, where brand posts creatives with captions that would make their followers see in which situations exactly BigBasket could be of benefit to them.
BigBasket designs different campaigns for different social media platforms.
For Instagram, they started #DetoxWithBB.
Here they post health tips in the form of pictures of detoxifying foods and helping their followers achieve a better diet.
For instance, a picture of an apple that says, Its fiber pectin aids in getting rid of piled up metals and food additives.
They have an extremely creative Instagram account where they post regularly engaging with customers through contests, videos.
Here is their Holi post.
In 2015, they roped Shah Rukh Khan as their brand ambassador to gain maximum followers. They released a series of TV ads as well as YouTube ads with him.
The recent one has Ratna Pathak with him!
This was a big move for Hari Menon who said, “Shah Rukh Khan’s endorsement has helped massively. We were conscious that it was going to give us visibility. Today, we are very visible. Now, we got to convert. He (Shah Rukh Khan) can’t make people buy. We have to do it. That’s our focus, that’s what analytics will do.”
BigBasket does a lot of influencer marketing. They collaborated with Beer Biceps, a male bodybuilding influencer with millions of followers.
Also, they collaborated with Being Momma, a middle-aged female influencer with a following of 57k, who gave BigBasket’s reference when talking about health and baby products.
Grofers
The main difference between Grofers & BigBasket is how they approach their marketing strategy. Unlike BB, Grofers doesn’t have a brand ambassador.
It relies on showing normal people’s narration of their day to day life.
Their social media campaign #GrofersSeMangao, a campaign in which they encourage people to order from Grofers rather than actually buy the product.
For instance, there is a creative which says,
Mom: Can you grind this wheat, please?
Me: Mom, please mujhe mehnat mat karwao, Grofers she mangao.
Grofers also uses content marketing in the form of blogs or recipe videos.
There are blogs on recipes. Like in the month of corn, Cheese won’t make you fat—learn the Italian way, Corn in a burger! We’ll tell you how—the American way, 3 Step recipe—Indian recipe.
They even use a lot of email marketing with captions like, “Sneha, did you get your offer yet?” or “100% cashback on your first order!”
This makes their remarketing game really strong!
Growth & Revenues
BigBasket
BigBasket with its massive backing saw its revenue grow by 35% to Rs 1,606 crore in the financial year 2017-18.
According to the company, its share of the total e-commerce grocery business in the country of $1.20 billion.
The total online grocery business is expected to touch $2.50 billion by 2020.
According to recent reports, BigBasket sells over 22,000 products and 3000 brands and expects to increase its revenue from private labels to 40% from the current 34%.
This acquisition has helped BigBasket in its Express Delivery model, to deliver groceries in one hour.
Presently it has over 418,000+ followers on Facebook, 25k+ followers on Instagram. BigBasket also has the best engagement rate, of 7%.
Grofers
For a company that started just a few years ago, Grofers has shown phenomenal growth in terms of revenues. The firm gathered 700 crores in sales in FY18, up from 250 crores the year before and is on track to exit FY19 with 2,500-3,000 crore in sales.
Recently, Saurabh Kumar, cofounder, Grofers said, “We are aggressively growing our business and aiming to clock $1 Bn in revenue by the end of 2019 with a significant focus on our in-house brands in 2019. Our G-brands contribute 40% to our current revenue, and we plan to increase it to 60% in the coming years.”
They have over
18k followers on Instagram & around
242,732 followers on Facebook.
What do you think about these two marketing strategies? Let us know below!
Also, for more such blogs, read here!
