Paul Writer launches New Age Marketing , 
Video interview series of CXO’s highlighting best practices
Nissan Joseph
Managing Director
Crocs India
On the importance of e-commerce platforms in strengthening their brand presence and the ways they are going about it..
E-commerce in India is a very exciting time, when you at the penetration of organized retail being 13-17% leaving a huge opportunity for e-commerce to come in. the ability for e-commerce to penetrate into two to three-tier cities is intense and this gives a brand access to their customers which they normally wouldn’t access because they didn’t have the infrastructure to build their own brand stores in such towns. The second part about e-commerce that’s making it more powerful in India is that we have more and more dual structured families that are time-starved and unfortunately our infrastructure does not allow smooth and easy shopping experience in a physical store. Not that people do not enjoy that experience but more importantly it’s quite a challenge to spend the few hours you have on a weekend spending time in traffic to get into a mall. So e-commerce helps us leapfrog a lot of such obstacles by providing you an option of having the inventory of the entire country at your doorstep. We see e-commerce as a very meaningful and important channel to run our business but having said that it has its own challenges- the waters are a little muddy in India where e-commerce is a form of discounting and as a brand we work very hard to make sure that our brand does not fall under the same umbrella. So the opportunities are huge but the challenges are just as many. As with every other country e-commerce has been able to enhance your brand presence and long tail a product, so when a consumer searches for your products on a site they aren’t only searching for stuff that you find readily available in stores but also looking for what else does your brand offer that you must not have in stores. As a brand Crocs is known for iconic clogs but this represents only 30% of our sales. We have an array of other products we would like customers to know about so e-commerce is a terrific tool to help us access those customers who want to look for more than just our iconic clog.
“So e-commerce helps us leapfrog a lot of such obstacles by providing you an option of having the inventory of the entire country at your doorstep.
