Phygital - a perfect blend of Physical and Digital. ‘Phygital’ is becoming a buzzword for all retailers, as it is a perfect combination for retail as well as the digital commerce sector, bringing in a new dimension to every brand. It also offers customers a platform to shop all they want almost 24 hours a day, allowing them to access products and choose the delivery service that suits them best. We had a session revolving around the emergence of phygital in retail at the recently concluded Phygital Retail Convention held at Renaissance Mumbai from November 10-11, 2021. This session, Powered by GreenHonchos, a Full Stack D2C enabler, had panellists digging deeper into the concept of phygital, giving us a chance to hear what the experts had to say.
Session Moderator: Navin Joshua, Founder/Director, GreenHonchos
Panellists: Hariharan Iyer, Group CIO, Raymond Group
Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer & Business Head, Pepperfry. com
Kunal Turukmane, Head - Strategy and Project Management, Being Human (FAFH)
Manoj Kansal, Director of Engineering, Myntra
Praveen Shrikhande, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail
Priyanka Chauhan, Head-Key Accounts (E-commerce), Bestseller India
Jitender Joshi, CEO, Ambab
“Click and Collect was something every brand wanted to do. And they wanted to do it overnight, without actually understanding that they don’t have the infrastructure. So we are kind of telling them to first build the infrastructure because it’s going to be a bad experience”
Jitender Joshi, CEO, Ambab
“When we started, the first 2-3 years we were not really selling large items by seeing analytics. We opened a couple of stores and influenced people to buy items worth ₹50,000-80,000”
Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer & Business Head, Pepperfry.com
‘Learnings’ from the omnichannel approach
COVID-19 has forced all the retailers and brands to dive into the digital universe, like never before. Retailers with a mass-focused customer base started to offer pickup solutions and delivery options to reach their customers quickly, at their time of need. Brands have started to use analytics, AR/VR, marketplace and virtual touchpoints to create a better shopping experience for the customers. Hariharan Iyer, Group CIO, Raymond Group told us about his learnings when they adapted the omnichannel approach during the pandemic. He stated, “Physical, essentially, we talk about it, it’s been across two or three phases now. So the high phases are just boiling down and COVID somehow crystallizes the whole scenario. What has now happened is that we have stores, we have front-ends, we have different applications, we have websites, and all of them have a hyper convergence. So we have got tons and tons of data to understand how a customer walks across, what is his buying pattern, what kind of analysis the customer does. But ultimately, you know, what really happens is that once you take it from the digital, you have to convert it down into a physical end. Otherwise, the convergence does not happen, the sale does not happen. And whatever happens, happens at different demarcations, different segmentation levels. So that’s where it stands, at least for the fashion industry. And it’s almost the same for all other industries, too, as far as I think.”
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