Impact of Omnichannel marketing in the Indian Retail for combating post-COVID consumer behavior changes

Abstract

Omnichannel marketing has emerged as a successful strategy against the looming problem of COVID-19 worldwide. The growing importance of the strategy can be accrued to the positive experience created for customers at every phase of their purchase journey while building a unique reputation and top of mind recall for a particular brand. Simply put, it is an integrated, seamless experience across multiple touchpoints for the company and its stakeholders, especially the customers. The characteristics of a winning omnichannel experience are: 1. Convenience: Providing full-scale integration across multiple platform and payment options to provide customers with at par, if not better, experience than traditional channels 2. Consistency: Brand value must be consistent throughout the omnichannel experience which helps increase customer loyalty and extracts higher ROI 3. Relevance: Understanding the customer needs, based on which the strategies must be defined to provide the best experience as required 4. Empowerment: Enabling customers to have the power of choice and creating appropriate awareness for the customers to decide which channel suits them the best increases customer stickiness 5. Agility: Through technological advancements, allowing customers to navigate from one channel to another without any additional costs or loss of benefits also increases channel value This project aims to understand the effectiveness of some of the prominent omnichannel strategies and how the customers have responded to these post-COVID-19. A comparative analysis is drawn with online retailers who only have a presence in the online marketplace, visà-vis those who invested in the possibility of omnichannel distribution before the COVID emerged. This project studies the relationship of purchase intention with the type of channel strategy used in the retail sector and if the effect is augmented through contextual promotional campaigns. Primary data was collected through the survey questionnaires floated among a set of diverse respondents. Secondary research was done to validate the survey results and hypothesis. Reduction and elimination of unuseful variables have been performed through factor analysis, and regression models have been formed to understand the level of interdependence between variables. Finally, the insights drawn have been used to formulate managerial implications, with certain constraints and limitation mentioned.