In 2021, InsideIIM launched for the first time the E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge, an exclusive program to give India's top talent at business schools a flavor of Marketing and Growth Hacking in an E-commerce set-up. To participate, MBA students were asked to create a marketing strategy for their favorite E-commerce platforms. Amongst all the entries that came in from India's top talent, five stood out! Here is a glimpse into the marketing strategies formulated by Vaibhav Mangla, an IIM Kozhikode student who worked on improving the user experience for L’Oreal and increasing their customer engagement and conversion rate. He is the winner of InsideIIM’s E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge!
InsideIIM's E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge - The Case
As a part of one of the E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge rounds, participants were asked to share their top three favorite E-commerce platforms, along with reasons to justify their predilection for these platforms. They were asked to create a short PowerPoint presentation on how they would market one of the above e-commerce platforms differently. The participants were given the objective to create a marketing strategy that would:
Increase user acquisition, i.e. the number of account registrations of the e-commerce site.
Increase user conversion, i.e. the number of transactions on the e-commerce site.
Participants' presentations would then be evaluated on components such as their marketing goals, the smoothness of the customer journey, frameworks incorporated, strategic tactics, marketing channels employed, and measurement of success.
The Winning Case - Vaibhav Manglas's 3-T Approach To Improve Customer Experience For L’Oreal
Amongst the five winners of the InsideIIM E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge 2021 is Vaibhav Mangla, a first-year MBA student at IIM Kozhikode.Vaibhav's winning case in the E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge revolved around L’Oreal, an undisputed leader in the beauty market. As his Mom is an active user of the L’Oreal products, Vaibhav understands some of the pain points that the customers face while using their platform. Thus, Vaibhav chose to create a marketing strategy for L’Oreal and enhance the customer experience with the objective of increasing the customer engagement and conversion rate.To begin with, Vaibhav first focused on understanding the customer by conducting primary research across all genders between the ages of 21 and 35. The objective of the research was to find the factors that enable a customer to buy a product. The research covered various points like buying decision factors, Sources of information, Emotional and rational expectations of the consumer, Consumer connotations, etc. The insights generated from the research were listed down.Next, Vaibhav lists down the problems that need to be solved and creates a 3-T approach to enhance customer acquisition and experience. This approach focuses on giving customers a trial of the product with the help of a sample product along with the full size product, an easy return policy, and a loyalty program. A customer journey from awareness of the product to the post-sales experience of the product is showcased below.Vaibhav now laid down the implementation plan for the idea. He stressed on why a D2C approach is critical for implementing such an idea. He proposes the launch of the L’Oreal app which would have all the features discussed above. A promotion and marketing plan was created for the product using the RACE framework. A basic costing model for the sale of every product through the app was created as well.What did you think of Vaibhav Mangla's marketing, user acquisition, and user conversion strategy for L’Oreal? What holes can you poke in the proposed strategy? Think you have a better, more effective strategy in mind? Let us know in the comments! Read more about the InsideIIM E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge here.