Shoppers, invariably seek 2nd opinion prior to finalising the item they desire to buy. This trait is exhibited more by women shoppers. No wonder, many at times women shoppers go shopping in groups, so that group members can offer 2nd opinion to their friends.
C&A, a Brazilian retailer, understood this shoppers' insight – of seeking 2nd opinion prior to finalising on purchase, and decided to leverage technology to offer this very benefit – of second opinion, but on a much wider scale.
For this purpose, C&A designed special clothes hangers and labelled them ‘Fashion Hanger’. These Fashion Hangers, prominently displayed the number of ‘likes’ garnered by the fashion item displayed on it from social media community. C&A labelled these ‘likes’ as ‘Fashion Likes’.
To achieve this objective, C&A embedded counters into each Fashion Hanger which in turn was linked to the C&A Facebook page. As and when C&A fans voted with their virtual fingers on the picture of each item, in real time each Fashion Hanger was updated!
If a shopper valued other people’s opinion then she had to opt for items which attracted maximum fashion likes.
For mavericks – who don’t care about opinions of others, they could opt for fashion items with minimal likes.
Business Lessons:
1. A successful business strategy is based on consumer insight - C&A has based its strategy on consumer insight that shoppers, particularly women, seek second opinion prior to purchase. They have leveraged technology to build and execute a strategy based on this insight.
2. Embed behavioural science principles into your Business Model - C&A has successfully embedded behavioural science principle - Social Proof - a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situations - into its business model.
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here.
