Brand Musings

What is wrong with customer experience in the Indian retail industry? There is no doubt that the growth of e-commerce has  affected the traditional brick and mortar retail industry. Retailers in India haven’t begun closing down physical stores like JC Penney’s have done in the US but there is no denying that a big chunk of retail business has moved online. It is not just the better discounts that are attracting customers to e-commerce. In India, more and more customers are beginning to shop online without comparing prices. The main reasons for this are the convenience and the customer experience.  Yet, it is surprising to see how little importance is paid to customer experience by Indian offline retailers still. Forrester’s India Customer Experience Index 2017 shows that customer experience has improved in comparison to the report of 2016. However, that improvement has largely been in the banks and financial institutions. In the traditional retailers category most retail

The importance of customer experience to the brand Early last month, Interbrand released its rankings of India’s most valuable brands. But in today’s business scenario are these rankings relevant? Some of the biggest brands in Indian industry are on that list, and yet they are not necessarily brands that customers would associate as the best. In 2016 brand valuation specialists, Markables,  reported that between 2003 and 2015, the contribution of brand valuation to the total valuation of a company had come down by as much as  50%. In that period the value of customer relationships more than doubled. The study covered mergers & acquisitions over the period and compared the respective values of brands (trademarks) and customer relationships to the total value of the companies. What this means is that enterprises seeking to merge with or acquire other enterprises now place much greater value on the customer relationships the enterprise has than the value of its brand