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Brief Introduction to Your Idea

Our Idea belongs to the category- Industrial Products.
Companies are focusing on relationship marketing. Customer retention is more important than customer acquisition. One to one marketing has given rise to concept of differential pricing. Customers may be informed about dynamic pricing and changing prices according to behaviour.

What?

Product Description:
The product will have three components:

  • Smart card with the customer
  • Smart bags for dynamic pricing
  • Smart tags on products

The Smart bags will be stacked into the "Bag stand" provided with a counter to keep track of the availability of the bags. In order to get the Smart bag, the customer swipes his card on the stand, if it's empty, the time will be registered into the system and sent to the Central Control Centre (CCC). The compensation for the wait will be based upon the time spent in waiting. Smart bag contains a card reader which will detect the customer ID number and will send it to the CCC, where all the customer information would be retrieved.

Each article will have a RFID tag. Whenever a customer puts an article inside the smart bag, the reader in the bag will sense the product code from the corresponding RFID tags and pass it to the CCC. The "Dynamic price" of the individual articles based upon the previous transits made by the customer will be calculated by the software. Upon calculating the price the data will be sent back to the Smart bag wherein it will be displayed on the display panel attached to it.

Having completed the shopping the customer will press the "Confirm Bil" button on the bag itself. By the time the customer reaches the Cash Counter the bill would have been already prepared thus saving the time and hassles of queuing.

Who?

Our target segment is organized retailers with proper CRM system in place. This includes Super Market Chains, Apparel Chains, Groceries, Book Stores, Music and video libraries.

Retail is India's largest industry accounting for over 10 per cent of the country's GDP and around 8% of the employment. The organized retail business still comprises a small proportion of the total size of the  Rs 9,00,00-crore ($200 billion) retail sector. Retail business is growing at 5-6 % per annum. The size of organized retailing was estimated as Rs 26,000 crore in 2004, only about three per cent of the total. However, it is now set to grow at 25-30 per cent per annum.
The market size of our main segment is as follows:

    Segment Market Size        (Rs. Crore)
  • Textiles and clothing            4050
  • Jewellery                           2,000-2,500
  • Consumer Durables              1500
  • Footwear                           1,300-7,500
  • Food and personal care        1000
  • Non-Store retail                  900
  • Luggage, watches and tyre   500
  • Books and music                 390


Why?

Customer has lot of alternatives at his end. The differentiating factor for retailers is no more the product quality or the product variety. Their unique selling proposition lies in customer's experience inside the shopping mall. The target segment aims at providing an ideal shopping experience for the consumer based on the advantages of large-scale purchases, consumer preference analysis, excellent ambience and choice of merchandise. Our product helps in providing every aspect of above-mentioned factors.
The USP's of our product includes:

  • The product serves an already existing need of the retailer.
  • Our product will provide them a competitive advantage.
  • The product is well compatible with the existing CRM systems and ERP systems in place.
  • Also, once the product is manufactured in-house it will also give the cost advantage.
  • The flexibility of designing also gives an opportunity to extend product features as and when required.
  • It shall reduce the number of employees and the corresponding costs thereby eliminating error due to human hands and the hassles of queuing.

How?

The team envisages to start with the most eminent and the most visited malls in the metropolitans as the retail market is more affluent in these cities. The compatibility with the existing systems, flexibility in designing and the cost-effectiveness of the product would be emphasized upon. Once the idea has been successfully implemented there, the next step would be to launch the product in a spendthrift manner in the other upcoming cities so as to reach every potential nook and corner. This would be done by presenting the product at business exhibitions, contacting the retail shops and full- fledged marketing by advertising through press and other media. Since the retail market is spread over a wide spectrum of sectors like : Apparel Chains, Groceries, Book Stores, Music and video libraries, different sets of the product with special modifications aimed at the corresponding sectors would be manufactured and promoted at the same time. Also the initial subscribers would be given special benefits.

Conclusion

The team envisages challenges in exploiting efficient product development and marketing strategies.This idea carries a huge future potential since it is directed towards the fastest growing sector- The retail sector. Moreover, with hardware costs dropping day by day and increasing retailer's expenditure on customer service, we anticipate a huge demand.