To take on a number of opportunities in the digital space, homegrown consumer goods company Marico is in plans to create a number of brands purely for online sales over the next few years.
“For consumer packaged goods (CPG), digitisation is more of an opportunity rather than a disruption threat. While CPG has been lagging in digitisation, I think there is huge opportunities not just for productivity and efficiency but also for long-term growth,” Marico MD & CEO Saugata Gupta has been quoted to have said.
Later, he said that Marico is viewing digitisation as an opportunity for accelerating growth rather than a disruption.
“We recently launched a brand internally to test this market. What we intend to do in future is actually have a series of digital brands which will be only in e-commerce and limited physical availability at modern trade. We advertised this brand 100 per cent non-mass,” he added.
The city-based compay recently launched a meal replacement beverage Saffola Nutri-Shake that is a digital- only product, he informed.
Marico, which sells hair oil brands like Parachute and Nihar, has created a new team internally called the Engine 2 that will enable it to create and incubate new categories.
“It is at the preliminary stage of digitisation. As far as revenue generation is concerned, we are setting up a new team that will work in a different way, by experimenting with some horizon projects of tomorrow. The risk appetite will be higher there,” he added.
He also informed that between now and the next two-three years, Marico may start a lot of initiatives, some of them of which will be digital brands, while the others will be disruptive.
