With the advent of the Great Indian Wedding Carnival, the glitz sellers are going all guns blazing to occupy a chunk of the ever growing Indian Jewelery Market.
The Indian Wedding Carnival is an offering promoted by Leading Jewelers of the World (LJOW), bringing major Indian players – Gili, Nakshatra, D’damas, Asmi, Diya, Sangini etc under a common promotional campaign, of offering ‘attractive prizes/discounts‘ on purchase of jewelery from any of the above branded jewelery showrooms.
All the players have launched TVCs advertising the same, most with new campaigns, featuring bollywood divas as the brand ambassadors( Kareena Kapoor endorses Gitanjali Jewels Retail and Parineeta, Priyanka Chopra endorses Asmi, along with Bipasha Basu for Gili, Katrina Kaif for Nakshatra and so on). Every brand-specific commercial is followed by a short message about the Wedding Carnival promotion. (Couldn’t find a video clip of the commercials yet, will post asap).
A word about the campaigns: the ads are all themed quite similarly, showcasing a bejeweled actress, dancing around in sepia-toned backgrounds! The ads lack differentiation, and I find it difficult to believe that the customer would have a strong enough individual brand recall (ability to recall a brand name AND the corresponding campaign).
The jewelery market in India has some peculiarities of its own. Here, it is the local unorganized retailers who hold a strong share. The traditional jewelers, specific to each city command strong customer loyalties, on the strength of years of associations with families. It is a classic case of relationship marketing, where the customer sticks to a specific seller because the seller aims to build a long-standing relation with the customer, customizing the product/service offerings based on experience. (To talk in a bit more jargonized way, it can be said that jewelery is strongly based on experiential marketing, with women always wanting to try it on and see how it looks. The local seller can do that by even making home visits for big customers, something that an organized corporate player would find difficult to do)
The underlying idea of the wedding carnival strategy, hence, is to encourage a shift to ‘branded jewelery‘, bringing in endorsers from Bollywood, and projecting an image of quality and exquisite workmanship. They are trying to beat smaller players on the terms of scale, wherein they can advertise on mass scales, splurging money for designer campaigns. The aim is to expand the organized market pie instead of individual market shares.
Note: Tanishq, from the house of Tata, on the other hand has a different approach. Having brought on Amitabh and Jaya Bacchan as brand ambassadors, they are positioning their brand as the maker of high quality, perfect jewelery, giving more emphasis on diamonds than gold jewelery at the moment. Watch the Tanishq ‘True Diamonds’ campaign below:
Let us see how it turns out for the jewelers of the nation, and whether they are able to conquer the Indian markets.
Ref: The Carnival Website: http://www.weddingcarnival.in/home.html