Digital influence on Indian urban consumers rises up to 70 pc: Report

Digital influence on urban consumers has increased by 70 percent for mobiles, around 60 percent for apparel, and up to 25 percent for the non-food consumer packaged goods categories due to COVID-19-induced changes, new reports from Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group said on Wednesday.
The results showed that 90 percent of consumers who have purchased apparel online during the lockdown show willingness to continue.
Within consumer packaged goods, this figure is 80 percent for food-related sub-categories, and 84 percent for non-food related sub-categories.
Furthermore, the reports revealed that people intend to explore online channels a lot more for purchasing smartphones, consumer packaged goods, and apparel in the coming six months.
For instance, 55 percent intend to increase online spending for mobile phones in the next six months, the research showed.
“Across mobile, apparel and CPG, we are observing changes in how and what consumers buy. We expect the online sales market for mobiles to touch 45 percent in the next 2 years,” said Nimisha Jain, Managing Director and Partner, Boston Consulting Group.
The findings were revealed during a virtual event and panel discussion attended by several leaders of India Inc, and saw businesses such as Samsung India, Mondelez India, and Big Bazaar, all of which have deep offline retail networks, throw light on how they have leveraged digital in these times.
“We know that digital influence has significantly increased across the path-to-purchase – up to 70 percent for some categories. We are now seeing businesses convert this increased digital influence into tangible business outcomes,” said Sandeep Bhushan, Director and Head, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook India.
“A significant digital acceleration has happened on the back of social media, and with 400M+ Indians connected on the Facebook family of apps in India, we play a consequential role in the consumer journey.”
The reports also pointed out that some of these trends are here to stay even beyond the pandemic.
“As India’s largest consumer electronics company, we have taken the onus to create new shopper journeys to aid physical distancing by leveraging our digital technologies with our deep retail presence in India. Facebook is our partner in this journey of helping our retail channel discover and target local consumers digitally,” said Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Samsung India.
“In addition, we have enabled consumers to purchase our mobile and electronic products online, whilst getting the deliveries offline from their neighborhood Samsung retail stores.”
The findings are based on primary and secondary research conducted by BCG India.