The next time you visit your neighbourhood grocery store or call the corner shop for a home delivery, don’t be surprised if your grocery shopkeeper remembers what you ordered the last time and reminds you to restock your Kissan Jam or your detergent and toiletries supply as they are running out and he has an offer. All this and more will soon be possible as the country’s largest consumer packaged goods company, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), is re-imagining the way we shop at neighbourhood stores.
Spread across 600,000 villages and 10 million outlets, general trade will continue to remain big in the next 10 years, HUL said in a presentation on its website on 6 June where it outlined Project Maxima, which is focused on precision marketing at scale.
The re-imagining of its supply chain and corner shop strategy is part of the company’s bigger initiative undertaken over the last four years for its entire
business with initiatives like Winning in Many Indias (WiMi), which divides the country into 14 zones. Also, management is decentralized with the formation of Cluster Category Business Teams, which are mini-boards for brand building and marketing.
Under Project Maxima, HUL is able to do targeted marketing within 100m of a grocery shop, which it will geofence for distributed marketing and offering. The company plans to extract details such as who visited the grocery store over the last three months, what they bought and when they are likely to buy next time, it said.
