None of us had expected the lockdown to last for over 3 months; the fight against Covid-19 has only united us and in a way and has prepped us all to adapt to the many ‘new normals’ that it brought with itself.
The nation-wide lockdown is slowly being lifted across orange and green zones and life is slowly crawling back to a new-normalcy.
Businesses and brands are now are making their way back into the business; planning their communication plans for a new world post the covid-19 lockdown, while keeping a note of some of the new buzz words such as ‘social distancing’, ‘work from home’ and the latest one; ‘atmanirbhar’.
In this story of Medianews4u’s brand series, Back to Business, we spoke to Pratap Kamath, Managing Director of Abaran Timeless Jewellery.
Read on.
How are you coping with the impact of Covid-19 on your Abaran Timeless Jewellery? How effectively have you used the lockdown period?
The lockdown period was a great learning experience. Monday to Friday for seven weeks De Beers-Forevermark organized learning sessions (webinars) for 2 hours for all our team members. Topics varied from soft skills, sales, product information, future of retail…etc. Also, the lockdown helped me understand the power and strength of e-commerce and social media and we are currently focusing to strengthen our presence.
The quest for a solution to a particular crisis helps invent new business opportunities and sometimes leads to a revision of existing business models … What sort of innovation has or will the Covid-19 pandemic bring to your brand/industry/category?
Online presence and E-commerce are going to be major streams for sales. Also, the in-store experience will be a lot different compared to pre covid. To enhance the in-store shopping experience we have installed touch screen kiosks to browse products, handheld tablets given to all sales staff to assist customers with billing, video conferencing for remote buying, and home delivery of products.
What will be your communication strategy post the opening of the lockdown? Understandably bringing customers back to you would be difficult… What will be the objective of the communication/marketing strategy?
Informing customers of our safe and secure environment and promoting the in-store and remote buying facilities being provided by us. More focus will be on social media and online.
How did you keep the morale of the employees during this lockdown period? On a personal note, what kept you positive?
Online webinars to enhance and brush up skills.We gave full salaries/wages for the lockdown period.
What are some of the post-lockdown business strategies that you will use to bring the business back on track or at least get it in the right direction and also create demand for yourself?
Focus on a safe and secure environment for staff and customers. Online sales. More focus on social media marketing. Enhancing the in-store experience with touch screen kiosks and implementing more technology to reduce multiple staff touchpoints.
