D2C brands bet big on quick commerce for festive season

As the festive season comes closer, D2C brands are largely allocating marketing budgets to quick commerce this year. While 2023’s festive season was all about retention marketing for these brands, this year with giants like Flipkart foraying into the quick commerce business, and existing players like Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart showing rapid signs of growth, D2C founders are betting big on rapid delivery to outshine competitors and drive sales during this peak shopping period.

A senior executive of a leading D2C wearables brand told e4m that the company has seen higher revenue growth over Blinkit than Amazon, which basically means quick commerce fared better over e-commerce for the brand. “Wearables is something which generally sees an uptick in any case during the festive period. Considering that Blinkit worked way better for us than the e-commerce giants, we decided to go heavy on quick commerce this year,” the person mentioned.

“I think this year the focus is to get the quick commerce business right. Rest everything is on the back burner,” added Deep Bajaj, Co-founder of Sirona. Earlier, for Sirona, the focus was only the marketplace and its own website. This year, as per Bajaj, the order of priority is – marketplace plus quick commerce and then its own website.

According to the founders, till a couple of years ago, new customers would go on e-commerce marketplaces and look for deals, thus the festive period back then became about retaining these new customers and spending more on loyalty schemes. However, they added that existing customers also stall purchases for the festive season.

“What will be interesting this year is to see how quick commerce is bringing a change in consumer behaviour in terms of moving from traditional marketplaces to online to quick commerce transactions. Hence most D2C brands are making quick commerce one of the core focuses this year for festive season, especially with new product launches lined up,” Bajaj explained.

Bharat Bhalla, Co-founder, Yu Foods also added that the brand will anyways be increasing spends with the onboarding of its beverage portfolio on all quick commerce channels this festive season. The brand has recently undertaken a category expansion by entering the hydration category in the beverage segment with the launch of products like coconut water and fruit juices.

“In addition, we have a number of new launches lined up over the next 2 months across all quick commerce channels that will entail us to increase our overall impressions and visibility across channels,” Bhalla further shared. He mentioned that the marketing spend for the brand is commensurate with sales and that Yu Foods has seen over 2.5x increase in revenue across quick commerce.

exchange4media also reported last week that a significant number of D2C players are in active discussions with e-tailer giant Flipkart, to list their SKUs on its latest quick commerce offering called ‘Minutes’. Flipkart piloted the offering starting from Bengaluru, right at the beginning of the festive period and D2C founders are optimistic about a festive spike happening from this partnership.

A heavy marketing investment for this period from D2C brands can be expected on digital, say media planners. Bajaj shared that for Sirona, there are no plans to go with offline marketing for this period and the investment would largely be on digital media with an objective of increasing the quick commerce business.

In a recent interview with exchange4media, Shankar Prasad, CEO and Co-founder of Plum had also shared that the brand will be increasing marketing spends for H2 by 60%. He had added that while digital is still a lot about deploying at the bottom of the funnel, around 25-30% is now being allotted to building brand awareness.