Driving Entrepreneurship and Commerce with Meesho’s Innovative Marketing”

   
•     Team Digitofy
   
•     December 5, 2023

Meesho is an Indian unicorn startup disrupting traditional retail and empowering small businesses and entrepreneurs across India. Founded in 2015 by IIT graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Meesho operates a platform that enables social commerce by allowing resellers, small businesses, and individuals to start their online stores via social channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

About Meesho 

Headquartered in Bengaluru, Meesho has over 100 million users and serves over 100,000 suppliers across India. The company has raised over $1 billion in funding so far from marquee investors like Prosus Ventures, Facebook, Shunwei Capital, and others.

What’s New with Meesho? 

Recently, Meesho expanded into grocery delivery through a pilot in Bengaluru, introducing features like automated bargaining and licenses for resellers. The grocery play pits it directly against giants like BigBasket and JioMart. However, Meesho is betting on its strong community of resellers and small businesses to differentiate itself.

Getting to Know the Meesho User Meesho targets individual resellers, women entrepreneurs, SMBs, and first-time internet users across Tier 2 and beyond towns in India. The users are typically:

• Price conscious
• value convenience and ease of use
• Prefer regional language interfaces
• Have limited capital and inventory

By empowering this user base with a digital platform and logistics support, Meesho wants to drive financial inclusion and independence.

Also, Watch Our YouTube Shorts Video on: Day 13 – The Fastest Way to 50 Crores Downloads – Meesho’s Unbelievable Marketing Strategy

Crafting the Meesho Marketing Mix 

Meesho has crafted an innovative, cost-effective marketing strategy that relies more on word-of-mouth and community building than expensive advertising. Let’s analyze the key elements:

Product Strategy

Demystifying Social Commerce Instead of traditional e-commerce that requires extensive inventories and capital, Meesho leverages a social commerce model. This allows small sellers to launch online stores via social channels like WhatsApp, where they already have an audience. Sellers can share catalogs with customers and manage orders and logistics with Meesho’s tools. This democratizes e-commerce for millions of underserved small businesses.

Price Strategy

Commission-based Model Meesho does not charge any subscription fees or inventory-related costs. Instead, it follows a commission fee model – charging a small percentage as commission on sales through its platform. This creates a win-win where Meesho’s revenue grows when its users grow their business.

Place Strategy

Piggybacking on Existing User Networks an essential aspect of Meesho’s strategy is leveraging its target users’ existing social media networks instead of having to do expensive customer acquisition. Most Meesho resellers already have a steady WhatsApp or Facebook network where they share catalog links. This allows them to keep margins attractive and better compete with offline stores.

Promotions Strategy: Influencer Marketing and Word-of-Mouth

Instead of traditional advertising, Meesho relies heavily on influencer marketing, where it partners with micro and nano influencers on social media to promote Meesho to their followers. Often, these Meesho resellers educate their audience on how they grew their business using such tools.

MEESHO’s Key Competitors 

While social commerce is still an evolving space in India, Meesho does face competition from certain players:

1. Facebook Marketplace – The social media giant introduced this platform to allow buying and selling between users. However, it lacks focused tools for sellers.
2. IndiaMart – This B2B marketplace connects manufacturers with retailers but has a different value proposition than consumer-focused Meesho.
3. Small Offline Stores – For most resellers, the biggest competition is still the corner stores that sell similar products. Meesho helps these sellers compete.

Cracking the Code of Social Commerce 

Meesho has crafted innovative strategies across areas like targeting, product, pricing, and promotions to crack the social commerce opportunity in India, where users still prefer personal touchpoints.

1. Building Tools for the Underserved: While Facebook marketplace attempted social commerce, they did not build robust tools tailored for small sellers. However, Meesho created an ecosystem of tools for aspects like:

• Cataloguing
• Order Management
• Payments
• Logistics

This end-to-end support allows even those with zero e-commerce experience to go online quickly. The regional language support further eases adoption.

2. Keep it Simple & Affordable: Meesho also realized that small businesses have thin margins and thus cannot pay large commissions or subscriptions. By keeping commission rates low and avoiding fixed fees, Meesho allows nano-entrepreneurs to benefit from social commerce.
3. Leveraging Communities: Instead of fighting giants like Amazon or Flipkart head-on, Meesho smartly leveraged its target users’ existing social media networks. This allowed sellers to get discoverable quickly to their connections. Combining this with an influencer & referral strategy, Meesho drove organic growth.

And that brings us to… The Secret of Meesho’s Success

Empowering Nano Entrepreneurs via ‘My Store, My Story’

The turning point for Meesho was the “My Store, My Story” campaign, which further lowered the barriers for any small business or even individuals to become Meesho sellers. These were often people doing small trade or without a formal company.

By simplifying seller onboarding to almost zero fixed costs and tapping into the long tail of informal retail, Meesho enabled a whole new segment to leverage social commerce. These hyperlocal sellers frequently conduct better than formal companies, given their social proximity and context to customers.

This strategy leads to massive word-of-mouth adoption and the fastest rise to 50 crore downloads for any e-commerce company in India. The most admirable aspect was financial inclusion, allowing tiny informal businesses to grow via social commerce. Truly democratizing at scale!

Key Takeaways 

Meesho’s well-crafted strategies around community leverage combined with tools to make social commerce accessible even for nano entrepreneurs is what sets it apart. This has led to meteoric growth significantly beyond Tier 1 cities.

While competition exists, the market is large enough for multiple business models to thrive. However, Meesho has cracked a code to drive massive adoption by opening commerce for the underserved informal economy. Enabling financial inclusion by empowering small businesses to grow online makes them a game-changer.