Google News
spot_img

Imagica: Providing an innovative FEC experience to consumers of all ages

Must Read
Sandeep Kumar
Sandeep Kumar
A multimedia journalist with over eleven years of experience in print and digital media, Sandeep Kumar is assistant editor with Images Group. Books, retail, sports and cinema are an inextricable part of his life.

Adlabs Entertainment Ltd has created India’s first family holiday destination of international standards, Imagica, a 130-acre theme park in Khopoli. Imagica is a complete entertainment destination present in a single location comprising of theme park, water park, and snow park. It has 21,000 sq. ft. retail space that encompasses the 13 stores and 7 kiosks present across all the parks combined, thereby providing cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints. The park has an estimated daily capacity of 15,000 visitors.

The brand, whose tagline is Badi Interesting Jagah Hai! works towards providing a truly innovative experience to people of all ages.

Unique Experiences

“Adopting a guest-oriented approach has converted our guests into our ambassadors to such an extent that we don’t need celebrities endorsing us. Year-on-year, we have firmly stood by the belief that a business is only as strong as the guest experience. We have taken various steps to work towards delivering moments of magic for our guests at every step such that our in-store experiences are tailored to delivering customer delight. At Imagica, we have created opportunities to make experiences immersive, which drives engagement and inspires the imagination of visitors,” says Dhimant Bakshi, Jt. CEO, Adlabs Entertainment Ltd.

Imagica creates unique experiences via:

Store Design and Format: 

Thematic Imagica Main Retail Store: This is replete with colourful and thematic flow units, vibrant color coded visual merchandising, which is mapped to theme park aesthetics

Ride Exit Store: This helps guests re-live their experience of thrill and adventure through merchandise designed specifi cally for that ride/ attraction with a conveniently placed store at the ride exit

Facilities Provided:
Digi Photo: Post-ride video screens present at the ride exit store exhibiting snapshot of the guests latest thrill/adventure ride climax as cameras are not permissible aboard the rides, enabling them to choose their images quickly and efficiently, make the purchase and walk away with this memorabilia

Easy Delivery System: The focus here is to deliver a convenient frictionless customer service to the visitors who make purchases at the numerous stores/kiosks across the park. The entire purchase can becollected at the Imagica’s main retail store or delivered at a designated location near the front entrance by the visitor before leaving the park.

Marketing Activities:
Experiential Selling: Designed retail experiences to comprehend the end benefit by allowing trial of products e.g. hand water fans during summers, glow-in-dark products during evening or night time etc.

Spin-O-Wheel: Visitors stand a chance to win quirky merchandise by spinning a wheel placed outside Imagica’s main retail store

Share-&-Win: Guests at the park need to post a picture with their respective retail merchandise/products on their social media platforms tagging Imagica, gather 150 likes and stand a chance to win a free gift

Lucky Draw – Full Paisa Vasool: On any given day, one lucky guest wins merchandise that is worth the ticket price they purchased by filling a voucher and dropping it off in the drop-box placed in the main retail store

Key to Success
The current Indian retail market is highly competitive in nature and majority of the Indian retailers are continuously aiming to improve customer loyalty by offering good service.

“In order to deliver the best customer experience, while also turning a profit, it is vitally important for us to optimise on-shelf availability and get the replenishment right. Imagica’s key to success is having the right product for sale to a shopper, in a place where they expect it and at the time they want to buy it. But at the same time, we also struggle to reduce the costs in order to stay competitive. Essentially in retail chains, the number of SKUs to be replenished typically ranges from several hundred thousand to tens of millions. This means that manually reviewing every order line is impossible.

This entails a complex process affected by many independent factors including suppliers, retailers, warehouses and stores associated with Imagica,” explains Bakshi.

Imagica has worked towards creating an adaptive, intelligent supply chain that helps remove the uncertainty, risk and complexity of demand planning, pricing and replenishment to deliver impressive returns and deliver the best customer experiences by leveraging the Automatic Store Replenishment tool. This tool provides them with a competitive edge by ensuring availability of the product in storage of the varied delivery locations within the park premises and the flexibility to determine when to replenish them.

Pricing

Theme parks are a capital intensive business hence budget allocation towards the retail unit is planned efficiently in order for it to be effective.

“We need metrics that track not only return on investment but return on experience and return on learning. Our customer demographic reveals relatively low spend threshold as their primary purpose of visit are the rides/ attractions while shopping is secondary priority. Therefore we have to work a lot harder to increase our revenue. Hence, we continuously strive towards offering exciting and international standard merchandise at Indian prices to bridge the gap.

Pricing strategy implemented within in-park stores and offline channels is post understanding the current market trends, benchmarking price across brands and categories and then arriving at a pricing tier almost at par to private labels of leading Indian retailers,” says Bakshi.

Marketing & Promotional Campaigns

Following efforts, several retail marketing and promotional campaigns were undertaken in the past year where brand tie-ups and exploring licensing avenues were instrumental in showcasing Imagica retail merchandise.

Within the park premises, tactical strategies implemented were up selling of coupons, Spin-o-Wheel, Share-&-Win, full paisa vasool vouchers. The kid-friendly theme park, launched Chhota Bheem – The Ride, in May 2018, which created a buzz among the 2-14 year old kid’s category which also helped in driving sales and footfalls to the park.

“Key activations that have paved the way for our merchandise to reach our target audience outside the park are via participation in BTL activations like the India licensing Expo 2018 and a Kids fashion week and Kids festivals. Hamleys in-store sales led activations where on purchase of any Imagica product within the store, customers get the Buy1, Get 1 free ticket that indirectly stimulates visit and footfalls to park and store,” says Bakshi. Aside from this, e-commerce marketing campaigns like banners on all the leading e-commerce sites with promotional offers were also activated.

“For 2019, we are focusing towards retail expansion via brand and character licensing and building further brand associations that will help maximize our reach and penetration into unchartered territory,” said Bakshi.

Growth and Achievements

Imagica Retail has exhibited a growth of over 3 percent till date versus previous. In addition, several valuable brand associations have been built upon starting of this year. The brands include

Speedo, Chhota Bheem, HB
Leisure, House of Stars, Mattel, Havmor and Edutainment. These brands contributed to 6.5 percent growth in revenue since their in-park placements starting April 2018. Recent alliances that have been built are across varied categories for development, manufacturing distribution of Imagica co-branded products with reputed brands such as WelSpun, Yedaz (Shemaroo), Mars Chocolate and Cello(back to school range).

Omnichannel Strategy
“We understand that the modern consumer is no longer a single-channel shopper and have therefore devised devise an Omnichannel strategy that connects us with our core and target customers as they move between retail channels and touch points. Even though our primary sale of merchandise is from our three parks, we are present in all the major e-commerce websites so that all our customers can have an integrated customer experience.

The end objective is to extend the experience beyond our park, penetrate every urban household through Imagica branded merchandise,” says Bakshi.

Expansion Plans

One of the key objectives is to scale the popularity of 18 of Imagica’s own IP characters called Stars of Imagica. Aside from this, the brand is constantly evaluating and exploring avenues to reach out to masses. In order to break through the clutter and make the brand more visible to the customers, Imagica is moving towards character brand licensing which is a proven method for product branding.

Latest News

Toys“R”Us to open up to 50 stores in India in 3 years: Nitin Chhabra, Ace Turtle

The company plans to open 12 Toys“R”Us stores in 2024 and 100 in five years, as per Nitin Chhabra...