How Skechers Is Picking Up Pace

With the objective of positioning Skechers as an athletic and fashionwear brand, Soumen Das, Senior Marketing Manager, Skechers India, is strategically communicating through product-based campaigns to build awareness and create engagement for the wide range of products in India

- Dipali Banka

Q] FIFA World Cup is on and we are seeing a lot of branding from Adidas and Puma. We are not seeing Skechers, though. Why is that so?

We are a six-year-old brand in India. So, we are still fairly new in this market. We have opened around 166 retail outlets till date in India, and market-wise we are present in 60 odd markets if you consider our retail stores. More than 120-130 markets are multi-brand operators (MBOs) and multi-platform with dealer distributor networks. So, while you see a lot of other brands and you are just perhaps starting to see Skechers because we are picking up pace slowly and steadily, as we are new. Whatever initiatives and campaigns we have done so far, has worked extremely well for us in terms of our sales figures. So yes, visibility and awareness is something that we are chasing and working on with that objective for our campaigns.

Q] How effective has your recent campaign ‘Beat my Speed’ been? What is the awareness quotient that you have derived from the campaign?

One of the insights that we had for the campaign was that people were not aware of the brand Skechers in this country and they had not used our products. One of our biggest USPs is the range of products we have. So, we decided to take our products to the consumer for them to experience, because we have seen that anyone who uses a pair of Skechers, buys a pair of Skechers. So, the whole initiative of ‘Beat my Speed’ was to get people to experience our latest running shoe GoRun 6 which was launched in April where we challenged them to run in a particular speed in our shoe, and if they could attain it, there was a possibility of them winning a free pair of shoes. It garnered great response, especially in Delhi and Kolkata, where we did a big event around this particular activation. We also saw an increase of about 30-40% in the online user generated content on our performance category pages.