Carpets and rugs are an integral part of India.

Since the Mughal period India gained

prominence in Carpet weaving and the Indian carpet weavers are renowned for their
exquisite designs, elegance, attractive colors and workmanship.
This is evident from the amount of carpet exports from India (to quote approx. INR
8500 crores worth of Carpets were exported all over the world in 2014-15). Yet the
local demand of carpets is not much (a mere INR 76 crore worth of carpets sold in
2015 in India).
Slowly this situation is changing due to increasing disposable incomes and growing
urbanization along with various industry factors and changing consumer
preferences. By 2020, sales in India is estimated to grow to around INR 100 crores.

In order to gain a better understanding on the carpet business and what exactly
drives an Indian customer in choosing a carpet, we conducted a primary research
and an extensive secondary research.
We gathered some major insights from our research pertaining to Jaipur RugsFirst, Indian consumers are not educated about the effort that goes into making a
hand-made rug by weavers. We need to educate the consumer about our brand and
also create awareness about hand-made rugs.
Second, Rugs are still not the top priority for Indian consumers while doing the
interiors of their homes. We need to change the buying behavior and create an
emotional connect.
Also, some other insights include - difficulty in cleaning rugs, fear of spoilage by
kids or pets and
increased use of wooden flooring that further discourages rug
buying.
To tackle this, initially we segmented the customers based on awareness and
willingness levels and then designed our campaigns accordingly. We suggest some
Below the line campaigns which use social media buzz, word of mouth and offline
marketing as channels and also we suggest a few Above the line campaigns which
involve Digital ads and Search Engine Optimization.
Also we proposed campaigns on increasing foot-fall to the Jaipur Rugs store while
increasing the in-store conversion.

One major campaign suggested by our team is Konnecting-Knots which is a

campaign that directly engages with the existing consumers, who then become the
believers and promoters of the brand. This campaign influences buying tendencies
in the peers via increased social media activity by the existing customers. This
campaign also increases the buyer-weaver engagement and with increased
engagement through this campaign, buyers will be proud to be associated with
Jaipur rugs foundation.

Next campaigns involve tying up with major home-improvement stores, furnishing

agencies and premium paints which reward their customers with special coupons of
Jaipur rugs. Also we propose to feature in concept living rooms in major dcor stores
to increase visibility and thereby awareness of Jaipur rugs.
Some other campaigns include engagement with art lovers, customer referrals,
trade exhibitions etc.
Also we have suggested some recommendations to improve online presence of
Jaipur rugs such as being present on blogging and review websites such as quora
and also expanding its presence on aggregators websites such as fabfurnish,
urbanladder, riseonly etc. along with communicating the value proposition of Jaipur
rugs.
Also we suggested some recommendations to improve offline presence such as Art
exhibitions, trade shows, Guest lectures, Design events etc.
Finally, some interesting campaigns such as setting up photo booth in store to
improve store foot-fall and playing short videos featuring the story of Jaipur rugs to
educate the visitors thereby improving store conversions.
We could also customize our offerings based upon customer requests through
online. So customer sends his design through online and immedietly with in lead
time Jaipur rugs will deliver the rug to customer
We could also chalk out the execution plan of proposed campaigns for stores.
Through our campaigns we expect to reach 18 million people. Expecting whole
industry will capture 1% of these 18 million people which comes as 0.18 million
customers. Since the rug industry is very framgmented and each player has market
share less than 5%. By assuming Jaipur rugs market share to be 4%, we found total
target sales would be around 7200 Carpets. Also, as part two of our cost benefit
analysis, we have computed the total marketing cost as 4.36 Cr which is well
near by target budget of 4 Cr. By taking proxy of luxury furniture industry we have
found targeted profits that can be earned is around 10 Cr.