Building on its active initiatives in social and content commerce, e-commerce platform Myntra recently hosted the Creator Fest, bringing together multiple influencers and creators under one roof.

According to Arun Devanathan - Senior Director, Social Commerce, Myntra, social commerce is here to stay as a larger trend in the world of marketing and the importance of content-led marketing, influencer marketing and creator-led marketing is continuing to increase.

Sharing more on the insight behind the Creator Fest, he said, “It becomes very critical to build a strong connect with the Creator ecosystem, to work with creators on an ongoing basis and to learn and figure out how to make content that really works for you. The idea was to kind of really celebrate all the work we've been doing with the creator ecosystem, bring all our creators together and talk a bit about you know what our plans for next year.”

The Rise of Social & Content Commerce

Social and Content commerce has three major stakeholders involved: the brands, the creators and the audiences. The influencers and creators who create content and interact with audiences, the second is the audiences who believe that this is something valuable and an interesting way to shop and third is the brands who are going to leverage social commerce as a platform to engage with audiences and build it both as engagement and a sales channel.

Throwing light on how this works well for Myntra as an aggregator platform, Devanathan shared, “One way to think of it is there are traditional models of e-commerce where a customer might open a website or app look for a product they want to buy, find it and you know, purchase it. What social commerce is doing is saying that you can have social-led product discovery and purchases where I look at a nice piece of content and that's how I find the product and purchase so to that extent, as a platform, social commerce is a very natural fit for Myntra. It is almost an extension of what we already do as an e-commerce player.”

The Way Forward

One of the major insights behind the recently hosted creator fest was also to explore the ways the brand is going to look at and scale social and content commerce going ahead. Sharing the plans of how Myntra is going to scale up, Devanathan shared three main focus areas. The first will be expanding the creator programs to the beauty and personal care category. The second big focus area is connecting with Gen Z audiences and creators while the third is making the whole creator ecosystem accessible to regional audiences.

Sharing more on this, Devanathan added, “The brand aims to bring in 80+ beauty enthusiasts which include both content creators on beauty as well as experts like makeup artists, and dermatologists so that we can create really comprehensive content which is not just entertaining but also has an expert point of view built into it. For the second focus area, Myntra already has a campus ambassador program where we work with budding young creators from the campuses of India and we will be taking that program and scaling it up a notch by taking the top creators from the campus program and inducting them into our style squad which will give them the opportunity to work with us on a long term basis and become professional content creators. For the regional part of things, we are creating content in regional languages, bringing in creators from beyond the metros from the small towns and cities of India because they bring their own unique perspectives on fashion and beauty and their local trends and create content that really appeals to that specific cohort of audiences.”

Aligning with the three major focus areas, Devanathan also emphasised the fact that Tier 2 and 3 cities and GenZ are going to be the main showrunners in scaling e-commerce models and especially fashion adoption. He added, “Non-metro markets are a big focus area in terms of future growth, both, at an e-commerce level and at social commerce. Something like live shopping is getting picked up in a more aggressive way by non-metro audiences. Similarly, the early adoption of social commerce is definitely happening a lot in the Gen Z cohort. We're seeing Gen Z be the first adopters of social commerce, which is reflected in our future plan to therefore bring in more Gen Z influencers and really double down on that.”