Uniqlo India Bets on Brand Over Performance Marketing

Seven years, 20 stores, and roughly Rs 1,192.8 crore in estimated revenue (per Tracxn) later, Uniqlo India is still describing itself as a brand in the awareness-building phase. In an interview with ETBrandEquity.com, Nidhi Rastogi, marketing director at Uniqlo India, put a number on it: awareness among the brand’s relevant audience is around 59%, with plenty of headroom left.

That single admission is more interesting than it looks. Most brands at that stage of profitability quietly shift budget into performance marketing and start optimising for cost per click. Uniqlo is doing the opposite.

Why the touch-and-feel insight changed the copy

Rastogi’s most quotable observation is behavioural, not commercial. Indian shoppers, she says, love to touch and feel fabric — a habit she notes is far less visible in markets like Japan, where she has lived. In stores, customers rub linen between their fingers, inspect knitwear, and form a quality judgement before they look at the price tag.

Uniqlo took that ritual and rebuilt its communication around it. Instead of trend-led fashion messaging, the brand now explains the engineering: why linen, why AIRism, why Heattech, why Pufftech.

This is a textbook case of matching message to processing mode. When consumers evaluate haptically, abstract lifestyle advertising underperforms — the shopper is already in a diagnostic mindset. Feeding that mindset with material and technology stories reduces perceived risk and, crucially, justifies a premium without a discount war. Uniqlo is price-conscious-friendly without competing on price, which is the hardest position in Indian retail to hold.

Relevance beats CPM: the deliberate trade-off

Connected TV CPMs are typically higher than most digital inventory. Rastogi’s answer is that reaching the right audience matters more than optimising the cost metric, and that Uniqlo’s investments lean towards brand building rather than performance because it is a retail-first business, not a D2C one.

That distinction deserves attention from founders. D2C economics reward attribution because the entire funnel lives inside a browser. Retail-first economics reward mental availability — the customer has to think of you before they walk into the mall. Optimising a retail brand’s spend on last-click logic systematically underfunds the very thing that fills the store.

The loyalty flywheel behind the numbers

The data Rastogi shared explains why first trial is the obsession:

• Repeat purchase is strong — people who buy once tend to return, making the first purchase the critical hurdle.
• Around 15% of revenue is online; 85% comes from stores.
• App users shop roughly three to four times a year versus once a year for non-app customers.
• Gen Z’s first purchase frequently happens through e-commerce, making digital an acquisition channel rather than a sales channel.
• The stated KPI is not conversions but “creating fans”.

Read that sequence as a funnel design: brand media creates awareness, e-commerce lowers the friction of first trial, the app converts triers into habitual buyers, and stores capture the bulk of revenue. Each channel has a distinct psychological job. Very few Indian retailers articulate this that cleanly.

Localisation without fragmentation

The city-level insight is a useful counter to lazy localisation. Heattech sells strongly in Mumbai — not because of weather, but because of travel demand during the festive and winter season. Delhi over-indexes on jeans, shirts and non-iron shirts; Mumbai on sweatshirts and AIRism tees.

Uniqlo does not change the product. It changes the emphasis — which SKUs get front-of-store, which get the media weight. New store planning uses first-party e-commerce demand data for that catchment, so no two stores are stocked identically.

Three takeaways for marketers

First, find your category’s equivalent of the fabric touch — the physical or cognitive ritual customers use to judge quality — and build your messaging into it.

Second, decide honestly whether you are a D2C brand or a retail-first brand before you set your brand-versus-performance split. The metric that flatters you is rarely the metric that grows you.

Third, treat localisation as merchandising and media weighting, not as a reason to build a hundred separate campaigns.

The rest of the season is calendar-heavy: Jasprit Bumrah and Kriti Sanon front the fall-winter campaign, followed by LifeWear Day in Delhi, the Arigato Festival in November and a holiday campaign in December — plus an AI try-on booth and continued Metro Wrap activations. Plenty of activity. But the strategic bet is simpler than all of it: get the remaining 41% to know who you are first.

Source: ETBrandEquity.com