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October 7, 2026
Vidya Sathyapriyan, ET Brand Equity
7 October 2026
Every single month, leather-goods brand Hidesign changes the storefront of its airport stores. The reason: “You can’t bore the man or woman who’s coming to the airport every week,” says founder Dilip Kapur.
But then what makes the airport shopper any different from someone walking into a high-street or mall store? Affluent? Sure. Willing to spend? Mostly. Time-poor and seeking convenience? Definitely.
That mix presents a particular challenge for brands: understanding what and why travellers will buy, and how quickly they can buy it.
Some have learnt to make the often lopsided economics work. Others are running an expensive billboard with a billing counter attached.
Crunching Numbers
The economics are punishing.
Airport rents, minimum guarantees, revenue-share, staffing and operating costs can make them significantly more expensive than conventional retail. For example, a good mall in Chennai charges roughly Rs. 350-800 per sq ft monthly in retail rent, compared with Rs. 150-200 per sq. ft. on the high street. Airport rentals can rise to as much as Rs. 6,000 per sq. ft. Similar differentials play out in other major cities.
Yet brands keep signing on because the alternative would be an advertising site with no retail attached. “A hoarding is for all and sundry and 1D,” says S. Shriram, founder of Miles2Go Consulting Services. “In the airport, captive audience, engagement is 3D and sometimes even 4D – touch and feel, trial, buy, and even return elsewhere.”
For deep-pocketed brands, spending on airport visibility can be justified even when store-level profitability is modest or even non-existent. Others gotta move on.
Go Colors, for instance, is rationalising stores at airports where the economics are not working. “The opportunity remains strong, but the location must justify the cost of access to the consumer,” says CMO Vatsal Koolwal. “As a broad benchmark, rentals in the range of 15-20% of revenue can work, provided the rest of the cost structure is managed effectively.”
The right sell
Six of Hidesign’s top-10 stores in India are at airports, says Kapur. The average Hidesign airport store generates roughly twice the turnover of an average mall store, while its smaller footprint pushes sales per square foot even higher.
A key reason is the skew in merchandise mix towards gifting.
Around 40% of the products sold in Hidesign’s airport stores are gifts. “If you have a product which can be gifted, can be purchased quickly and is work-oriented, you’ve covered most of the problematic variables.”
An overwhelming majority of domestic air travellers are men, who may not spend two hours browsing a mall, but can quickly buy a premium handbag for someone back home. Time is their scarcest resource, not money.
“Those are breaks (from routine). These are things that they would normally not have time to do,” adds Forest Essentials executive director Samrath Bedi on why premium skincare too commands attention in an airport environment.
But categories such as perfumes, cosmetics, watches, sunglasses, travel accessories and bags have an obvious advantage – they can be bought quickly and generally don’t require fitting rooms or extensive trial. As Pravat Paikray, VP-Commercial, Bangalore International Airport, says, these “one-size-fits-all” categories perform well.
Right-Sizing
Apparel, jewellery and other categories involving multiple sizes, fits or lengthy considerations have a harder job.
“Standalone apparel and niche lifestyle stores would typically be loss-making,” says founder, Third Eyesight, Devangshu Dutta.
Shriram believes even these categories are being held back by conventional merchandising assumptions. He points out that a business traveller does not necessarily need another blazer simply because they are at an airport. What they may need is a pair of track pants for an overnight trip, a gift for someone at home, or a product they discover while waiting for a flight.
For instance, Ramraj Cotton’s proposition works partly because of its local-brand resonance and partly because of its gifting-driven merchandising. “There are a lot of combos which work very well for gifting,” says Radhakrishnan. He says passengers are usually concerned about weight restrictions, so the store even repackages the items as per requirement. The brand declined Brand Equity’s interview request.
Airport merchandise can carry a 20-40% premium, he says, because the customer is paying partly for convenience. The traveller does not necessarily want to step out into the city just to save a few hundred rupees.
Front of the Queue
Paikray says Bengaluru airport explicitly designs its retail proposition around this time constraint. Brands are expected to adapt their store design, assortment, staffing, service and operations rather than simply transplanting their city format. “If a brand has 100 stores, don’t come and open 101st store in an airport, ” he says.
For Forest Essentials, what changes is also the reason the consumer is being shown the product, says Bedi. Hydration for flying, sleep on long journeys, stress relief, gifting, replenishment, etc. “It’s just about how you angle it.”
Bengaluru airport is also lowering the barriers for brands to test the market by using pop-up stores to let newer brands test travel retail without committing to long-term contracts.
Paikray says challenger and D2C brands are increasingly considering airports earlier in their expansion journeys.
But the opportunity is not on auto-pilot. Only those who adapt can turn the minutes before boarding into something more valuable than visibility – a sale.
(Published in ET Brand Equity)
Devangshu Dutta
June 8, 2010
REVIEW: FLIP THE FUNNEL: Joseph Jaffe (John Wiley & Sons)
I’ve read Joseph Jaffe’s book across multiple air journeys, nationally and internationally. I agreed with the principles described and saw parallels with excellent services businesses over the past few years. However, the implications didn’t quite strike me in the gut until I realised – while writing this on board an aircraft – that the journeys I had taken with this book had also been with just one airline.
My loyalty to this airline is not because of the mileage card I hold, although their mileage programme is certainly among the best in the world. It is not because they were the cheapest or the most on-time, though they compete favourably with other comparable airlines.
My loyalty to them is because of what they did during the Mumbai floods in July 2005. Those who remember the chaos, through personal experience or through media, wouldn’t blame airline staff for abandoning their counters, and leaving the airport to try and reach home as early as they could. Certainly most of them must have felt helpless in the face of increasingly desperate passengers who couldn’t expect to depart any time soon. Jet Airways stood out as being the only one in Mumbai’s Terminal 1-B whose team felt responsible enough to stay back at the airport to be available to the passengers. Not only did they ensure that the passengers stuck in the terminal were safe, but that all waiting passengers got three meals a day! Whether or not they were flying with Jet Airways.
Now, in telling you about incident, I have closed the loop and given you a living example of the “flipped funnel” that Jaffe describes in the book.
The normal marketing funnel is described by the process Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action (or “AIDA”) which underlies the spray-and-pray approach of traditional marketing. The result of AIDA is that a lot of customers become aware of a business, brand or product. Some are interested enough to seek out the product. However the number who move on to the next stage of actually expressing desire to buy is lower, and those who actually buy are fewer still, as amply demonstrated by carts being abandoned before actually checking out.
Jaffe points out that the AIDA principle was created in times of abundant growth in the US, but is a suicidal funnel to fall into when resources are scarce. It is lopsided, with more money being spent on customers who will not buy. It is linear and does not capture the complexity of buying behaviour. It is open and incomplete because it only handles potential customers up to the point where they become actual customers, but does nothing with them thereafter. AIDA also inherently assumes customer churn, hence the opening focus on creating awareness among potentially new customers.
The alternative principles Jaffe describes are simple: getting more customers to buy from us and more often (repeat purchases), to spend increasing amounts with us (loyalty), and finally, to recommend us to their friends and associates (referrals). However, to do this requires dramatically different thinking from AIDA spray-and-pray. Jaffe’s alternative model – ADIA (Acknowledgment, Dialogue, Incentivisation and Activation) – focuses on customers more than prospects.
Acknowledging customers itself is such a major stumbling block for so many companies, such as the retailer whose front-line staff would prefer to fold and put away garments than meeting the eyes of the customer who has walked into the store. In some cases it may be about using technology effectively rather than as a barrier. When the taxi company can recognise the number you are calling from and close your order in less than 120 seconds, why does the telephone company that issued that number make you jump through burning hoops for 5-10 minutes before they will allow you to request a duplicate bill?
That acknowledgement should lead to an on-going dialogue, before, through and well after the purchase is done. This would be supported by constant incentives for the customer to buy more from you. It is not about having a loyalty programme, as Jaffe quotes studies that demonstrate that loyalty programmes alone don’t produce loyalty; in fact there are enough businesses that do not run loyalty schemes but have what can only be called fan followings.
The final link in that funnel is building that community of evangelist enthusiasts who will carry your brand message farther and far more effectively than any traditional form of marketing could. Religious organisations have known this for thousands of years – it is high time that businesses and other organisations recognised the power of the community as well.
Jaffe acknowledges that Seth Godin actually came up with the term “flipping the funnel” over 3 years ago, when he released the e-book of that name (available on sethgodin.typepad.com) primarily about using social media effectively. Jaffe, to his credit, has applied the principles more fully across the marketing and customer service process.
Jaffe recently sold his business, crayon, but has kept his title “Chief Interruptor” at the acquiring company. If you want to make your marketing really pay, you’ll find it worthwhile letting “Flip the Funnel” interrupt your normal marketing thought-process.
(This review was written for Businessworld.)
