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Product cover image for From Tradition to Transformation: BigBasket’s Strategic Dilemma in Launching BBDaily Kolkata

From Tradition to Transformation: BigBasket’s Strategic Dilemma in Launching BBDaily Kolkata

Rakesh Kumar Meet, Himanshu Chauhan, Prateek Biswas, Rahul Nainwal, Mysha Vats

Product #:W44546
Supplier:Ivey
Discipline:Marketing, Strategy
Setting:India, 2020
Details:Case (PDF) • 13 pages • 2025-08-01

Subjects:

Sales and marketingMarketingStrategy

Industries:

Goods, trade, and consumer services

Geography:

IndiaAsia
Your Price:$10.54

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As dawn broke over Kolkata—a city steeped in tradition and vibrance—Pritam Biswas reviewed delivery metrics that told a story of unconventional success. Biswas was city head of BigBasket Daily (BBDaily), a new vertical focused on delivering essential items like milk, bread, eggs, snacks, and fresh produce to customers’ doorsteps each morning. By mid-2020, Kolkata’s BBDaily operations broke even with 11,000 daily orders, defying projections and outperforming other cities. Although BBDaily’s subscription-based model for delivering essentials before sunrise faced logistical and market trust challenges, Biswas prioritized business sustainability over scale. Kolkata’s unique cultural ecosystem and Biswas’s adaptive leadership offered a rare win. But could this success be replicated elsewhere without compromising service quality or operational viability?

Learning Objectives

The case is designed for graduate and postgraduate courses that cover strategic marketing, marketing management, entrepreneurship management, and sales and distribution management topics. It can serve as an introduction to the correlation between a company’s performance requirements and a company’s objectives. The case explores the business strategy function within online grocery, Q-commerce, direct-to-consumer, and fast-moving consumer goods companies where technology integration with business operations, consumer engagement, brand building, and promotions is a pivotal requirement. Upon completing the case and its accompanying assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:
  • Assess the customer alignment, scalability, and feasibility of strategic alternatives such as subscription-based models, Q-commerce, and hybrid formats.
  • Apply frameworks like G-STIC to devise a GTM strategy.
  • Evaluate competitors’ strengths on business parameters using the CPM.
  • Assess market potential using the concept of TAM, SAM, and SOM.
  • Apply Vroom’s expectancy theory for team motivation and enhanced performance.
  • Understand how to cultivate a high-performing, ownership-driven, and results-oriented team culture from the ground up.
  • Identify operational levers in last-mile logistics and assess resource decisions that impact speed, cost, service quality, and financial performance.
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Case Study: From Tradition to Transformation: BigBasket’s Strategic Dilemma in Launching BBDaily Kolkata (English version) | Ivey Publishing