We are in the middle of the peak festival season and everyone is in a festive mood, and most of the companies have come out with schemes to capitalize on this festive spending mood. Yesterday I decided to do a market visit to check-out the festival offerings, driven by a friend who wanted to purchase a fridge.
We went to the nearest consumer durables shop and were caught by the Philips water purifier guy wanting to sell purifiers. A need which had been there but had not seriously considered buying it due to various reasons. Found the guy at the small promotional counter quite well informed, but couldn’t take a decision as we wanted to compare the offer with the 
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Inside the shop we were shown many models of Samsung and told about the local scheme which was running and how last week itself nine of his customers had won Mobile phones. We couldn’t compare Samsung with LG and went to check that out in another shop nearby. The response from the shop sales person was not good, so we decided that Samsung was better.
On the way back we saw another promotional stall put up by Eureka Forbes, found the price to be similar to what was being offered by Philips, but it has the hassles of the getting an annual service contract and the salesman couldn’t provide us with the brochures and product information, maybe the fact that they have the water purifier market for themselves for a long time has made them complacent, again we decided that Philips was a better deal…
As a marketer when I was reflecting back on our experience I could clearly see that as consumers we didn’t see much difference between the fridge brands or the water purifier brands, and what made us decide in favor of one brand over the other was the experience we were getting at the POS while interacting with the sales people, and these sales people will not be directly appointed by the companies themselves they would be more of dealer appointed sales persons, though the company would give them special incentives to push their brands..
But at the end though we did so much of information collection we didn’t make the final purchase, we had taken a decision on the brands but the final purchase is still pending and who knows what might change…
Update : My conviction that a good sales person at the POS can lead to more brand switching compared to the effort one has to put to create the same kind of difference through mass media is getting reinforced. In one of our recent trips to the market we were looking for a room heater and had only two brands in our mind, USHA or Bajaj, but the owner at one the older shops in the city convinced us to buy an unknown brands of the room heater , the name which i have forgotten and all my efforts to remember it and it put a link here should be an adequate proof on the ability of the POS sales person to make the consumers switch brands....
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We are in the middle of the peak festival season and everyone is in a festive mood, and most of the companies have come out with schemes to capitalize on this festive spending mood. Yesterday I decided to do a market visit to check-out the festival offerings, driven by a friend who wanted to purchase a fridge.
We went to the nearest consumer durables shop and were caught by the Philips water purifier guy wanting to sell purifiers. A need which had been there but had not seriously considered buying it due to various reasons. Found the guy at the small promotional counter quite well informed, but couldn’t take a decision as we wanted to compare the offer with the
Inside the shop we were shown many models of Samsung and told about the local scheme which was running and how last week itself nine of his customers had won Mobile phones. We couldn’t compare Samsung with LG and went to check that out in another shop nearby. The response from the shop sales person was not good, so we decided that Samsung was better.
On the way back we saw another promotional stall put up by Eureka Forbes, found the price to be similar to what was being offered by Philips, but it has the hassles of the getting an annual service contract and the salesman couldn’t provide us with the brochures and product information, maybe the fact that they have the water purifier market for themselves for a long time has made them complacent, again we decided that Philips was a better deal…
As a marketer when I was reflecting back on our experience I could clearly see that as consumers we didn’t see much difference between the fridge brands or the water purifier brands, and what made us decide in favor of one brand over the other was the experience we were getting at the POS while interacting with the sales people, and these sales people will not be directly appointed by the companies themselves they would be more of dealer appointed sales persons, though the company would give them special incentives to push their brands..
But at the end though we did so much of information collection we didn’t make the final purchase, we had taken a decision on the brands but the final purchase is still pending and who knows what might change…
Update : My conviction that a good sales person at the POS can lead to more brand switching compared to the effort one has to put to create the same kind of difference through mass media is getting reinforced. In one of our recent trips to the market we were looking for a room heater and had only two brands in our mind, USHA or Bajaj, but the owner at one the older shops in the city convinced us to buy an unknown brands of the room heater , the name which i have forgotten and all my efforts to remember it and it put a link here should be an adequate proof on the ability of the POS sales person to make the consumers switch brands....
We are in the middle of the peak festival season and everyone is in a festive mood, and most of the companies have come out with schemes to capitalize on this festive spending mood. Yesterday I decided to do a market visit to check-out the festival offerings, driven by a friend who wanted to purchase a fridge.
We went to the nearest consumer durables shop and were caught by the Philips water purifier guy wanting to sell purifiers. A need which had been there but had not seriously considered buying it due to various reasons. Found the guy at the small promotional counter quite well informed, but couldn’t take a decision as we wanted to compare the offer with the
Inside the shop we were shown many models of Samsung and told about the local scheme which was running and how last week itself nine of his customers had won Mobile phones. We couldn’t compare Samsung with LG and went to check that out in another shop nearby. The response from the shop sales person was not good, so we decided that Samsung was better.
On the way back we saw another promotional stall put up by Eureka Forbes, found the price to be similar to what was being offered by Philips, but it has the hassles of the getting an annual service contract and the salesman couldn’t provide us with the brochures and product information, maybe the fact that they have the water purifier market for themselves for a long time has made them complacent, again we decided that Philips was a better deal…
As a marketer when I was reflecting back on our experience I could clearly see that as consumers we didn’t see much difference between the fridge brands or the water purifier brands, and what made us decide in favor of one brand over the other was the experience we were getting at the POS while interacting with the sales people, and these sales people will not be directly appointed by the companies themselves they would be more of dealer appointed sales persons, though the company would give them special incentives to push their brands..
But at the end though we did so much of information collection we didn’t make the final purchase, we had taken a decision on the brands but the final purchase is still pending and who knows what might change…
Update : My conviction that a good sales person at the POS can lead to more brand switching compared to the effort one has to put to create the same kind of difference through mass media is getting reinforced. In one of our recent trips to the market we were looking for a room heater and had only two brands in our mind, USHA or Bajaj, but the owner at one the older shops in the city convinced us to buy an unknown brands of the room heater , the name which i have forgotten and all my efforts to remember it and it put a link here should be an adequate proof on the ability of the POS sales person to make the consumers switch brands....
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