Maggi Crisis - Will Marketers Win Again?

Maggi and the Lead Crisis seems to be going out-of-hand for Nestle. I have written earlier about Maggi and is one of my favourite examples to wake-up students in the class, so felt obliged to share my view on the crisis. I have few die-hard fans at home too…

Historically we have seen brands go this kind of challenge, once with the Cadbury's worms issue and the Pesticide Issues with the Colas drinks, and they have recovered fairly well from the crisis, so the same prognosis goes for Maggi too. But yes, a lot needs to be done before the recovery would happen. I am going a little ahead of time, as the worst of the crisis is yet to come, and that would happen over the next couple of months, with more reports coming in and the media having a gala time, debating the issue on the prime time :)

The reasons why I say that Maggi would make a come-back, (though in the process some other brands would be able to gain market-shares which they would have never dreamt earlier) is the loyalty it has developed over the years and the loyal Maggi eaters would eat it anyway, good or bad. The second reason is marketing, they have had very good marketing brains working for the brand and that has been the reason for its success and they would fall back on the same people to help them revive the brand. My guess is that the strategy would already be getting ready in the boardrooms and mid-night oil must have been burnt reading the experience of coke and Cadbury’s..

But interestingly one challenge which I see is winning back the “Mother", though most of the communications have mother at the centre, but she has not been very happy with serving Maggi to her children all along.  I overheard this conversation between a mother and her seven year old daughter, where the child was asking the mother about MSG and the problems with it, and the mother extended it to even pizzas saying that even they were not good. Over the years the typical mother has been grudgingly let the child eat the quota of Maggi without being able to do much, now here she sees a window of opportunity. She will try and use this crisis to wean the child away from Maggi. But my hunch is that the marketers will use more powerful tricks to win both of them back, for the child is the taste and mother the convenience…

I have used the word "Quota" in Maggi consciously, ideally it should be 'rationing' as the child is not allowed to eat Maggi whenever he or she wants....

Swach Bharat Challenge

Saw the poster being hung in one of the bigger railway stations and the photo should itself explain how difficult it would be to go beyond the poster, though I have seen some transformed stations too but then India is not a few stations...

Ecommerce Revolution 3.0

There have been two phases of ecom revolution in India,

The first phase was ecom 1.0 the first time internet and ecommerce was started in the late 90's and early 2000 (at least in India), and they also very exciting days, lots of hype and recruitment happening. I also bought stuff online and experienced the revolution first hand as a consumer. As with many other new industries there was a bust (Dotcom Bust) and very few survived. The focus in those days was to get maximum eye balls, but how would one monetise them was never answered or rather questioned ………

We are in the second phase now, and as with the last time this phase is also very heady, deals and match-making happing between companies and consumers having a ball with deals and free deliveries and it seems that the party would never end. And guess what is the focus now, it is on transactions, al a the "Billion Day Sale” of flipkart or the snapdeals. There is a mad rush to get to the maximum transactions, again as earlier no one seems to be looking at anything beyond transactions. The snapdeal losses should help open our eyes....

I guess there would be ecom 3.0 which would happen where people would focus on profitable transactions, and that is when the industry would stabilise. I hope this would happen without a bust and companies like the Flipkart’s and the snapdeal’s would be the ones who would capitalise on the market which they have built, but then you never know if revolutions can happen without bloodshed.....

Forgotten Brands

It must be true for the other markets also, but I find this a little surprising when I see very good brands languishing in neglect in a market where there is a dearth of good brands. I saw one example yesterday in a shop and that triggered this post. The brand which I am talking about is catch, it use to a quite well-known brand a couple of decades back, but now I do not think many people would think of it is a strong brand. 

A more recent example is a brand in apparels - ColorPlus, it again use to a  very strong brand in cotton apparels , but now today I do not see it occupying the mindshare as it use to 10-12 years back.

One of the reasons is that these two brands were bought over by larger player like Raymonds bought Colour Plus, but then rather than leveraging the brands name , it has left to die, maybe some the internal dynamics of the organization would dictate that or the brand gets lost amidst  the numerous brands that the acquirer has.

The list of the forgotten brands is very long, Uncle Chips, Deccan Airways, Kelvinator...

Nokia will also join the list soon, at least in the mobiles....

Sachets and their role in increasing category penetration

Sachets are perhaps the most important innovation to happen in the Indian market in the recent times. They say that litmus test for a real good innovation is that after it is executed it seems very simple and apparent, that is true for the use of sachets in India. Another reason could be the fact that we are naturally used to buying in smaller quantities be it buying cigarettes in sticks, oil in loose , one just needs to go to the hinter lands to see what can be sold in smaller quantities.

The overall role of small packs in increasing penetration of categories like shampoos in rural India is an old story.

A few days back saw the small packs of Hershey's Syrup. My guess is that this is an adaptation for the Indian market. Will surely promote the trial of the product especially in India where familiarity with the category is low.

Can toothbrushes be further Differentiated?

Whenever I have think of tooth brushes, the first image which come to my mind is that of the toothbrush salesman moving from one shop to the other walking with bundles of toothbrushes.....

And feel that all that can be differentiated in a toothbrush has been done, no further ways to make your toothbrush different from the other..

But then time and again I see examples which remind me that a marketer can find ways and means of differentiating and continue doing it

The zigzag bristles, additional tongue cleaner and so on....are the usual ones

The most interesting one which I found was the idea of putting an indicator in Oral-B. It made sense because it helped both the company as well as consumers who would be reminded that it time to change the brush and the company obviously in sales...

The last visit to a large retailer brought to my attention a new offering from Colgate which is also equally interesting , the SlimSoft Charcoal , the website enlists two advantages, first the micro slim-tip bristles help reach deeper between teeth & along the gum-line and second  the charcoal infused bristles remove plaque bacteria.

The other toothbrushes also had something to offer, but this one stood out....

If some much can be done on a simple toothbrush, then the scope and limits are which are set by a manager not a product....

Markets blooming during Diwali

If one wants to experience the festivities during Diwali one needs to move away from the Malls and shopping centers into the traditional markets. Went to two of the older markets in lucknow, sharing some photos from the visit. 

Candles being Sold by Kilos

People busy Buying

Diya's Being Sold

Brisk Sale of Pooja Items

Season of full page Ads continue

A full page by mobile store talking about off line advantages

Season of full page ads 3

More full page advertisements, this time it is Big Bazaar, on flipkart sale.

Flipkart's Big Billion Day Sale - Sale with no Logic?

Typically every festival season marketers burn the mid-night oil to come up with block buster offers. For many years this responsibility was shouldered by LGs Samsung’s in the Durables Business and then the Mobile marketers, which lined up new products and offers during the festive season, but this year it is the ecom firms which are hogging the limelight or should I say the front pages of newspapers (albeit through full page ads)….

This post is specifically about the flash sales and the one-day sale model which flipkart has been using. They have had a series of flash sales for the Motorola and Xiaomi mobiles. Today morning they have tried a similar model with the one day sale model where they have ridiculously priced products up for sale like a Samsung Tab2 for 1,390, hand blender for 1 and so on

And this was backed up a fairly aggressive TV and print campaign and obviously numerous reminders on Facebook and where not...

But even at 8.02 AM in the morning what you can see is "Sold-Out" for these products, I think flipkart is playing with fire, what does it want to do with this kind of sale, create awareness? Then let them be warned, these limited stock deals create more heart-burn than any long term customer loyalty and if they think consumers cannot see through their tactics then they are again very wrong.

Do they want to clear old stocks,  or do they just want more people visiting their site??? Hopefully they are mature enough to think beyond the eyeballs model.

And even before the event I can see a lot of negative posts about them on social networking sites and even in the earlier flash sales , I could read more negative

comments than good experiences being shared.

I use to be a loyal flipkarter till some time back, but have shifted out to their nearest competitor, but even then I am worried about the direction which flipkart is going....

Swachh Bharat - Onus of Success Lies with us..

Whenever we travel out most of us are struck by the cleanliness in cities likes Singapore, Seoul or a Hong Kong and come back home thinking - why are our cities dirty...

We try to console ourselves saying they are much smaller places and so easier to maintain perhaps, income levels are higher and so on....

This is where the Swachh Bharat  nitiative of Prime Minister Modi is significant, as it brings the issue of cleanliness back into focus, on the top agenda in your to-do-list. This is something which I sure do not remember happening in my life time, yes we have read about it in Gandhi Ji experiments with truth and so on,...but it is something which we read and ... Whenever I read something about Gandhi Ji the first thing which strikes me is the vision that the person had and clarity of thought ( things which he spoke about and wrote and so relevant today) ...I think in the recent years it was the “Munna Bhai” Movies which had the maximum impact on making the youngsters remember the principles of Gandhi Ji than anyone else,

Coming back to the campaign I sincerely hope we succeed at and we get our Swachh Bharat...and the onus lies with each of us, and a lot of MNCs are also eager to pitch in ....

Let us start with our offices, homes and then expand and hopefully change our habits of treating our homes sacred, but the road on which the dorr opens as the responsibility of the Munciplaity. The three cities which I spoke about in the starting also were as bad as many of our cities a few decades back, but then today …so we do have hope

Chhota Bheem & Kellogg's

On to the next orbit in Customer service

On many occasions I have used this blog to vent out my frustration on the poor quality of service which we get.  It is a very sensitive issue and if I touch this issuer in a class it would ensure that for next 10-15 minutes everyone is sharing his/her service horror stories.

I would try to justify telling them that marketing is new in India, categories are unsaturated and so on... And sort of conclude that things will improve as time goes by,

And yes in the last few years the customer service levels have improved, but this improvement has not come from the traditional older firms, but it is the ecom firms which are setting up the new benchmark.  

The best experience is from firms like Amazon which has a stated aim of becoming the world's most consumer friendly company.  And for the first time other firms in India want to follow the international standards, so our own flipkart and myntra also provide the same exceptional customer support services.

I think historically companies have competed to reach the bottom rung in delivering customer service, and this would apply to both domestic as well as multinational firms. With the MNCs I guess when they start-off they do set high standards and then over time decide to compromise or match the lowest denominator in the industry. 

But with the consumer getting a chance to experience best-in-the-class service he/she will demand the same from the traditional older firms and they will have to respond if they have to compete and survive

More on channel shift

Continuing on the previous post on how traditional channels are being threatened by online channels this post tries to understand the impact across product categories.  The example which I often talk about is the closure of Gangarams Store in Bangalore.  I think most of walking on M G Road would visit the book store to look for new books.  And for a die-hard book fan its closure marked a major milestone on how people would buy books in the future. But one question which I still think about is that even today I first check-out books in the physical stores and then buy them online unless there is a real urgency or I am traveling with no books. So the importance of the physical stores in the experiential part even in a category like books is still strong, but how long will the physical stores manage to survive. In a period of six years I have seen a Landmark Store open and close down in Lucknow.....

Books as a category are the most favorable for online shopping, so consumers taking to online buying of books are not surprising.  But more interesting are categories like jewellery where traditional brick-n-mortar stores like Tanishq have worked for many years to move the consumers away from family jewelers to their stores. The new online options like bluestone . com are ones which will face the uphill task of convincing consumers to buy online.  Books and Jewellery perhaps form the two ends of the spectrum of online buying..

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But one thing is sure we as consumers are in for exciting times.

Gap between Promise and Execution in Marketing I

As a marketer we spend a lot of time and energy on conceptualization - how to position, advertise the brand. The message strategy, the right celebrity for the ad... and the list is long 

But do we put enough effort on execution of what gets promised..???

By execution I will give examples, Bingo has something called Mad Angles, the product is in the shape of triangles, what happens when more than half of the pack has broken triangle? You buy an Cadbury's Bourneville chocolate and once you have moved away from the shop and start eating it you realize that the product has been refrozen. These examples are not of the serious kind which can lead to health hazards, which obviously these also have serious implications.

And coming back to the theme with which I started the post, whom would you assign the responsibility to the retailer, the distributor, or the distributor sales man who loads the packets in the morning in the vehicle or the logistics guy... 

In theory we do talk about the internal marketing where other departments are also sensitised about marketing. I will continue this post with more examples from the ecommerce domain...

Full Circle and Carbide Free Mangoes

For the last 3-4 years I have stopped enjoying the mangoes during the summer. And I stay in the heart land Dasheri mango in eastern UP. The reason is that the satisfaction I would get from eating mangoes has been going down, because most of them have not ripened naturally. They have been ripened by using chemicals. The same is true with many vegetables that we buy today. Saw the Infibeam.com ad in that context and thought of sharing it,

  

That is where the issue of opportunity for marketers to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of consumers comes in. A huge market for with the organic and chemical free fruits and vegetables.....

The full circle is the topic for another blog post

Summer Brands

With Summer setting in many marketers are rolling up their sleeves for the hot summer sales which will follow, most excited would be the Ice cream , Soft drink and AC marketers.....

Yesterday was in a typical kirana store buying the monthly regulars, interestingly the small shop is exactly on top of a larger EasyDay shop...but more on that later..

In the shop I saw the packs of Rasna ready-to-make drink, and suddenly started feeling nostalgic on how central the brand use to 25-30 years back in terms of the summer experience. The presence of the Rasna bottle in the monthly purchase bag would trigger a long elaborate process of preparing the drink, sugar + powder + concentrate (in a separate small bottle) and transferring the same into large glass bottles would mark the start of serious summer.

               

While I was still ruminating, my three old daughter coolly picked-up a bottle of Fanata and did not even look at the Rasna boxes… In today's world full of aerated drinks and instant drinks (sugar added) the excitement around older brands like Rasna is missing....

But from a branding perspective one does feel that the brand still has a lot of potential (not sure with the right target segment though..)

The brands which I very closely associate with summers would be Kelvinator ,  Target, Chacha Chowdry . …

Product Innovation for Indian Markets - LG Evercool Refrigerator

Wanted to share this ad many months back,when I first saw the ad...

Another example of Innovation for Indian consumers. For most of the tier-II city residents in the country this feature "Longest Cooling During Power Cut" makes a lot of sense...  

Emergence of New Product Categories in Grocery

Normally we assume that in grocery as a category one would not see many new categories emerge, but for the last couple of years or slightly more one can see at least 4-5 new categories emerge and become high growth categories..

The new categories are,

Oats

Green Tea

Olive oil

Frozen food (the likes of smiles….)

There seems to be two strong reasons for the emergence of these categories, one is the increasing health consciousness among the Indian consumers and second is the increasing presence of organized retail. The first factor heavily influences three out of the four categories, but the organized retail  impacts all the four, because for many of them some handholding is required which is easier in the organized retail domain rather the dominant mom-n-pop stores….

May be the category of energy drinks can also be added to the list….

Converting Brands into Verbs the Marketers Dream....

This post is triggered by the new ads of Flipkart, which end with "Ab sirf shopping nahi, Flipkart Karo" Wanting a brand to represent a category and becoming generic is at one level, most of us would say zerox karo even though it is a cannon photocopier. It works in the company's favour when the category is nascent, as the online shopping world is today, but then what would happen later when one flipkarts a book from a infibeam.com? Taking into the next level is to push the brand to become a verb, Internationally Fedex the letter kind of things… Despite the possible negatives in the future, it is a marketers dream to become generic for the category and even become a verb... Some other companies which have been trying to do this is Cadbury's with " kuch meetha ho jaye" or "Shubh Aarambh", “Tanda Matlab” Coca Cola Campaign some time back.......