India Story : Road blocks Ahead

This blog is dedicated to the India Story, the great belief that we would continue to grow at the same pace which we have witnessed in the recent past. The belief that the time for the Indian market and the consumer has come.....

But in the last few months we suddenly find the unending euphoria about India suddenly taking a hit. Lot of this is driven by what is happening in Europe, but within the country too, the increasing interest rates, inflation & the rising petrol costs has everyone wary. The sudden assurance that we would start growing at double digit rate is being rethought.

I had the opportunity to listen to Mr Nitin Paranjpe CEO of HUL. He spoke a lot about these issues and brought out the darker side of the growth story and how it needs to be handled if we need to keep growing. He reminded the listeners how we had wished away the issues of illiteracy, health, infrastructure, corruption , perhaps hoping that high growth would take care of it. He said that inclusive growth was not a political jargon but the need of the hour. And as a corporate one cannot be a bystander and not do anything….

He said that it was imperative that businesses come up with customer propositions which take care of the environment, make business sense and add value to the customers. This trisection is currently very small and in the coming years it needs to be expanded. He gave a few examples, which I will share in the next post. But all in all, corporate world is seriously trying to address issues related to sustainability and inclusive growth as they also realize their future is also intertwined with these issues..

Rin Vs Tide ad, ethical ?

It took me some time to actually believe that HUL was directly comparing Rin with Tide. Digged the ad out of youtube to see it again and then today's ET had a new item on the same. Link


Not that sort of comparison has not been done at all , Complan vs Horlicks ad controversy is still fresh in our minds. Many years back it was pepsodent versus colgate ads (but even then no direct mention of brands), and it is said that it took the marketing heads of both the companies to sit together to end the money being wasted on comparative ads.


But at a very fundamental level, marketing as an activity which is 'relative', firmly anchored against competition , be it USP or differentiation the point of reference is competition. And what has been happening till now is that companies avoided directly naming the competing brand , but use a similar coloured or looking product in their ads. But in the Rin ad the line has been crossed and HUL has very clearly shown the competing product. And people like Harish B who writes a popular blog on Indian brands, observed that by naming Tide in the ad directly 75% of the time in the ad was devoted to Tide than Rin. Link for more on his post on the issue.


On the legal front praveen , points out the small disclaimers during and at the end of the ads, should help HUL's case in the courts, but then raised the question of why such an ad in the first place. Now that P&G has gone to the court against the ad, other resort would be to go to ASCI , the body which looks into these kind of issue, but it is more of recommending agency, with no regulatory authority..


On the issue of whether it is right or wrong, ethically yes, we question the ad, but then how right or wrong is it to use a similar looking product without actually naming the competitor? or other forms of comparative advertisements that we have been seeing. But as they say too much of anything is bad, even too much of attention or focus on competition is also bad as in the process you might lose focus on your own customer???


Lastly an observation on the maturity of the blogsphere in India, there are more than 5-6 blog posts on the issue , since the ad was aired, so I thought I should also jump into the discussion :). There are discussions going on the issue on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites ...

Plastic usage in Everyday life - Marketing Implications

I thought I should start the new year by writing on something which would become a prime concern for marketers in the years to come - 'environment consciousness' . World over there is an increased concern on the role corporates/marketers play in maintaining the environment and accepting responsibility towards their actions and its impact on the society at large.

Though there is a lot of talk and discussion happening on global warming and climate change, many a times we tend to see these issues happening at the Macro level, something about which we as individuals cannot do much about. I will share a recent experience which made me realize how we as consumers add to these problems and perhaps have to think a way out of these issues.

The example is from our recent trip to Andaman, where the islands have a policy of zero plastic usage, if you walk into a general store you will not get a plastic bag and rather shown the policy (though some of the shopkeepers will give you a plastic bag, but then insist not to tell where u got it from!!!). There are notices in all beaches on don't use plastic and so on, the photo above should give you an idea of how well it is being followed...

Being a nature lover we have been consciously avoiding leaving plastic around , but this time around we thought we will be more strict in our plastic usage and try and monitor it. So we started the exercise of keeping all the plastic we used in a day in our back-pack and disposing it back in the dust-bin when we would be back to the main island after our trip. And we were surprised and guilty about the amount of plastic two of us were consuming every single day. We use plastic in everything.... whether we eat a pack of biscuit , drink water, eat chocolates, consume soft drinks, you name a product and inevitably it is packed in plastic....We were made aware of how much dependant we had become on plastic in our everyday life.

And future marketers need to look at this issue very seriously, because we need to find ways to break our dependence on plastic as the main source of packaging and move towards a more environment friendly material...

I just thought I will share this as a food for thought to start the new year, will look forward to more comments from you...

Wishing all of you a very Happy new year...

Ads targeted at Children- Ethical Issues

The recent trend by major multinational companies of stop advertsining to chilldren must have been noticed. This issue has come into limelight in the recent years against the rise of child-obesity in the developed countries. Kellogg’s is the latest to join the band wagon, with its voluntary initiative to restrict ads aimed at kids for products that don't meet certain nutritional standards. The voluntary nature of the action is suspect as it is under pressure from health activists and many law suits, but anyway the move is a step in the right direction. Restrictions are also planned in schools in the US on the availability of junk food in schools, and allow only water, milk and juice-based drinks in vending machines and regulate the size and nutritional composition of foods sold. In India also in many states the sale of colas has been restricted in schools. Initiative of the cola majors to broaden their portfolio to include products other than the colas and gradually moving into juices and other healthier alternatives is a reflection of this changing trend.

The ethical question to be raised here is that the companies would have always known that they were advertising unhealthy products to children who would not understand the significance and force their parents to buy the product. We are not talking about small companies , most of these companies are in the top-rung of the fortune 500 list?????