Friday, July 13, 2012
Kingfisher, coffee and tea...
Is Kingfisher Kaput?
By Harish Bijoor
Q: I’m
curious. What’s next for Brand Kingfisher? Is it all over?
-Samantha
P Cox, New Delhi
A: Sam, good to be curious on the whole.
Kingfisher is a dominant brand in the Indian
context. The brand for a start is a beer. And from there on has developed the
brand equity of brand kingfisher airlines. To that extent, the recent set of
issues in aviation tends to hurt the equity of Kingfisher airlines more than
the beer. The airline is a service brand that touches the lives of hundreds of
people. The beer is a product brand. To that extent there is less of an issue
there. There is no transference of negativity from aviation to beer for sure.
The negative publicity that hits Kingfisher airlines is really about the pains of the traveler more than anything else. A traveler faced by flight cancellations at the last minute is impacted the most. This is where the biggest pain point of the brand equity of Kingfisher airlines lies.
Public memory is however short. Do believe me, but this proverbial short public memory is a brand’s best friend.
To that extent, all the current woes of Kingfisher Airlines will be forgotten faster than we do believe it will. Remember all the issues that Jet Airways went through, with its employees protesting and venting their ire in public on national network television? Everything is forgotten today. Everyone lives happily ever after. Till the next fracas.
In reality nothing succeeds like success. I do believe this is a temporary blip in the brand equity fortunes of Kingfisher Airlines. With some degree of fund infusion, it will be business as usual. Just wait and watch for FDI in the aviation sector, and you will see the King of good times soar again. And how!
Right now, Kingfisher needs to get off the pedestal of being a brand and talk and emote with its users and those sitting on the fence of its usage. It is important to be transparent and admit folly where folly lies.
The Kingfisher brand is one that has been designed carefully with a lot of patience and passion. It would be unfair to write it off so soon and so quick.
Q: Nokia is still topping brand
charts in India despite its completely low growth and loss of market shares.
How?
-Seenu Venkatesan, Mumbai
A: Seenu, the reason why Nokia does get repeatedly listed in the top ten is simply because of what I call the "ubiquity effect". Please do note that the largest numbers of mobile handsets in use as of now in India is quite likely to be the Nokia handset in the middle and upper-end segment. Add to it the fact that the mobile phone is a 24 X 7 device that people do not switch off even when they sleep. Mobile phones live closer to people than their own wives and husbands do.
This ubiquity gives a halo effect to the brand that is used by most.
Many swear by their mobile phones. Many can't stay away from them. Many touch
them a lot more than they touch their spouses. And a lot more intimately even. This
proximity adds to the halo effect of the hand-phone brand. And Nokia is a
benefactor, as of now. Give it five years more for the Samsung effect to set
in. Samsung is the next big guy lurking round the corner.
Q: How do coffee Café chains globally
ensure consistency in terms of delivery? And what is the learning for me to
take?
-Rohinton P Malla, Mumbai
A: Rohinton, the issue is all about scale. Once scale develops, you can look at central sourcing. And central sourcing is all about consistency offerings. Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts globally believe in the mechanics, efficiency and delivery of central sourcing. Their systems are totally integrated to technology and what it can deliver in terms of back-end efficiency.
What is it that you can learn from the business model of Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts then?
From Starbucks, Indian companies can learn the power of a brand and the power of consistency delivery, the power of pulsating with the consumer mind, mood and movement. From Dunkin Donuts, the best thing to learn is the fact that the consumer has little time to sit and dawdle in the future. On-the-go coffee is a format whose time will come in the future. Prepare for it aggressively and morph your sit-down models to talk the language of stand-up and on-the-go coffees as well.
It is important to remember that every Cafe market has a glass ceiling. This glass ceiling is all about saturation in terms of numbers, boredom with ubiquity, lack of differentiation, the consumer in a state of recession, and a continuous lack of value-for-money propositions. Most Western markets have reached this level over the last three decades. India to that extent is still a nascent Cafe market and this is a market that will grow. Café Coffee Day, the market leader has shown us that success can be made to happen.
Q: How is tea such a big drink in India, far bigger
than coffee?
-Sapna Khanna, New Delhi
A: Sapna, tea is India's favorite beverage. The per capita consumption of tea is a multiple of 11 to that of coffee. India's mass beverage of choice is tea.
All this has happened progressively over the decades with the painstaking effort of the early companies in this space that did yeomen work. Brooke Bond and Lipton were the two companies that did hard work in this space.
The heritage of
tea plantations run to painstaking British norms in the North East regions of
the country helped establish an origin status for tea as well. Early work in
this space had pioneer marketers go village to village in the country to
popularize the drink. The edifice of tea consumption was built brick by brick
with painstaking marketing effort. I would call this early tea evangelism. That
created this big status for tea in India.
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Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email:harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Labels: ADVERTISING, branding, Brands, India, Kingfisher, Liquor, Twitter
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
The Facebook Farmer and Rural Twitter
The Facebook Farmer
By Harish Bijoor
Q: Do you see social networking sites
spreading their applications and wings? If so, where is the opportunity?
-P Malik Krishna, New Delhi
A: Malik, social networking sites hold immense potential for a range of applications. These applications need not necessarily be for urban educated folk alone. The opportunity is ripe for the rural farmer as well.
Take the large agrarian community in India. Most live distanced from
physical market places. Facebook or Twitter or for that matter any other robust
social networking format that attracts eye-balls and visits that are robust (we
are told FB has 423 million daily visitors and users) can help bridge the gap
between the physical and the virtual. Staying far away from physical markets
can no longer be a disadvantage. In many ways, geography is history. If a
farmer is on FB, he can experience real-time prices, a real-time feel of the
market, and indeed a real-time interface with buyers and sellers alike. To that
extent, buying and selling and information facilitation is just but one of the many
applications that can be farmer-friendly.
On the other hand, for the Corporate, the social networking site does away with the one big issue most corporate organizations grapple with: access to market. Access to market today is defined not by physical product presence in the market, as much as the access to information about the product. Imagine a fertilizer or a seeds company that can network with the farmer online, offer prices on quantities, offer consulting and counseling services, and then finally sell. All this is today possible, thanks to the social networking site.
In the old days, a corporate entity would define for itself the urban market space as the space it could manage to cater to, due to distance. Today, every corporate can have an e-presence and an e-commerce and e-consulting and e-counseling plan in place. This means that no corporate is too far away or too close to the market. In many ways, the social networking site re-invents the model of Pure competition, where no player is too far or too close from the market. The potential is therefore pregnant.
Farmers can use these sites in several steps. Step one would be to garner information. This can relate to weather, cropping patterns, crop-volume-estimation across growing areas, rainfall patterns and more. In addition, farmers can network with brethren-farmers across the world and utilize the power of peer group influence in terms of buying and selling. Add to it the possibility of a more knowledge-enriched farmer, and you have the potential of a shift of power back to the farmer, from the current days where the power and margin largely rests with the middle-man. In many ways social networking sites can help dis-intermediate the market and help the farmer retain larger margins.
Q: Premium and luxury brands do not
advertise on radio as a medium. Why?
-Shephali B Raghavachar, Hyderabad
A: Shephali, yes, premium advertisers think radio as a non-premium medium. There is just too much of it, and there is ample research available that tells you that the premium-category shopper does not depend on awareness scores for luxury brands from radio. In fact radio tends to negate effort for luxury brands as of now. Proves counter-productive to effort. Radio is much too mass for luxury brands.
Premium luxury brands will still depend on niche mediums. Niche mediums such as niche print for instance. Airline in-flight magazines work beautifully here. Even for the small town traveler. In fact he carries away these in-flight magazines and salivates and shops. Works better than radio for sure.
Q: How big is the e-retail industry
today and how does its future potential look?
-Nalin Vaidyanathan, Chennai
A:
Nalin, e-retail is today growing differentially across categories. Since the
base is small, in some categories you witness a 600% growth and in some a 220
per cent growth. Today, we have 143 million Indians on the Web. Of these, we
have 49 million people who are the prime audience for e-retail mechanisms as of
now. My prognosis is that we will have 320 million Internet users by December
2014. As this happens, expect e-retail to boom.
Harish
Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Labels: ADVERTISING, branding, Brands, City brands, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Rural brands, Twitter
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
The Top-10 Brands of 2010
The Top Ten as we enter 2010
By Harish Bijoor
Q: With the dawn of 2010 everyone everywhere is focusing on the number 10. Let me also ask my “10” oriented question. Which would you rate as the ten big hits of the year gone by in terms of marketing and branding success?
-Jacintha P Viegas, Mumbai
A: Jacintha, my top ten for the year 2009 at this point of time:
1. Twitter: The brand came to the fore in the Indian mindset with millions jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon. Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor was the un-witting brand ambassador for Twitter in India. One tweet of his made Twitter a buzz-word among large number of Indians, both urban and rural. Politicians from across the range of political formations and parties seized the opportunity. In the bargain, Twitter gained. At no cost. No price. Zero-cost marketing buzz. All due to a faux pas!
2. Rakhi Sawant: Rakhi continued to manage her brand visibility at peak levels. 'Rakhi ka Swayamvar' had the entire nation watching. Rakhi emerged a winner in the sweepstakes for star affection. An unlikely candidate and a dark-horse for sure. Millions across small-town India emote with her. Surprisingly, women-folk from the small towns of India emote with her equally. Many live their lives vicariously through the grit and bravado of a Rakhi Sawant in small-town India.
3. IPL: Decimated five day cricket. Decimated interest from one day cricket even. Morphed audience love overnight literally. Grabbed eye-balls, and with it marketing bucks of the best in the business.
4. Facebook: For grabbing a total of 14 million accounts in India in a very short period of time. And that number is as big as the population of Sikhs in India. Made people go virtual. Real relationships have now morphed into electronic ones. People live very active social lives....on the Internet. Thanks to Facebook.
5. The Congress Party: For upping the political ante on every issue and sweeping into power. In the bargain, it decimated and broke the BJP into factions.
6. News 9: A small English television News channel from Bangalore. The channel grabbed the imagination of the English speaking and English-listening audience of Bangalore. It brought zing into local News and has brought the immediacy-buzz into people's lives.
7. Tata Nano: For re-defining value altogether. As the car hit the streets, editorial buzz led the way for the brand with full order-books that will run into the next several years. What Bajaj Chetak did to the scooter market many decades ago, Nano has done to the small-car craving market.
8. Tata Tea: With its "Jaago re" campaign the company captured the soft-high-ground. It captured the imagination of a country when it was going to vote. A campaign run well to the benefit of the brand. Did not convert into actual votes, but did a great job in plugging the brand. Subliminally.
9. Nokia: Emerged with a whopping 65% of the market-share in India. Morphed to become as Indian as any company can be. Made offerings that were true-blue Indian. Handled every crisis that came up (battery flare-ups included) with panache and transparency. Talked the language of green and re-cycling as well.
10. Nescafe: Has quietly emerged as a super-brand. Consistent advertising and a very consistent brand-strategy has kept he brand single-mindedly ahead in the brand stakes. If there is one fmcg brand that can aspire for true blue super-brand status (and I am not talking of the super-brand tag being doled out by organizations to all who require it), it is Nescafe!
Q: What is Brand India? What does it really mean?
JP Guha, Kolkata
A: Guha-da, Brand India has two facets. The intrinsic one to India and the Indian in particular and the extrinsic one which is relevant to the non-Indian.
To me Brand India is about patriotism. It is about the tricolor. It is about the nation, its freedom and the environment that facilitates democratic life, democratic living and propitiates democratic institutions. To me brand India is freedom. This is intrinsic to the Indian.
To the International audience Brand India is an emerging opportunity. An opportunity that is free-market oriented. It is also about the mystique of India. A nation that is all about its tigers and snakes and snake-charmers and elephants alike.
Q: E-commerce is small in India. Sad?
-Gaurav K Mishra, Delhi
A: Gaurav, sad indeed. India is strange in many ways. We actually produce a lot of the back-end for IT, and we help create seamless end-to-end e-commerce enterprises for the world. We however are producers and manufacturers. We do not consume enough of it. That is the tragedy.
E-commerce is very small in the country as of date. First of all, Internet penetration itself is not as robust as a country with a population of one billion plus must have. Secondly, those who use the Internet at large use it largely for that one killer-app: email. A small percentage of those who use the Internet actually surf the web for buys. And those who surf the web for buys, end up using it as a reliable medium to compare products, quality and their prices. Most end up doing the research on the Web and buying in the physical market-place.
The e-commerce environment in India therefore remains small. Nano.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
By Harish Bijoor
Q: With the dawn of 2010 everyone everywhere is focusing on the number 10. Let me also ask my “10” oriented question. Which would you rate as the ten big hits of the year gone by in terms of marketing and branding success?
-Jacintha P Viegas, Mumbai
A: Jacintha, my top ten for the year 2009 at this point of time:
1. Twitter: The brand came to the fore in the Indian mindset with millions jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon. Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor was the un-witting brand ambassador for Twitter in India. One tweet of his made Twitter a buzz-word among large number of Indians, both urban and rural. Politicians from across the range of political formations and parties seized the opportunity. In the bargain, Twitter gained. At no cost. No price. Zero-cost marketing buzz. All due to a faux pas!
2. Rakhi Sawant: Rakhi continued to manage her brand visibility at peak levels. 'Rakhi ka Swayamvar' had the entire nation watching. Rakhi emerged a winner in the sweepstakes for star affection. An unlikely candidate and a dark-horse for sure. Millions across small-town India emote with her. Surprisingly, women-folk from the small towns of India emote with her equally. Many live their lives vicariously through the grit and bravado of a Rakhi Sawant in small-town India.
3. IPL: Decimated five day cricket. Decimated interest from one day cricket even. Morphed audience love overnight literally. Grabbed eye-balls, and with it marketing bucks of the best in the business.
4. Facebook: For grabbing a total of 14 million accounts in India in a very short period of time. And that number is as big as the population of Sikhs in India. Made people go virtual. Real relationships have now morphed into electronic ones. People live very active social lives....on the Internet. Thanks to Facebook.
5. The Congress Party: For upping the political ante on every issue and sweeping into power. In the bargain, it decimated and broke the BJP into factions.
6. News 9: A small English television News channel from Bangalore. The channel grabbed the imagination of the English speaking and English-listening audience of Bangalore. It brought zing into local News and has brought the immediacy-buzz into people's lives.
7. Tata Nano: For re-defining value altogether. As the car hit the streets, editorial buzz led the way for the brand with full order-books that will run into the next several years. What Bajaj Chetak did to the scooter market many decades ago, Nano has done to the small-car craving market.
8. Tata Tea: With its "Jaago re" campaign the company captured the soft-high-ground. It captured the imagination of a country when it was going to vote. A campaign run well to the benefit of the brand. Did not convert into actual votes, but did a great job in plugging the brand. Subliminally.
9. Nokia: Emerged with a whopping 65% of the market-share in India. Morphed to become as Indian as any company can be. Made offerings that were true-blue Indian. Handled every crisis that came up (battery flare-ups included) with panache and transparency. Talked the language of green and re-cycling as well.
10. Nescafe: Has quietly emerged as a super-brand. Consistent advertising and a very consistent brand-strategy has kept he brand single-mindedly ahead in the brand stakes. If there is one fmcg brand that can aspire for true blue super-brand status (and I am not talking of the super-brand tag being doled out by organizations to all who require it), it is Nescafe!
Q: What is Brand India? What does it really mean?
JP Guha, Kolkata
A: Guha-da, Brand India has two facets. The intrinsic one to India and the Indian in particular and the extrinsic one which is relevant to the non-Indian.
To me Brand India is about patriotism. It is about the tricolor. It is about the nation, its freedom and the environment that facilitates democratic life, democratic living and propitiates democratic institutions. To me brand India is freedom. This is intrinsic to the Indian.
To the International audience Brand India is an emerging opportunity. An opportunity that is free-market oriented. It is also about the mystique of India. A nation that is all about its tigers and snakes and snake-charmers and elephants alike.
Q: E-commerce is small in India. Sad?
-Gaurav K Mishra, Delhi
A: Gaurav, sad indeed. India is strange in many ways. We actually produce a lot of the back-end for IT, and we help create seamless end-to-end e-commerce enterprises for the world. We however are producers and manufacturers. We do not consume enough of it. That is the tragedy.
E-commerce is very small in the country as of date. First of all, Internet penetration itself is not as robust as a country with a population of one billion plus must have. Secondly, those who use the Internet at large use it largely for that one killer-app: email. A small percentage of those who use the Internet actually surf the web for buys. And those who surf the web for buys, end up using it as a reliable medium to compare products, quality and their prices. Most end up doing the research on the Web and buying in the physical market-place.
The e-commerce environment in India therefore remains small. Nano.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Labels: Brands, indian luxury brand market, Nescafe, nokia, Telecom, Twitter
