Sen hits back (with a kick in the 'butt' - literally !!)

Bravo Robin,You are on the home stretch.Just a little more "footwork" and the "net" is all your's! Someone with your depth of insight should not have been "slow" to realise at all.In India, we've shown a historical tendency to "ape" & "adapt" westren trends / models, roughly with a 20/25 year lag. Applies to almost everything, apart from the way our country is run.Why is it that "many" big newspapers are given away free (a la Yellow Pages), abroad? The cover-prices charged by most deshi mastheads hardly cover anything, anyway! So why charge it at all? Sandip has indeed very aptly mentioned his vendor's POV.

This reminds me of a very similar incidence (oldies like me are very fond of anecdotes you see), albeit in a very different product category. Those were the days when ITC, India's tobacco major, got to know about the possible bans on tobacco advertising. And they were naturally groping all the wrong things, in the dark. Other smaller competitors smelled blood & went on a launching spree! Rothmans King Size was rapidly rolled out aimed directly at the India Kings & Classics. Even VST, technically a sister concern, threw all caution to the smokes & ventured into the premium brands arena with their deshi vesrions of King Sizes & Wills beaters.

As we all know, the underdogs get major support from the aam-aadmi.So, the Rothmans & the other wannabe Kings got ample shelf space, visibility & support from the pan-shops.This irked the giant even more. To add insult to this monopoly threatening injury, BATCO, ITC's parent, refused to let 555 or B&H to be manufactured in India. Unless of course ITC could "prove" that it had the "mettle" to fumigate local heroes out of retail shelves!

Thus begun the great store-merchandising industry in India (that was 1990/91). With pockets reaching all the way to its pulled up socks, a huge & capable field force and of course many extremely talented top managers, ITC went to battle. Retailers all over India were mapped & put on street-maps, manually. Each was alotted unique codes & relevant commercial data was tagged, against each individual outlet. The exercise took almost 90 days & about 800 of us worked 24X7 to compile the data, digitize them on to a spanking new oracle platform & create tailor made reporting & analysis modules.

On completion, it was almost a child's play to locate any cigarette selling outlet in any corner of the country, with almost current data about its shelf-space, compass-bearing, ownership, disputes, offtake & what not! Then some of the most brilliant managers, including legends like KNG, Chandu Mishra, (Late)K Ramnath & Mehmood Ahmed, churned out a list of the "most coveted" outlets across the top cities. These outlets (several 000s) HAD to be ITC's & ITC's only! By whatever means. Now starts the similarity with today's 3-letter wars in print media! Outlets were first reasoned with, then coaxed & cajoled and finally "bought out" against huge contracts. I still recall the record sum signed up by the outlet next to Bengal Club, just outside ITC's Kolkata HQ. The ministry of direct taxes will summon me in as a government witness to sugnificantly boost their revenue, if I mention any of the sums involved!

After about 3 months, I was doing a round of a particularly "sensitive" market in Kolkata (as I was heading Kolkata then). Sensitive, as many of our top honchos used to reside in the same neighbourhood (rings any bell now?). To my surprise, I found a very "expensive" Classic Branded outlet, not having a single stick of cigarette to sell! Naturally I was fuming & getting ready to blast the sales guys. Somehow, I mustered up some courage (these sensitive retailers could get lowly ITC staff like us sacked real fast, seriously) to "ask" the pan-wallah WHY he did not have any cigarette to sell! The answer was, as you may have guessed by now "why sell anything when you are already paying me xxxxxx every month? My income, earlier was merely 800-900"?

So, you see, it's quite pointless to "ask" whether the industry leaders (advertisers) or media honchos "know" about the ABCs & NRSs' real worth! Who cares a damn?

September 3, 2008 10:49 PM