Page 109 - DMGT547_INTERNATIONAL_MARKETING

International Marketing

Notes
Three months ago, Angar’s Chairman and Managing Director, Manubhai Shah, had
commissioned Product Pulse — a market research agency — to conduct a study to evaluate
the viability of a proposed extension of the company’s Glow brand of soaps. At the time,
Ranganathan was sure this was the most cost-effective means of making a foray into the
health-soap segment, but Shah remained unconvinced. And now, the findings of the survey
Product Pulse had conducted appeared to suggest that the platform on which the extension
was being planned could prove incongruous with the parent product’s attributes and
would even dilute Glow’s brand equity in the long run. Obviously, the risks were high.
“Selling soap used to be such an uncomplicated business,” said Ranganathan, even as he
invited his two deputies — Arvind Tahamane, General Manager (Sales), and Shankar
Paranjpe, General Manager (Marketing) — to sit in the rich wood paneled room. “Put a
pretty girl, richly lathered in soap suds, under a running shower, and hey presto!” he said,
only half in jest. “But, obviously, the market has changed. There are no sure-fire formulas
for success any longer. Brand loyalty appears to have become a thing of the past.”
He was right. Over the decade, the 400,000-tonne ` 1,300-crore toilet soaps market had
witnessed a remarkable transformation. And the change had been particularly dramatic
over the last five years. Although the market was growing at 7 per cent per annum, the
concept of market segmentation based on pricing — which had primarily influenced
positioning strategies in the past — was no longer valid.
Now, consumers made their purchases based on their perception of how well a brand met
their individual needs at a price that was seen to be value for money. In other words, it had
to promise a functional, rather than a lifestyle, pull. Therefore, the crumbling of the
premium and popular platforms had erased brand-pricing associations. And all the soap-
brands had veered around to occupy three new platforms — beauty and complexion care,
health, and freshness — within which there were a number of niche players at either end
of the pricing spectrum.
Fortunately, Angar had been largely unaffected by shifting consumer perceptions and the
reformulation of product positioning strategies that had characterised the soaps market.
The reason: the company had adopted the beauty and complexion care platform for its
marketing and advertising right from the beginning. And each launch in either the premium
or regular segments had reinforced this tack under the common brand name, Glow. The
sheet anchor of this strategy was so finely tuned that its advertisement baseline — Glow:
It Cares for you — had made the company’s soaps synonymous with beauty and complexion
care.
However, it had taken several years before the company had been able to attain that
enviable position. Set up in 1980 by Manubhai Shah, a technocrat-entrepreneur, Angar
operated from a sprawling industrial suburb in Chennai. Soon after graduating in chemical
engineering from the Victoria Jubilee Institute of Technology in Mumbai in 1975, Shah
had joined the family business: a wholesale dealership of cosmetics, toiletries and
detergents for a well-known transnational. But all the while, the budding entrepreneur
was restless to strike out on his own.
That opportunity presented itself in 1978, when he learnt that his alma mater had developed
the technology for the manufacture of a milk-based soap and was looking out for a sponsor
to bankroll the ` 50 lakh pilot commercial project. Convinced he was on to a winner; Shah
borrowed ` 10 lakh from his father, leveraged the family’s contacts in the trade to raise the
rest and got the unit off the ground in early 1979. When the soap was test marketed six
months later, Glow — as Shah branded it — met with a fair degree of approbation in the
southern region. Shah’s gut feeling had been right.

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