The Hindu Business Line : A rage abroad, but lacklustre here

WHAT'S common to step-thru motorcycles, radio paging services and ladies cigarettes? These are some of the products and concepts that were introduced in the Indian market with much fanfare but failed to take off. The fact that they are more than flourishing in foreign markets just adds the spin to the story.

The list includes fragrant paints, barbeque equipment, coffeemakers, soda makers, remote cordless headphones and `roti' makers. Even in the booming telecommunications market, concepts such as Internet Telephony and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) have not taken off despite the initial brouhaha.

Take, for instance, the concept of step-thru motorcycles (which is designed like a scooter for ease of mounting and dismounting), a big time rage in South-East Asia, which failed to catch the imagination of Indian bikers. The fact that the middle class consumer profile of South-East Asian countries and India was similar seemed to have no bearing in this case.

"Lack of understanding of Indian consumer behaviour put paid to the fortunes of most of these new concepts and products. While mopeds and scooters have succeeded here, the Hero Honda `Street', India's first step-thru design bike, met with indifferent response. The 100-cc bike was a replica of the Honda `Cub', which was amongst the highest selling in the world when it was introduced here. However, its undoing was the design - it diluted the macho image associated with bikes here," an auto sector analyst said.

Or take, for example, the radio paging service. In countries such as the US and China there are more than a million paging subscribers, in India the sector has been officially proclaimed dead. "While the paging industry - which a few years ago boasted of a subscriber base of seven lakh - blames the lack of policy initiatives, the Government believes its demise was caused by the success of the short messaging services offered by mobile operators,'' said a former paging operator.

Internet telephony is another concept on which the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had betted heavily. After lobbying hard with the Government to allow them to offer the service, ISPs find a few takers for Internet Telephony. In comparison, the services are flourishing in the US market, with a few hundred operators.

An example of a concept that flopped because it was ahead of its times is the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) mobile services that were launched by cellular operators for pushing data services to compensate for decline in revenues from voice traffic. The unavailability of cheap WAP-enabled handsets and dearth of content ensured that WAP never took off.

And nor did perfumed paints or women's cigarettes. Perfumed paint, a big hit overseas, failed to make a mark here after ICI launched a Dulux paints' variant with a 7-day fragrance. "The product is a big hit in the UK. Here, it was probably ahead of its times and the market had not evolved enough to accept such a product," a senior ICI executive said.

Women's cigarettes were another non-starter, despite the rising workingwomen population and its increasing smoking habit. Godfrey Phillips India had launched `Ms' cigarettes exclusively for this segment.

"Ladies' cigarettes did not click since women continued with the brands they were used to, more so since the product is prone to extreme brand loyalty and distribution network for the cigarette was fragmented. Women preferred going in for milder versions of popular men's brands," an industry player said.