The Hindu Business Line : Electrolux's new gambit

IN what it hopes will be a turnaround year for the company, Swedish home appliances giant Electrolux Kelvinator has embarked on a new positioning which makes the Indian woman central to its operations and products.

For starters, Electrolux has raised the number of women working in its corporate office from five per cent to 15-16 per cent this year and has plans to recruit more women at its facilities and its research and development centres. The reasoning perhaps lies in the cognition that women can best understand and find solutions for women better.

Similarly, the company is in the process of setting up women-only dealerships in the country with the first one coming up in Delhi in a few months, to be followed soon by one in Mumbai.

But why such an aggressive woman-oriented positioning for a home appliances company? Says Rajeev Karwal, CEO and Managing Director of Electrolux Kelvinator Ltd, "Our research found that as far as purchases of home appliances were concerned, women tend to be the decision makers in the family or in about 80-90 per cent of the cases at least play a major influencing role in the decisions."

So, starting off with a fresh, single-brand strategy this year (after a couple of years of turmoil), the question before the company was how best to reach out to a woman's mind and also how to make life easier for the consumer through its products; in other words to find "solutions to real problems." Says Karwal, "Through our advertising, we are not only to trying to bring out the benefits of our product, but there is also a social message intertwined in them." Thereby, it tries to provide solutions to everyday problems while, at the same time, looking at larger issues. "We have called the woman the family's `hopemanager'... she `manages' her family's dream of a better tomorrow. Electrolux, meanwhile, seeks to help her in fulfilling her role as a hope manager," says Karwal. It was this reasoning which also eventually led to the development of Electrolux's brand positioning of `Nurturing Hopes. Nourishing Life.'

So, for example, in its ad for refrigerators, the product is shown with the dual benefit of `healthguard' for better food protection, and also has a `hands-free' feature, as it comes equipped with a foot pedal to open and close the door, making life easier for the harried `home manager.' At the same time, the ad also conveys a mother's dreams and expectations from her young daughter. Similarly, in the commercial for its washing machines, while the product benefit highlighted is that it safeguards coloured clothing, the ad also attempts to break stereotypes regarding working women.

A similar theme can be seen in the company's advertising for its other appliances such as air conditioners and microwave ovens. Apart from the product specific ads, the company has rolled out a corporate campaign, created by its agency Mudra Communications. Electrolux intends to be an aggressive advertiser this year and is reported to have doubled its advertising and marketing budget to about Rs 40 crore this year.

However, industry watchers point out that while Electrolux may be going all out to grab the attention span of the Indian woman, Whirlpool of India has virtually owned the "home-making" platform for about seven years now. Thereby, it would be a task for Electrolux to share that platform with a player which is already a leader in the refrigerator category. Further, Whirlpool too is believed to be aggressively building its image around this platform and has even recently held awards for women achievers.

Meanwhile, other consumer or women `friendly' products which the company intends to launch in the forthcoming months include a refrigerator equipped with an FM radio (the insight being that a radio tends to be a woman's best friend in the kitchen and there is also a shortage of space to place an actual system in the kitchen), a Net-enabled refrigerator, a robotic vacuum cleaner called Trilobite (which cleans the room automatically) and many similar products. Another product which the company intends to roll out soon is a refrigerator with changeable door panels. This would serve well from an aesthetic point of view as the panels of most refrigerators start looking old after a few years; the consumer can now just change the panels to keep the looks of the fridge new.

But the current advertising and positioning adopted by Electrolux does impart a very urban skew and feel. Says Karwal, "The appliances present in our portfolio are predominantly very `urban' products and not as common in very small towns and rural areas, due to reasons such as lack of electricity. In addition, for the small town consumer, there is a high degree of aspiration attached to the product."

Meanwhile, the company is seeking to create a niche in the female mindscape through its social responsibility programmes. The company has already supported and sponsored two awards for women achievers. Also, in light of the increasing crimes against women, the company is in the process of rolling out a self-defence training programme for women, called FemmeForce! Electrolux recently ran ads in various newspapers inviting women to attend these free self-defence training sessions and claims to have a received a very positive response. The first such session will be held in Delhi during the first week of April. "We have already started getting corporate inquiries about this programme. We also intend to target call centres, where women have late working hours," says Karwal. If that's not enough, the company also intends to take celebrity women to smaller towns to hold lectures which stress on the education and progress of the girl child. Surely, the company is leaving no stone unturned to fulfill its ambition of garnering a leadership position in the home appliances category. However, with the Korean onslaught in full swing and refrigerators leader Whirlpool ready to hit the market with a range of aggressive initiatives, only the figures will eventually tell if the strategy has clicked or not.

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