The Hindu Business Line : Made for India

Many companies that enter the Indian market engineer their products to suit local conditions, but customisation should factor in regional differences within the country too, say observers.

Customising needs more work

Sravanthi Challapalli

Tamarind, lime and even vinegar are common household solutions to get rid of grease, scale and dirt from dishes. But orange and mango? Why ever did the company think of putting them into dishwash? It’s not as if dishwash needed a flavour, or did it?

The brand in question is Pril, the company Henkel. Internationally, Pril is a popular dishwash liquid, but in India and the rest of the sub-continent, the company transformed it into a bar because that’s what the consumers were used to. This is just one of the many instances of what companies have to do to make a dent in new markets. So what do companies not used to the Indian market take into account when they enter this country? Or how do Indian companies adapt a foreign product to their own market?

Debashish Das, Category Manager (Cleansers), Henkel India, says that even as the company launched Pril liquid in India in 1999, its focus was on bars. It combined its understanding of international and Indian preferences in these quarters into a lime-and-vinegar dishwash bar – lime was the Indian component and vinegar its Western counterpart – and later launched orange-and-vinegar and tamarind-vinegar bars. A while ago, it launched a mango-vinegar variant in its liquid, as mango skin is used as a scrubber in Uttar Pradesh, says Das, adding that the effort was to refine the customisation further to regional habits.

“The orange has the citric acid necessary for cleansing action but the idea was to give a new fragrance, a new colour and increase the joy of dishwashing, make the last task of the day a more enjoyable experience,” he explains.

Sometimes, it’s a no-frills, pared down version that holds the key to the market. As Xenos Technologies found out. A year ago, this automotive accessories company ventured into the audio and entertainment space with a car radio that is completely customised to the Indian market. Only FM channels are popular, cassettes have almost disappeared from usage and CD and MP3 are infrequently used, so the radio was shorn of the CD and MP3 features. It came with a USB port that enabled users to upload music on to the radio, and was priced Rs 5,000, much cheaper than other brands which were costlier because they came bundled with other features, says Jerry Daniel, Vice-President & Chief Operating Officer, Xenos. It also offers radios with CD players, but they are at least 20 per cent cheaper than most others, he adds.

Harish Bijoor, brand domain expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults, points out that standardised products worked in certain categories — such as Knorr soups, Milkmaid and Mars chocolates that are largely distinctive products on their own merit. “When it came to products of a different nature such as shoes of the MNC kind, durables and kitchen equipment, manufacturers realised that cloning a product was not where the money lay.” Shoes for the Indian market began to be made of sturdier material. They were heavier, but sturdier as well. Nokia came in with its ‘Made for Indian conditions’ phone to face the dust and grime of the country and dishwasher companies had to re-make their machines to fit in Indian vessels and deep frying pans that were a challenge in themselves, he explains.

Pedigree doesn’t always work

A universally acknowledged excellence may not become popular either. As an observer points out, Japanese companies are reputed to make the best consumer durables, but in India, it was the Korean ones which were able to generate huge market shares. They brought in relevant technology, price points and had a good distribution strategy, whereas the Japanese goods were seen as having high-end features and high prices, which did not meet the requirements of the Indian masses.

Says Sulajja Firodia Motwani of Kinetic Engineering, “When we launched the Kinetic Honda in 1986, people rejected it. They were used to a steel body, a kick-start, gears … but women started buying it because it had the auto ignition and was gearless. So we started an India-specific campaign, had it travel to Khardungla pass – the highest motorable point, drive non-stop day and night for 1,001 hours and cross the Sahara with the same fuel consumption as a small car (which were all world records). The biggest challenge, though, was the pricing and the localisation – the supply chain was a challenge, no vendor had the technology to develop the technical base.”

Says Radhika Chadha, Principal of boutique consulting firm Paradigm and co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager, “Customisation need not only mean the tweaking of the functionality or product attributes. It can work well through advertising and communication, branding, and definitely distribution.” Korean brand LG, she says, understood the stratification of Indian markets, came up with customisation that included TVs with menus in regional languages and TV sets that factored in poor reception quality in rural areas, and dovetailed a marketing-distribution blitzkrieg in small towns.

“Post-liberalisation history is dotted with brands that didn’t customise and failed – consider Reckitt’s Calgonit (a cleaning product for dishwashers) – a prime example of an idea out of sync with Indian market reality,” says Chadha, “or it could be that brands that customised failed due to poorly conceptualised customisation – for example, Kellogg’s cereals with Indianised flavours (Mango-Elaichi, Rose and Coconut-Kesar). Brands which have survived without customisation are typically the premium ones.”

Both Bijoor and Chadha believe that the allure of foreign brands has dimmed, though the latter says foreign would still work in premium markets and the definition of foreign has expanded to include, say, LG or Samsung. Bijoor cites the case of kitchen mixers and grinders which replace the traditional, heavy stone grinders used for idli and dosa batter. “To replace this hard-working device which costs a pittance, has a kitchen life of 50-60 years, and is the most efficient of them all in terms of quality output, one needed something very hard-working of the electrical kind. In came the Sumeet mixie, which had a motor that was a powerhouse. No mixer-grinder of a Morphy Richards or Philips could replace such a powerhouse of an Indian product, and it went on to be exported all over the world.”

Cultural differences, naturally, are the plank on which much customisation is done. Says Vivek Khanna of Aviva, “The kind of investment Indians make for their children is very different from the rest of the world. Take a daughter’s wedding, for example; you don’t see that anywhere else.” Child plans in the insurance sector don’t exist in most markets, says Khanna. As a point of contrast, in the West, especially in the UK, funeral schemes are a big draw as parents don’t want to burden their children with those; in India, these expenses are generally not considered a big deal.

How do multinational companies in the F & B sector keep their brand equity and yet endear themselves to the local market? From potato veggie burgers to tandoori chicken pizza, various innovations and combinations have had to be devised to have Indians sink their teeth into Western foods. But while acknowledging the need for customisation, Amit Jatia, joint venture partner, McDonald’s India (West & South), also points out that consumers want a unique taste, not a samosa or paneer, so the company came up with a wrap which is basically a rumali roti but contains salsa, of Mexican origin, for some spice kick, which worked very well. The company does not use beef and pork in India, has separate kitchens to cook vegetarian and non-vegetarian food and builds on its menu according to customer feedback, says Jatia, adding that it even took the Pizza McPuff, developed for the Indian market, to West Asia.

Packing a punch

Packaging is as important an element of customising, affecting price and benefits. Says Henkel’s Das, “We brought in sachets of Pril liquid to motivate customer trials – none had done this in the dishwash segment so far, and we set off a trend in the market.” Xenos’ Daniel says the launch of the company’s first product took them “on a complete learning curve”. It was a remote locking security system for cars, made in collaboration with a US company. “In the US, the looks of the remote were not important, only the performance mattered. But in India, 5-6 years ago, it was a status symbol to have a remote for the car, and looks became very, very important, so we had to redo the product completely” says Daniel. For convenience, the company also incorporated the car reversing alarm, usually a retrofit, into the remote, something that did not exist in the American model. In the US, passers-by would move out of the way when they noticed a car backing; in India, people assume the driver will wait for them to move away. Xenos now has close to 30 per cent market share after making these changes, he adds.

Kinetic’s recent launch, the Flyte, made in collaboration with SYM of Taiwan, has been turned into a different vehicle for India altogether. Originally a unisex product, in India it has been positioned as a women’s vehicle – it’s a scooter with front fuelling so that the driver need not get off at the petrol pump to have it filled, there’s higher ground clearance to ensure a smooth journey on all kinds of roads, and its shape is in keeping with Indian preferences.

“India is a pretty unforgiving market, a community-based market where word travels fast, so however good the technology, it has to be suitable to customer requirements,” says Motwani.

Chadha of Paradigm says customisation is still not widespread. “The diversity of India makes it essential to innovate at a more local level – treating the country as a homogeneous whole is as sub-optimal as treating India as part of large global cluster.” As she mentions in her book, customising for regional clusters “needs a mindset which accepts that the needs of a village in Bihar are as different from those of a town in Tamil Nadu, as are, say, Africa and Japan.”