The Hindu Business Line : With your permission, please!

Ever been accosted by an earnest young man at a mall requesting you to fill a form and seeking your ‘permission’ to talk about a Club Mahindra membership? Or, seen huge hoardings or posters at a mall or theatre of happy families holidayin g? Or, perhaps a dialogue with executives at your apartment complex? It’s been a long haul for Mahindra Holidays selling top-end Club Mahindra memberships, even more so now when a slowdown is upon the economy.

Aniruddha Haldar, Head (Marketing), Mahindra Holidays, said the company took a conscious call years ago to practise permission marketing. Says he: “Even when call centres were sprouting and tele-calling was rearing its head we decided that without the permission of the consumer we would not pursue them.”

The first contact with a consumer and of a brand promise would be at an event or at malls. The subsequent marketing process was briefing the consumer of the quality of the concept and product.

“We made sure that the interactions with consumers were uniform, presentations were made on laptops and would be interactive, based on what consumer likes are and what he would like to do on a holiday. We have created a brand in this space and sustained it entirely on permission marketing. Consistency is a big challenge and we have to do it without being offensive,” explains Haldar.

The brand used endorsements, not from models, but from “people like us.” And it recorded feedback in multiple languages. Word of mouth proved to be powerful as 38 per cent of new memberships are through referrals. The company has 80 franchisees around the country and 800 frontline staff altogether selling the concept.

It’s been slow going too for its new brand Zest, targeted at young, upwardly mobile consumers. Unlike Club Mahindra which offers a holiday every year for 25 years, Zest is cheaper and is for a ten-year period. With the IT slowdown, a core target audience has been affected.

As Ramesh Ramanathan, Managing Director, points out, Zest’s target segment is facing a recession for the first time in their lives. “We are okay with that as we have tweaked our model to push more hotel room sales,” he says. Zest has five properties to date, with a little over 3,000 members.

“Even if membership growth is slow for now, the idea is to keep the experience high so when the good times come, we will be right up there in mindspace,” says Navarun Sen, Business Head, Zest.

As Sen says, Zest, a business unit of the company, is creating a high-energy youth-oriented destination and is investing in new activities and also roped in a new head of resort operations, a Canadian “We are now creating the product in its completeness and putting it on a higher plane,” he adds. Zest has tied up with Bangalore-based company Yuyutsa to offer Paint Ball at some of its resorts. It’s a game involving strategy, team work and colour, where an opponent team is knocked down by coloured pellets, a game originally designed for the army.

Ramanathan avers that the brand will not look at tweaking prices of its offerings as a holiday membership is not price-sensitive as it’s more a lifestyle product. However, given the current environment, the company is looking to micro-manage the acquisitions process, meet more prospects, look at events where it can get more bang for buck, go into corporates to sell the concept. Mahindra Holidays spent 28 per cent of sales as selling and marketing costs last year and expects to maintain the same percentage this year as well. Getting people to go on a holiday is hard work indeed!

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