question hour,. Kinder Joy

I recently heard about Kinder Joy creating different versions for boys and girls. Is this really necessary? What’s behind this idea?

Mumbai

Anamika, do brands have a gender? I really do believe they don’t. Gender in animate brands is created by usage. Attitude to gender is created later by clever marketers. Marketers are good at doing this.

For products where the usage is defined by who uses it most, there is just no issue. It appears the brand has a gender. A brand of feminine hygiene is therefore given the gender it connotes in terms of usage. But then, when it comes to a brand of tea, is it a male or a female? Is that biryani you eat at your favourite restaurant a male or a female biryani? Ouch, that’s ridiculous!

The opportunity to segment brands with a gender appeal exists, though. The chocolate market is a classic example. Yorkie in the UK, for instance, took a campaign on its pack and everywhere else, where it said “It’s not for girls!” Guess what? Girls went out and bought it with a vengeance. The guys kept buying it thinking it is a macho chocolate only for men. The brand gained. Yorkie went one step further and had a variant that was packed in pink. This was meant for girls. Yorkie thus established for itself a chunky chocolate imagery as opposed to the dainty and the fragile. When a business wants to segment its offerings, it does it with business prudence in mind. When Kinder Joy finds that its market excitement is dimming (if at all), it will look at opportunities to segment and add zing. This is certainly one such effort. Out here there is more meaning. A little girl who gets one might want a little doll in the toy kit and a little boy may want a little truck. Segmenting by gender, therefore, makes eminent sense here.

Our coffee shop chains are getting cluttered. Is there any differentiation? With Café Coffee Day (CCD) floating an IPO, is there more excitement ahead?

Vijayawada

Chellam gaaru , there certainly is a lot of action left in this space. The café chains have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity ahead. And Coffee Day has done the best in this space to date.

Coffee shops started in India in November 1996 with VG Siddhartha's first CCD outlet on Brigade Road in Bangalore. Ever since, a lot of coffee has flowed under the bridge of the fine coffee café movement.

In many ways the pioneer set the pace, and everyone who came in after the first CCD aspired to copy first and then innovate. The first to attempt differentiation was Barista. In came lifestyle, as a point of differentiation.

Barista brought in the guitar, the Pictionary board and lots more to add a lifestyle dimension to the segmentation of the market. Others followed. Some focused on food, others focused on ambience and yet others focused on the brews on offer. In the bargain, as of today we have cafés which are largely undifferentiated.

There are small differences, but the differences are not large enough to be noticed. They are not large enough to form part of a differentiated retail brand proposition.

I do believe now is the time when differentiation will be attempted further.

With the entry of Starbucks in India, the country has entered Version 2.0 of the café movement in India. Chains will now attempt to segment audiences. One can do this on the basis of tastes (in music, literature, cinema and what not) and most certainly in terms of even gender-oriented cafés, just as you can have community-oriented segmentation. You could even have cause-oriented cafés in India, such as the ones you have overseas. You could have an AAP anti-corruption café even, just as you can have a women’s issues-oriented café.

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Mail your questions to cat.a.lyst@thehindu.co.in

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