The Hindu Business Line : Marketing discoveries from an Indian footpath

When Karl Kummer, a German was posted to the Indian operations of Xerox as the Director of Marketing, we did not know what to expect. At his first ever meeting, he regaled us with his discoveries from the streets of India:

ADDICTION: Every Indian kabaadi and pan- wallah knows marketing! The pain of disposing old newspaper is no secret; show up at periodic intervals to ‘relieve their pain’. The buyer believes and the seller willingly obliges the former into a deceptive game of self-seduction.

AFFINITY: ‘Fortune tellers’ in India respond to something that the customers think is essential for them to know and do not, but presume the fortune teller knows better. Any subject of scarcity in India seems to offer a case for sale! So why not provide expert advice on all subjects of perceived scarcity and build up goodwill and customer base?

EVERGREEN OBSOLESCENCE: Indian jewellers redefine the meaning of being out of date. The market for remaking the same piece of gold over and over again, sometimes for generations, never seem to go out of date in India; dotting every lane and street, their choice of design ‘seem deceptively evergreen and current’. The seller seems to be the sole arbiter on what gets old and when, while customers blissfully cough up the price demanded! There seems to be an invisible perpetual contract that entices the buyer to keep switching-out and switching-in forever .

OUTMODED: Have you wondered why no shopkeeper in India ever goes bankrupt? I have seen that I get almost the same stuff at almost the same price offering me the same dull routines I am trapped into but with a different face each time. Take me to your disenchanted customers; buying the same thing from a German national may provide them the difference they may never have experienced before!

Karl stayed on the two full years exploding marketing myths with alarming regularity and confounding his sceptics every time with his definition of value-price dynamics: “The job of marketing is to originate demand (X-axis) while ‘sales’ are employed to propose value (Y axis). The buyer and the seller alike generate four fundamental modes for meaningful engagement between demand initiation and effecting the ‘buy decision’.”

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