The Hindu Business Line : Marketing is a kid’s game?

Hasmukh Patel, my landlord in Baroda, never finished school but inculcated a culture of entrepreneurship in his grandchildren at the formative stages of their life. Living as a joint family, there were about a dozen school-going children in the house who kept demanding pocket money from parents for varied purpose. Hasmukh hit upon an ingenious idea of creating a corpus of Rs 100 for them and told them to meet their expenses out of the returns they generated from it.

Imagine the power of learning the invaluable lessons on defining the market space (X-axis) and creating the positioning appeal (Y-axis) to determine an appropriate price for their offerings while still at school.

Vanilla: ‘Peppermint’ project applied the principle of buying unbranded vanilla peppermints sold loose and sell them in twist-wrapped cellophane. The weekly profit was Rs 25 and the children stopped asking for pocket money thereafter. Everyone could copy them but few would because they would be perceived to be lacking in originality!

Limited edition: While most of the children would buy kites to celebrate Uttarayan, the time in January when wind changes direction, the Patel clan manufactured kites of different sizes and sold them door-to-door at double the premium! Their personalised and custom designed kites were sold on an offer of ‘Now or never ever’ that their customers found irresistible.

Segmented offering: Identifying a segment of students who could not afford to buy textbooks, the Patels would collect the used books and unused pages in the notebooks from each household as soon as the exams got over every year. While other children went on expensive vacation, they were busy binding them to rent them out to the students the following year against a nominal deposit. The returns on investment were infinite because they were procured at zero cost.

Exclusive rendition: The up-market private schools expect their students to begin the year with all their books and notebooks faithfully wrapped up and labels affixed on them. While the parents have no time, the children lack the skills or the inclination.

The Patels encashed on this opportunity by undertaking such ‘projects’ on a time bound and turnkey basis charging Rs 3-5, material and labour included, per book. The premiums charged varied with the volumes, urgency and level of sophistication demanded by the customer!

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