The Tatas have announced that its employees will be allowed to park only company-made vehicles in the company’s parking lot. If you happen to own a car made by somebody else, well, find your own parking somewhere else. Apparently, the circular issued by the head of the Tata Motors Pune plant says that this move is meant “to promote brand image and demonstrate pride of being part of Tata Motors”.

The Tatas have taken a soft approach. I would have gone the whole way and not just restricted parking but have put it as a condition of hiring. It has to be an embarrassment for an executive of a company to be using a rival product. If you are working for Apple, can you be carrying a Samsung phone around without getting dirty looks? Where is your loyalty, a rival to your job will claim.

The loyalty factor

I can see where it makes sense to use rival products for a short time. By using the rival’s product you are trying to learn more about its strengths and weaknesses that will help you improve your own. It helps if you are working in research and development, but it will also help if you are working in marketing. After all, a marketer needs to see her product from a consumer’s perspective.

On the flip side, by using your own product, you get to know more about it, and can find ways to improve your own product. I think this, rather than brand image or demonstration of pride, will be the invaluable result of the move by Tatas.

Doing the Tata

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could extend this idea to the Government?

The Education Ministry is busy giving everyone the right to education and spending tonnes of money trying to improve government schools. A simple one-line order would suffice: All government employees, especially of the rank of gazetted officers, must send their children to government schools. You will see an immediate impact on education in the country. The quality of primary schools will improve as teachers turn up for classes to teach their own children. District collectors will ensure that the schools in their district have the latest lab facilities, and text-books that make sense. One can extend the idea. The secretary for petroleum must go and stand in line at a gas agency to get a new gas connection when he is transferred to the ministry.

The secretary for external affairs must go to the passport office and apply for a new passport, rather than sign forms sitting in his office and have the passport brought to him on a silver tray. Can you imagine how quickly the systems and procedures would be rationalised? Think about how long the honourable secretary will be prepared to wait for police verification?

The kings of yore, according to our history books, would wander incognito in their countries to get that ‘user’s’ perspective.

What’s your stake?

The bottomline is this. What’s your stake in it? If you do not face the pain, you are not going to make it work for yourself or others. As Adam Smith presciently observed many years ago, it is by the selfishness of the butcher and baker that we get our food, and not because the Planning Commission has issued a diktat that grain must be produced. If the passport officer stands in line to get his driver’s licence instead of calling on his colleague to say that he is sending his assistant to collect it, then the officer gets the consumer’s perspective that the Tata management wants its executives to have. It’s not that the private sector is a perfectly operating place, either.

Somehow, when demand seems to exceed supply (and it helps to be a government sanctioned monopoly), the private company starts behaving like a government agency, and gets into rationing mode. Think of your experience trying to buy alcohol in States where distribution has been handed over to a private contractor.

Even if it is a competitive market, as with wireless services, when the basis of competition comes down to only price, then customer service does not seem to matter — till a new player finds there is a market that is prepared to pay for good customer service.

Unfortunately, there is no alternative passport provider within the country to compete with the ministry! While on this subject, I do not know what to make of the proposal, apparently under serious consideration of the UP Government, to require all employees to wear khadi .

Certainly not to get a user’s perspective on khadi . Perhaps a desperate attempt to imbibe the Gandhian spirit?

(The author is presently professor and dean of Jindal Global Business School, Sonepat, Haryana.)

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