All Maruti cars since Swift bear a new, sporty DNA. The car's success has not only brought new customers but also changed the way Maruti is perceived, and perceives itself Twenty-five years ago, I V Rao, nursing a dream to design cars, joined what was then a fledgling Maruti Udyog Ltd. It must have been a distant and vague dream.
Maruti was just starting to roll out an 800 cc mini car designed and built in Japan. It was to compete with Hindustan Motors' Ambassador and Premier Automobiles' Premier Padmini, both of which, designed outside India, had been largely the same for decades.
Currently the joint head of the engineering and research & development wing of Maruti "" it is Maruti Suzuki India now "" the lanky and genial Rao looks amused to find himself living that early dream.
Earlier a typical day for him would be monitoring the status of component development ""meeting the basic dimension, metallurgy, performance and durability. Testing of vehicles occupied a lot of his time.
Now, his time is spent working on new models simultaneously and in conjunction with Suzuki's team in Japan. "Although I am with the same company in the same department, it's a new job," says Rao.
His comrade-in-arms is C V Raman, who denies any connection with his Nobel prize winning namesake.
The surprise is even bigger for Raman. A few years ago he was in the vendor development department "" as far removed from design and development of cars as a tender is from a spanner.
These two have been instrumental in bringing out DZire, the sedan based on the same platform as Swift, in March this year.
This car fills the void left by the exit of Esteem. Since it also has a diesel version, fitted with the same 1,248 cc engine that has been appreciated in Swift, it marks the entry of Maruti in the diesel sedan segment.
DZire is the second sedan in 10 months from Maruti, which is known as predominantly a maker of small cars. That is much more than what the companies known as makers of big cars do. But the change in Maruti is bigger the size of its cars.
The sharp, swift turn
Since Swift in May 2005, Maruti has launched seven cars in 34 months. Some of its rivals haven't done that in their entire existence in India.
The change is not about numbers either. Swift was the first car from Maruti that, other than the value provided by its competitive pricing, sought to provide the consumers with style, sportiness, high performance and a premium tag.
"Swift was a watershed. Our styling philosophy has changed. Earlier, we made traditional and conventional designs," says Rao. Seconds Raman: "Be it small cars or large, Suzuki's DNA has changed to sporty. We are talking about world cars." Indeed, for a long time, the company did not bring out Swift in white as the colour was considered too plain.
Of all the cars by Maruti since Swift, only the new Wagon R would fit the description of a typical Maruti car: simple, straight lines, value for money.
Zen Estilo is small, but its design has little in common with its older siblings like Alto, Wagon R or Esteem. All the other new launches, too, flaunt curves, sportiness and performance not usually associated with Maruti cars before Swift. The cars in the pipeline "" A-Star and Splash "" take the new philosophy forward.
"Swift was the turning point for Suzuki (the Japanese car maker that owns 54.2 per cent of Maruti's equity) and Maruti," says Maruti managing director S Nakanishi.
The new dictator
The turning point was sharper than it appears to the naked eye. The most significant change "" and the one to be handled most adroitly "" was the churn in customers that Swift and the subsequent cars have wrought.
Till 2005, Suzuki used to sell a hatchback version of Esteem in Europe and called it Swift. The car had a loyal following. It is said that when the new Swift hit the market, the buyers and wannabe buyers of the old Swift came to see it and went back shaking their heads in bewildered disappointment.
In their place came a new, much bigger crowd of customers that wanted the new Swift. After 2000, the total installed manufacturing capacity, at about 1.6 million a year, became much higher than the demand of about 1.2 million. The market became the buyer's, instead of the seller's.
The post-Independence generation lived in scarcity and was averse to spending. The next generation came into some money but spent only what it had in its pocket.
The present generation, spoilt by the boom in retail finance, is not willing to wait for the day after tomorrow, when money would come, to buy its dream. It is a generation that crowds airports, not railway stations, and doesn't mind spending Rs 500 on a movie show. "Yesterday's conveniences are today's hygiene," says Mayank Pareek, the joint head of sales and marketing.
Inevitably, the concept of the car could not remain insulated from these changes. From a transport solution, it has become an extension of the owner's personality.
The new customer has to be treated in new ways. Traditionally, the Indian consumer is a big value-seeker. So, value had to be at the core of Maruti's strategy, but it came to be laced with what Pareek often speaks of, "excitement".
The expectations of a value-for-money buyer would be different from that of the buyer of a more premium car. The latter would almost certainly have been exposed to the best. His service expectations would be higher.
Of late, Maruti has infiltrated the cyber space, including blogs and YouTube. The commercials of SX4 and DZire, as well as discussion forums on them, started on the Internet much before their launch.
Since the potential buyer, with 310 television channels at his disposal, would be busy flipping, Maruti has embraced the new concept of Marketing for One, which seeks to desegregate customers and contact them individually with specific communication.
The company's customer relationship management programme has more than a million existing owners of Maruti cars. It gets mined regularly since an existing owner is also a potential buyer "" only 34 per cent of car buyers buy a car for the first time; the others either add to the number of cars they own, or replace old cars.
Dealer showrooms have been spruced up and a training progarmme has been developed for dealers' sales force. As many as 14,000 sales people of dealers were trained for three months to prepare for DZire's launch.
As part of the training, the sales people were taken for meals to five-star hotels and given a feel of really high-end cars.
"A person buying DZire lives a certain lifestyle. He may be a Mercedes owner buying DZire for his wife or son. You have to know his lifestyle so you can put yourself in his shoes... In the old days, the retailer was the king. Then the customer became the king. Today, the customer is the dictator," says Pareek.
The nuts and bolts
Pareek's feedback to the engineering and R&D department is that Maruti cars should stand out from a mile. While associating a personality with the cars, the name that crops up often is actor John Abraham's.
Rao, Raman and team are getting used to the new lingo. But that is just one part of the change. Starting 1995, Maruti began to build R&D capability, but it was slow progress. Maruti 800 was revamped in September 1997 (it still wears the same skin) but the revamp was done by Suzuki in Japan and transferred to India.
The spate of models that were launched at the turn of the century "" Baleno, two types of Alto, and Wagon R "" were already in production in Japan (the Alto that came to India in 2000 had been in production since 1998). Only some fine-tuning of the suspension, etcetera, was needed to bring them into India.
The revamp of Zen in 2003, referred to as Zen Minor by the R&D folk, was the first major local design effort. The revamped Zen was not exactly a hit, but it did enough to earn Maruti large-scale involvement in the development of Swift.
Twenty-five engineers were sent from India to Japan to work on the car.
For the first time, the model development took place in India at the same time as in Japan, Europe and China. Once the design was completed in Japan and the prototype made, the subsequent model development took place in India. Earlier, even after a model went into production, all quality issues would be addressed in Japan.
The surge in car sales in recent years has put the spotlight on Maruti, which has managed to retain more than 50 per cent share of the market.
Industry experts say this is the kind of growth that even Suzuki, in India for a quarter of a century, had not anticipated. In the last financial year, Maruti sold more cars "" 711,000 "" than Suzuki sold in Japan (673,000). Maruti's sales in the year grew nearly 12 per cent, while Suzuki's in Japan fell 2.5 per cent.
The growth story may well continue. Car penetration in India is still only seven per 1,000 people, compared with 10 in China, 450 in the US and 500 in western Europe.
If Maruti is to safeguard its market share, it needs a bustling pipeline of new models and upgrades of existing ones.
Then there is the fact that the Indian consumer has evolved an identity of its own that is closer to Europe than Japan. "The Japanese models are boxy, with straight lines. Indian taste is more European, much more rounded and with curves," says Rao.
Thus, the number of engineers working in Maruti's R&D has increased from 269 in 2006-07 to 488 at present. This number is slated to rise to 1,000 by 2010. A large number of them is often in transit, flying to or back from Japan.
Seventy-five of Maruti's engineers have just spent two years there. At any given point in time, there are 40 Maruti engineers at Suzuki's facilities. "Our engineers are part of their teams. They learn on the job and come back and apply their learning on Maruti projects," says Raman.
It is a sign of things to come that the concept of A-Star, Suzuki's next global car to be launched this year, has been designed in India. Its prototype had to be built in Japan, since it had to be a quick job. For that, Maruti dispatched designers and engineers to Japan.
It is Nakanishi's top priority to increase Maruti's sales to a million by 2010. By that time Suzuki is targeting global sales of 3 million. Given this ratio, Rao, Raman, Pareek & Co can expect their lives to change some more.
