What consumers want

BS OPINION

Thus it was with the Ambassador car or Bata shoes, both of which enjoyed major market shares in pre-liberalisation India though few people would have called them great products. Over the past few years, though, near unfettered competition in consumer goods has radically changed the way brands are judged.

Availability and distribution have become standard parameters of performance; to be successful, brands must deliver service and, increasingly, not just please but delight the customer.

This year's annual Brand Derby "" in which leading marketing and advertising professionals are asked to rank the most successful launches of the past year (loosely defined) "" emphatically confirms this trend.

Consider, first, the top three winners of this year's Derby "" the results of which appear in today's issue of The Strategist "" conducted in collaboration with the Mumbai-based Indica Research.

They include, in order of rank, an automobile (the Scorpio) and two entertainment brands "" the film Devdas and India's first on-line lottery Playwin. This almost mimics last year's Derby winners, which featured the much-marketed film Lagaan, the Fiat Palio and Living Media's news channel Aaj Tak in the first three slots.

Note also that in our first-ever ranking of the last seven years' winners and losers, an automobile brand "" the Hyundai Santro "" and two entertainment brands, Lagaan and Aaj Tak "" top the lists.

The significant point about both this year's results and those of the last seven years is that automobiles figure prominently as both winners and losers. This could be interpreted as inevitable, since the industry has high-decibel launches every year.

But the winners have always been those that appear to offer the consumer service and value-for-money as much as a sense of chutzpah and style. But the gap between consumer perception and market performance is starkly visible further down the table at number 13, which is where Reliance India Mobile figures.

With a subscriber base of 3.5 million since it launched in December last year, Reliance Infocomm considers its limited mobile phone service a big success. Certainly, with 48 per cent of respondents voting it "Somewhat successful", it can't be called a failure.

Yet, 32 per cent of Derby respondents voted it "Not successful," which means it can't be called a huge success either. What is more, Reliance India Mobile figures as a prominent first among those spontaneously mentioning brand launch failures in the last year ( i.e, without the benefit of cue cards). Clearly, there is a discontinuity between a company's measures of success and a consumer's.

Why this gap? Our follow-up report showed that the high-pitched promises that accompanied the launch of the service were not matched by performance "" billing services were disastrous, the instruments were often user-unfriendly, and so on.

The message: India's consumers, spoilt for choice, are learning to separate hyperbole from reality.