Between 1969, when Nirma hit the shelves and 1982, the detergent brand made little progress. Then Doordarshan went into expansion frenzy with Asiad `82. And that gave Karsanbhai a medium to peddle Nirma to millions. The rest is history.
Many of the marketers we polled for the big marketing ideas talked about tele-communication as one of the biggest drivers of change in the Indian marketplace.
Some cited pioneering effort in C&S, others spoke of STD booths and the Internet. In fact, telecom narrowly missed making it to The Big Five list, that too because marketers chose different aspects of tele-communication as their pick.
For Shunu Sen, CEO of Quadra Advisory, cable TV had a phenomenal impact on the way marketing was done. "This gave a big boost to the way communication happened," he says.
"For the first time, a marketer could physically show his product to a large number of consumers, which was missing in print and radio, " says S L Rao, former director general, NCAER, and the mind behind the now-famous survey Consumer Market Demographics in India.
If Doordarshan's expansion in the 1980s gave marketers the opportunity to reach out to the masses, cable and satellite (C&S) television provided the medium to accurately target specific segments. The proliferation of channels too has been rapid. We now have over 50 channels, in different languages, talking to different consumer groups.
"These gave focussed reach to audiences in a culture-specific way," points out A G Krishnamurthy, chairman and managing director, Mudra Communications.
But, for Krishnamurthy, the bigger thing was the way STD booths grew across the country. "In a country with a vast geographical expanse like India, communication is critical. Access to telephony has been traditionally limited. (Sam) Pitroda's telecom mission ensured that long distance phones were available at an arm's length - thereby changing the way we live and do business. Private telephony is today benchmarking itself against this mega-initiative," he says.
Connectivity means greater exposure. This not only increas
