CII Marketing Summit: Change mindsets to reach untapped markets

New Delhi: Santosh Desai, managing director and CEO of Future Brands thinks that the Indian marketplace is a changing one and the industry must realise that "existing mindsets have to change if we are not to miss the new opportunity that is before us".

Desai says that currently marketing strategies tend to approach the untapped market with a "view from the top'' rather than take a bottom-up approach, and this is what needs to change.

Rural focus: Bottom up approach needed
Speaking at the ninth CII Marketing Summit at New Delhi, Desai was addressing a session on "Scaling the market-size: The sachet to Nano experience. And what next". He agreed with the earlier speakers on the second day of the summit, saying that there was a need to integrate the market place, if one had to widen the rural reach.

"Industry must realise that there currently exists a disjoint between product and pricing. For the vast untapped markets, it is a question of affordability and appropriateness that were most important. And, this is something that the industry must consider,'' says Desai.

Prabhat Pani, CEO of Roots Corporation said, "good business sense is made when one is able to balance price and performance."

Outlining the genesis of the Ginger Group of Hotels, Pani said that it was the weight assigned to these factors that helped the group create its brand space. Businesses need to "institutionalise innovation if they were to move forward," even as they give adequate emphasis to incorporating technology in delivering value.

Innovation is the way forward.

''Such innovation'', says Thomas Muthoot, director of Muthoot Fincorp Ltd, ''was necessary if businesses were to promote inclusion of the untapped.'' Muthoot detailed various schemes implemented by his company to promote financial inclusion, saying "it was important that financial institutions spoke the language of the people. And this means working from the ground up. Also, businesses have to understand that in the new markets, it would be volume and efficiency that would be the driving force."

Abanti Sankaranarayanan, executive director and deputy CEO of Mount Everest Mineral Water Ltd agreed with the view that the bottom of the pyramid is a vast market, waiting to be tapped. ''Here, solutions that maximised value and were not necessarily low in cost and quality will find greater acceptance," she says.

Sandip Patil, vice president and partner, and managing partner GBS-India / SA, Asia Pacific GBS Financial Services Sector Leader at IBM Global Business Services, says the "key to tapping the bottom of the pyramid lay in aligning integration with innovation."

Promoting the partnership model of expanding one's reach in this segment was essential for companies such as his as this market was largely fragmented, said Patil.