A red-letter day

Today is a truly historic day. Never before has the world looked at Indian business with so much hope, awe and delight. Today TATA motors launched its famed ' 1 Lakh car'. Christened as 'Nano', this 33bhp hatchback with a 624cc engine, is priced half that of the current cheapest car in the market. According to information supplied by the company, Nano has a lower overall pollution level than two-wheelers made in India and the higher fuel efficiency (20 km/litre) ensured low carbon dioxide emissions.

Indian car sales are predicted to more than quadruple to $145bn by 2016. Tata will initially make about 250,000 Nanos and expects eventual annual demand of one million cars. This breakthrough product will surely find buyers in many other markets, including the developed markets for a higher version even if it were to cost $5000 - 6000. Coming to think of it, this fits exactly with the idea of how radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new solutions, which i had covered in my earlier post on Evan Williams

Are we therefore at times limited only by our thought? ...

My salute to everyone at Tata Motors who made this possible.

The accidental innovator

Check out this interesting article on Economist online on Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter. The article talks about how Evan stumbled upon both ideas. Evan believes that radical constraints can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

Market dominators

ET Brand Equity carried an article on how some brands like Amul, J&J, Nokia, Maruti etc. have been able to dominate the market for long in their respective categories.

The article says that most market dominators stay at the top for the simple reason that they continually work on putting distance between them and the competition through constant innovation.

The article goes on to cite Parachute as a good example of innovation. The brand it says is the leader because it has continually strived to raise the aspirational value of the category by making coconut oil contemporary and relevant to a younger set of consumers. I have a slightly different take on this. How long will hair oil remain contemporary is a challenge and therefore the brand has already started looking at the ‘next’ extensions – hair gel and cream. It’s more important that the younger consumers use ‘Parachute’, whether it's in the form of hair oil should be incidental.

There are plenty of examples of how even innovative companies have being overtaken by challengers not necessarily from their industry. Kodak was taken by surprise by the digital camera wave and then later by the camera phones. It did however try and still find a way to be relevant by literally ‘sleeping with the enemy’ – you can click on digital cameras or even cell phones and get them printed on a Kodak paper. But Google’s Picasa and Flicker still pose a threat as they make sharing pictures so easy without having to print them. Kodak should have owned photography but failed to see the change.

My sense is that it’s not just innovation but the ability to see the imminent change and its competitive implications that has served these brands better. It’s more about having a clear sense of how one can remain relevant despite the change, in fact a step further on how a brand can ride and exploit the change….or can it be the change?

Brand Convergence

This article of mine was first listed on Interbrand's http://www.brandchannel.com/ in Nov. 2006. It was republished in TOI group's Retail Biz in Jan. 2007


It was also a recommended link on Urbanhonking's Co-branding discussion. There are some other good links as well on this site.