Time Pass - a need or a brand?

If you have ever lived in Bombay (Mumbai), you would have travelled in the crowded trains bracing yourself for the one hour or more journey to the station nearest to your home. Other than the real regulars who corner the best seats to play cards or have formed a group of common interest - be it talking about the share market ups and downs of the day, for others it is one of patient waiting. Suddenly, you will hear a vendor shouting 'time pass, time pass, {product that he is selling, e.g. peanuts}, time pass'. The product could almost be anything - a puzzle, something to eat or do. But the real marketing insight that this group of vendors had was that they took a colloquial term for doing nothing of substance and used it to label the boring hour that you had to spend - literally pass time until you reached your destination. They named your need and offered something to fill it. Brilliant! I really don't know what to label it as - a need category or a genericised brand (ala 'fridge' or 'kleenex') except here you could substitute almost anything. If you really want to learn marketing and marvel at business acumen, look around you and they will be aplenty, like the ones on the downtown restauranteurs or the youngster with the scissors and glue that I wrote about earlier. They all executed flawlessly on the marketing process - observing their customers, intuiting what they need and then filling the need. If you are aspiring to be a marketer par excellence, that's what you need to do.

No Rawa Dosa, No Tea!

A quick explanation for non-Indians visiting the site :). Rawa is the South Indian word for samolina (coarsely ground wheat) and dosa is a thin pancake - more like a crepe.

Switch to my favorite city - Bombay or Mumbai to be PC. Mumbai like many megapolises of the world is busy, everyone in a hurry and space is at a premium. Many restaurants in South Bombay are very small with just a few tables sometimes as few as 4 or 6. During the rush lunch hour, most things on the menu are available in a South Indian restaurant but no Rawa Dosa and no tea or coffee. Why do you think that is? Simple - Rawa Dosa takes a relatively long time to cook on the pan (tawa) and people tend to dawdle over their tea and coffee after a meal. What is the restauranteur trying to achieve? Minimize the time spent by each patron at his most constrained resource - a table for his next customer to sit at. So he eliminates those items that either take longer to cook on order or to consume. Another important constraint plays on his mind - there is a short window of time (typically 2 hours, with the middle one hour really busy) for him to maximize his sales. To the student in you, he is managing table yield - revenue per table per hour. In fact to further enhance this, there is an unwritten rule quietly enforced by him and accepted by the busy Bombayites - you share the table with others if you or your party is not occupying all the seats - maximizing utilization at a given point of time.

And that is an astute businessman applying marketing thinking!

The Act of Marketing

Many of you will hear or might have heard the expression: 'Let's do a marketing act on this' and it could be a piece of collateral or an event or a product launch. I cringe to the depths of my marketing soul, when someone says that after having decided on what is being referred to. The act of marketing is best executed from the beginning and not after the fact. Why do I say that? Planning for the lamest piece of collateral involves thinking about where and when it will be used, who we want to send it to, what will make them read it, and what behavior we want to elicit after they read it - all this before a single word is written. Or at least that is what an act of marketing is for me.

The act of marketing is about infusing value into every organizational activity that is trying to address the needs of the customer. Why the word 'infuse'? The dictionary meaning is: 'to introduce'; 'to instill'; 'cause to penetrate'. And that is what we try to do - introduce and instill value into everything we do. In the absence of value, the customer has no reason to engage with you. This ties back to our earlier definition of marketing of it touching every facet of the organization and animating it from creation to delivery of product or service, and capture of value.

Let me quote one of my favorite examples. In Bombay, near nearly every local train counter which issues ID cards, stands a young entrepreneur with a pair of scissors, a bottle of glue and a two pocket (one for the ID card and the other for the monthly train pass) plastic wallet. And the reason - the space for the photograph on the ID card is smaller than any standard photo size, for which you need a pair of scissors. The Indian Railways does not provide glue and therefore the glue stick. And the young entrepreneur charges you the price of the plastic wallet. What did you just buy? The time and cost value of the additional trip you saved, the money you saved for that day's train ticket or just being frustrated at the thoughtlessness of the railway authorities. And you weren't even thinking of buying a plastic wallet which had its own utility. And that is a marketing act par excellence!!

(It is also an example of business model innovation where the product or service that is being sold is different from what is actually being bought by the customer and we will talk about it in a later post. Some may argue that it is just a product being sold with services wrapped around it, but the more nuanced thinking throws up more market opportunities in general).