With India standing out stronger in the global markets, we should market our “Indianness” more happily, writes Prachi Tiwari
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Clients wish to capitalise on the ingrained belief that international products are better, especially in the area of technology, cosmetics and fashion, writes Ashu Sabharwal
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Be Yourself. Everyone else is taken — Oscar Wilde A look at Indians' affinity for foreign brands and gloabal branding.
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Understanding the basic needs of a traveller can go a long way in encouraging him to return for yet another culinary experience with youBy Ranbir BatraThe truth is, although we must eat to live, which one of us doesn’t live to eat? Ah…food. Just the word itself has an unparalleled ability to evoke reactions — emotional, physical and even spiritual — by nothing more than its mere mention.World over, family discussions, business meeting, social outings and even national and international debates are planned and designed around the communal consumption of food. Whether you are sitting at home inhaling the aroma of spices simmering around you, or in your office anticipating the unveiling of your lunch tiffin, or at a restaurant searching through a menu to find the dish that will hit your sweet spot, or in an airplane hoping the food service will sweeten your journey, we routinely hit the pause button on our busy lives to — yes, you guessed it — eat good food!As a student in a culinary school, developing a keen understanding of the relationship with food was as important a component of my course work as learning about the science and art of food itself.First, there are cultural norms and preferences to consider, then, of course, there is the seasonal availability of the ingredients. But above all, there is the inexplicable and completely unpredictable X-factor to be mastered — your customer’s mood!Years later, figuring out what will make my customer truly happy remains the most important question I address when I step into my kitchens day after day. And as a professional in the food service industry, I recognise that no matter how many varieties of food I offer on my menus, and no matter how much I may have learned about the preparation of good food, ultimately each one of my customer will form their own, individual opinions about their meal they are served.Even before my customer has taken the first bite of his or her food, their eyes and nose have initiated the experience, and as a restaurateur, my primary goal is to ensure that the hundreds and thousands of these food critics that come my way leave with a positive review.The world has become more globalised and innovative in the last 20 years. Through continued innovation, more and more people across the globe are able to freely communicate with others with a mere touch of their phone pads and arrange travel itineraries within a couple of minutes. Through globalisation, more people are able to travel to all corners of the world in search of life-changing experiences, business opportunities, religious enlightenment, and better education. The trade association for the world’s airlines — International Air Transport Association (IATA) — released its first 20-year passenger growth forecast, projecting that passenger numbers are expected to reach 7.3 billion by 2034. That represents a 4.1 per cent average annual growth in demand for air connectivity that will result in more than a doubling of the 3.3 billion passengers expected to travel this year. In light of this information, many of the airlines need to ask themselves: How do we gain an upper hand over competition? How do we improve the quality of airline travel so we can increase our revenue? How do we offer all of our new and future customers an enjoyable travel experience so that they remain long-term customers? The answer may lie in appealing the palate, the tongue, and the stomach! Members of the airline industry may be able to distinguish themselves from their competition by improving their culinary offerings. Should an airline serve their passengers a full meal, but charge them no more than the cost of an airline ticket? Or should an airline offer a wider range of meal options, and expect passengers to pay for the meal of their choice? Should airlines serve fancier, more exotic meals to appeal to their wanderlust-driven travelers? Or simpler meals that are nutritious, easy-to-serve, and less accident-prone 30,000 feet up in the air?As the airline industry continues to work its way through these questions, one thing is clear that as competition among airlines for market share continues to heat up, the question of which airlines serves the best food is becoming an increasingly important consideration in the race for customer loyalty and retention.Further, airline food is no longer viewed as simply a means of sustenance, aimed at tiding the passenger over until they’ve reached their destination and a real meal. On the contrary, given that there isn’t really much to distract a passenger through his journey, the question of when their meal will be served, and what they can expect to find under the foil covering their food trays is, in fact, one of the few things most passengers look forward to after take-off. And what they find under that layer or foil can, and does, define a passenger’s experience with any given airline.However, as passengers, we are often not aware of the myriad challenges faced by the airline industry. Airline food is cooked in professional industrial sized kitchens, cooled to below zero degrees within a fixed window of time in order to kill all bacteria before the meals are transported to the airline, stored on a plane and then reheated, once again within a fixed window of time to ensure that the food is kept out of the temperature danger zone, before it is finally served to the passenger. Airlines also follow extremely strict hygiene policies when it comes to serving food on a flight, and have to ensure that all food service areas remain extremely clean at all times.When you see the flight attendant bringing that food trolley towards you, already thoughts are flowing through your head and you wait for that question: “Sir/Madam, would you like to have our vegetarian option or non-vegetarian option?”Most often on domestic airlines, we have a pre-judged notion that we are going to get cold hard paneer, green peas, rice and potato or some dry, hard chicken curry, along with some yoghurt, cold salad, fruit and a dessert. When that is the case that smile immediately turns into a frown.Even before getting to how delicious their meal is, it is the simple things passengers are looking for: just a soft and warm bread roll can transform a traveller’s meal experience.Unlike restaurants, while airline meals cannot be prepared to cater to each individual’s unique taste, paying attention to the details can go a long way in meeting the expectations of a passenger. Every airline must strive to achieve basic criteria when it comes to serving meals: meals that are healthy, hot, and as importantly, pleasing to the eye once that layer of foil is peeled off the tray. In my opinion, if an airline can successfully meet these criteria, half the food battle is won.Is achieving all of the above a challenge? Absolutely. But do we passengers see things differently, and expect nothing but the best because “we have paid for it”? Absolutely. Survey after survey has shown that passengers are choosing their airline, and even paying for higher-priced tickets, if the airline has a reputation for serving delicious food.When it comes to the question of who pays for these meals, some argue that if the airline industry is expected to improve the selection of meals served on a flight, then the passengers should be expected to pay for their share of the meal.In my opinion, expecting passengers to pay for their meals on a short sector flight may, in fact, be a reasonable strategy. But on a longer sector flight, where meals are the one thing that keep the passenger going with hours left to landing, it is in the airlines’ best interest to up the ante and make their passengers’ journey as satisfying and memorable as possible.Furthermore, given the increasing costs of travel and some ungodly charges that airlines are beginning to impose on customers (for example, carry-on bag charges, excess baggage charges, and higher ticket costs), charging customers additional amounts for a hearty meal could only jeopardise maintaining the customer base. Through my experiences, I have learned that it may never be possible to satisfy everyone. And in the case of the airline industry, the task at hand is even more challenging, but understanding the basic needs of a traveller, and staying true to the question of “What will make my customer truly happy” can go a long way in retaining your customers’ loyalty and encouraging them to return for yet another culinary experience with you. The writer is a fourth generation restaurateur and owns Mumbai’s New Yorker and Pune’s Frisco. He studied at Kendall College, Chicago and graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Culinary Arts.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 02-11-2015)
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The core purpose of HR should be to safeguard, develop and nurture the most important asset of the company — its employees, writes Prof. Mala SinhaLuxetta’s strategic approach to gain competitive advantage is outward looking, which means adjusting the organisation’s relationship with external environment by changing structure or repositioning products and services. The fallout of this approach is that even when products are unfinished and have technical glitches, they are launched in markets to be in time with, perhaps, a festive season, be first among competitors , or simply to ‘beat the Chinese’. For this reason, in the past, a noiseless juicer that Luxetta had launched failed in three markets and had to be withdrawn. Now, market intelligence had indicated that competition was ready with three new products in refrigeration section: making the marketing department push for early launch of the technologically advanced five-door refrigerator, Liza Extra, even though its ice dispenser unit — also supposed to be the ‘wow ‘ feature of the product — was giving problems. The R&D and production people were resisting, and felt this move to be a recipe for disaster.An outward strategic approach is essentially reactive and stems from inherent insecurity due to uncertainty regarding the external environment — more prevalent in case of European and US-owned multinationals when they are dealing with Asian economies. At Luxetta, the strategy is also blinkered by centralised control mindset, possibly a colonial hang over, with little trust for people from APac. Thus, when Ken Williams, the previous head of Asian R&D resigns, instead of mentoring local talent from Asia, though there is a half-hearted and therefore a failed attempt to do this, the company deputes John Kramer based in US after year-long bickering. This is strategically a bad decision because John will now be even more stretched by responsibilities straddling US, Europe and now APac , while simultaneously reporting to three bosses. In order to make life a little easier, John gets the company to agree to a suboptimal solution like appointing a junior in Singapore, who would report to him, while he himself would be based in US. This move ends up causing several complicated and inefficient lines of communication to develop among the APac countries, Europe and US, leading to delays in decision making which further strained the system. Prof. Mala SinhaOrganisations benefit from an inward looking strategic approach, which focuses on their core purpose, embodied as products and services, meant to serve specific needs of stakeholders in a particular way the organisations know best. In case of Luxetta, the central purpose of the organisation is producing top quality and technologically advanced home appliances, and therefore all systems, processes and people resources should be focused primarily to fulfilling this objective. When strategic intent deviates from organisation’s core purpose and decisions are guided by secondary concerns such as being first in the market, or beating the Chinese, among others, there is misalignment of people, processes and products, which leads to adverse consequences. At Luxetta, the strategy is determined by a desire to retain European control of APac operations, and rather than nurturing Asian talent, which, with their greater depth of understanding of Asian markets and culture would be more capable of serving the central purpose of the organisation, deputes an overworked westerner to APac.An incident from Jaipur Rugs, an Indian SME that has won several prestigious national and international awards for excellence is illustrative. Traditionally, the company gave designs for carpets and rugs (in demand by western markets) to weavers in India, but this time CMD N.K. Choudhary asked 10 weavers to create their own design — essentially make a carpet based on their own creative insights. After completion, when the carpets were exported and put on sale at High Point Market in North Carolina, US (one of the world’s largest centres for home furnishing where over 2,000 suppliers exhibit wares at a time), seven of the 10 carpets were sold within an hour of being unpacked. The inward approach of aligning processes and markets with weavers’ competence, rather than the other way round, resulted in the creation of top-class products that got instant recognition from external stakeholders —the customers. Anchoring the organisation’s strategy to mavericks of market forces and uncertainty brought about by rapid and unpredictable technology change makes the organisation strategically directionless.By the same analogy, the HR strategy at Luxetta is also outward looking. The core purpose of HR should be to safeguard, develop and nurture the most important asset of the company — its employees, in a way that the larger and overall purpose of the organization can be effectively served. HR should have been the first to worry about John’s wellbeing, and the first to question the rationality of making a person travel across the globe for greater part of the month, deal with idiosyncrasies of three bosses and juggle two seemingly bipolar hats — brand management and R&D.The maintenance engineer while taking care of company’s physical assets increases efficiency by mechanical precision and documenting data, but HR, which deals with intangibles of human nature has to be more creative in sense making. The approach of HR towards annual health checks of employees at Luxetta is documenting and informing, wherein it should have been discerning patterns in the state of health of the organisation’s human capital, and counselling. HR should also motivate people to be conscious of their health, and had Madhav been counselled by food and exercise therapists, he may have realised the seriousness of his medical condition and taken remedial steps that could have averted the brain hemorrhage he ended up with. People are paid to work for the organisation, and therefore worrying about themselves often takes a back seat. Good health maintenance can be incentivised as happens with defence personnel, where poor physical fitness impacts promotions as medical category goes down. The services know that soldiers and officers have to be physically fit to be able to do the job for which they are hired. John was a valuable asset, he was handling two critical functions — R&D responsible for producing high quality home appliances — the core of Luxetta; and branding which is essential to survive in a competitive environment.What are the limits of corporate responsibility towards the health of an employee? In the context of heated global competitiveness due to the economic success of emerging economies, consumerism and greater material and stimulation needs of populations, corporate work life has become more stressful. Abetted by principal-agency nexus comprising of faster returns to shareholders compensated by hefty corporate salaries, perks and bonuses, corporate stress levels have increased exponentially, making it difficult for individuals to deal with it on their own. HR must play a greater, nay, a more sense-making role in corporations. Performance criteria should also include good health — we want people who are both productive and healthful and perhaps even the balance sheet can report on these matters. Radical changes in the way companies are trying to reduce performance appraisal linked stress are on the anvil. Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme recently told The Washington Post that starting in September, the performance of the company’s 330,000 staffers will no longer be judged based on company rankings and annual evaluations, but on a more fluid system. The irrationality of forced ranking along distribution curves will be abandoned and people will be evaluated for their role, and not vis-à-vis someone else who might work in Washington or Bangalore.Finally, the case indirectly questions the limits of western values like individualism, free will and autonomy, which are fast becoming the values of new age aspirational Asians too. John was on fast track of personal growth and treated every added responsibility as an opportunity in this direction. He was individualistic and his wife’s observation at the funeral that ‘he took to heart if he missed soccer game with kids’ was perhaps compensatory concern towards the family; and the fact that ‘he was always smiling’ and never shared with his wife the considerable problems at Luxetta showed John did not relax at home. John Kramer was perpetually on a centrifugal spin and had forgotten to be still and listen to his body. The markers of the stressful life he was leading were present, only he never recognised them. The writer teaches Business Ethics, CSR and Leadership through Asian Values at Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhimala.sinha@fms.edu(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 07-09-2015)
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While the algorithm to resolve dilemmas may be impossible to crack, some frameworks can be adopted to offer clarity in making wise choices, writes Vineet Kapoor
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Anila Ishwar circled the quote in the brand equity, again and again, lost in one thought: Why did Madhav Walia say this?
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Madhav walia created a winner smartphone brand using a celebrity endorser. Today, a few years later, Madhav is not recommending the strategy to Anila, who is seeing potentially big benefits for her youthful phone brand, Nix. Why?
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The herd mentality is dead. the consumer is much more evolved, and the time to delve into deeper relationships with them is now.
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