abhishreshthaa
Abhijeet S
The Pilot Project:
The women’s self help group (SHG) movement had been very strong in AP. Basically groups of women – around 15 a group – who save a rupee a day and the corpus so generated loan out to members of the group to help them in their work and not for meeting personal needs.
The groups get a matching loan from the government on soft terms. The interest earned is ploughed back into the corpus. There are over four lakh such groups in AP. Taking advantage of the available situation; the company decided to convince these women Self – Help Groups to help sell the Prestige brand.
MART and the company organized meetings of the women of the SHGs and explained the concept of pressure cooking, giving them details on the company, the brand and what they stand to gain by selling Prestige pressure cookers. For enlisting dealers the help of ‘animators’, who are paid a stipend by the Government for propagating / implementing development activities of the State Governmental among the rural population, was enlisted.
All those who became dealers were given a demo pressure cooker. Meetings were organized by the dealers for potential customers, where the concept of pressure-cooking was explained. Company personnel attended these meeting so that dealers got trained on the concept of pressure cookers.
Intense working of these markets for two months by a management trainee of the company along with the guidance provided by MART saw the company selling 50 pressure cookers.
The company thus with its excellent strategy the back – up that it got from the state government could enter the rural markets successfully. It could enter a market (Mehboobnagar), which was one of the most backward districts of AP.
However after the whole exercise i.e. from the company’s pilot project, the company had come down to the following major conclusions on how to go rural and the various problems that governed rural selling that are discussed below:
1) Logistics and high price point.
2) Limited rural purchasing power.
3) Difficulty in convincing the customer on the product’s utility.
From the conclusions thus drawn the company could now frame a proper policy with the perfect product design, price – point etc. it then came up with the product with the following changes (the new adopted strategy):
1) A ‘rural’ brand at a much lower price point was launched immediately.
2) To take care of another crucial aspect of logistics was another problem as there were few distributors. For this TTK directly started supplying to these dealers from warehouses at Hyderabad and also at Vijaywada.
3) To take the initiative forward the company got in touch with the Department of Women Empowerment. The TTK group was asked to make a proposal on how it could work with the Government on improving the lot of the rural women. After prolonged discussions with the department, TTK gave a proposal, which was three-pronged strategy:
Appointing women as dealers of ‘Prestige;
Setting up an assembly plant in AP with land and building provided by the Government using women of the rural areas;
Setting up a ready-to-fry snacks conversion units in each of the 21 Districts of AP with equipment provided by TTK and appointing dealers to sell these snacks in each of the mandals in these 21 districts (around 1,000).
The TTK had its own brand of ready-to-eat snack, Fryums, which had been withdrawn but the group sells pellets to converters who convert it to ready-to-fry snacks and sell it. The whole proposal involved creating one-lakh women workdays and generating Rs 3.42 crore of income for the rural women in the fifth year of operations.
The women’s self help group (SHG) movement had been very strong in AP. Basically groups of women – around 15 a group – who save a rupee a day and the corpus so generated loan out to members of the group to help them in their work and not for meeting personal needs.
The groups get a matching loan from the government on soft terms. The interest earned is ploughed back into the corpus. There are over four lakh such groups in AP. Taking advantage of the available situation; the company decided to convince these women Self – Help Groups to help sell the Prestige brand.
MART and the company organized meetings of the women of the SHGs and explained the concept of pressure cooking, giving them details on the company, the brand and what they stand to gain by selling Prestige pressure cookers. For enlisting dealers the help of ‘animators’, who are paid a stipend by the Government for propagating / implementing development activities of the State Governmental among the rural population, was enlisted.
All those who became dealers were given a demo pressure cooker. Meetings were organized by the dealers for potential customers, where the concept of pressure-cooking was explained. Company personnel attended these meeting so that dealers got trained on the concept of pressure cookers.
Intense working of these markets for two months by a management trainee of the company along with the guidance provided by MART saw the company selling 50 pressure cookers.
The company thus with its excellent strategy the back – up that it got from the state government could enter the rural markets successfully. It could enter a market (Mehboobnagar), which was one of the most backward districts of AP.
However after the whole exercise i.e. from the company’s pilot project, the company had come down to the following major conclusions on how to go rural and the various problems that governed rural selling that are discussed below:
1) Logistics and high price point.
2) Limited rural purchasing power.
3) Difficulty in convincing the customer on the product’s utility.
From the conclusions thus drawn the company could now frame a proper policy with the perfect product design, price – point etc. it then came up with the product with the following changes (the new adopted strategy):
1) A ‘rural’ brand at a much lower price point was launched immediately.
2) To take care of another crucial aspect of logistics was another problem as there were few distributors. For this TTK directly started supplying to these dealers from warehouses at Hyderabad and also at Vijaywada.
3) To take the initiative forward the company got in touch with the Department of Women Empowerment. The TTK group was asked to make a proposal on how it could work with the Government on improving the lot of the rural women. After prolonged discussions with the department, TTK gave a proposal, which was three-pronged strategy:
Appointing women as dealers of ‘Prestige;
Setting up an assembly plant in AP with land and building provided by the Government using women of the rural areas;
Setting up a ready-to-fry snacks conversion units in each of the 21 Districts of AP with equipment provided by TTK and appointing dealers to sell these snacks in each of the mandals in these 21 districts (around 1,000).
The TTK had its own brand of ready-to-eat snack, Fryums, which had been withdrawn but the group sells pellets to converters who convert it to ready-to-fry snacks and sell it. The whole proposal involved creating one-lakh women workdays and generating Rs 3.42 crore of income for the rural women in the fifth year of operations.