The Hindu Business Line : What's love got to do with it?

The café at large is not about coffee at all. It is this singular experiential `third place' (the other two being home and office or home and school/college as the case may be) in our lives. For some it is a gym, for others a beauty parlour where you let down your hair and for some it is the café for sure.

The café is quite a crucible of consumer action as well. It is here that the user/consumer is all of what he or she really is.

Building novelty into the plain vanilla café is yet to happen in a big way in our country as yet. Globally, this is an evolved category and a lot has been tried. Novelty is all about offering that differential. That one thing or set of things that can create magic and earn a magnet status for the brand in question.

All societies start with the plain vanilla café. And then come in the bells and whistles.

In my study across 102 brands of cafes across some 21 countries over the last several years, I have come across a lot of novelty that has exciting potential.

Segmentation of the café is one such novelty-building item. The plain vanilla café that attracts all and sundry in the early days morphs into a segmented offering. A men-only café. A women-only café. The Gay Café. The Rock Café. The Pop Café. The Health Café. The Organic Café. The Politics Café. The Christian Café. Essentially, interest groups clustered into communities and offered a solution-locale to thrive in. And then there are the celebrity cafes. Jackie Chan Café. Name a celebrity and you could have one. Memorabilia Cafes are a hit as well. An Elvis Café just as you will have a Che Guevara Café. A Hitler Café even, as you may find in some locations.

Rural markets are difficult to access. Are there new ways? And is it a profitable exercise?

- Jairam Menon, Chennai

Access to rural markets has progressively deepened and widened. Today, nearly 6.72 lakh villages are accessible by road or waterways. The road structures, kuchha or pucca, are good in normal non-monsoon times.

Market access is further facilitated by a host of co-operative societies, the retail distribution system of wholesalers and re-retailers in the economy. In India the "feeder-market" is a concept in itself. These are essentially robust re-retailers who take the product and service into the rural interiors for a margin that is higher than normal.

There has been a dramatic shift in market access possibilities. And this is a forever exercise. Servicing the rural market is a labour of love in itself.

And profits?

With the growth of average bill share from rural outlets, servicing of these markets direct is today a possibility. Rural marketing, which hitherto was a long-term market seeding operation in the past, is today a break-even possibility as well in most markets, a profitable proposition in a small percentage, and of course remains a profit-nightmare in many markets as well.

The rural market is suddenly not such a slow-burn process anymore. Marketers are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. In some villages, the tunnel is longer than the other. In some villages, there is no tunnel at all, to the delight of the modern marketer on his rural marketing hunt.

Newer distribution channels that depend not only on what I derogatorily call the alimentary canal system of distribution we have known for 80-odd years in India (the one dominant distribution system that moves stock from the factory of the producer to the C&F agent, to the distributor, to the wholesaler and then to the retailer, to whom consumers come,) seem to help in this profit search as well.

Hindustan Lever's experiment with rural entrepreneurs who do something similar to a peer-to-peer selling exercise is one such. ITC's e-chaupal is another model as well.

What's love got to do with it? With marketing?

- Prerna Rawat, Mumbai

Prerna, that's an inspired question. For a moment I was wondering whether I am running an agony-Uncle column out here. On a little thought, I get the meaning of your question.

What's love got to do with it? Plenty! The new wave of using the language of love in everything that you sell, whether it be `dal, cheeni, chawal, atta or tel' (lentil, sugar, rice, flour and oil, to the uninitiated), is all about capitalising on the soft side of life that governs us all.

Essentially, marketers are re-discovering the fact that at the end of it all, the consumer is alive and for real. At the end of the day, the consumer, however savvy and hard-nosed, is all about the soft aspects that govern life. And love is the biggest universal truth of them all.

Marketers therefore use the mood, tenor and tone of love more often than not. Some use it overtly and some covertly. The covert use of love could be the classic Saffola stance of buying the healthier cooking oil for the health of your loved ones. The more overt ones would be the line an Amul chocolate would use: "A gift for someone you love!"

When a marketer uses universal language, particularly the one that grips our imagination in fits and bouts, more often than once in our lives thankfully, the marketer is bound to strike a chord with the consumer. The way to a consumer's purse seems to be most certainly through his or her heart.

The use of the emotion of love can be made in varying degrees of intensity. Use it well to the benefit of your brand, depending on the challenges that your brand faces in the market. Don't overdo it, though. You don't want consumer cynicism to hit your category of product or service all too soon!

(Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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