Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.
"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!"
Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above.
The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.
Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras.
Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry.
The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.
Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?
The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle.
Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"
Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."
In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.
In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned.
The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!
India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.
Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.
One last illustration.
20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning?
The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
One for the Monk - Old Monk
That squat dark oddly-shaped bottle. That funny fat bald old man in a robe beaming at you. What is the magic of Old Monk that never dies? What is the basis of the unquestioning faith that the Old Monk drinker reposes in the brand? What is the source of the extreme brand loyalty it generates? After all, there are millions of men who start their hard liquor life with Old Monk and never drink anything else till the day they die.
The facts, for the record. Old Monk is a dark rum blended and aged for seven years (though there is also a more expensive 12-year-old version, the Old Monk Gold Reserve). It has an alcohol content of 42.8 per cent and is produced by Mohan Meakin, based in Mohan Nagar, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. It is the third largest-selling rum in the world, and has been the biggest Indian made foreign liquor (IMFL) brand for decades. Old Monk is the only spirits brand to figure in advertising guru Ian Batley’s list of potential Great Indian Brands, which could tap the world market. Suzuki Motor Corporation Chairman Osamu Suzuki is a connoisseur of wines. In his personal dining room and bar where he entertains his guests, there is a bottle of what he believes is the best liquor brand from each of the 192 countries the company operates in. India is represented by Old Monk.
But Old Monk enthusiasts couldn’t be less bothered with the numbers. For them this rum is more than just a drink. It is a close friend, a confidant, a keeper of memories. With every sip that you take, incidents come flooding back. The first time one got sloshed and got caught by the hostel warden. The first time one confessed one’s love but to the wrong girl in a moment of drunken recklessness. And finally the heartbreak when nothing but Old Monk could soothe the pain. Nostalgia is definitely something that Old Monk brings. Even if you are rich now, and only drink Scotch or wine, you retain a special affection for the brand.
The sense of kinship that comes with being an Old Monk drinker is legendary. There are tales galore about how strangers became fast friends over a glass of Old Monk. Mention Old Monk or “budha sadhu” (as he lovingly calls it), and Aditya Dhar, manager-training with American Express, and memories of the good times he spent with his friends crowd his head. “I can never forget this one cold January evening that we spent at a friend Neil’s place. We kept on drinking and Neil continued to strum the guitar till his fingers bled. But did he stop? No, not at all. Old Monk was the only remedy required and he played every single song in the book,” reminisces Aditya.
Glenn Satur, one of Internet’s unknown poets, puts it thus: “You’ve brought feeling to our lives, at moments of desperation. For most of us, you have been our mentor and our inspiration. We don’t give up on things, even if we think our lives have sunk. There’s always a solution to a problem when we have you dear Old Monk Rum!”
Arijit Ganguly, team leader with Royal Bank of Scotland, shares his story about a friend who just couldn’t take the freezing cold of Himachal Pradesh. “We were in Chail and we had to change buses. It was freaking cold and we found to our consternation that the bus would arrive only after an hour,” he recalls. One of his friends was so cold that even three trousers and countless number of sweaters couldn’t keep him warm. “Suddenly he took out a bottle of Old Monk and gulped down 100 ml of it in one shot. Within 15 minutes, his eyes and ears had turned red and soon he was found singing ‘My balls are on fire’ in a mere sweatshirt and jeans.”
Perhaps another thing that works for the Monk is also the sense of reassurance that one gets on seeing the signature design that hasn’t changed a bit in years. It is a soothing thought that in this ever changing world, one has something constant to hold on to. Of course, the fact that quality has never faltered helps. Then there’s the distinctive taste, different from every other rum in the world. Anyone who has ever had Old Monk will recognise the taste in any blind test.
When drinking with Old Monk enthusiasts, one has to adhere to the proper etiquette. One cannot say, “I am having a glass of rum,” when you are having Old Monk. Old Monk is not a rum. Old Monk is Old Monk. It is utter sacrilege to drag this priceless drink into the category of regular unexciting rums. You need to feel the pride, the proper respect, the honour when you hold a glass of Old Monk.
There is something about Old Monk that makes you feel all-powerful, that you have the strength to take on the whole world. A friend, Arindita Gogoi, could muster up the guts to tell her mother that she drinks only after she had had a few sips of Old Monk: “I was in Delhi, having Old Monk with a friend on a chilly December evening when my mom called from Assam. When she asked me what I was doing I told her very emotionally that, ‘Maa, it is very chilly here and nothing but a dark rum could save us.’” Her mother hung up. But to this day, Arindita continues with her unfettered fealty to this amazing drink, in spite of her mother’s displeasure. “You don’t feel stylish with Old Monk. It just makes you feel more rustic and grounded,” says Arindita.
However, Old Monk hasn’t been without its own share of heated debates. The one that has been plaguing its fans since eternity, or well since cola companies took over the world, is what is the best way to have this drink. With cola or hot water? On the Old Monk Appreciation Society page on Facebook, enthusiasts discuss such topics with a vengeance.
While some suggest having it with three-fourths Coke, topping it off with two cubes of ice, others consider the use of cola sheer blasphemy. It’s hot water or nothing at all.
While legions of fans argue on Facebook, Vikram Gour and Chaitanya Chadha sit back and watch as their creation achieve all that they had envisaged for it. When they created this society on Facebook, they wanted to find like-minded people who shared their love. And they weren’t disappointed. People from all across the world answered their call. Today, the society boasts of 1,100 members.
Some of the overseas fans have even been able to sniff out Old Monk vendors in the backlanes of their cities. “A fellow group member, Jeet Singh, based in New York, joined this group because he had had Old Monk many years ago. The thought of enjoying this drink again led him on a hunt through New York where he actually managed to find a bottle! Imagine that!” says Vikram.
If you go looking, you will be able to unearth countless anecdotes related to the Monk, most of them bordering on the insane and bizarre. Our favourite is the one about the drunken cockroach posted by director Shekhar Kapur on his blog. Remember the scene from Mr India in which Sridevi jumps on to the bed in alarm when she spies a cockroach? Did anyone notice how the cockroach was so well behaved throughout the scene? ‘Well, I needed the cockroach to be very still for the camera as he/she eyed Sridevi threateningly. Focusing takes a long time and the cockroach needed to be patient. So we got the cockroach drunk!! No kidding, we surrounded the cockroach in a pool of my favourite Old Monk Rum and it was soon lolling around like a drunken sailor, giving in to director of photography Baba Azmi’s every demand. Unbelievable, but hey, talk to anyone on the sets. It was true!’ We believe you, Shekhar.
So what is it about the budha sadhu? We believe that the subconscious reason for the way the fan thinks of the brand is that Old Monk never tries. It is a rum with no frills, no add-ons, no come-hither branding and advertising. It’s just a damn good rum and it wants to be treated with the respect that a good friend deserves. That is its only demand from you. It is totally no-nonsense. Thus, there is something pure and trustworthy about it. It has always wanted to be just a tasty rum, and by focusing on that, has transcended liquor and become something else. Completely.
The facts, for the record. Old Monk is a dark rum blended and aged for seven years (though there is also a more expensive 12-year-old version, the Old Monk Gold Reserve). It has an alcohol content of 42.8 per cent and is produced by Mohan Meakin, based in Mohan Nagar, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. It is the third largest-selling rum in the world, and has been the biggest Indian made foreign liquor (IMFL) brand for decades. Old Monk is the only spirits brand to figure in advertising guru Ian Batley’s list of potential Great Indian Brands, which could tap the world market. Suzuki Motor Corporation Chairman Osamu Suzuki is a connoisseur of wines. In his personal dining room and bar where he entertains his guests, there is a bottle of what he believes is the best liquor brand from each of the 192 countries the company operates in. India is represented by Old Monk.
But Old Monk enthusiasts couldn’t be less bothered with the numbers. For them this rum is more than just a drink. It is a close friend, a confidant, a keeper of memories. With every sip that you take, incidents come flooding back. The first time one got sloshed and got caught by the hostel warden. The first time one confessed one’s love but to the wrong girl in a moment of drunken recklessness. And finally the heartbreak when nothing but Old Monk could soothe the pain. Nostalgia is definitely something that Old Monk brings. Even if you are rich now, and only drink Scotch or wine, you retain a special affection for the brand.
The sense of kinship that comes with being an Old Monk drinker is legendary. There are tales galore about how strangers became fast friends over a glass of Old Monk. Mention Old Monk or “budha sadhu” (as he lovingly calls it), and Aditya Dhar, manager-training with American Express, and memories of the good times he spent with his friends crowd his head. “I can never forget this one cold January evening that we spent at a friend Neil’s place. We kept on drinking and Neil continued to strum the guitar till his fingers bled. But did he stop? No, not at all. Old Monk was the only remedy required and he played every single song in the book,” reminisces Aditya.
Glenn Satur, one of Internet’s unknown poets, puts it thus: “You’ve brought feeling to our lives, at moments of desperation. For most of us, you have been our mentor and our inspiration. We don’t give up on things, even if we think our lives have sunk. There’s always a solution to a problem when we have you dear Old Monk Rum!”
Arijit Ganguly, team leader with Royal Bank of Scotland, shares his story about a friend who just couldn’t take the freezing cold of Himachal Pradesh. “We were in Chail and we had to change buses. It was freaking cold and we found to our consternation that the bus would arrive only after an hour,” he recalls. One of his friends was so cold that even three trousers and countless number of sweaters couldn’t keep him warm. “Suddenly he took out a bottle of Old Monk and gulped down 100 ml of it in one shot. Within 15 minutes, his eyes and ears had turned red and soon he was found singing ‘My balls are on fire’ in a mere sweatshirt and jeans.”
Perhaps another thing that works for the Monk is also the sense of reassurance that one gets on seeing the signature design that hasn’t changed a bit in years. It is a soothing thought that in this ever changing world, one has something constant to hold on to. Of course, the fact that quality has never faltered helps. Then there’s the distinctive taste, different from every other rum in the world. Anyone who has ever had Old Monk will recognise the taste in any blind test.
When drinking with Old Monk enthusiasts, one has to adhere to the proper etiquette. One cannot say, “I am having a glass of rum,” when you are having Old Monk. Old Monk is not a rum. Old Monk is Old Monk. It is utter sacrilege to drag this priceless drink into the category of regular unexciting rums. You need to feel the pride, the proper respect, the honour when you hold a glass of Old Monk.
There is something about Old Monk that makes you feel all-powerful, that you have the strength to take on the whole world. A friend, Arindita Gogoi, could muster up the guts to tell her mother that she drinks only after she had had a few sips of Old Monk: “I was in Delhi, having Old Monk with a friend on a chilly December evening when my mom called from Assam. When she asked me what I was doing I told her very emotionally that, ‘Maa, it is very chilly here and nothing but a dark rum could save us.’” Her mother hung up. But to this day, Arindita continues with her unfettered fealty to this amazing drink, in spite of her mother’s displeasure. “You don’t feel stylish with Old Monk. It just makes you feel more rustic and grounded,” says Arindita.
However, Old Monk hasn’t been without its own share of heated debates. The one that has been plaguing its fans since eternity, or well since cola companies took over the world, is what is the best way to have this drink. With cola or hot water? On the Old Monk Appreciation Society page on Facebook, enthusiasts discuss such topics with a vengeance.
While some suggest having it with three-fourths Coke, topping it off with two cubes of ice, others consider the use of cola sheer blasphemy. It’s hot water or nothing at all.
While legions of fans argue on Facebook, Vikram Gour and Chaitanya Chadha sit back and watch as their creation achieve all that they had envisaged for it. When they created this society on Facebook, they wanted to find like-minded people who shared their love. And they weren’t disappointed. People from all across the world answered their call. Today, the society boasts of 1,100 members.
Some of the overseas fans have even been able to sniff out Old Monk vendors in the backlanes of their cities. “A fellow group member, Jeet Singh, based in New York, joined this group because he had had Old Monk many years ago. The thought of enjoying this drink again led him on a hunt through New York where he actually managed to find a bottle! Imagine that!” says Vikram.
If you go looking, you will be able to unearth countless anecdotes related to the Monk, most of them bordering on the insane and bizarre. Our favourite is the one about the drunken cockroach posted by director Shekhar Kapur on his blog. Remember the scene from Mr India in which Sridevi jumps on to the bed in alarm when she spies a cockroach? Did anyone notice how the cockroach was so well behaved throughout the scene? ‘Well, I needed the cockroach to be very still for the camera as he/she eyed Sridevi threateningly. Focusing takes a long time and the cockroach needed to be patient. So we got the cockroach drunk!! No kidding, we surrounded the cockroach in a pool of my favourite Old Monk Rum and it was soon lolling around like a drunken sailor, giving in to director of photography Baba Azmi’s every demand. Unbelievable, but hey, talk to anyone on the sets. It was true!’ We believe you, Shekhar.
So what is it about the budha sadhu? We believe that the subconscious reason for the way the fan thinks of the brand is that Old Monk never tries. It is a rum with no frills, no add-ons, no come-hither branding and advertising. It’s just a damn good rum and it wants to be treated with the respect that a good friend deserves. That is its only demand from you. It is totally no-nonsense. Thus, there is something pure and trustworthy about it. It has always wanted to be just a tasty rum, and by focusing on that, has transcended liquor and become something else. Completely.
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