Five years after he posed famously with some tiger cubs, Britannia CEO Sunil Alagh has started looking at his company's strategy from a step lower in the food chain. Project Tiger, designed to protect the endangered Indian tiger (Panthera Tigris Tigris) and add some polish to Britannia's best-selling mass-market biscuit brand Tiger, is still alive and well. Only, Sunil Alagh's role model these days is a cartoon mouse most children would be familiar with-not Mickey, but Jerry, as in Tom and Jerry. So much so that the English language has undergone a modification in the second floor of Britannia Gardens, the old worldly headquarters of the Rs 1,451-crore Britannia Industries in Bangalore-the level on which Alagh, and his senior execs sit.

The change-a proper noun becoming a common one, if you insist-is documented on a small slogan on Alagh's table that says, no, not The buck stops here, but Don't chase a jerry. Alagh, 55, with a carefully disheveled silver mane is at pains to explain the slogan, an encapsulation of Britannia's newest business philosophy. ''Bemoaning that there is a slowdown on, or that the fast moving consumer goods market isn't growing are Tom-like characteristics. I want Jerry's ability to survive and thrive under any circumstance. That is why I keep telling my guys not to chase a Jerry.''

Now, more than at any time in its chequered past, Britannia needs those survival skills. Its fast growth dairy business-it accounted for 12.6 per cent of turnover and grew at 32 per cent last year-has been hived off as a 49:49 joint venture with New Zealand's Fonterra. And the market for biscuits, bread, and cakes isn't exactly setting the streets on fire; last year it grew by a modest 6 per cent.

Till the Fonterra deal was announced, dairy, if you will forgive the pun, was Britannia's great white hope, the ticket to its articulated objective of selling to one out of every three Indians by 2003. Now, that responsibility belongs to biscuits, a business that accounted for 82 per cent of sales in 2001-02.

Problem is, despite being the country's largest biscuit company, Britannia doesn't have much to show for it: one brand, Tiger, can stake credit to nearly half its biscuit sales and the company hasn't been able to do a repeat of that roaring success. That's why Britannia's born-again-biscuit focus-something the company hopes will treble turnover to around Rs 3,000 crore by 2005-could have been timed better. Still, we'd rather not chase a jerry. We'd rather ride the tiger.

In March 2002, in an effort to strengthen its markets Britannia named lifer Nikhil Sen its Chief Operating Officer.

Ride the Tiger

Three companies, Britannia, Parle, and Bakeman's, dominate the Rs 2,000-crore biscuit market in the country-the market is actually some Rs 1,500 crore bigger, but all of that is unorganised-sector domain-- and Britannia is the biggest of the trio. Britannia's pre-eminence wasn't always as matter-of-fact as it is today: before 1997, the company's presence in what is termed the popular segment was a little shaky, largely a function of the pedestrian performance of its plain-vanilla offerings, Circus and Glucose D. As Nikhil Sen, the company's Chief Operating Officer candidly admits, ''We did not read the requirements of the market correctly.''

Tiger changed that, but even today, the hangover of a bias towards the premium end of the market haunts Britannia and is reflected in its marketshare figures-a 40 per cent volume share and a 48 per cent value one. Tiger gave Britannia the kind of rural reach it had always hankered for. In 1998, a mere 14 per cent of the company's sales came from the rural market; in 2001-02, 40 per cent did. ''Tiger,'' grins Alagh, ''has opened the door for Britannia in the rural market.''

The doorway was there, but Britannia didn't use it: it spent the late 1990s and the early 2000s focusing on its dairy foray (See A White Mystery). That seemed a logical next-step for the company. Danone, which has a 22.5 per cent stake in the company, is a dairy biggie and analysts expected Britannia to build up some expertise in the business-getting the supply chain right isn't easy-and serve as a conduit for the multinational's portfolio. That wasn't to be; Britannia hived off its dairy business as a joint venture with Fonterra; and it is now back to its basics, biscuits.

Growing the biscuits business won't be easy. The removal of quantitative restrictions on imports has resulted in a deluge of high-end offerings, fragmenting the already small urban market. The rural markets, then, are key. Alagh's strategy: to get Britannia's high-end offerings to ride Tiger's success into the rural market over time. That'll take some doing. Says Milind Karmakar, Head (Research), Dalal & Broacha: ''It will be difficult for Britannia to replicate its Tiger success with its high-end range.'' The company is aware that rural markets will have to mature before it can do that. Which is why it has other buns in the oven.

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