Quick, what do cash croppers in Kerala and Karnataka do when returns on plain vanilla crops like coconut, rubber, and coffee decline? Well, they grow vanilla itself. Natural vanilla, whose green beans fetch about Rs 3,000-Rs 3,500 to the kilo is the flavour of the season in the southwest coast of India where some 6,000 farmers have already joined the bandwagon. Vanilla's lure lies in economics: an acre under cultivation can produce 1,000 kg of vanilla beans at the end of the fifth year when the plant matures. In number terms, read this as an investment of Rs 100,000-150,000 resulting in a payoff of Rs 35 lakh at the end of five years, a return no other can match.

Madagascar and Indonesia are the source of 90 per cent of the world's vanilla (2,300 tonnes of green beans a year) and India's share is just about 1 per cent. However, the humid climate in Kerala and coastal Karnataka is ideal for vanilla and C.J. Jose, the Chairman of India's Spice Board expects the area under cultivation to increase from around 1,000 hectares now to 15,000 by 2007. "There is a shift happening from synthetic vanilla to natural vanilla," says K. Gopinath, Vice President, R&D, AVT Natural Products, a Cochin-based pioneer in vanilla cultivation. Some 18,000 tonnes of synthetic vanilla is consumed every year and 5-7 per cent of this is expected to move to natural vanilla every year. And vanilla products are the rage everywhere as evident in the success of Coca-Cola's vanilla-based drink in the US. Did anyone say plain?

-Sahad P.V.

"How Can You Pre-test Creative Concepts?"

Scott Bedbury helped Starbucks and Nike become brand icons before launching his own brand consultancy Brandstream. He spoke with BT's Kushan Mitra in the sidelines of the recently concluded Ad Asia in Jaipur. Excerpts:

How did your association with Nike begin?

In 1987, Nike was a laggard brand. It did have Michael Jordan, but after he broke his ankle, it had no superstar. The company appealed to a 15-22-year-old essentially white male audience. It was number three in America.

So what was the strategy you cooked up?

Expand your market presence, make products that appeal to a larger number of people. Appeal to other sports and to women.

So, how did 'Just Do It' come about?

Very strangely, it just popped up at a brand strategy meeting, and to be very honest I did not like it. I do not like tag lines, they tend to become like crutches at times.

How important are celebrity sportspersons for Nike?

Important, but not all that important. The message is that the people at the top of their game also use products that are top of the league.

What according to you is the biggest problem afflicting advertising today?

Pre-testing. This happens because clients want a return on investment. Every second company that approaches me wants a 'Just Do It'. But can you ever quantify this. How can you pre-test creative concepts?

For the complete Scott Bedbury interview and for more from Ad Asia go to www.business-today.com

CLIMBER
Value Seeker
Headstrong's Arjun Malhotra is still at it.

Headstrong's Malhotra: Moving up the chain?

Three years ago, when Scient and Razor Fish- both top-end it consulting firms-ruled the roost in the US, Arjun Malhotra, one of the co-founders of HCL, visited this magazine's offices. Malhotra , now 54, and an alum of IIT Kharagpur, has a little bit of the evangelist in him. This was very much in evidence during the visit when he spoke about how most Indian software services firms were largely involved in 'maintenance work'; Techspan, the company he then chaired, he said, would do a Razor Fish.

Circa 2003, Razor Fish is dead, but Techspan is still around, albeit in another avatar, having been merged into little-known US consulting company Headstrong. "The dream was always to scale up, be a relevant player, and to be better than the best," says Malhotra. For the record, the merged entity has revenues touching $100 million and a workforce over 1,000. And Malhotra, Chairman of Headstrong and now on a whistle-stop tour around the world with CEO Kevin Dougherty meeting with employees and customers has lost none of his evangelical zeal. "I'd say no one has been able to move up the value chain thus far,'' he says. None, except his company, that is. Techspan's billing rates, he reveals, enjoyed a 25 per cent premium over the competition's. This, he claims, will increase once the multi-shore delivery capability of the merged entity-Techspan has centres in Delhi, Bangalore, and the US, while Headstrong has one in the Philippines-kicks in and starts delivering value to its 113 customers. The buzzword this time is "distributed consulting", a model where consulting resources are based across multiple locations, and Malhotra's immediate priority is to convince customers that this is worth paying money for.

The man's obsession of the moment, though, is biotechnology. "I may sign up for a masters in biotech," jokes Malhotra who believes the discipline will change the world in more ways than the internet. Medical biotech, he adds, with its combination of software, biotech, and pharmaceutical skills, could just be the next big thing for India. Well, Malhotra was right about it consulting, although Techspan itself never lived up to its promise. Maybe he'll be right about medical biotech too.

-Vandana Gombar

CLICK
Living With Camera Phones

A camera is a camera and a phone is a phone, and the twain shall never meet. That's what Adachi Yoroku believes. The member of the Canon board was in India to oversee the launch of some 20 of the company's digital doodads, and he revealed that Canon wasn't working with any of the wireless phone manufacturers to marry the phone and the camera. ''My guess is, people like to carry multiple devices,'' he says. ''The camera phone and the digicam can co-exist.''

-Vandana Gombar