What do a 118-year-old political party, a Bollywood production house, an upstart (and start-up) low-cost airline, the initial public offering of a biotech company and the entire offshoring-to-India trend have in common? Well, according to a panel of judges BT put together, they marketed themselves or their offerings best in 2004. The result, detailed in the pages that follow, is the second edition of Business Today's Best Marketers. Like the first edition, this was based on an expert interview with specialists (think consultants, academics, researchers) across six centres: Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. As they met these specialists (around three in each centre), our reporters discovered something strange: unlike last year, when the judges came up with a total of 13 names, this time, the number of entries common across them was a mere five. One way of looking at that is to surmise that the quality of marketing has dipped. Another (the one we prefer) is that these five marketers have done enough to be obvious choices.

CONGRESS
Sonia Gandhi/President
Hoi Polloi Hosannas
Forget what it did for its image; the Congress' advertising and marketing campaign successfully repositioned the Bharatiya Janata Party as an urban clique.

The marketing success story of the year was scripted by a 118-year-old brand that most people had written off: the Congress Party. Thus, when it was announced late last year that elections to the 14th Lok Sabha would be held in April and May, 2004, no one gave the Congress a chance. The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) embarked on a trifle over-the-top India Shining (and hey, we made it shine) campaign. That gave the Congress some ammunition: rather than waste its energies and meagre resources on positioning itself-not easy at all, especially given the fact that it had been out of power for nine years and, no matter what its resident wonks now claim, not very sure of what it stood for-it decided to reposition the BJP, as Harsh Verma, a marketing lecturer at Faculty of Management Studies, New Delhi, puts it: "as a party meant for the urban upper class elite". The advertising strategy that the party chose, then, says Jayshree Sundar, Executive Director, Leo Burnett, the agency that created the by-now legendary Congress ke Haath, Aam Aadmi ke Saath (the closest translation would be, the hand of the Congress is always there to help the common man; in equal parts, a vision statement and a play on the party's election symbol, the hand) campaign, "was about relevance and relatability". "We did not make the mistake of thinking everybody above 18 was equal," she adds. Nor did the party make the erroneous assumption that India is one market. Its advertisements, 3,600 of them spread over 60 days, appeared in 32 languages. "We ran a regional campaign," says Jairam Ramesh, the brains behind the campaign and now a member of the Rajya Sabha. "Not a national campaign translated into a regional one." The party's marketing effort itself was broken into four phases: the first was seven days of intensive demolition of the NDA's India Shining campaign; the second, 10 days spent highlighting the Congress' achievements; the third, 15 days spent outlining the party's vision; and the last three devoted to the kind of hysterical hyperbole without which no party considers its marketing complete. "We actually depicted Vajpayee (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Prime Minister of the country and a BJP leader) as Ravana," chortles a gleeful Ramesh.

At the beginning of the year the Congress boasted 114 seats in the Lok Sabha; today, it does 145

None of this addressed the problem the Congress faced. The party, says Santosh Desai, President, McCann Erickson India, an advertising agency, "has always occupied this centrist, liberal, wooly sort of space", and its message, even after close to six months in office (as the largest party in the United Progressive Alliance government), is yet "to crystallise". What it did do was to take on the India Shining campaign head on and ask, as it did, Aam aadmi ko kya mila (what has the man on the streets got to show?). Along the way, the party discovered a new and saleable brand ambassador in its President Sonia Gandhi-her presence, concedes McCann's Desai, "has given the Congress some guiding principle where it earlier had none"-who hit the campaign trail with a vengeance in a sort of below-the-line one-to-one marketing effort. "The Congress comeback is a marketing success story," says Nirvik Singh, Chairman (South Asia), Grey World-wide, the agency behind the India Shining ads, although he is quick to add that "ads are not the only things that matter in politics; a lot of other things come into play". That they do, and the Congress, as is evident from the fact that it is the leading constituent of the alliance that governs India today, was ahead on them too.

-Amanpreet Singh

YASH RAJ FILMS
Yash Chopra/Chairman
Dream Factory
Bollywood is replete with production houses craving to turn into assembly lines churning out one blockbuster after another. Here's one firm that has done that in 2004.

If someone were to sit down and write a history of Bollywood in the 2000s, the account is certain to be peppered with instances of companies trying to make and market films the way others make and market soaps, say, or washing machines. One company that captures the zeitgeist of this period-it also seems to have mastered the twin arts of marketing and film-making-is Yash Raj Films. The company, promoted by veteran Hindi motion picture producer and director Yash Chopra and his obsessively reclusive son Aditya (he has only given two interviews ever and, alas, chose not to meet with this writer), started down the 'corporatised' path in 2001-02. It decided to work with more directors as part of an effort to ensure a varied pipeline of releases and then followed a textbook method of audience segmentation. Thus, in 2002, the company released three films by first-time directors: Saathiya, a contemporary urban love-story-with-a-twist; Mujhse Dosti Karoge, an adolescent love story; and Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, a remake of the Julia Roberts-starrer My Best Friend's Wedding. Only one of these films, Saathiya, clicked at the box-office. In 2003, the company had no releases to its name. But if 2004 is any indication, then the company has indeed got its act together (and how!). First came Hum Tum, an urban romance directed by Kunal Kohli; then Dhoom, a biker flick directed by Sanjay Gadhvi; and finally epic-wannabe Veer-Zaara, directed by Yash Chopra himself. Hum Tum boasted gross takings of Rs 22 crore in the Indian market alone and Dhoom, Rs 29 crore (Veer-Zaara would appear to be both a critical and a commercial success; in two weeks it has already made some Rs 26 crore in the domestic market). The takings of these two films alone, when compared to those of the three releases of its competitor Varma Corp.-another wannabe corporate assembly-line style production house-Ab Tak Chappan, Ek Hasina Thi and Gayab (all of Rs 20 crore together) would seem to indicate that Yash Raj is doing something right.

Yash Raj Films has given Bollywood three of its biggest hits in 2004, contemporary urban romance Hum Tum, biker-flick Dhoom, and period love story and wannabe-epic Veer-Zaara

Most people associated with the motion pic industry think so. "Its audience segmentation and targeting has been outstanding," gushes Aditya Shastri, Head, Twentieth Century Fox (India). "The marketing has been just right too, creating the right expectation for each film and then delivering beyond that." "The best thing about Yash Raj's marketing has been its ability to find a theme or pivot and then multiply the curiousity around it and ensure that the audience makes it to the theatres at least once," adds Sunir Kheterpal, Country Head (Entertainment and Media Banking), Yes Bank.

Hum Tum was positioned for the female audience and for young couples, and Yash Raj's marketing efforts for it included special promos on Lays (Frito Lay) packs in return for in-film promotion, and the by-now-famous three-way promo involving The Times of India-the hero of the film is a cartoonist whose cartoon strip, Hum Tum, appears in The Times of India (it actually did)-and Sony Television (the female protagonist of its soap Jassi... reads the cartoon strip on The Times of India following which the cartoonist makes an appearance in one episode of the soap). "Once you cross the tipping point, it's a win-win (situation) for everyone and each party wants to participate more to multiply the marketing impact," says Tarun Tripathi, the 20-something marketing head of Yash Raj Films and an iim-Lucknow class of 2002 graduate.

In what is definite proof of sharp audience targeting, Hum Tum did poorly in rural areas, where it was meant to do just that.

Next came Dhoom, a biker flick characterised by slick editing and action sequences, and clearly aimed at "men in groups", as Tripathi puts it. To promote this motion pic, Yash Raj forged an alliance with ESPN just before the English premier league football season and created an ad for the sports channel with its main star cast sporting Manchester United and Chelsea colours. Another marketing effort was to get the cast to ride around Mumbai in the high-powered bikes featured in the film, draw enough for visual-starved news channels to air clips of the same all through an entire day. The film did not do well in the overseas market, but then again, it wasn't meant to.

Just how much does Yash Raj spend on marketing a film? "The rule of thumb is about 10 per cent of production costs; that typically translates into an average of about Rs 30 lakh per film," says Tripathi.

As for its latest release Veer-Zaara, the company launched its own music company to sell the soundtrack. Other promotions have been fairly low key, all by design, claims Tripathi. "It's got a huge star cast and was promoted as Yash Chopra's first film in eight years, enough to create the expectation."

As for audience targeting, Veer-Zaara is the quintessential Bollywood film where audiences across metros, non-metros, even overseas, converge into a homogeneous mass for a motion picture where there is something for everyone.

-Priya Srinivasan

BIOCON
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw/CMD
Biotech's Infosys
With its IPO, Biocon has signalled its status as the bellwether of the Indian biotech industry.

This is, if memory serves this writer right, the second time this magazine is referring to Biocon as Biotech's Infosys. On the face of it, that description would seem to be right. Biocon's market capitalisation stands at an impressive Rs 5,400 crore today; on the basis of average market capitalisation between April 1, 2004, and September 30 of the same year, the company ranks 30th on the BT 500, a listing of India's most valuable companies; with a net profit of Rs 105 crore on revenues of Rs 367 crore for the first half of this financial year (April-September, 2004), Biocon boasts a net profit margin of close to 30 per cent, a figure that brings back memories of Indian infotech companies in their glory years (for the record, Infosys' net profit margin for the same period was 26.8 per cent); and thanks to her humble beginnings (she is a first-generation entrepreneur), pioneering spirit and the riches the initial public offering (IPO) has left her with (she alone is worth around Rs 2,106 crore), the company's Chairman and Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is at once a combination of infotech's triumvirate, Infosys' N.R. Narayana Murthy, TCS' F.C. Kohli and Wipro's Azim Premji. Yet, it wouldn't be right to call Biocon biotech's Infosys, not in the context of this article.

Its initial public offering was oversubscribed 33 times, and it now trades at a 71-per cent premium over its listing price. Biocon has arrived

Biocon finds a presence here because of the consummate skill with which it sold its IPO. This (the 10 million equity shares of Rs 5 face each were issued at a price band of Rs 270-315 and the issue was eventually oversubscribed 33 times) was something investors, both institutional and retail, had been waiting for, and nothing, not even the spate of IPOs that preceded the company's, could take away from that. Infosys, for those who came in late, did not fare as well when it made its IPO in 1993. Forget oversubscription, the IPO barely went through and when the stock listed it did so at Rs 145, a modest premium of Rs 50 over the listing price. It is what the company did since-it grew, silly, and faster than most others-that transformed it into the it services powerhouse it is today and made several of its employees and shareholders richer than they could have imagined in their wildest dreams. For instance, a Rs 5,000 investment in Infosys at the time of its IPO would today be worth Rs 39.98 lakh, accounting for splits and bonuses. And that's not counting the dividends the company has consistently declared. Biocon's issue price and current price may rule out a repeat for shareholders (although several employees have become millionaires on the strength of their stock options suddenly turning widely fungible), but the fact is, this is one IPO that was sold well.

At the core of this success are two things. The first is Mazumdar-Shaw herself, a trained brewer who started off making enzymes in her garage because no brewery would hire her, who later parlayed her company's skills at this into other, much more lucrative areas. India's biotech industry has been hailed, for quite some time, as the next big thing and thanks to her commitment and communication skills, Mazumdar-Shaw emerged its spokesperson (The Economist actually called her India's Biotech Queen).

The second is Biocon's ability to tell the world what it really does. That's not as easy as it sounds. For the first 17 years of its existence, Biocon was a pure-play enzymes company. That is to say it made a living out of extracting an enzyme from papaya that could be used to make meat more tender or from the swim-bladder of a tropical fish that makes beer clearer. Even today, when you pick a can of juice anywhere in the world, there is a one-in-four chance that the enzyme that preserves the product has been made by Biocon.

In 1995, the company ventured into statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) and thus successfully forayed into bio-pharmaceuticals. This proved to be a turning point. Today nearly 78 per cent of Biocon's turnover comes from statins, while a mere 12 per cent comes from enzymes. Since then Biocon has launched Syngene, a custom research company in the synthetic chemistry and molecular biology areas (it does high-value, early-stage research and development work for at least four of the top 10 pharma players in the world), and Clinigene, a clinical trials company. The country has one of the world's largest populations of "naive" patients on whom no medicine has ever been tried, making them ideal for study. Now Biocon has moved onto even more complex challenges. It recently launched its recombinant human insulin under the brand name 'Insugen'. The product will pit Biocon against multinationals like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which have already lowered prices in the Rs 220-crore domestic market.

Now, try selling all this to investors. Biocon did. And as the fate of its IPO shows, it came up trumps.

-Venkatesha Babu

AIR DECCAN
Captain G.R. Gopinath/MD
First Flight
Low-cost airlines are the flavour of the month in India. Here's the company that started it all and hard-sold the concept.

Air Deccan's office on Bangalore's arterial Cunningham Road is unprepossessing; in his windowless room on the first floor of this building, a hyperkinetic Captain G.R. Gopinath (his rank does not come from being a pilot; he was in the Indian Army and saw action in the 1971 war) sketches out why his low-cost airline, which has captured nearly 10 per cent of the passenger traffic (by volumes), has only one way to go: up, up and away.

"Today, whenever we enter a particular sector, the conventional airlines suddenly start introducing dynamic fares or discover 'value'," he laughs. The captain is quick to add that he doesn't believe Air Deccan is competing with established airlines such as Indian Airlines (IA) or Jet, but creating an entirely new market by catering to people who wouldn't otherwise fly. He has even got this audience pigeonholed into neat compartments: the auto-component manufacturer from Coimbatore, the wool merchant from Ludhiana, the knitwear supplier from Tirupur and the hardware merchant from Belgaum.

There can be no doubt that Air Deccan's business model flies: some 15 million people travel by trains in India every day, with 3,00,000 of them travelling First Class; the airline hopes to get some of them to consider flying by offering rates that are the same, sometimes lower than the First Class tariff. That may sound simple, but the idea came to Gopinath-military hero, award-winning sericulturist, collector of Kannada literature-on a 2002 holiday to the Grand Canyon. The epiphanic moment came at the Phoenix airport. "I hadn't heard of (management guru) C.K. Prahalad's theory of targeting people at the bottom of the (income) pyramid," he says. "All I knew was that the us, which had a population that was one fourth India's, boasted 40,000 flights and four million passengers a day."

It wasn't that India did not have the requisite infrastructure; true, the quality of some airfields in the smaller towns leaves a lot to be desired, but fact is, they exist and it is possible to land and take off from them. For the record, India has around 400 airports that were not connected through any flights at all before Air Deccan began operations. For instance, Bellary in Northern Karnataka has a pre-ww-II airport that can be used to land small airplanes, as does Dindgul to the south of Madurai in Tamil Nadu.

In 13 months of existence, Air Deccan has ferried 1.5 million passengers, boasts 74 scheduled flights a day, and is on course to register revenues of Rs 405 crore this year (by March 31, 2005)

Capt. Gopi (as he is called by one and all) says that conventional airline players, as he refers to Jet and IA, tried every trick in the book to keep Air Deccan from taking to, well... air.

"They said irresponsible players would destablise the markets and lobbied that a new entrant (like us) would need to have a minimum capital base of Rs 250 crore,... that we should not be allowed to fly on trunk routes (connecting India's main cities)... that our ATR 42s were old and unsafe," says Capt. Gopi. Today, 13 months after its launch, Air Deccan flies to almost all B-class towns with airports (think Belgaum, Kanpur, Tirupati, Coimbatore, Vijaywada, Hubli, Rajamundhry) and connects most metros.

If the cost of leasing or purchasing planes is the same for everyone (it is), fuel costs are the same for everyone (they are) and airport landing fees the same (they too are), how is Air Deccan able to offer such low-cost tariffs? Simple, by cutting out all the frills. On Air Deccan flights, even water isn't free. The exterior of the plane has been sold to the likes of Sun Microsystems and NDTV (as an advertising hoarding) and the interiors to the likes of Chevrolet Tavera for in-flight promotion. Air Deccan does not offer frequent flyer programmes; nor does it put up people at hotels if a flight is cancelled (only the ticket value is refunded); it does not offer a cargo service (cargo delays turnaround time); and it flies point-to-point rather than follow the hub-and-spoke model, which has a cascading effect should one flight be delayed or cancelled. Then there's the choice of aircraft itself: ATR 42s make sense as they seat just 47 and the load factor can be improved (then, smaller airports lack the infrastructure to handle Boeings and Airbuses). "Low-frills and no-frills, its extreme counterpart, is a movement in itself," says Harish Bijoor who runs an eponymous marketing consultancy. "Air Deccan has helped cascade this entire movement." There's competition in the wings, with Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher and the Wadias' Go set to take flight soon, but Capt. Gopi is convinced that there is room for everyone. "My role models are Ryan Air and South West, which carried 27 and 80 million passengers last year, respectively," he says. To help fund its growth, Air Deccan is reported to be raising $60 million (Rs 270 crore) by selling a substantial stake to Temasek, the Singapore government's private equity arm that has been pretty bullish on Indian firms. But Capt. Gopi is unwilling to let on. "We have appointed N.M. Rothschild to do the needful," he says. "We may have something to announce in the next 45 days."

-Venkatesha Babu

INDIAN IT
Kiran Karnik/President, NASSCOM
Offshore Haven
The backlash is over and Indian IT services and BPO firms can afford to focus on business now.

Early in 2004, a British tabloid dubbed Azim Premji 'the man who wants to take away your jobs'. Around the same time, Lou Dobbs, an anchor on CNNFN, an American business channel, discovered that his show's ratings increased every time he bashed the concept of offshoring in general and India in particular (what do you think he did?). And American Presidential candidate John Kerry (he lost!) termed companies that were offshoring work Benedict Arnolds, a reference to the American turncoat who worked for the British during the American war of independence.

In many ways, 2004 was the hysterical peak of a wave that began in the early 2000s. The dotcom bubble had burst, the American economy was going into recession, and people, a lot of them, discovered that they were rendered jobless because their positions had gone East, to India. The result was a public backlash that one Indian it services executive describes as "rabid, foaming-in-the-mouth kind of stuff".

Cut to late 2004, and the situation is different. Kerry is a bad memory (the stocks of Indian it services companies cheered on d-street when he lost); the big it services companies have grown by between 35 per cent and 47 per cent in the first six months of this financial year (April-September, 2004); Premji is written about increasingly for his wealth, power and, most recently, philanthropy, not his desire for other people's jobs; and there are actually studies that show that companies that outsource work to India or any other destination actually end up creating more jobs locally in functions such as marketing. So, what happened?

NASSCOM, India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, did, as did Infosys and Wipro. Even as everyone else was grappling with the problem at hand, Wipro Technologies' CEO Vivek Paul, who is based in California, decided the best thing to do was to tell things as it is. Conservative journalists looking to bash India were often surprised at Paul's willingness to meet with them, sessions during which he fought hysteria with reason. "(Look at) patents that have been written by Indian software engineers in Wipro," he told technology portal CNET. "The individual engineers get the credit; the ownership is the customer's. So in some sense, us technology companies are racing out ahead of their global peers to tap into the intellectual base that is in India. If the US were to repel it in some way, it would create its future competitor. By embracing and directing it, the us has pre-empted competition." Not surprisingly, Wipro has received more than its share of good press since.

Then, NASSCOM got into the act. "The biggest problems that we faced as an industry were misinformation and lack of awareness," says Sunil Mehta, Vice President, NASSCOM, and the man widely seen to be behind the industry-lobby's anti-offshoring campaign. Mehta spent three months criss-crossing America and parts of Europe and the UK, meeting with anyone he thought could help (and, obviously, everyone that mattered). "It was not easy. We had to handhold and educate the media, policy makers, analysts and union leaders among other key stakeholders, who in many cases were either misinformed or had a general lack of awareness," he explains. In addition to sometimes being subjected to intense questioning by hostile media (particularly from areas where job losses due to offshoring were severe), Mehta also had to endure two hours of grilling in the British House of Commons. By then, others like N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys, Jerry Rao of Mphasis, Ramalinga Raju of Satyam and Pheroze Vandrevala of TCS, among others, had joined the massive pr initiative, talking to everybody from us senators to local media.

It helped that the numbers were on the side of India. The Indian IT sector employed less than a tenth the number of employees in the American it sector. Several independent reports estimated that for every $1 (Rs 45) invested in India via offshoring, the American economy gained $1.14 (Rs 51.30) in direct and indirect benefits.

The tide turned when NASSCOM and companies like Wipro and Infosys convinced western media that it had to come down to India and see what was happening. "They saw the fact that Indians were buying American brands, drinking Coca-Cola and Pepsi, wearing Levis and Nike as well as flying in Boeing aircraft," says Mehta. One of the more dramatic turnarounds came from New York Times Foreign Affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Once someone who had questioned the motives behind the shifting of jobs, his visit to India morphed him into an Indophile. In an op-ed article titled 'The Secret of our Sauce', he argued that offshoring to India would only increase America's inventiveness.

However, the success of winning hearts and minds in America has been long and tiring, and sceptics like Dobbs haven't changed their spots. New challenges continue to be thrown at the industry, the latest being the non-tariff barrier of security. India would do well to learn from the example of how China combated vociferous opposition to the shift of blue-collar jobs in the late eighties and early nineties. "India has to build an ecosystem around itself," argues Mehta, while bemoaning the fact that "the job is only half done." Still, it remains a half-job very well done.
-Kushan Mitra