Use One-On-One Communication

Communicating to the Superich is not just a question of choosing the least cluttered media with the highest bang for the advertising buck. The use of any mass media, however closely aligned its reach and penetration are to the target audience, is potentially dangerous here. To be sure, urban media like satellite TV channels, whose reach is focused on the 24 urban centres that are home to the Superich, may seem appropriate choices--as media planners for, inter alia, De Beers diamonds, Cartier watches, and Scabal suitings, have concluded. These, and many other, brands targeted at the Superich have been advertised with high frequency on satellite TV channels.

The problem, however, is that such media, because of their one-to-many rather than one-on-one characteristic, do not create the sense of intimate communication that products aimed at the Superich need. On the contrary, they create the image of a widely-available product. Points out Raina: "Your brand is being advertised in the mass-media, but you have, obviously, decided not to be present in certain markets. Dissonance is bound to occur." Besides, they disperse the message among people outside the tight focus of the target, resulting in a waste of mediaspend. Sums up IDI's Roy: "For a strictly discretionary consumption item, such as Rs 55,000 Cartier watch, the market is so small that it is virtually non-existent." That is the feeling that the buyer revels in. To use any form of mass media, however small its viewership or readership, for advertising such a product will destroy that feeling--and, with it, the chances of success.

CASE STUDY. When the Rs 415.13-crore Titan Industries expanded from the watch market in April, 1995, where its Titan brand had been extremely successful, into designer jewellery with its Tanishq brand of watches, the company was obviously trying to appeal to the buying power of the Superich. To begin with, Tanishq offered 18-karat jewellery to consumers who have traditionally purchased yellow 22-karat gold. Also, the European designs did not go down well with consumers who preferred chunky traditional jewellery. More important, however, not only was branded jewellery a super-premium product to begin with, Titan had also priced the product at a price level that was 20 per cent higher than that of jewellery. But despite its avowed attempt to provide an exclusive product, the company not only used newspapers for its advertising--thus robbing the brand of media exclusivity--it also built a retailing system and ambience not vastly different from those it had used for Titan. Repelled by the easy availability and lack of exclusivity, although their budgets were no constraint, the Superich responded lukewarmly to the product, forcing a pricing and positioning rethink two years later. Says Philips' Kant, former marketing director of Titan: "Such products should be marketed on a more exclusive platform."

THE LESSON. Since the Super-Rich are not members of the mass market, they must not be addressed as if they were. The communication media must be as exclusive as the products.

For a number as small as they are, India's Superich command disproportionately large buying power. That is just what makes it so necessary for marketers to home in on the impulses and motives, the satisfiers and the dissatisfiers, that drive their purchases. For, their numbers are steadily, albeit slowly, rising. And as the country's income and consumption levels swell, today's Superich will turn out to have provided a classic laboratory for testing the rules of marketing to the affluent. "The growth rates at the topmost levels of income will be the highest," points out Natarajan. Companies that get their strategies right now will soak up rich benefits tomorrow. For, that is when the Superich will also become the Super Profit-Supplier for the country's marketers.

--Additional reporting by Radhika Dhawan, Pareena Kawatra, & Nanda Majumdar

Redefining the Rich  /  The Nearich  /  The Clearich
The Sheerich  / The Superich

Issue Contents  Write to us   Subscriptions