Drawing from her rich experience with brands in India, marketing consultant Anisha Motwani has written and edited a book of 20 stories of brands that have been successes in more ways than one. With a foreword by insight specialist Santosh Desai and an afterword by innovation specialist Ranjan Malik, Anisha Motwani speaks to Pradyuman Maheshwari as ‘Storm the Norm’ makes its way to leading bookstores and e-commerce sites. Read on…
Your book cover says that it carries the ‘untold stories of 20 brands that did it best’. Many of these stories, or case studies, are known in the industry; some even discussed in B-schools. So how are these ‘untold’ stories?
These are known brands [but with] partially-known stories and some completely untold details. The brief to the business owners — and my subsequent interactions with them — led to certain revelations that you won’t find in whatever has been shared till now. The stories are as much about strategic manoeuvres as they are about human endeavour: Stories about ordinary people pursuing extraordinary dreams and achieving them. It has details of not just what they did, but also why and how.
We have 20 stories in the book… any brands that you would’ve liked to look at, but weren’t able to?
These 20 stories are the final set that went into publishing. I did also want to look at brands like BookMyShow, Himalaya and Maggi.
Having studied the 20 brands and various more while shortlisting these, would you say there’s anything common to all of them and their success stories?
After having written these stories, Ranjan Malik and I decided to take a perspective-building step back and noticed something really interesting. There was a pattern in the way these brands had gone about ‘storming the norms’ of their respective industries. So if there’s one truth that these success stories prove beyond doubt, it is that industry ‘storms’ aren’t purely accidental. They can be made to happen by design and, perhaps, at will. There is a method to the magic.
While researching the success stories, we discovered a factor that economists have known for long but businesses don’t: The issue of Total Surplus. One big secret behind most business successes is the stormer’s ability to spot the invisible, sub-optimal in the industry, and conceive a breakthrough that unlocks new total surplus.
Tell us more about the ‘unique new framework for the industry’ that your book promises…
Most organisations just go from one project to the next, or are too busy celebrating their success to pause and look at what lead to that success. We’ve did just that, across 20 brands. And hindsight offers some amazing insights. We’ve tried to decode the method in retrospect, and to help organisations apply it by design in their most high-challenge projects. We have outlined a five-stage methodology called the Storm the Norm Framework.
Clearly innovation and thinking out-of-the-box is something everyone wants to do, but is it easier said than done?
This is the best time for innovation. We will see more innovations in the next decade than we did in the last century. And there are two reasons for it.
First, we have hindsight so we now know what has helped organisations succeed with innovation in the past. Thanks to these learnings, the strike rate of innovation in the future will be much better than it has ever been in the past. Our reason for developing the Storm the Norm Framework was just that, to develop a methodology after studying different kinds of organisations: legacy, challenger and entrepreneur
Second, every sector has evolved well and has developed amazing technologies. There is enough cross-industry inspiration available. Today you simply have to imagine a fantastic scenario, and someone somewhere has already cracked the solutions needed to realise it. You often only need to create creative combinations. Organisations often don’t look beyond their own industries. Our aim with this book is to trigger cross-industry learnings and inspiration.
Do you think global giants find it tougher to be nimble and adapt to the times because they have to follow a certain way of doing things compared to homegrown players who are less rigid?
Both kinds of organisations have their own strengths and their own ways of succeeding with innovation. Constraints aren’t always bad; they force you to unlock new value within the defined boundaries. We have included both kinds of organisations in the book. Every organisation must find its own unique way. That’s why this book – to get a more nuanced understanding of what stormers do differently, and initiate your own storm the norm strategy.
If you had to identify one brand (from among the 20) that has achieved more than the others, which one would that be?
Each brand in the book has had its unique context and unique challenges. Each one of them has been amazing in its own way. They achieved the extraordinary and ended up surprising, not just the world but their own selves too. I can’t pick just one.
This interview first appeared in dna of brands on January 18, 2016
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The Story of Success
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Extracts from ‘Storm the Norm’, a new book that recounts the ‘untold’ stories of 20 leading brands
By Anisha Motwani
A diverse assortment of stories that give insight into what kind of levers can be used to create a winner brand. Take for example chocolate maker and market leader, Cadbury. Everyone has savoured the taste of Cadbury Dairy Milk, and nearly every marketer worth his/her salt would be aware of the brand’s successful integration into the traditional-sweet-eating habit of Indians. But what strategies and actions went into achieving this? The Cadbury story documents how it all began with a big shift in thinking about business and growth. It is a lesson at many levels: a lesson on how a large and potent target audience can slowly become a roadblock for future business; a reminder that the path to growth need not always be through growing market share; a story of how it is possible for a foreign brand to become part of the cultural fabric without localizing the product too much. Equally the story showcases the magic that ensued when the brand adapted itself and created new codes that fitted more seamlessly with category and culture.
Let’s change gears to a challenger brand now. When you think of great products, bathing soap is hardly the first thing that comes to mind. However, that is exactly what the Indian Tobacco Company (ITC) aimed to do, when it decided to penetrate the category with Fiama Di Wills. A really late entrant into one of the oldest categories in the country, the brand was clear that its foremost intent was to challenge the typical soap and create a sensational new product–one that was differentiated not merely by form, colour or fragrance, but also a concoction of ingredients and technology that Indians had never witnessed before. The Fiama di Wills story illustrates how some companies are clear that first it is critical to create a hero product. The bells and whistles and propositions and campaigns can come much later. In its endeavour to deliver a new, unmatched experience to consumers, there were so many stumbling blocks that the Fiama team had to face, so many occasions when it could have given up and created a me-too product and just used the ITC muscle to push sales. But it didn’t. It persisted every time it was tested, to ultimately emerge with a winner.
Moving to another league of brands altogether–the young entrepreneurial businesses. While there are plenty of such success stories in India today, I have selected a few that have made a mark in more ways than one. These are businesses whose success is not simply measured in terms of business valuation or the fact that they are media darlings, but those whose start-to-date journeys hold vital lessons in doing business for everyone. For instance, Make My Trip. This is an extraordinary story of pursuing the dream of forever changing the way Indians researched, planned and booked their travel. From the days where vacation planning was a tedious project and life without travel agents and long ticketing queues unthinkable, to now, when online travel planning and purchasing is common practice, this brand has had a pioneering role in shaping the change. By riding emerging trends, taking sensible decisions when a large bulk of the market was not ready for their dream and fostering deep relationships with allied partners, Deep Kalra and his team strategised their way to success. Like a great movie, the journey had several twists and turns and a few occasions when the founder was tempted to sell or shut shop but chose to keep faith instead. What adds to the excitement is that the Make My Trip story is packed with not one or two but so many innovations across product offerings, service standards, technology, marketing and operations that one is constantly looking out for what next they did differently!
Such remarkable lessons continue across other entrepreneurial brands as well. What these kinds of brands do best is to open up refreshing ways of thinking and going about their business, so they naturally offer many valuable lessons along the way. Like PVR, where Ajay Bijli turned the whole expectation from cinema theatre upside down. Until the 1990s, cinema theatres were mostly just a destination, and movies were the real deal. The theatre itself was just a venue for stories to unfold. But he changed all that. Not only did he introduce the country to the multiplex, he created a new era in movie watching, where choice, comfort, luxury and entertainment all came together to take the movie-goer’s experience to a new high.
There are several more examples of such category transformation. Radio Mirchi, for instance, is a story of a turnaround of the radio medium itself; of how a boring medium from which expectations had remained unchanged for decades, turned cool and irreverent; and how entertainment found a new source. It is also a great lesson on how you can win many fans by experimenting all the way through.
Many of you may not know this, but Raymond’s ‘The Complete Man’ broke the conventions of fashion advertising in its time. Then there is Honda two wheelers–a fabulous story of storming the norm in scooters and making Activa a resounding success, and then of how it carried with it its winning strategies post its joint venture with Hero coming to an end. On a completely different note is the story of Sprite, a brand built on communication, on strongly marrying youth insights with product truth, of turning an absolutely niche lime category into a mass brand.
Similarly, there are Ford Ecosport, Axis Bank, Kissan, MTR Foods, Saffola, Real Juices, Sensodyne, Tata Tea and Mahindra XUV500. Each of their growth stories provides insights into creating a storm in their respective categories and achieving outstanding results. Some successes are based on distribution, some on product, some on communication, while others are based on core business models. There are stories of reinvention, of strategies on market expansion, and some even of using weaker siblings in the brand portfolio to fortify overall business.Â
Published with the permission of the Author/Editor
Storm the Norm: Untold Stories of 20 Brands that Did it Best
Written and Edited By Anisha Motwani
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published by Rupa Publications India
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