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Tag: Verghese Kurien

  • Adperson Anil Kapoor, Bharat Dabholkar and Rahul da Cunha on the man who created superbrand Amul

    Verghese Kurien: Great vision, Dream client

     

    By Bharat Dabholkar

     

    No better client, no better professional
    By Anil KapoorChairman Emeritus, DraftFCB+Ulka

     

    Dr Kurien was one of the greatest human beings I’ve worked with. You couldn’t find a better client, a better professional. When we were being briefed for what became Amul: The Taste of India, he said “Amul is an iconic Indian brand. Rather than doing advertising on the products, let’s do this and the rest will follow.”

     

    Based on the brief, we took the script and music to him and it was approved immediately. He was a proud Indian who always wanted original Indian advertising. After that, even as they launched a number of other products they never had to do separate advertising.

     

    It was always Amul: The Taste of India. Dr Kurien used to say, “If I have a good product and good advertising, it will sell by itself.”

     

    That’s why Amul is such an iconic brand. In the food industry where brands are constantly coming up with schemes, it has never relied on any schemes to dealers or consumers.

     

    Everything moved; they’ve never dumped. He gave the agency a total free hand and never changed so much as a comma or full stop in the copy.

     

    Once when we were presenting a campaign, a gentleman turned around and started to make suggestions. This was not Dr Kurien’s style at all. ‘

     

    He turned around and told the man, “If you call an architect and then make changes, if the roof falls, would you blame the architect or yourself?”

     

    (As told to Ravi Balakrishnan)

     
    He gave each man his own space
    By Rahul daCunhaCEO, daCunha Communications

     

    My father Sylvester daCunha created the Amul butter campaign in the 1960s. He took it to Dr Kurien and explained its unique qualities: the creation of the girl, the need to run it on outdoor hoardings, the topical nature of the campaign. It needed a certain frequency to be created and therefore the trust that they could go ahead without the client approval.

     

    These were the incredible trust guidelines that Dr Kurien set down — a great example of a client saying ‘You are good at what you do so just go ahead.’ He backed the campaign in spite of it not having any of the clichés of food product advertising since what he created at Amul was off the beaten track.

     

    My interactions with him were more as a child and not so much as a client. By the time I came on board, he’d pretty much delegated the campaign to his team. But the core team has not changed and in many ways, that’s what makes the Amul model so unique. The current marketing team and managing director have worked with Dr Kurien and so it’s just a question of carrying the campaign on. In their favour, many clients change campaigns only when they don’t get good feedback or the sales have been dropping; neither of which has happened with Amul.

     

    Dr Kurien did support us though: there was one hoarding, where the person it was about got quite upset; I won’t get into who the person is. I was quite stressed. This person thought it would be clever to sue Dr Kurien. Which was the worst thing to do since he had dealt with a lot more than one man suing him.

     

    He was quite happy with our work; happy that a campaign he’d given a green signal to back in the 1960s could continue. I interviewed him for the book Amul’s India and he says a very interesting thing: “I realise how wise a decision it was to give complete freedom to the ad agency to do their job in a professional way. I never interfered with their work and the result is before you. They have done an exemplary job.”

     

    When you see a man like this and then see the levels of corruption that exist today you wonder, where are our leaders? Where are the visionaries of today? Here was a man who built a brand and a movement that’s been reproduced in so many unions. We use words like ‘a great man’ very loosely these days; he actually was one.

     

    (As told to Ravi Balakrishnan)

     

    Source:The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2012, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

     

    I have worked for almost 15 years on Amul and I have interacted professionally with Verghese Kurien. He was a dream client to work with and simply an amazing person. At the outset, he had set the premise of our working relationship, where he clearly said he didn’t want to see what we were doing as he didn’t want to interfere in our work. He said he didn’t know advertising and that is the reason he had got us, so he didn’t want to change or rewrite anything that we wrote. This was such a change from clients who would always want to give their inputs even if they didn’t know anything about the way advertising works.

     

    I have always maintained that the success of Amul advertising lies in the hand of Mr Kurien and his approach. His immense trust in the agency and their creative potential is so gratifying, and that was what made us push to do good work. If the onus lies fully on you to create something and you get total freedom to create that brand I think it only leads to more responsibility and makes one conscious of the efforts one is making, because it had better be brilliant and match the confidence that the client has shown.

     

    I have visited him a few times in Anand and what he has created is a dream out of nowhere. His vision is unmatched, whether it is about creating a world class campus at Anand or in his vision of creating milk powder from buffalo milk instead of cow which was the norm. He rewrote rules and was an innovative thinker. He had a fabulous lot of lieutenants who supported him and whom he supported in these innovations. Like when we launched Nutramul he tasted it and said make chocolate out of it too, so he was inspirational too.

     

    For his advertising agencies, he knew that he had chosen the right people and trusted them immensely. The confidence he showed in a copywriter tells much about his personality.

     

    Another thing I shall always remember about him was that he was always very punctual and never late for meetings. If he had given a time to his agency he would never make them wait unlike many who deliberately would make an agency wait. He respected the agency and not just see them as supplier of creative product. This was a rare personality.

     

    He was an honest entrepreneur. I remember once we were to launch Amul milk shake and we came up with our research that said chocolate and strawberry were the most popular flavours. He immediately said that chocolate milk shake was possible because of the chocolate powder Nutramul but strawberry he said was a seasonal product and he refused to put essence as it would be cheating consumers. He put his foot down on the strawberry flavor instead opted for elaichi which was more readily available.

     

    Also I remember when Amul launched its tetra pack he hated the design. Once when we went to meet him, he asked, are you still using the horrible pack? But he never interfered and asked us to redesign having known that even if he didn’t like it the pack worked in the market.

    I feel fortunate to have met someone like Mr Kurien and to have had a client like him.

     

    – As told to Tuhina Anand
    Image credit: amul.com

     

  • The man who turned India into the world’s largest producer of milk passed away on Sunday. Many felt that he deserved to be honoured with highest civilian honour of 'Bharat Ratna'

    V Kurien: Man who brought ‘Anand’ to India

    By A Correspondent

     

    Death, wrote Scottish playwright poet Sir Walter Scott, is not the last sleep, but the “last and final awakening”. Verghese Kurien, who passed away in the wee hours of Sunday near Anand in Gujarat at the age of 90, would have agreed.

     

    After all, he knew a thing or two about awakenings: The Syrian Christian by birth but bornagain atheist was a messiah to millions of modest milkmen whom he empowered at the expense of predatory middlemen by founding the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF); he built the Amul brand of dairy products and went on to replicate its success nationwide with the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB); he then launched Operation Flood, or the White Revolution, which as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted in a condolence message is responsible for making “India the largest milk producer in the world. His greatest contribution was to give a position of pre-eminence to the farmer…”

     

    Like most leaders of awakenings, Mr Kurien was fiery, blunt and controversial. Multinationals faced the brunt of his fire, and ire, over the decades. Way back in 1956, he stormed out of a Nestle board meeting in Switzerland when the dairy multinational was reluctant to “let natives handle a sensitive commodity like milk”. In 2008, two years after he resigned as GCMMF chairman in the wake of increasing dissent against him from board members, he thundered (in a chat with Economic Times): “When we started, there were Cadbury, Horlicks, Nestle, Polson ahead of us. Where are they now?” And two years ago, he was exhorting the country’s milk producers to unite against MNC “opportunists”.

     

    The man who won a host of top local and international honours, from the Wateler Peace Prize and World Food Prize to the Padma Vibhushan – many felt he deserved a Bharat Ratna and perhaps even a Nobel Peace Prize – was also an enfant terrible of sorts. Unconventional to a fault, he had a reputation for not dressing up his thoughts and actions in political correctness. In 2001, Mr Kurien was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence, which he shared with Reliance Industries founder Dhirubhai Ambani.

     

    Mr Kurien often yearned for life beyond Anand, a village with 10,000 people, and would periodically escape to Mumbai for the weekends. “I would dress up nicely, put on my green felt hat and ‘misbehave’, waiting for the government to accept my resignation as a dairy engineer posted in Anand,” he once told ET, only half in jest. A few years ago, when he was asked about the imminent entry of a fresh set of multinationals, he minced few words when he declared that “we will take their pants off “.

     

    And Mr Kurien seldom displayed reluctance in running in with politicians and bureaucrats in his efforts to do good for milk farmers.

     

    Says NDDB Chairman Amrita Patel: “He strode like a titan across the bureaucratic barriers and obstacles that, at virtually every stage of NDDB’s history, could have brought it to its knees. By his example, he has taught us to act with courage when faced with those who oppose the interests of our nation and its farmers.”

     

    “I dealt with politicians and bureaucrats to grow Amul’s reach while HM Dalaya (who built Amul’s tech backbone) took charge of the dairy operations,” Mr Kurien told The Economic Times in a chat in 2008.

     

    Still, such a penchant for provocation led to inevitable confrontations, a few of which ended up with Mr Kurien on the losing side. In March 2006, 33 years after becoming the chairman of GFMMF, the Milkman of India resigned – not because he had reached a ripe old age (84), but because he had no choice, what with 11 of 12 board members going against him. Ironically, Mr Kurien and his protege Ms Patel ended up in the two corners of the ring in a bruising, long-drawn public spat. Ms Patel had a view that NDDB had to be corporatised as the marketing set-up was in a shambles. Mr Kurien felt this would be tantamount to backdoor privatisation.

     

    There is a view that the man who gave up plenty of things in life – from God to his hometown Kozhikode in Kerala – could not let go of what he cherished the most: Amul, the brand he built with unswerving dedication and focus over almost six decades. “If Amul has become a successful brand, it is because we have honoured our contract with consumers for close to 50 years. If we had failed to do so, Amul would have been consigned to the dustbin of history, along with thousands of other brands,” said Mr Kurien at a marketing seminar over a decade ago.

     

    Taking him away from the baby he fathered, nurtured and grew, hurt. The experience was similar at his other creation, the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). Mr Kurien was prodded into starting the institute in the late 70s when he was slighted by a board member of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A). In response to Mr Kurien’s predictable observation that students should not be trained just to work with MNCs, one of the board members wondered aloud whether he wanted IIM students to milk cows.

     

    A furious Mr Kurien resigned from the IIM’s board and went on to set up a rural management institute. But here too, he had a run-in with the top leadership. As life-long chairman of IRMA, Mr Kurien was keen to get rid of then director K Prathap Reddy. The matter went to court. The key difference here, however, is that Mr Kurien won. Such rows were perhaps inevitable in the life of a person who had a strong belief and who would never step away from it, come hell, high water, politician or bureaucrat. And that belief was that the farmer had to be empowered. As Bajaj Auto Chairman Rahul Bajaj says: “He was an exemplar. His success underlines the great management acumen he had.”

     

    Adds Shyam Benegal, director of Manthan, a film based on a story jointly written by Kurien and Benegal and set against the backdrop of the White Revolution: “He is a hero of free India – imagine a man turning a milk-deficit country into the largest milk-producing nation in the world in a span of 25 years. Importantly, he was also extraordinarily honest and free of any kind of greed for money.” BJP leader Arun Jaitley counts Mr Kurien among “the biggest missionaries in post-Independence India”.

     

    “Eight hours for dairy, eight hours for your family, and eight hours for sleep,” was one of Mr Kurien’s favourite maxims. The man who has reached the final awakening will neither be at the dairy nor at the side of wife Molly, daughter Nirmala and grandson Siddharth; but the iconic Amul moppet along with millions of farmers and consumers of Amul milk, chocolates, cheese, butter, paneer, mithai et al will ensure the Kurien legacy eludes the clutches of the Grim Reaper.

     

    Source:The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2012, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

     

  • Excerpts from Dr Verghese Kurien's speech in 2001 on 'Markets in Motion'

    How Amul honours its contract with consumers: V Kurien

    Excerpts from Dr Verghese Kurien’s speech in 2001 on ‘Markets in Motion’

     

    The success of the Amul brand name has, no doubt, resulted in my being asked to comment on its history and the reasons for its success. I have, therefore, reflected on the long history of the brand to see if I could distil reasons why Amul is a name widely recognised and respected, not just in our cities and towns, but in our villages as well.

     

    Probably the easy, but nonetheless wrong, answer is that Amul has been advertised well. Certainly it has helped that those responsible for keeping the Amul name in the public eye have used considerable imagination and, if I do say so, ‘The taste of India’ is nothing short of brilliant. However, there is much more to it

     

    A successful consumer product is the object of thousands, even tens of thousands of transactions every day. In these transactions, the brand name serves in lieu of a contract. It is the assurance to the buyer that her specifications will be met. It is the seller’s assurance that quality is being provided at a fair price.

     

    If Amul has become a successful brand – if, in the trade lingo, it enjoys brand equity – then it is because we have honoured our contract with consumers for close to fifty years. If we had failed to do so, then Amul would have been consigned to the dustbin of history, along with thousands of other brands

     

    The tough part of the use of a brand as a contract is that every day is a renewal; if, just once, the brand fails to meet the customer’s expectations or, more exactly, if it fails to delight the customer, then the contract loses its value. If Amul’s sales continue to rise, it is because that contract has been honoured, again and again. I would like to think that the granddaughters of some of our first customers are now ‘contracting’ with us to buy their butter, cheese, baby food, chocolates and other fine Amul products. It is also a fact that when we first thought of exporting to West Asia and even to the United States, it was because of the loyalty of Amul customers who, even when far from home, still craved our ‘taste of India’.

     

    What goes into the ‘contract’ that is a brand name? First is quality.

     

    No brand survives long if its quality does not equal or exceed what the buyer expects. There simply can be no compromise. That’s the essence of the contract. In the case of a food product, this means that the brand must always represent the highest hygienic, bacteriological and organoleptic standards. It must taste good, and it must be good.

     

    Second, the contract requires value for money.

     

    If our customer buys an Amul product, she gets what she pays for, and more. We have always taken pride in the fact that while we earn a good income for our owners – the dairy farmers of Gujarat – we don’t do it at the cost of exploiting the consumer. Even when adverse conditions have reduced supplies of products like butter, we have resisted the common practice of raising prices, charging what the market would bear. Rather, we have kept prices fair and done our best to ensure that retailers do not gain at the consumers’ expense.

     

    The third element of the contract is availability.

     

    A brand should be available when and where the customer wants it. There is no benefit achieved in creating a positive brand image, and then being unable to supply the customer who wants to buy it. In our case, over the years we have built what is probably the nation’s finest distribution network. We reach hundreds of cities and towns through a cold chain that not only ensures that our products are available, but they reach the customer at the farthest end of the country with the same quality as you would find in Ahmedabad or Vadodara.

     

    The fourth part is service. We have a commitment to total quality.

     

    But, occasionally, we may make a mistake – or, our customer may think we’ve made a mistake, and the customer, as they say, is always right. That is why, for Amul, every customer complaint must be heard – not just listened to. And, every customer complaint must be rectified to the extent humanly possible.

     

    For close to fifty years now, Amul has honoured its contract with the consumer. The contract that is symbolised by the Amul brand means quality. It means value for money. It means availability. And it means service.

     

    Source:The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2012, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved