Racing to the finish line

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Wanted: CEOs from India

: contain the rapid growth of these brands. We began to develop such brands, but building new brands was a time-consuming and hard task. It took us months before we were able to craft them to marketable proficiency. These were, Now to contain Style, Capstan Filter Kings to challenge Charms and Wills and Virginia to checkmate red Regent, but the time gap of our defencelessness was very worrisome and I experienced several sleepless nights.

It is another matter if your counter-action does not succeed fully. At least you have some satisfaction that you have engaged the rival and perhaps slowed down his brand’s advancement. But, if you have no ready weapons, then for some precious time, you sink into an abyss of inaction. You naturally feel bad being in this situation, but also a part of your sales force in the area of strong competitive activity tends to get demoralised and lose confidence in the ability of the core team to keep pace with competition. Besides, such doubts also arise in the mind of senior managers of other departments and divisions, and some of them can be quite uncharitable in their criticism.

After these three incidents, I vowed to myself that I would not allow such a situation to happen again. So, I made a simple decision to set up three ‘make-believe’ competitive teams, one for each competitive company, to figure out what kind of brands they would think they need and market them during the next three years, and in fact, take another step forward to think out as to what kind of brands we would need to counter them. I knew that some people would regard such an exercise as ‘mission impossible’, as I have commented earlier that every organisation hasa small number of shakerkhors (permanent doubting Thomases). The only way to deal with them was to ask them as to what would they do in such circumstances. Once questioned, they invariably shirked, avoided giving a direct reply and backed out.