Consumer Goods Marketing and Sales

To all those who are following this, sorry for the delay - both of us have been horribly busy at work, but we'll post 2-3 more articles by the end of this week. In the meanwhile, here's a great convergence map that shows how most consumer brands are owned by SIX COMPANIES! Quite insightful, this. Full credit to Convergence Alimentaire -  You can click on it to enlarge.

Many times, you will come across this line with your distributor/retailer/sales officer saying “Sir, aap ke maal mein rate ka lafda hai”. What this basically means is that your stock is available at a lower rate in the market – this could be another wholesaler, another distributor or anyone else. A product that has a rate problem means that it is a top selling item in the market, which is good news for your brand team, but VERY bad news for you. When you start creating rate differences, you start playing a price war and there is no end to that - so our advice to you is stay away from it, even if it means a couple of extra gaalis :) To explain better, let us look at the following scenarios: Scenario 1: You are selling Parle G biscuits. Your distributor is called ABC Traders, and there is a distributor in an adjoining area not too far away called XYZ Traders – however XYZ is not under your jurisdiction. I will explain landing rates in a...

This post is co-authored with my good friend Nishit Ganatra who is currently the ASM of Punjab, J&K for CavinKare. He interned with me at L'Oreal and graduated from XIM, Bhubaneshwar. He enjoys troubling the Pakistani army by attempting to cross over the border from time to time and is giving their economists nightmares as he contemplates to sell Chik shampoo across the border owing to the kindness of his boss.You can find him here . So probably the first thing that your distributor/dealer/stockist is going to tell you when you go to him for the first time is “Sirjee, ROI nahin baith raha hai”. What this simply means is that he is challenging you to calculate his return on investment. This is sort of a monthly exercise – he knows that he is getting an ROI, else he would not be in the business. What he simply needs is some ego massage so that he gets an ILLUSION that he is in control of something when he is not – your rates are fixed, your schemes are fixed, and so are...