Parle- G, the Desi Biscuit

David Ogilvy once said: “Good products can be sold by honest advertising,” and proving the validity of this quote is a biscuit brand that not only turned out to be a great product but also touched lives of millions of people. An iconic brand backed by a history of more than 75 years that has evolved over time to become the world’s largest selling biscuit brand. A brand that never differentiated its customers based on their income levels. A brand born before its country emerged as an independent nation.

Parle-G was first manufactured in the year 1929 on a very small scale in Mumbai but was quickly accepted by biscuit lovers. Due to its initial success and sensing a huge growth opportunity, Parle launched an ad campaign, in the year 1947 (soon after India’s independence) to compete with foreign brands and promote Indian biscuits. The ad campaign ignited the patriotic sentiments of Indian consumers as it turned out to be a masterstroke and took the brand to new heights. Parle-G became an instant hit and was embraced by the Indian masses who perceived it to be a ‘Desi’ brand (just like Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali is seen today).

Due to the imitable nature of the product, other companies started replicating Parle-G’s strategy. However, Parle-G tackled the competition very professionally. They re-positioned their product from an ‘energy biscuit brand’ to a ‘tasty, healthy food for all’ brand. And this is how Parle Gluco became Parle-G (G Genius).

Success Factors of Parle-G

Price

Parle G is priced at ₹5 and is considered to be one of the most affordable biscuits. With its low pricing strategy, the brand has ensured that it is available to the population present even in the remotest of locations.

Even though inflation in India has seen an increase almost every year, in the last decade, Parle-G, with its constant innovation ensures that its prices are not raised beyond a certain level. For such a low price, the perceived value for the customers is high, resulting in more sales.

Product

Though the low price is one of the factors for high acceptability of Parle-G by the masses, however, there is another big factor due to which Parle-G is such a huge success i.e. good taste and quality of biscuits.

The taste of the biscuits is so generic that it is liked by people of all ages. The fact of its high acceptability is evident from the fact that Parle-G is used as ‘a verb’ every time somebody wants to consume a biscuit at a tea stall (‘Bhaiya, Parle-G de do).

Packaging

Parle-G biscuits come wrapped in red and yellow wax paper with the image of a small girl on the pack.

The image on the packet is used to build a brand association and connect with people. All these years, Parle-G hasn’t experimented much with its packaging and kept it very simple and rustic. This eventually helped the brand to differentiate itself from the competitors and led to a high recall value among the customers.

Branding

Parle G is branding itself as – ‘Bharat Apna Biscuit’. (India’s biscuit.) With its effective TV and print ads, the brand has been creating memories since 1939.

It has been very effective with its advertising campaigns and ensures that it targets all the segments: be it kids, the youth or the elderly. One such campaign which targeted kids and became a huge success was Parle-G’s – ‘G Genius’ campaign. Soon after the campaign, the biscuit brand saw a huge increase in its sales and further strengthened its dominance in the market.

Focus back on confectionery

Parle is looking at another shift. Post GST, biscuits are taxed at 18 percent as compared to the earlier 12 to 14 percent. Their popular and Poppins account for around 12 percent, which is Rs 1000 crore of their revenue.

As for their future plans, Krishna adds that the confectionery business is pegged at Rs 10,000 crore and is growing at 12 percent with a potential to reach 20 percent. The total confectionery business is at Rs 30,000 crore. “While our focus hasn’t been in the confectionery business, we intend to touch 15 percent in the segment within the next two years,” Krishna says.

Krishna reveals that their top confectionery brand is Kaccha Mango which contributes close to 24 percent of their revenue business, followed by Melody, at 20 percent and Kismi, which is at 15 percent.However, today, while older international brands and British restriction

Conclusion

Albert Einstein once said: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”Parle-G with its low price, high and a strong brand image has ensured a high perceived value for the customers. This, in turn, has resulted in the brand history of over 78 years and made Parle-G the undisputed leader in the biscuit industry. In a country like India where a lot of new biscuit brands are launched every year with very less differentiation, surviving for such a long period seems like an unimaginable task. However, Parle-G has shown that if people love your product, then you don’t really need to worry about the competition.

Parle-G is the most consumed biscuit in India that not only provides relishing moments to people who crave to eat something good but is also available to those who belong to the lesser privileged sections of the society. In every sense, Parle G has proved to be an iconic brand that focuses on adding value to the end customer rather than minting money from the pockets of Indian masses. This is what has differentiated the brand from its competitors and has led to its magnificent success.

source:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sell-practical-way-hitesh-bathija

How to discover your company’s core purpose?

Jim Collins and Jerry Poras, authors of the innovative business classic Built to Last, embarked upon a 6-year study of truly exceptional companies that have prospered over the long term, including well-known brands such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Procter & Gamble, Nordstrom, Disney, and Marriott. These long-lasting organizations each have a remarkable average of 100+ years of sustained business performance. The stock of these organizations has performed 15 times better than the overall stock market has since 1926.

Collins and Poras uncovered some key components that have allowed all of these high-performance businesses to both endure and thrive.

One of these key components is a deeply-held core purpose that creates a strong sense of identity and continuity throughout a business.

Here’s how Collins and Poras describe an organization’s core purpose:

[It’s] the organization’s fundamental reason for being. An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work—it taps their idealistic motivations—and gets at the deeper reasons for an organization’s existence beyond just making money

What’s your company’s core purpose?

A core purpose is bigger than a charismatic leader, product, service, team, or technology.

As Simon Sinek says in his book, Start with Why, it’s the idea of who you are as a company and why you exist. As such, an organization’s core purpose has to be completely idealistic.

Your ability to prosper as a company is not about what you sell, it’s about what you believe. And it should drive everything you do.

Unfortunately, too many companies fail to capture this concept. Instead, they end up with uninspiring, cliche mission statements that are neither motivating nor memorable. These businesses are often driven solely by profit and performance, which in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace isn’t sustainable.

“Leaders die, products become obsolete, markets change, new technologies emerge, and management fads come and go, but core ideology in a great company endures as a source of guidance and inspiration,” Collins writes.

The whole point of your core purpose is to motivate and lead your people. It’s the glue that holds your company together as it grows, expands, and diversifies. Employees at every level of your company must know that at the heart of what they do is something meaningful that continuously anchors their daily activities.

Defining your core purpose is all about clarity, genuineness, and alignment. It doesn’t have to sound impressive on a billboard or as a tagline. It does, however, have to be meaningful to your business.

A true core purpose will endure throughout the lifetime of your company.

Meaning drives engagement

Employees at every level of your company must know that at the heart of what they do each and every day is something that is meaningful. Every day they come to work, they crave a reason for why they are at their job. People fundamentally want to know that what they are doing serves a greater purpose.

Of course, your team knows that their day-to-day responsibilities boil down to tangible, tactical, productive work. But when they know that their daily work is part of the bigger mission, they are more driven to show up every day on time and do their job well.

As a whole, a well-communicated core purpose results in a workforce that is more engaged. Engaged employees work with passion and they feel a profound connection to their company. They cooperate to build a company and they create new customers.

Companies with a highly engaged workforce improved operating income by 19.2% over a period of 12 months, whilst those companies with low engagement scores saw operating income decline by 32.7% over the same period.

2010, Towers Watson Strategies for Growth study.

A clear understanding of how a person’s job contributes to their company’s reason for being is a powerful form of emotional compensation. It, quite simply, is more thrilling to share a common purpose than complete a job.

How do you identify your core purpose?

Collins identifies five important characteristics of a company’s core purpose:

1. It’s inspiring to those inside the company.
2. It’s something that’s as valid 100 years from now as it is today.
3. It should help you think expansively about what you could do but aren’t doing.
4. It should help you decide what not to do.
5. It’s truly authentic to your company.

Bear in mind, your core purpose is not your strategic differentiator. In fact, you can have the same or a similar core purpose as another company, even one that is in an entirely different industry.

For example, both an interior design company and a landscape company might have a core purpose of “bringing beauty to people’s lives.” A puzzle company and a team-building event organization may share a core purpose to “provide tools of imagination.”

Not sure where to start? Here are some questions that can help you determine your core purpose:

• Why does our organization’s existence matter?
• What is our most important reason for being here? Why?
• What would be lost if this organization ceased to exist?
• Why are we important to the people we serve?
• Why would anyone dedicate their precious time, energy, and passion to our company? (Note: the answer is not money.)

Defining your core purpose is all about clarity, authenticity, and alignment. This means that you do not have to sound “sexy.” This is not something that has to sound impressive on a billboard. It does, however, have to feel meaningful. You’ll know when you finally identify your core purpose because it will be accompanied by a strong sense of conviction. Your team will feel a deep “yes!” when it is uncovered.

Delving into the depths of your business and finding your core purpose will take effort – it’s a major evolution in thinking. But when you make the strides to shape your business from the inside out, you are undertaking actions that have a high ROI.

Knowing your core purpose will heighten employee and customer engagement. Your purpose-driven brand will create and inspire enthusiastic advocates who are personally invested in your company’s success.

Source:https://www.kinesisinc.com/how-to-discover-your-companys-core-purpose/

23 Business Facts That Will Give You a Whole New Perspective

Interesting. Business. Facts.

Simple, right? Yes, it is.

Let’s take a look!

1. Wal-Mart averages a profit of $1.8 million every hour.

2. Starbucks‘ round tables were created specifically so customers would feel less alone.

3. One in 10 Europeans are conceived in an Ikea bed.

8. Marvel Comics once owned the rights to the word “zombie.”

9. The red and white Coca-Cola logo is recognized by 94% of the world’s population

10. Candy Crush brings in a reported $633,000 a day in revenue.

11. Warner Music owns the copyrights to “Happy Birthday,” so it’s technically owed royalties every time you sing it to someone on their big day.

12. If Bill Gates were a country, he’d be the 37th richest on earth.

13. More people in the world have mobile phones than toilets.

14. The Rubik’s cube is the best-selling product of all time. The iPhone is second.

15. Over 40% of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010.

16. It is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep a current one.

17. In 1999, Google’s founders were willing to sell the company to a web portal called Excite for under $1 million.
However, Excite passed on the offer. The rest is history.

18. Best known for consumer electronics, Samsung’s other business areas include weapons manufacturing, life insurance, and theme park management.

19. Ronald Wayne, the third founder of Apple alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, sold his shares for a mere $800 after 12 days in the company. His stake, i.e. 10% of the company, would be worth $35 billion today with Apple’s current valuation.

20. Number of Mickey Mouse-related products sold per day? More than 5 million!

21. Movie theaters markup the price of popcorn by an average of 1,275 percent.

22. The First YouTube Video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, featuring its co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
(For more information about YouTube and it’s Market Reach: Read this article)

23. Adding /4 to the end of Facebook’s URL will take you to Mark Zuckerberg’s profile.

Which one do you like the most? Leave a comment!

source:http://busiwall.com/business/business-facts-that-will-give-you-a-whole-new-perspective/