Zee Bangla 101 Markets 2012: Decisions for Tier II & III cities can't be taken from offices in Mumbai and Delhi

Nanda Kishore Sethuraman of BOI AXA Investment Managers underlined the need to get to the ground level for the markets beyond metros. He set three paradigms: educate, empower and engage in order to crack the Tier II and Tier III markets.

"I am sure half of us cannot name the cities on the India map, including me. It can be pretty overwhelming," said Nanda Kishore Sethuraman, head, marketing, BOI AXA Investment Managers as he began his presentation on the potential of markets beyond metros, referring to how difficult it is to figure out how much Tier II and Tier III is.

He said that India is very divided - on religion, language and cultural aspects; in fact, we are more divided than together. According to Sethuraman, the kind of campaign that will be successful in Maharashtra may not work in Tamil Nadu or Kerala. "India is a country which has made large corporations buckle down on their knees and come out with solutions that are much localised," he added, giving the example of Coca-Cola and how its localised campaigns became a model for replication across Southeast Asia.

Sethuraman said that those living in places beyond metros consume in ways that are very different from our neighbour next door. "We are dealing with extremely intelligent people who outsmart you with their sharp thinking," he revealed.

According to Sethuraman, the first paradigm to connect with non-urban consumers in India is to educate them. Giving the case study of his own organisation, Sethuraman said, "We used to be Bharti AXA Investment Managers. As the JV was restructured and Bharti moved out, we are now known as BOI AXA Investment Managers. When the original JV happened, with Bharti and AXA, we were the 34th player in the market. That was the time when regulation had become extremely stringent. Mutual fund as a category was a pushed product, rather than a pull product. The entire industry depended on a channel, which was the distributor."

The challenge for the organisation was to empanel more distributors and start selling their products. They came up with a simple campaign that targeted distributors.

"By doing a series of campaigns, we were able to gain a lot of loyalty from the distribution fraternity. By projecting distributors as experts, we made 'larger than life' heroes out of them," says Sethuraman. The company was able to get more than 5,000 distributors empanelled, which was remarkable for a late entrant, especially during great economic difficulty.

The second step in the paradigm, as per Sethuraman, is to engage the consumer. "It is important to engage them, in their own language. In this way, they will be more receptive to your communication." He said that 'elegant' ATL campaigns may just not work. "Engaging in today's parlance would mean social media. But somewhere beyond 70 kms from this city is a town where Facebook and Twitter may just not be the best way to engage. The best idea would be to roll up your sleeves and step down on the pedal yourself."

His company started a series of events called 'Chai, Samosa and Bharosa' as a small training programme and carried out a full-fledged marketing/lead generation activity. About 15-20 prospective investors were brought into the office, along with one/two distributors, and completely explained the concept of investing through MFs and also about the brand.

"The distributors were allowed to collect the lead and close the sale for which they would get the credit, while the selling job would be done by us. The result was that we got more than 50,000 investments," he claimed.

Sethuraman proposed the next step in the paradigm as to 'empower' and cited the example of Tupperware. "All that Tupperware has done is to train people and let them loose, thus empowering people and getting them to sell the products."

He said that when it comes to Tier II and Tier III cities, it is not possible to take decisions from the offices in Mumbai and Delhi.

Finally, Sethuraman emphasised on the need to generate a mechanism of feedback of all kinds and also create a mechanism for response.

This afaqs! event was presented by Zee Bangla.