TRYing for MORE….

“Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.”  As an engineer and thus from a science background I understood the complexities of the later but was not aware of the first. As most other adolescents shopping, visiting malls was also my favorite way to pass time but I never considered how much time, efforts and planning goes in designing a mall. Not just malls even a smaller super markets shop floor designing to product planning involves great effort and no two would be same. The design and marketing strategy for each would be different and would be as per the mindset and convenience of the audience they cater to. A classic example of this is are two super markets TRY at Mahabalipuram and MORE at Annupuram.

  Try is a super market in the town of Mahabalipuram, Mahabaliupram officially know as Mammalpuram is a 7^th century port in the state of Tamil Nadu. It has a population of 12,345. This small town has many structures of historical importance and is a popular spot for tourist attraction. Thus Try’s main clientele are foreigners and local public of Mahabalipuram. More on the other hand is a super market in the Annupuram is a DAE township. Annupuram is home to the DAE employees which thus serves Officials who are from various parts of India currently settled there.

     The visible difference between these two can be broadly be categorized as Shop floor layout differences and products available. As mentioned earlier TRY main clients are locals from the state of Tamil Nadu. Here I saw various brands local brands that I haven’t seen before in super markets in other states. For example Arasan washing powder that I couldn’t find in shops other than Mahabalipuram. Whereas More having a more diverse clientele had brands that were popular and had negligible local brands with them. 

TRY had their local brands too and these very strategically positioned to the attract the customers attention. Positioning of the products plays such an important role, a well-placed local or not so popular product also has an increased probability of getting selected. TRY places these on racks heading from one end of the room to another in close proximity of their competitor more popular brands of Tea grains pluses etc. Their strategic positioning causes the customer’s attention to immediately be drawn towards them. From this we can make out that a prime objective is selling their brand. However when we enter MORE we can see that they are catering to a more educated and practical customer base. As soon as you enter the More shop you can very prominently see the banners of discounts that they are offering. Even the positions of the categories of their products is such that those categories that are offering the most discounts are placed first as compared to others. Not only these but brands that have more discounts or freebies are are placed more conveniently a compared to those that don’t. Clearly showing that attracting a regular money-wise smart homemaker is their prime motive.

As Lee Lacocca very wisely said “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can not get them across, your ideas will not get you anywhere”. So we can conclude by saying that the most important thing we can do for our business is to market the product and the product is our most important marketing tool.

Astha Agarwal

FT13415