The Purchase Process

It’s nearly Friday and it’s time for storytelling again.
Remember Maggie? The sauce? Of course you do.
Not just because you consumed a little while ago, but because it occupies a disproportionate part of your life for the kind of product it is. If you consider, it is not even the main meal - it is an accompaniment. Yet it demands and gets attention.
Besides, it also evidences the fact that the length of the name of an entity has nothing to do with its recall. So what do we recall? Well, we recall Maggie sauce as “Maggie Hot and Sweet Tomato Chilli Sauce - It’s different”. That’s nine words, quite a mouthful.
And when uttered, a vivid set of images form in the brain. The genre of the image is that fun and indulgence. The type of thought it evokes is pleasant, as it uses humour. The tonality is Indian. And by that we mean that it is deliberately slapstick, wonderfully irreverent, comfortably silly. And so when you eat it, you consume more than cooked and pasted tomatoes.
As a matter of fact, come to think of it, it is only after Maggie entered our lives, that the bottle of Kissan Ketchup started appearing dull and drab! So have you noticed, how when you stare at it today, you wonder if the ‘sauce’ is fresh. And so in a store while shopping, you pick it up, roll it in your hands and place it back on the shelf. Then you pick up the fun bottle - Maggie and move on to the next item on your shopping radar. And you did so not because Kissan was not fresh, but only because Maggie is ‘fresher’. Not because it really is, but only because of it’s image, carved out of plain fiction, not rooted in any fact.
Amazing, isn’t it?
But the more seemingly innocuous entity is actually the Maggie bottle. It conceals a whole sub science of marketing strategy. In jargon we call it “The Purchase Process”.
To make it lighter on the mind, let’s imagine a time when Nestle was planning to enter the ketchup / sauce market.
They needed consumer insight to find a unique slot in the consumer’s mind. Remember, those were days when Kissan was literally equal to the category. So what did they do?
A small team (large teams give findings, not ‘insights’!) went over to the Kirana store and quietly observed the ‘purchase process’ of a man buying Kissan Ketchup.
And this is what they observed.
There were two SKUs on the shelf - one a ‘big’ bottle of sauce and other a ‘small’ bottle. Now while buying, the consumer merely identified what he wanted, as ‘big’ or ‘small’ bottle of ‘ketchup/sauce’. So he would say - “give me that big bottle of sauce’. He never bothered identifying the bottle by its quantity i.e. volume or weight. So he never said something like “give me 500 gms of ketchup”. This gave Nestle the cue they were looking for.
Now when ‘Maggie’ was launched, it was ‘different’ for more reasons than just its advertising.
First, it was ‘sauce’ not ketchup.
And it was more dilute.
Moreover it was flavoured ‘hot and sweet’.
It was indisputably brighter or so it seemed.
But most importantly, it was more expensive.
And still more importantly, the bottles of both ‘big’ and ‘small’ SKUs looked different in their shape than the Kissan bottle such that one could never compare the quantity! So the consumer couldn’t tell and in fact didn’t care that Maggie gave him less ‘sauce’!
As a matter of strategy, the implication is even more significant. Now every unit of Maggie sold is consequently more profitable. It has to be. Plus, the price too is higher. Higher price per unit, lesser quantity and still the value offered is perceptually much greater. Now this is what we call strategy. If you look at it, the offering has no rational component. But emotionally it’s a winner. And that’s what makes it a stupendous brand.
At the cost of repeating, it is the same for ICICIdirect.com. One long at what all we rationally give, is still only a partial look. The emotional pegs of online share trading form a vivid set of images in the brain. Those cause the pull or bonding to happen. Good relationships are after all, cemented emotionally only.
Think about it and also think how we can leverage it more.
But come to think of it, there’s more than just the purchase process behind the Maggie story. But on that, later;
(Now they have “Maggie Pichkoo”. Howzatt!)