The one candy marketing

If you ask any brand manager, what is your ultimate goal? Nine out of ten times, his answer would be, ‘brand loyalty’. Different marketers swear by different tactics to attain this nirvana of brand loyalty. Just last week, I was spectator to a candy being used by one of the chemists in my local market. The significance attached to this candy here is more symbolic than literal, the reason for which we shall soon find out. Now, this chemist that I was referring to is no ordinary medicine seller. He is there since the past thirty years, selling medicines and other over the counter products. He has, over this period, evolved into a trusted chemist, who not only delivers prescribed drugs but also advises people on other issues. These issues could range from the most effective drugs, to who are the most bankable doctors in the vicinity of the locality etc etc.

But, all these years, things have not been hunky dory for him. Just like any other business, he has had to go through his fare share of competition, which in this case is two shops (also chemist shops), with each one on the left and right side of his shop. The walls of these two shops share a common wall with this chemist. Now, this could be any shop owner’s nightmare or a blessing in disguise? Let us see why.

Being adjacent to each other makes it very difficult for these three chemists to conceal their orders from the other two competitors. Just to give a hint of the physical proximity these three chemists shops share, if a person goes to any of these chemists and asks for a medicine, and in case the sales man tells him that the medicine is not available, then the sales man in the other shop can easily overhear this and call the customer to his shop, proudly telling him that he can offer him the drug in question. The kind of market faced by these three chemists can easily be placed on the extreme right of the socialist-capitalist continuum, except that the product in question is a tightly regulated one.

This is where my chemist takes away the game from the other two. He understood the fact that to sustain himself in the same locality, he has to not only win over new customers from competition, but also retain his existing customers. He invented his customer relationship system before this term got famous among the big Indian retailers and MBA’s like us. His CRM programme is one of the best I have seen and is second only to my local panwala’s, which I would talk about in some other article.

All he does is, takes out a candy from under his counter and hand it over to his customer without taking any money for it. The type of candy that a customer gets depends on the demographic and psychographic profile of his customer, which he matches perfectly to the database of his customers stored safely in his brain, out of bounds of all the viruses of digital nature. The surprising thing is that he manages to instil the same teachings in all his salesmen, who perform this ritual with equal aplomb. Let us see in detail how it works. Suppose a person goes to his shop and that person has a small child with him, then he would take out a sweet candy and would nonchalantly give it to the kid. If the customer is a smoker, which he somehow finds out, then the candy in question would be a mint one. If the person making the purchase is suffering from cough & cold and makes it evident by coughing a couple of times in his face, then the sales man would, without reprimanding the person for not showing the expected mannerisms while coughing, give him a ‘halls’ or a ‘vicks’.

This trick might seem simple but it works in mysterious ways, through which he wins the loyalty and trust of his customers. All of us know the special place a child has in the family in any culture and especially more so in our culture. When a sales man, who’s basic job is to give a medicine in return of the money, assumes a different role and pops out a candy (the symbolic reference that I mentioned earlier is manifested here because in doing so he is noticing more then the mere economic transaction and complements the role of the nurturer by taking care of the child), the customer reciprocates with his loyalty due to the warmth generated by that gesture. And this gesture doesn’t cost a bomb to the chemist. The cost of that vital candy is easily recovered by the 20-40% margins that his business gives him and is a small cost if one were to calculate the life time value of that customer.

This is how he manages to keep his customers happy, when the customers actually go to his shop to buy a product that one could never be happy to digest. This is how he manages to retain his customers, even when the waiting time on his counter is more than the waiting time at his competitors. This action might look simple and easily imitable. But most of the business men often forget the simple fact of life, which is, everybody feels happy to get recognised and acknowledged in special ways. My chemist apart from ensuring that I recover from the cold I am suffering from has ensured that I will never forget this insight. I think it’s a good time for me to pop out a thankyou note for my chemist.