Thursday, December 20, 2018

The Power of AND!!



I love the word ‘And‘,  and the symbol ‘&’.
By now you would have noticed that I use this word very frequently in my writing, especially at the start of each sentence.

Why I do this?
There is a short history behind it.
If you wish to know, please read on..

20 years back, at Hewlett Packard India (HPI), we had a challenge in selling our newly introduced DeskJet line of InkJet Printers. HP was the No. 1 leading and dominating brand in the Laser printer category with market share >85% !
However, we just could not ramp up our DeskJet volumes. Our numbers for India could not even qualify for bulk shipping rates, which only made the product even more costly.

There were basically 2 product lines. The commercial DeskJets for corporates and office use and the personal DeskJet for home and SMB (Small and Medium Businesses).
Commercial DeskJets were expensive and the inks ( cost of printing  ) for these printers were comparable to the lasers.

Personal DeskJets was our biggest focus as they meant huge volumes and equally large potential for consumables (ink) .
Worldwide HP followed the classic ‘Gillette’/’Kodak’ business model.
Sell the main unit cheap (at negative margin) and make money on the consumables.
So, in India too we priced the basic printer at a low price (making an upfront loss on every unit we sold) and priced the ink cartridges high so that we could get profitable over the lifetime usage of the printer.

Many felt our Ink cartridges were ‘obscenely’ priced. And I was also once royally roasted in an NDTV interview for 30 min on this painful subject.

So, the choice for customers were
-        Buy high cost printers with low priced ink cartridges
-        OR
-        Buy low cost printers with very costly Ink cartridges
Combinations that made choice difficult and ultimately leading to low sales.
And these choices were not acceptable to the India Business team either. 

So, we went back to the R&D at HP and demanded a special model/SKU for India. (SKU = Stock Keeping Unit).
The target we set for the development team was to give India a printer that cost less than 100 USD and delivered printed pages at less than a cent each!
Soon we got one close to our expectations.
A model that we could price at Rs8,999/-list price.
Black ink cartridge at Rs 499/-, which could deliver more than 550 printed pages.

Then we ran a huge promo campaign, print and BTL (Below the Line marketing)
Theme – the Power of &!!
No more difficult choice.
Now get a low-cost printer AND lower priced ink Cartridges!!

All our Ads and marketing collaterals carried a huge symbol ‘&’!

For our resellers & channel presentations I made up a story and started each of my talk with this one…

A team of research students went to a school and questioned the children in Class 1.
They asked a simple question – who do you like – Your Mon OR your Dad??
The kids replied as expected – Some Dad, Some Mom & Some were indecisive.

Then the students went to nursery section and asked the same question.
They got the normal answers too.
BUT,  a fair number of these tiny tots surprised them with
Mom and Dad -BOTH!!
Some even paraphrased – I like my mummy AND my daddy!!

That is the power of AND.

Check it out again!!
Offer these nursery kids – Toffee or Lollipop?
Many will grab BOTH  - unlike the ‘educated grownup kids’ who would choose just one.

Folks, you do not have to get compromised with an OR anymore!!!
That was my message. So, Go ahead and sell HP!
And we sold by shiploads each month.

Now just think about it.
We get too easily boxed in with a set of choices, many of which are forced upon us and some due to our own making.
We never explore if there are more choices than those presented to us. Pressure and time constraints only make it harder and make us myopic.
In my story, only two choices were presented

Either Mom OR Dad.
But there were two more which many of us would never think of.
Both Mom and Dad
Neither Mom nor Dad.

So, as we grow older, we tend to stereotype our brains and constrain them with such limited choice. Many times, these are driven by our parents, teachers and bosses too.  How many times in our younger days have we heard….
Eat your cabbages OR you won’t get the ‘gajar halwa’.
You can take either computer programming OR Economics.
You can be either a musician OR an Engineer.

Why are we forced with such limited options?
Why??

And slowly and consistently our minds are brainwashed from that wonderful free thinking beyond the boundary imagination of a nursery child to a well programmed ‘educated Robot’ – to make choices based on the given data only. And no more!

So much so that most people have forgotten to think without boundaries and take bold actions out of their own free will.
And now it takes a De Bono to teach us ‘Out-Of-the-Box-Thinking’. Lateral thinking as he calls it..
Something that came to us so naturally when we were young.

The power of ‘&’ unshackles such constraints and explores possibilities beyond the obvious choices presented to us.

So why should there be just Either Beauty OR Brains.
You can have Beauty & Brains
You can have Cheap & Good Quality
You can be Handsome & a Computer whiz Kid!
You can score max in English & in Maths
You can be Fast & Steady
You can be Super rich & Honest
You can have an Egg & the Omlette
AND you can also have a Cake & eat it too!!

Why not ??

Krish..

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