In this article, I emphasize on the importance of the operational Industry over a brand; we focus on a business that failed miserably as a result of not considering the power of a product category or industry. The concerned business today belongs to the Pizza Industry in India. It is a well-known fact that the leaders of the Pizza industry in India (an emerging economy) comprise of Dominos and Pizza Hut. But a few years back a local company, ‘Pizza Point’ came into existence with a belief of capturing the market share global pizza giants couldn’t meet.
In emerging economies like India, consumers are not exposed to global brands for a long period of time, causing a lot of variance in the perceptions of brands and products. In this case, consumers’ perception of Pizzas largely oriented from global brands like Pizza Hut and Dominos. The Managers at Pizza Point reckoned that two-thirds of the market could not afford the highly priced Pizzas offered at the international pizza chains. So they created a brand hoping to capitalise the flexibility of being a local brand offering a localised pizza at cheaper rates. On one occasion Pizza Point senior managers had quoted, they would like the brand to be much more localized and not thought of in a glamorous manner.
Eventually, Pizza Point failed to position their brand locally. Why? Though the prices were cheaper than those of their International competitors, they were much higher than the prices of local food like curries and other similar dishes. This immediately reflected on their perception; consumers would not visit a Pizza Point unless it was a special occasion when they are prepared to spend more.
Many consumers also felt that the food was ‘foreign’ and not ‘Indian’, which inadvertently gave Pizza Point a status symbol to be associated with (something they never wanted). The management could have perhaps gone for an Indian-(ized) name to go with, which could have countered the glamorized image. A major problem for Pizza Point came from pre-conceived perceptions in their target markets’ mind oriented from a product category that was dominated by Pizza Hut and Dominos. This never allowed Pizza Point to differentiate their image from the International pizza giants.
The lesson to be learnt here is, that many a times industries hold more prominence than a brand’s name, identity or strategy. Since several companies have failed to consider this fact, we hope to come up with more real time evidences on the above claim in the near future.
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[...] More here: Branding Mishaps: Pizza Point [...]
[...] dimensions of India. Something similar to what we saw turned out to be vicious for Pizza Point (see how Pizza point missed out on appealing to the Indian consumers) when they entered India. Apart from the high pricing, it proved to be an unachievable task of [...]