Sachet Revolution

Hi... friends today i want to post about "Sachet Revolution" which created a reflection in the market trend in grabbing Rural market in India..
Over the years, the sachet strategy has proved so successful that, according to an ORG Marg data, 95 per cent of total shampoo sales in rural India is by sachets.
let us go in detail who is the man behind this.......
C K Ranganathan, CEO of CavinKare is somebody who changed the rules of the FMCG game. He is widely regarded as the man behind the sachet revolution.
So how did Ranganathan become a tycoon?origin of concept:
His father Chinni krishna, a school teacher had an entrepreneurial streak in him. so he started a small pharmaceutical packaging unit and gone on to manufacture pharmaceutical products and cosmetics. The father may not have become a big time businessman, but he had a few radical ideas about the Indian consumer. He wanted the common man to have access to what was then termed as rich man’s products. He also believed in packaging for single-time use. The sachet which was to revolutionise FMCG marketing was his creation.
when his father passed, Ranganathan, a fresh graduate entered the family business.However, Ranganathan wanted to branch off on his own. He had clear ideas about how to do business.He started Chik India as a small partnership firm, Chik being an acronym for his father’s name. The partners were his mother and grandmother. Chik India started off by offering a single product, Chik shampoo. Ranganathan took the shampoo market by storm, selling his Chik brand of shampoo at a much lower price than other shampoo sachets which were selling at Rs 2. He targeted rural and small-town consumers who used soaps to wash their hair. . He introduced the sachet at 90 paise.. in the year 1988.
'Whatever I make, I want the coolies and the rickshawpullers to use. I want to make my products affordable to them,' he used to say. Selling things in sachets was his father motto as he said, 'this is going to be the product of the future.' But my father could not market the concept well. . He moved from one innovation to another but never thought of marketing strategies. After 1998, the company focused on sniffing out rural markets outside the south. It broadened its distributors network to about 1,200 outside the southern market, where it had about 600 distributors.Next they planned Chik Shampoo-sponsored shows of Rajniknath's films. they marketed the product through advertisements in between, followed by live demonstrations. They also distributed free sachets among the audience after these shows. This worked wonders in rural Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Ranganathan claims that these promotions led to exponential gains: sales jumped from Rs 5 lakh in 1984 to Rs 38 lakh the year after.The company then started a special scheme whereby anyone who returned five used sachets of Chik to the retailer got one sachet free of cost.
“In those days, this was a novel offer, and we met with an enormous response,” recalls Ranganathan.Gradually, the brand gained acceptance among rural consumers accross India on the strength of its price-proposition.Chik is big news in those days because it has become the second-largest shampoo brand — after fast-moving consumer goods giant Hindustan Lever Limited’s (HLL) Clinic Plus — in volume terms.
In the quarter of 2002-2003, according to the AC Nielsen ORG Marg retail audit, the Rs 100-crore Chik has grabbed a 22.49 per cent share of the 35,000-tonne shampoo market in India, and is just two percentage points behind Clinic Plus which has a market share of 24.27 per cent.
Thus Hindustan lever and procter and gamble (P&G) also introduce the shampoo in sachets in order to regain their market share.

So the people who were initially not buying the shampoos, because of sachet will start buying it.
Let us take some more examples:
1. CavinKare Ruchi Pickles in sachets
2. Feviquik
3. Maggi Noodles in Rs 5 pack
4. Coke - Rs. 5
5. Oils
6. Vicks - Rs 7
7. Confectionary .. Polo from Nestle
and lots more.
Thus the stratagies used by the C.k ranganathan became a benchmarking techniques to grab market share in Rural market.