Innovation Stories from India Inc by Vijay Menon

Author:Vijay Menon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
ISBN: 9789386432704
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Titan

Titan Company Ltd (FY16 revenue Rs 11,278 crore, $1.7 billion) is a joint venture between the Tata group and Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation. The company was set up in 1984 and has four lines of business: watches and accessories; jewellery; eyewear; and precision engineering. Many of its brands—Titan watches, Tanishq jewellery, Fastrack accessories, and Skinn perfumes—are household names.

Titan positions itself as a sophisticated but not elitist alternative in all its categories. When it started, the public-sector company HMT ruled the wrist watch market with robust mechanical watches. Titan brought in quartz watches that had an international look and feel and yet retained a distinctly Indian identity. Its iconic Edge series of wrist watches, launched in 2002 and promoted as the ‘thinnest watch in the universe’, fired the public imagination. It was a remarkable recovery for a company that had—buoyed by its early success in India—overreached in the nineties by expanding too much and too fast in Europe and nearly gone bankrupt.

Tanishq, the jewellery brand started in 1995, had a rocky start. It started with eighteen-carat gold and diamond jewellery in international designs sold through up-market stores and found no traction. It now offers a more comprehensive collection with a more pronounced Indian sensibility. A Tanishq innovation, the Karatmeter, a non-destructive way to test the purity of gold, has been hugely successful in promoting the company’s image as a seller of genuine gold. Fastrack was launched in 1998 as an irreverent urban youth brand of accessories.

Bhaskar Bhat (born 1954), managing director of Titan, is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and has been with the company since 1988. An excellent raconteur, Bhat recounts with wry humour how innovation throughout Titan’s history has often resulted from not focusing unduly on market research.

Leader speak: Bhaskar Bhat

Throughout our history, we’ve taken many decisions that have been subsequently described by others as innovative and disruptive. At the time we took those decisions, they seemed to us to be a logical choice based on our reading of the situation. But as a company we also have an impulsive and restless gene in our DNA and when I look back on some of our major inflection points, these have been the result of this curious combination of logical thinking and impulsiveness.

Let’s start with our entry into the watch market. In the eighties, 99 per cent of the watches in India were mechanical watches. The only quartz watches most people had then seen were cheap digital watches that looked terrible, went bad quickly, were not water resistant, and could not be repaired because there were no spares or service outlets. And since the market leader, HMT, was a public-sector company with a ponderous sales and service setup, conventional market research would have told us to become a more friendly alternative to the existing product.

We read the market differently. Xerxes Desai and J R D Tata, the people who started Titan, felt that the market was in fact, ready to change to something new.

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