Dial 'S'ilence for death!

The Kannadiga consumer has been stuck in strange circumstances in a market, which in reality exists only because of him. While the consumer's language and hence the consumer himself are being neglected in business, a language alien to them is receiving red-carpet welcome as the medium for all business activities. This has led to a situation that is inconvenient and insulting to the Kannadiga consumer. There is an urgent necessity for awareness among Kannadiga consumers. The consumer needs to be educated of his stance in the market, and the finer details of the market's economics. This awareness will help turn the situation in the consumer's favour and get them the very much deserved reverence in the market.

Unfavourable environment around consumer
There are several occasions in the market around Kannadiga consumers wherein products and services in business are either offered in a limited fashion or not offered at all in the consumer's language, while its importance in any business activity is commonplace among businessmen. Let us dive a little deeper and find out some such occasions where the Kannadiga consumer is being belittled:

1. Certain products which are of critical value to consumer's health like medicines have none of the important information in Kannada, thereby making English learning compulsory for activities which could be performed in Kannada more conveniently.
   
2. Products on sale in commercial establishments have name tags in one or two languages, but not in Kannada - the language consumers of this land speak. This has projected a false image of Kannada as a language incapable of helping consumers in making their choice.
   
3. Information about medical examinations that are an important first step for a doctor's decisions are all found provided in English but not in Kannada. Owing to such setup patients unaware of English have to run the risks posed by some investigative tests. Safety of these consumers is being compromised as an outcome of linguistic neglect.
   

If these are just a few examples of market situations where a consumer's priorities are being sidelined because of neglect displayed towards his language, there are other cases where the consumer's identity in the market is being injured because of forced domination of other languages in the market.

Consumer's rights and responsibilities in the market
In the wake of such incidents in the market that are subjecting the consumer to unfair treatment, the consumer needs to become aware of his rights and responsibilities in the market scenario:

1. Expecting the market to provide products and services in a way that he likes is not wrong on the part of the consumer. In fact not meeting these expectations is a mistake on the businessman's side.
2. The market will simply cease to exist without the consumer, and the existence of the market is hinged around the consumer himself.
3. The Kannadiga consumer has to expect to be served in Kannada, and this is not at all a crime. It is definitely not a matter of insult to expect local language presence in one's market.
4. The denial of products or services in Kannada to a Kannadiga consumer is but denial of service, and is a violation of consumer's basic rights in a business.
5. As a duty on the Kannadiga consumer's side, one needs to encourage and congratulate efforts in making products and services available in Kannada. This way the market will consequently allot more space to Kannada in the market, and hence encourage more Kannada presence around us.

The inclination of any developing market to adopt foreign languages that have already found widespread use in business, is an automatic development. This needs to be opposed for sustainable development to take place in our market too. Achieving market goals without involving our language in it is a short-lived experience, and the consequences of such growth can be disastrous to the cultural richness that Kannadiga consumers currently possess.

Consumer "how-to"s
Quite often nowadays a Kannadiga is subject to neglect in the market, and gradually Kannada is being subdued by the dominance of other languages as medium of business conduct. While this is a widespread experience, it calls for planned opposition and demand for correction in business practices. Approaching this problem according to its magnitude opens the following avenues to oppose this linguistic oppression in the market, and demand deserving respect to Kannada and Kannadiga in business:

1. Firstly, every consumer should press for service to be rendered in Kannada, and no other language in the Karnataka market. Presence of any other language in Kannada's absence is an insult no Kannadiga consumer should withstand.
   
• Nearly 60% of such cases of Kannada neglect will bend to these demands itself.
2. In cases where this simplest form of protest doesn't fetch desirable results, seek to complain to the dealer's higher-ups and authorities monitoring the business at a higher level.
• While in some cases (10%) a mention of higher authorities may yield results, in some other cases (20%), with continued pressure, the higher authorities in business will be forced to put efforts to resolve our problems, eventually.
3. The rest 10% of cases are where the consumer is really being troubled and denied service in a way he desires. This being a violation of the rights bestowed upon a consumer, can be contested in a consumer court of powers.
• The consumer court is aware of the linguistic angle of consumer's rights and will be the right platform to provide justice.

Reflecting upon success stories such as Radio Mirchi, Petrol bunks in Bengaluru, ICICI ATMs across Karnataka help reveal the real power of collective consumer demands and protests against unfavourable practices.

As a final note, the Kannadiga consumer needs to wake up to these three potential damages owing to Kannada's absence in businesses around him:

• Difficulty he is subject to because of Kannada missing from businesses around him
• Insult to his language, and projection of an inferior image that Kannada is incapable of being a good business language, which is untrue.
• The consequent economic degradation Kannadigas will notice in them, and an eventual shortage of jobs for Kannadigas with declining usage of Kannada and thereby Kannadigas in businesses.

It is time the Kannadiga consumer woke up to all this and raised his voice to protect his own interests in the market.

Serve and 'Wah'li in Kannada!

"Customer is king!" Such is the claim of all businessmen that have come to realize that the key to their victory in today's competitive market rests in the hands of the customer. And today's customer is not so easy to please, what with there being a multitude of parameters that matter when this customer makes a choice from among the competing candidates! To be effective in their courtship, each such business needs to run keeping such key parameters of its customers in mind, primary of which happens to be the language this king speaks!

Business - way to go!
Talking of business and its ways to find success in a market like ours, it is but affirmative for the businessmen to understand and keep high the spirit of this market - its cultural footprint. The strong interleaving of language with the culture of a society in general leads to this understanding that success of a business in a market is all about how well the business understands and aligns to the cultural and linguistic vein of the market. Failing on these counts could be detrimental to any kind of business, apart from leaving a trace of violation of the rights that rest with the customer.

Kannada in Karnataka means business
Business with a Kannadiga, especially when inside Karnataka, cannot happen without the involvement of Kannada language in every part of its activity - be it on the customer interaction front involving talking and liaisoning with customers, or marketing of products, or in the packaging and delivery of goods to the customer's end. The usage of any language other than Kannada in business with a Kannadiga is not only an unfair practice by the businessman, because by doing so the businessman has kept the customer in darkness about important product related information, but also a display of lack of business acumen.

Any kind of interaction with a customer is proved to be most effective (in a broad sense) when it happens in the language of the land - that is Kannada on Karnataka soil. The emergence of Radio Mirchi in Bengalooru at the top (leaving Radio City behind) after they resorted to 100% Kannada music is an apt benchmark for this.

Looking around

One casual look around the world at markets rife with local language activity shows that technology is never a limitation to exploring new avenues to use local language effectively in bringing out the best results in a business. Countries such as China and Japan have explored all avenues of technology to reach their goals of bringing their rather complicated scripts onto every medium that is involved in businesses - be it print or multimedia. The point here is that these people have figured out ways in which their language yields well into a form favorable for business. This motivation to effectively use such facets of local language and constantly upgrade it to meet market expectations to be successful in a business is what is required in our businessmen too. The key ability to tailor one's language to obtain that cutting edge in business is quintessential for successful business, and that is required in our businessmen too.
An urge to think out of the box, retain the common sense and conduct business in Kannada is all that is required to shine and make hay in business on Karnataka soil.

Lets "click" in the Kannada market!

Generally when we talk about Kannada, more often than not we talk about literature, film, music, drama, folk forms & similar ones. But we come across very little discussion on how these can be seen as products & services that people utilize or experience. It is rarely seen from a business perspective, as a potential market. It is very important for businessmen (Kannadiga & non-Kannadiga) to understand the market potential of these Kannada-centric products & services. Let us open up a discussion on this.

Products & Services

We can perhaps start by preparing a list of products & services possible around Kannada. The list below is not an exhaustive one and we encourage readers to let their imagination add to this list.

The information below is organized under two headings: Content & Delivery Channels. Content is language specific & the Delivery channels are the infrastructure to deliver this content.

Sl. No	Content	Delivery Channels
	Literature	Book, Print Media, Internet
	News	Print Media, Radio, Television, Internet
	Films	Theatres & Multiplexes, Tapes & CDs, Television, Internet
	Music	Radio, Television, Tapes & CD, Internet
	Plays & Dramas	Auditoriums, Television
	Study Material	Books, Radio, Television, Tapen & CDs, Internet
	Software	Tapes & CDs, Internet
	Advertising	Radio, TV, Print Media, Public Spaces, Internet

We can drill down further a couple of levels under each of the line-items under Content heading and can define those as specific offerings in the market. For example, if you consider music as a category: classical music, light music (sugama sangeetha), film music, folk music, devotional music are a few sub-categories which can have specific offerings in the target market.
Newer opportunities that are emerging are:

• Kannada specific voice based call center services,
• Training centers to train people (wanting to do business with Kannada speaking people) on Kannada.

Market Size
There are two angles to look at the market size - namely the head-count of the existent market, and its size in terms of monetary revenue it can bring to the involved organization or body. On the former scale, head-count or population, the market is around 60 million + (with approximately 50 million inside Karnataka and 10 million outside Karnataka). On the latter scale, revenue, with a very conservative estimate, 60 million people spending an average of Rs 100 per month in this market bundles up to Rs 7200 crores per year.

Current Realization of Market potential

Low (may be 15-20 % market has been realized). There is tremendous opportunity in this market as the current players are small businesses run by individuals or families which lack professional management capability & there has been little effort in market exploration, tapping and development.

Although in the last couple of years, large corporations have entered the Television, Radio & Print Media, enterprises planning to enter these markets need to hire extremely talented people who are well-versed in Kannada and understand the pulse of the market. When this happens, the real value of the Kannada market will start getting tapped, and fetch attractive returns.

What next?

The write-up above with a preliminary analysis of the Kannada-centric products & services was to initiate a discussion & present a different perspective. Karnatique readers who may be interested in working with Banavasi Balaga in researching these markets & working with the industry representatives in initiating market development activities in these industries, please respond to banavasibalaga AT gmail DOT com.

Kannadigas in Bengaluru - truths and hard truths

Although the Kannadiga character of Bengaluru needs no surveys to establish, allow us to draw your attention to a recent survey of FM Radio listenership in Bengaluru. Contrary to the belief of a few vocal people, Kannada FM channels have scored way, way, way above English and Hindi channels. On 22 Jan 2008, the Times of India reported that -

FM radio, the medium that has captured the imagination of young and old alike in Bangalore, shows that an average of 75% of all listenership is for Kannada radio channels. The rest of the radio stations, primarily programmed in Hindi and English, manage to attract only 25% of the audience.

So what about all the bullshit that Kannada is a minority language in Bengaluru? What about the notion among migrants to Bengaluru that Kannada is the language of auto-drivers and one-foot-in-the-gravers? Did the statistics surprise Mirchi? Rahul Balyan, business head, Radio Mirchi (Karnataka and Kerala), answers -

"This is not surprising at all. Two years ago, when we launched, we found that AIR Rainbow had more listenership than the only private FM channel in Bangalore at that time — which stunned us. When we looked at secondary data like mother tongue, language spoken and written and TV viewership figures, it was pretty obvious that Kannada was the language of a large majority of Bangaloreans . This was across all strata of society, and more so in the higher socio-economic (SEC) groups. Today, the four Kannada channels — Mirchi, Big, SFM and Rainbow add up to 75% of all listenership"

"The skew to Kannada is maintained even in the younger age groups."

Bengaluru's market is full of Kannadigas. What else did you expect?

Who are the buyers in Bengaluru? What is the purchasing power of Kannadigas? How many Kannadigas visit the funkiest malls in Bengaluru? Do Kannadigas mostly stick around stinking petty-shops? Will it work if businesses continue to use Hindi instead of Kannada in advertising? Naveen Chandra, Radio Mirchi's sales head for India, has answers to these important questions:

Advertisers need to break out of the common perception that Kannada is not hip. Kannada is very hot right now. Kannadigas have the highest purchasing power in Bangalore. We had commissioned a mall research in Bangalore through IMRB in 2007. It showed us that of all people visiting malls, Kannadigas had the most purchasing power and were the most likely to purchase goods and services available at malls. If any advertiser wants to reach the best audience in Bangalore, they have to bet on Kannada.

The truth which Naveen Chandra and Radio Mirchi have realized is apparent to anybody who just sticks his ear out and listens to the Kannada nature of Bengaluru, be it in malls or foodcourts or cinemas. Kannadigas, not others, form the market in Bengaluru.

Our failure to encash our own market

Given that the market is made up of Kannadigas and not anybody else, have we been able to encash on our own purchasing propensity? The answer is a sad no. Kannadigas have been happier playing the host while others “made hay” while the sun shined in Bengaluru.

That the first Kannadiga-run TV channel "Kasturi" took nearly 12 years to make an entry after Sun networks' foray into Karnataka is proof enough of the lackadaisical approach of Kannadigas in tapping even local markets.

While Andhra hotels are expanding into big chains, the likes of Adyar Ananda Bhavan setting up multiple outlets at various locations, TN based Subhikshas are penetrating into even the smaller towns banking on the purchasing power of Kannadigas, conventional Kannadiga enterprises like Iyengar bakeries or Udupi chains or Local co-op banks are finding fewer customers beyond the local Kannadigas. What's wrong with us?

Burning questions

Many questions remain unanswered:

• Why was anyone under the belief that Kannadigas are a minority in Bengaluru?
• Why was anyone under the belief that Kannada is spoken only by the lowest strata of society?
• Why was anyone under the belief that Kannada is not considered "hot" by youth?
• Why was anyone under the belief that Kannadigas go to Kalasipalya but not the Forum Mall?
• Why did Radio Mirchi initially start off with Hindi programming?
• Why have we been unsuccesful in tapping our own Market?
• What does it take to turn this around?

It is not easy to answer the above questions. But there is no option for us other than to find the answers, get over the past and make the future ours.

Also read: ENGURU on customer service issues in Karnataka