Orange Cream Biscuits

I had fallen into this habit of eating orange cream biscuits when I was at Chennai during the summer season. Being new to the place and not knowing Tamil, I preferred to go to shopping places (MTO's) like Heritage, Spencers, Lifestyle, etc for buying the biscuits.
Now at the stores the following biscuits were available:

So, going w.r.t cost per 100 gram of the biscuit, we see that Parle is the clear winner and it offers the maximum weight for a rupee.
However, before concluding anything w.r.t value for money, we also need to consider other things like taste, hardness, etc.
In my opinion the taste of all the above biscuits except, the Complan biscuits, is similar and not much differences can be attributed to taste. (Complan biscuits taste a bit like medicine).
In terms of the hardness of the biscuits, I found that the Sunfeast Special orange cream biscuits were a bit tough and needed quite an effort to break inside mouth. The other biscuits were comparatively soft and could be easily handled by my teeth. (Meaning the moisture content in the Sunfeast Special orange biscuit is less as compared to other biscuits).
Thus, in terms of properties which I look for in an orange biscuit - Taste, Value for money (here weight), hardness, Parle Kreams is the best.  All this was w.r.t consumer’s point of view.
However, thinking from the point of view of the company, I feel that Parle is losing out w.r.t ITC and Britannia. Britannia is the market leader in cream biscuits market even though it charges the highest per 100 grams (Complan can be left out of discussion due to its taste and positioning as a complete food) Parle is charging less for what the consumers are willing to pay more. Why not cash in? Why is Parle not getting aggressive? ITC on the other hand is currently applying the best strategy. It has orange cream biscuits at both the Rs 5 and the Rs.10 price levels. In addition, I found that ITC biscuits were replenished every 5 days or so thereby keeping the shelf always filled with biscuits. On the other hand, Parle biscuit shelves were always half filled or so suggesting that the focus on the distribution of Parle isn't as good as that of ITC. Britannia's replenishment was moderate i.e not as frequent as that of ITC but not as low as that of Parle Kreams. Currently, Britannia is the market leader in the orange cream biscuit segment. However, because it is charging the most and new player like ITC is introducing new pack sizes at both higher and lower prices, I believe that ITC will surpass Britannia in this segment.
Thus, if we think with respect to company, I feel ITC is doing the right thing while thinking from consumers point of view, Parle is better.
 
Conclusion: It is not always necessary that the consumer is always right. If we think only from the point of view of consumer, we might lose out on creating shareholder value. Thus, marketing personnel should be aware that doing too much for consumer can be detrimental to the sole purpose of the company.

Decision Making - An irony in life

I have often felt that life is all about making decisions – be it with regards to work, children, parents or society. Every decision taken by a person is the determinant of what he/she is likely to face in the future. The path on which a person walks is shaped by the various decisions taken by him. An appropriate and a wise decision could get person lots of goodwill and success while an inappropriate decision could lead to misery. So, it is extremely important for individuals to take appropriate decisions.

Now, at every point of life we take decisions - be it deciding about which clothes to wear for a birthday or buying/ renting  a house or getting gifts for friends or choosing a stock in the market.  Some decisions have a short-term impact on our life while other decisions have a long-term impact. Ideally, for a better life in future, the long-term impacting decisions need to be taken with more care and thought as compared to decisions which do not have such a long-term impact. These long term decisions should be taken considering all the pros and cons critically. So, the time required for a long-term impact decision should be more as compared to short-term impact. But does it actually happen?

Consider the following situations.

1. Gift to be bought for a friend for his birthday - We do a thorough review on his belongings and find out what he is in need of. In addition, we also keep an open ear for his desires so as to know what is he longing for and so on. I typically start thinking about the gift 1 week in advance before the present is to be gifted. A lot of consultations and discussions occur before arriving at the final decision.  Thus, for deciding the time required to do a simple thing such as this, we take close to 7 days.

 2. Campus recruitment - Typically, in an engineering college or a B-School, students are intimated about a company 1 or 2 days before the recruitment day. The ppt by the company happens just before the process of recruitment begins. We are left with no more than 30 minutes to decide whether we want to join the organization or not. The exact details like the location of job, the salary package and the exact work profile are told only during the ppt. While it is true that in the 1 or 2 days when we have been intimated about the company, we can do some research by asking peers, seniors, etc about the company, the exact details are only obtained only during the ppt. So, a decision has to be made considering the newly added parameters within 30 minutes or so.

Thus, for taking a decision for a job which could have a long term impact w.r.t career and future, we are left with less than 30 minutes while for a trivial matter like a gift, we get full week for decision. Such an irony.

Yet, another example where the irony is visible is the arrange marriage decision. We need to take a decision about our life partner in around 2 or 3 meetings and that too short duration meetings of 1 hour each or so. I mean such a major decision - marriage - has to be taken by meeting a person (with whom we wish to spend rest of our life) for a total of only 3 hours.

Thus, I conclude that the time given to take a decision is inversely dependent on the amount of the long-term impact the decision is going to make in one’s life. Greater the long-term impact of the decision, lesser is the time given to take the decision and vice versa.