The Story of 300 Crore Candy

Let’s talk about every office’s smoking gang.

They are big at ‘gatekeeping’, aren’t they? They have their own WhatsApp group, their own code to go either downstairs or upstairs (there is no need to say anything, they communicate via eye gestures) and yeah, there’s Pulse. If you see an adult person having a lot of Pulse candy in their pockets/purses, it’s kind of safe to assume that they’re a part of the gang.?

Pulse, today, is THE CANDY of all candies. It probably has more points of sale than drinking water, and for the DS group, a conglomerate that does everything from Rajnigandha to Catch masala, it is the fastest growing product line with recurring annual sales of over INR 300 crores. That is 36 million dollars in cash - from a product with a ticket size of Re. 1/-. We’re not even mentioning the hundred other cool things about it, like how it is a bigger brand on social media than all of DS’ other brands put together, or how it has turned into more than just smoking candy i.e. Into the ultimate mouth freshening, saliva circulating ,and palate cleansing tool for any person with a rupee to spend.

All that is well and good. But I can feel a burning question coming up in the minds of all you veritable entrepreneurs and business owners reading this - why should I give a Scheisse? (don’t translate that to English, I’ll be fired)

Well, my dear friends - there’s a brilliant lesson hidden in here. Did you get it? No?

Well, let’s go back to the DS Group line. The legends here will already know this, but for those who don’t - the DS group was originally a tobacco product manufacturing company, the company that manufactures Rajnigandha, which then ventured into multiple fields, and became the ‘consumables conglomerate’ that it is. And the lesson lies in how and why they launched Pulse in the first place.?

DS have been in confectioneries since 1999, with Pass Pass (nostalgic?). However, Pass Pass and their other confectioneries fell out of favour with the smoking crowd when Happydent came in. Happydent took off because of its strong minty taste, and the fact that it would help smokers rid themselves of the smell of cigarette smoke.

Like the Greeks in the Trojan war, DS strategised. And they strategised some more.?

First, they looked for a USP that could beat Happydent. And after a while, they found it - taste. The exact thing that Happydent had beaten them with.

Happydent, while providing consistent taste, did not have a huge palate of flavours to offer - just mint, strawberry and menthol. DS thought, what if we don’t do that and instead, focus on making it an entire experience in itself? And while doing that, why don’t we make it taste like flavours that our target market is familiar with? And while we’re at THAT, why don’t we use taste profiles that our competitors have already proven in the market?

So, after mentally thanking a competitor (a certain candy that rhymes with Pachcha Bango Myte), they built Pulse - a tangy, spicy (literally) candy that would also be capable of making sure that the smell of cigs doesn’t linger in your mouth. While building the taste profile, Rajiv Kumar, vice-president of DS, sent only one brief - “Agar product chatpata ho, toh aapki aankh bandh honi chahiye, varna maza nahi aaya.” (If the product is spicy, then you should close your eyes, otherwise it is not fun.)

Second challenge - how to announce to their target market that they were present? Simple - packaging. Pulse is SO brightly packaged that you’ll have to be either colour-blind or completely blind to miss it sitting on a shop counter. (One of our colour-blind colleagues says that he can still see it).

Thus, after years of preparation - the Trojan Horse, Pulse, was ready. And we know that it worked.

So what do we learn? Not that we should smoke - we shouldn’t. We learned that no matter how monopolising or established an incumbent may be, a disruptor can always build a unique space for themselves - as long as they know how to find and fix the gaps the other team leaves open. Pulse was just an example - OnePlus did this with smartphones, VU did it with TVs, bOat did it with audio devices, Slack did it with B2B communications; there are hundreds of examples. To quote Shuri from Black Panther,?

“Just because something works, doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.”

There - as promised, we finished talking about 300 crore candy. What next, you ask? Don’t ask me - you’ll know next Thursday when it hits your mailbox. As always, taking into consideration the constantly lowering human attention span (it’s lower than gorillas now), here’s Hooshang explaining this in less than 90 seconds. Until next week, hasta la vista :)?