WHAT'S NEXT?

ITC HAS MOVED BEYOND CIGARETTES TO THE MOST VALUABLE INDIAN CONSUMER COMPANY. AS IT SETS OUT ON AN AMBITIOUS EXPANSION WITH CHAIRMAN SANJIV PURI'S ITC NEXT VISION, ITS REAL CHALLENGES MIGHT JUST BE BEGINNING

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

Virginia House no longer smells of tobacco. Rather, it smells of fragrant agarbattis. What once housed the cigarettes of W.D. & H.O. Wills is now the home of milled atta, baked cookies, incense sticks, and more.

The big daddy on the cigarette block, ITC realised it was but just a wanna-be kid when it entered categories like biscuits and atta (wheat flour) in 2002. It was surrounded by well-entrenched top guns of the FMCG sector (fast-moving consumer goods, a term used to describe products ranging from soaps and snacks to flour and floor cleaners) from global giants like Unilever, Nestle and P&G to homegrown players like Dabur and Parle. The writing on the wall was clear. The company had to do something drastic and dramatic if it had any hopes of surviving, let alone dominating, the segment.

“In a globalising marketplace, you cannot compete unless you bring something unique to the table,” said Sanjiv Puri, chairman and managing director of ITC Ltd. While planning its ambitious foray into biscuits, strategy sessions at Virginia House, the colonial building on Kolkata’s Chowringhee Road (now officially Jawaharlal Nehru Road) that housed its corporate headquarters, were clear: in a market dominated by household names like Parle and Britannia, you need to break the clutter. But how?

“We started innovating from the beginning. Our first Marie (tea biscuit) was an orange one!” said B. Sumant, currently ITC’s executive director and back then part of the team that launched snacks. “We had an orange Marie, a regular Marie, and then we came up with an oats Marie. We were the only ones I knew till date having an orange Marie and an oats Marie!”