Empty spaces!

A company like HUL, well, only HUL has a presence in 80% of the market in North-East India. The next best are some food and beverages giants with 18-20%.

There are few issues with food and beverages that stops their market to grow. Refrigeration and storage needs are the biggest and then, of course, convincing the happy bigger brand distributors to sell your product.

CAN BE FILLED THROUGH INNOVATION
AND DISTRIBUTION

Whatever little knowledge I have gained by understanding the FMCG industry, I can say with decent enough confidence that two things are necessary to fill up the empty spaces of the market, to increase your penetration- innovation and distribution.

With innovation I mean out of the box thinking. Doing something that has never been done before. Generating weird ideas and making them productive.This can be done by inspiring, pushing and giving your employees the 'power to fail'. Ideas can only be generated in a free and open culture, rest assured if the ideas are weird.

And yes, distribution is the biggest tool for the FMCG industry. Safe to say a FMCG company can not survive unless there is a strong distribution network. Its importance can not be emphasized more upon. Other than the DSD and indirect distribution, we have been unable to find out ways to distribute.

If only we could mix innovation with distribution and get a new, improved way to keep cold drinks 'cold' in deserts, the empty spaces can be filled!    

Everything happens for a reason!

I was reading about the dot-com bubble, the fibre optics revolution and so on. While going through them, I bumped into a statement made by Bill Gates in early 90s.

He accepted that dot-com innovation was just a bubble and so was the revolution by fibre optics companies. But, as he said, all these innovations gave individuals and companies more power. This power was recognised after the bubble blew away. Although the burst was short, it gave way to seamless and cheap communication.

Today, companies might win and lose in the battle of technology. It might happen that we, in 15 years down the line, don't even think about technology. But whatever we may talk about, the road to that is certainly made easier by the efforts of this generation. The generation of innovators.