THE PROPOSITION
Before demand comes permission
Some leaders compete for market share. Others have to build the market first.
There was one question I wanted to stay with when I sat down with Anil Chopra: what do you do when the market itself is uncertain?
For a large part of his career, Anil was building demand in a category India had barely decided it wanted. That is a different management problem from winning share in an established market. Before you can sell the product, you may have to make the category culturally acceptable. In other words, you have to create permission before you create demand.
Lakmé is a useful place to begin. Tata records that the company was set up in 1952 after Jawaharlal Nehru raised concerns with JRD Tata about foreign exchange being spent on imported cosmetics. Tata’s advertising archive also notes that Lakmé’s early communication had to address the stigma around Indian women wearing make-up and educate consumers about cosmetics. 1,2
| THE PRODUCT EXISTED. DID PERMISSION EXIST? |
Young managers are often trained to study competitors. Anil’s story forces a harder question: what if your real competitor is the absence of the category itself?
A compressed timeline of the business story discussed in the conversation. Dates are sourced in the notes at the end.
BRAND BUILDING
A brand is an idea. Experience is a system.
He joined Lakmé in 1974. Over the years, the work moved from brand and distribution to fashion, salons and services. That sequence is interesting because each step reduced the company’s direct control over what the customer actually experienced.
A brand can be designed centrally. Distribution decides whether anyone can buy it. A service adds another variable entirely: a human being.
Lakmé Fashion Week is perhaps the clearest example of the brand choosing to build the world around its product. In a later account of the property, Anil described a branded event as a communication channel that had to compete for investment with television, print, outdoor and other media. He also recalled the problem Lakmé faced around 2000, when younger consumers increasingly saw it as “good, but my mother’s brand.” Fashion gave the brand a way to reconnect itself with youth, aspiration and contemporary culture. 3
| SELL THE PRODUCT? OR BUILD THE WORLD AROUND IT? |
That is a more interesting business move than sponsorship. You can advertise inside a category. Or you can help build the cultural platform that makes the category matter.
SERVICE BUSINESS
When the product becomes a person
This is where the conversation starts to travel beyond beauty.
In 2009, Business Standard reported that Lakmé’s service business included 140 salons, most operated through franchise partners. Around the same time, Anil told The Economic Times that the company was working to create “a service mindset” tuned to consumer needs. 4,5
That shift from product to service changes almost everything. A lipstick can leave a factory virtually identical every time. A service cannot. The customer meets a person, in a particular location, on a particular day, with all the judgement, skill, fatigue and personality that a person brings.
| WHEN THE PRODUCT BECOMES A PERSON How do you scale consistency without removing individuality? |
Leadership enters here as well. Service businesses are often described as difficult to scale because people introduce variance. That is true, but incomplete. People also bring judgement, warmth, recovery, improvisation and trust. The management task is not to engineer people out of the experience. It is to build systems that make good judgement more likely, and then give people enough confidence to use it.
This is also where Anil’s journey becomes directly relevant to hospitality management. Hotels, restaurants, salons, airports, wellness businesses and luxury retail may look like different sectors. Yet the management problem is often remarkably similar. The brand promise is created centrally. The customer experiences it locally. Usually through a person.
“Real estate matters. Technology matters. Process matters. Brand matters. Then comes the last metre.”
THAT LAST METRE IS HUMAN.
HOSPITALITY, REFRAMED
The categories are starting to blur
For hospitality education, this is a useful way to think about the future of the industry. Graduates need to understand operations, consumer behaviour, service design, retail economics, technology, human capital and leadership as parts of the same system. The experience economy does not respect old category boundaries.
There is another interesting turn in the story. Tata records that in 1998 Lakmé divested its cosmetics business and moved into apparel retail, eventually becoming Trent Limited. The company again entered a field where established national brands were relatively scarce. 6
Cosmetics. Fashion. Salons. Retail.
Different businesses, certainly. But all of them sit somewhere around aspiration, identity, experience and people.
Perhaps that is why a conversation like this belongs at the Indian School of Hospitality. Hospitality has always been a people business. The larger management lesson now travels far beyond hotels.
The graduates entering the industry today will probably work across businesses that do not fit neatly into the categories we use now. Some will manage established companies. Some will build platforms, concepts and service businesses that barely exist today.
SOURCE TRAIL
References & further reading
Every historical or industry claim in the feature is anchored to a published source. The editorial interpretation remains the author’s.
| 1 | Tata Group – A Legacy of Empowerment
Tata’s account of Jawaharlal Nehru persuading JRD Tata to establish an Indian cosmetics company. |
| 2 | Tata Group – From Jazz To Swadeshi Soaps
Tata’s advertising archive on Lakmé’s early campaigns addressing stigma around make-up and educating consumers. |
| 3 | Business Standard – Building the perfect property
Anil Chopra’s first-person account of Lakmé Fashion Week as a brand property and communications platform, including the “mother’s brand” challenge around 2000. |
| 4 | Business Standard – HUL hives off Lakme, Ayush Therapy into new arm
Reports 140 Lakmé salons in 2009 and the predominantly franchise-led service network. |
| 5 | The Economic Times – Lakme changes makeup to fight competitors
Interview with Anil Chopra on creating a service mindset tuned to consumer needs, and his 1974 start at Lakmé. |
| 6 | Tata Group – Trent Limited
Tata’s corporate history of Lakmé’s 1998 divestment from cosmetics and transition into apparel and soft-goods retail. |
Editorial note: This feature is based on Kunal Vasudeva’s conversation architecture for Anil Chopra and on the published sources above. It intentionally avoids attributing unverified statements to the recorded conversation.