Jubliant Foodworks, the Franchisee for Domino's India and recently Dunkin Donuts, is recognized worldwide as one of the best franchisee for Domino's and one of the reason for the same has been the leadership of Mr Ajay Kaul.
Mr Kaul, an IIT-D alumnus, was invited to the campus of IIM Raipur as a part of the Corporate Guest Lecture series. Mr Kaul’s lecture was focused on how the concept had to be ingrained into the psyche of Indian Consumers for whom both pizza and home delivery were alien concept. He began his presentation by highlighting the challenges the brand faced in the beginning. He told how in the beginning Pizza was considered a ‘snack’ which would be consumed between meals.
In a highly interactive session he delineated how the brand used the concepts of emotional and functional laddering to affix its position into the minds and phone books of Indian consumers. Through a series of TV adverts he showed how the brand migrated from its famed 30 minute home delivery to the more subtle “Khushiyon ki Home delivery”. The success of the brand is evident, it has registered 31% same store growth, 53% system level growth last year.
The next part of the discussion was the operation and logistics part of the 30 minute delivery that from USP has become a UBP for the brand. Mr. Kaul recalled the biggest challenge in implementing this meant that the store had to say no to business. He told for a store manager this would have been a precarious situation as on one hand there were sales targets and on the other hand this meant people who were outside the 2.5 km range ( or Lakshman Rekha in company parlance) the store owner was supposed to say no. The company trained its store staff on lines military training to ensure a strong store discipline. He told that even today once in the year the senior management in supposed to work in the store to remember this regime and also understand consumers better. Another part was to celebrate the first free delivery to get the stigma out of free delivery and also wearing a badge that said “I won’t be fined for delivering free”, thus taking the loss on company’s books. This also discourages any practice where people may still pay out of pity.Upon being asked how much the loss would was he indicated it to be around 1% of all pizza’s delivered were free.
In the final part of the lecture he talked about the future strategy of Jubilant Foodworks which has now over 400 stores all over the country. He refused to divulge any strategy for Dunkin’ Donuts which is expected to be launched in 2012. Upon being asked where would the focus be for next few years. He indicated that the roll strategy for new stores and the roadmap for the next 2-3 years has already been charted out and the company is well in line to deliver the phenomenal growth it has been clocking for all these years.
Our director, Prof B S Sahay, keenly took part in session and invited Mr Ajay Kaul to write for the Operations Club Magazine Strive and thanked him for interacting with the students of IIM Raipur.
