Lucknow: Mr. Sudhanshu Vats, Vice President, Home-care at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) conducted a marketing workshop at the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L) recently.

The three-hour-long session on "Challenges involved in the launch and development of a new product" provided students at IIM Lucknow a great opportunity to learn the key insights in the field of marketing.

Mr. Vats started the session with a live case study that involved finding the strategy to revive the market share for VIM in the Utensil Cleaners market - the development that initiated HUL to launch Vim Liquid in the market. Today, the company enjoys leadership position in the Utensil Cleaners market.

Students formed a group of eight and analyzed the case from different perspectives to arrive at different strategies that came very close to the actual strategies employed by HUL.

Supplementing the case study with his insights, Mr. Vats explained HUL's strategy of targeting rural and urban consumers separately.

"Although it is mostly the consumers in urban sector who were responsible for the high sales of VIM bar, management at HUL realized that it is the rural market that has more potential for growth in the future. It faced the biggest challenge from the popularity of ash and powder in the rural sector. It was not easy to enter into this market especially because of the easy availability of ash in villages", the case study said.

Mr. Vats explained that HUL decided to establish strategy of lowering the input costs to arrive at a low cost VIM bar for rural sector consumers.

Seeing that the future of liquid cleaners is promising in urban sector, Mr. Vats explained the reasons which led to the launch of a new product 'VIM Liquid'.

Sharing the secret of this successful launch, he explained how HUL identified and overcame barriers that existed in the minds of consumers.

"The perception that the liquid cleaner is not strong enough was cleared by the tag line that one drop is sufficient to clean a good number of utensils. Also, to ensure the cost efficiency of the product, an innovative bottle cap was introduced that only allowed drop by drop usage", the study further said.

Mr. Vats then shared the successful market results achieved by HUL and concluded the workshop with the encouraging feedback on the case analysis by students.

The audience was highly enlightened by his insights and thanked him for the successful workshop.