INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT – TIRUCHIRAPALLI (CHENNAI CAMPUS)

“ RETAIL MARKERTING STRATEGY”

Submission by:
Arjun Savi
Mahesh Sundar
Mathew Joe
Nithish D
Rini Rafi

GROUP CASE STUDY – Titan Company – Mining for gold through innovation and
entrepreneurship

1. How Titan developed its retail concept in watches, jewelry, and eyewear?
Titan used the following strategy for developing its retail concept in watches,
jewelry, and eyewear:
Titan focused on being a category player for a targeted segment of consumers.
Titan’s retail outlets were designed to help the company promote the
categories it wanted to play in. Titan was a “Personal Adornment Company”.

 Watches
a. It focused its product development on quartz watches instead of
automatic or mechanical watches
b. As a result of the inhouse product development team for watches, and
backward integration into manufacture of critical watch components,
Titan ramped up quickly and expanded its portfolio of watches from
200 to 850 models in 3 years.
c. Air-conditioned shops with attractive product displays
d. Well trained store staff
e. Strong brand development through advertising
f. Widespread stores – 452 World of titan stores, 159 fastrack outlets, 41
helios outlets.
g. 11000 dealers sold Titan watches in 2500 towns

 Jewellry (Tanishq and Gold Plus)

a. Availibility of instruments for customers to check the purity
b. Emphasis of quality as a part of its branding
c. Gold plus was launched one level lower for the middle-class
consumers
 Eyewear
a. Prescription eyewear was launched in 2007
1. What are Titan’s strengths?

The following are Titan’s strengths:

1. Innovation and design skills for rapid new product development

2. Brand building with clear segmentation.
3. Titan excelled at exploring new customer segments. They launched
various brands in different segments – Aviator for men, Raga for
women, Fastrack for youth. In Jewelry, Zoya and Swiss made premium
watch Xylys targeted upscale, urban consumers.
2. How Titan promoted innovation and entrepreneurship?

Innovation through the “Future shock” program – 200 young managers were
divided into 10 diverse cross functional teams; five focused on improving
existing businesses and five focused on exploring new business opportunities
that the company might pursue over the next 5 or 10 years.
The ignitor program – Companywide participants could propose a case for
new businesses for the next five years. This was less a business delivery
program and more of encouraging a start up mentality in the employees. The
proposals were presented to a jury like a Venture Capitalist. There were
several ideas like silk sarees, decorative lighting and silver articles which
came of the ignitor program. The company was willing to support the teams
until a successful pilot implementation.
3. Whether Titan’s diversification is related or unrelated?

According to the senior management of Titan, the company was not in three
different business – Watches, Eyewear and Jewelry. The company is a
“Personal Adornment Company”. Therefore, all the current three products
are related, since they are personal accessories, otherwise termed as second
skin.
4. Under what conditions does it make sense for a company to stop exploring for
new businesses and focus instead on exploitation? Should Titan focus on growing
its existing business or should they also explore new business opportunities?

The below figure (Source: HBR Exploit product life cycle) shows the exploitation of
the product life cycle. The exploitation of the product happens over the 4 stages –
Market development, growth, maturity, decline.
Now, every product will have extended life cycles as shown in the figure below, which are
introduced by changing the product for a new target segment etc.

Further, a business should at no stage stop looking for new business. The exploration for new
businesses is a continuous process. The existing businesses should ideally be categorized into the 3
horizons.

H3 – new businesses (Several businesses should get added in this list and investments made. Only
few may succeed, but this is an absolute necessity)

H2 – Growing businesses

H1 – The revenue generators