Strategies are usually conceived in the top echelons of companies in plush board rooms, far removed from the streets where day-to-day transactions often happen.

Of course, companies try to maintain objectivity by capturing inputs from the real world through customer surveys, product pilots, market research studies and the like, but despite all this, when a new strategy is implemented, it is not entirely impossible for it to fail. Such events are akin to hundred-million dollar movies bombing at the box office — it happens. What’s worse, sometimes, the result from a strategy is the opposite of what was expected.

Signature cards

Let me begin with an example of the credit cards business and how certain security strategies conceived by the card issuers have failed to produce the desired results. I don’t know who originally came up with idea of asking the credit card owner to sign every time the card is swiped, but I assume that the intent was to match the name and signature of the card owner at the back of the card against the sign on the payment counterfoil.

This could help check if the person who owns the card is actually the one using it, at the time of the transaction.

But we all know that no one cares about the signature on the payment counterfoil anymore. I have tried scribbling whatever I want on the counterfoil and no one at the billing counter has ever questioned me.

In fact, many a time, I signed my name when I used my wife’s card, by mistake, and that would pass too. No wonder credit card thieves so easily go on a shopping rampage unless the card owner calls the bank to de-activate the card. Basically there is no authentication of the user happening at the point of sale.

So card companies invented the next level of authentication at the point of sale — a security chip on the card that requires the user to enter his/her secret PIN every time the card is swiped.

Hopefully, they might have thought this additional security check would finally allow the card holders to rest in peace. Unfortunately, again the reality has turned out to be quite different from the intent.

Any restaurant where I have tried to use the new chip card, the waiter politely comes to me with a sheet of paper to write down my PIN so that he could enter it in the card swipe machine. Isn’t this crazy?

Obviously I refuse to oblige to this request of revealing my PIN to the waiter. But this only makes things even more difficult.

Instead of savouring the moments after a wonderful meal, I now have to follow the waiter into a dark unpleasant corner of the restaurant where the billing system and card machine are kept, so that I can personally key in my secret PIN.

This is because, unlike in the West, where card swipe machines are wireless and mobile, in India, most card swipe machines are connected to fixed telephone lines and, hence, can’t be brought to the customer.

Personally, I feel Indian customers have only been inconvenienced by the launch of chip-based credit cards and soon the PIN is going to go the way signatures did.

AUTO experiment

Another case to learn that what is expected to work may not be what actually works — is the market for automatic transmission cars in India.

Given the bad roads, heavy and chaotic traffic in the cities and frequent stops at signals, one would expect customers to prefer automatic transmission cars over manual shift. But the fact is automatic transmission never really took off in the country till date, despite many experiments by OEMs.

It could possibly be the ‘perception’ of low fuel efficiency of auto transmission cars, but one never knows for sure — people just don’t take to it that well, period.

On the run

However, despite this market statistic, a particular two-wheeler maker launched a clutchless bike in India based on the rationale that using the clutch every time is an unpleasant experience for city commuters who need to change gears often.

It was expected that a clutch-less bike would provide the much-needed relief and city commuters would take to it in droves. But the product never really caught on.

In hindsight, I think the reason for the poor response was largely due to perception of customers with regards to fuel efficiency and the feeling that a bike without a clutch is less of a bike.

The latter is not surprising given that most bike riders in the country are men, and they may actually take pride in the fact that the complex coordination required to drive a bike in the city makes them feel more manly!

So, while making a bike too easy to ride could make the experience comfortable, it could rob the customers of their pride or pleasure and, hence, make them less interested in buying it.

Too far-fetched? I don’t know, but I hear that an automatic transmission commuter bike for the Indian market is now under works — we will know the truth based on how customers take to that. Suffice it to say, there is many a slip between the cup and lip when it comes to new strategies.

(The author is a business consultant. Feedback can be sent to perspective@thehindu.co.in)

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