Marketing Battles – Part VI

(This was written in 1988 for the parting copy of the IIM-Bangalore hostel magazine IIMages as a spoof history of marketing management. Needless to say, the fictional company and characters do not intend to describe anyone in the real world and, if any existing company or person is mentioned, there is certainly no intent to state that the actions and motives ascribed to them are in any way the truth This was written in an era where the internet was not even a blip on the horizon and TV was a relative newcomer to the world. Furthermore, it is set in an era when even TV was barely a blip on the horizon.) Click here for Part I
HC was, naturally, not pleased. In case you had forgotten by now, HC was the cat food magnate and this rampant dog mania was cutting deeply into his profits. In the initial days, he was indulgent towards Z’s mania for dogs. Later, he found that anyone who had no pets had opted for dogs and his profits were stagnating. Hampered by his own famous dictum “I am not a Me-too”, he could not enter the fray in favor of pet cats much as he wanted to do so. Now, cat owners were starting to shift to dogs and his company was suffering serious reverses. He had to act and to the devil with what people would say. The fury of HC’s actions matched the fury in his mind. In next to no time, cat shows were rivaling dog shows through the length and breadth of the country. Hoardings lauding cats as pets jostled for space with those lauding dogs. His only misstep was the hoarding “Scratch a cat and find a soul-mate” which was taken too literally by the populace, who discovered that if you did scratch a cat it scratched back viciously. All the industries that sprang around the dogs made a bee-line for cats as well. There was not a whim or fancy that a cat could have which did not have a product to satisfy it. Cats were hunted with equal gusto on the streets but with more hilarious results considering that they could climb trees and jump off buildings. Dogs had not given much business to doctors – except for the odd rabies injections – but cats made for roaring business with various would-be cat owners reporting in regularly to restore their skeletal integrity after too enthusiastic a chase after tree-climbing cats. The police, however, drew the line at a cat squad. They felt that the police station would start appearing like a zoo if things went on like this. Further, the strong message from above was that there was enough infighting in the force to add cat-and-dog fights to the general merriment. This refusal of the police to add cats to the force did not meet much public opposition. What with cat-napping already having been snapped up by the inveterate snorers, any respectable criminal had to say cat-kidnapping, which had too many syllables for comfort. Furthermore, anyone attempting a cat theft or cat-kidnapping was soon made to feel that he would have been better off leaving sleeping cats lie. So cats created much less problems for the police and this was the Unique Selling Point of the cat food magnates. To think that the only pets being pushed were dogs and cats is to insult the ingenuity of the commercial classes. The first alternative pets were canaries. This did not really catch on. There were vicious rumors stating that the canaries were being bought up by the cat food guys in order to use as input in their manufacturing process. Z denied the accusation that he was the author of the rumors vehemently but the satisfied smirk on his face did not lend much credence to his denials. Pets ranging from rodents to cheetahs were being pushed by all sorts of businessmen. Cheetahs, however, were avoided quite soon when it was discovered that they preferred their owners to the cheetah foods that were being served. Thus, the only extant pet cheetahs were with the movie villains, who were nasty enough to be considered inedible even by cheetahs. Unwittingly, Z and HC had set off the new fad for pet shows. Businessmen with no specific interest in any single pet started organizing pet shows that were broad-minded in their approach to what pets could participate. One can only wonder about the sort of criteria used to compare pets. Their rule-book must have items like 1 good cats paw = 0.75 doglegs and such other esoteric formulae. These were, however, not very important in the general scheme of things. In the end, the world remained mainly a world where cats and dogs reigned.
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