The Promoter & Director of Dainik Bhaskar Group – Mr. Girish Agarwal, explains: - How “customer connect” helps you in making your company successful? Dainik Bhaskar Group - - 3500 crores market capitalization - 2300 crores turnover - 13,000 employees (3500 people in Editorial + 1500 people in Production) - World no. 4 – Print Newspaper - MY FM – FM Channel - 58 Copies Circulated Every Day - 4.5 crore – Readership - No. 1 Newspaper brand in India - Works in 12 states of India and newspaper prints at 68 places - Increasing the Penetration of Brand - Earlier, the print setups of newspaper companies are very limited. - As a result, newspapers need to travel 300-400kms to reach to their customers. - Consequently, customers get newspapers late and most of the time they receive newspaper when the news get old. This disappoints the customers. - Dainik Bhaskar understood this problem of customer and started increasing their print setups so that the customers get the newspaper on time. - Today, they have 68 print setups in 12 states of India. In each of these states, a bureau of Dainik Bhaskar is established. ## Entering a New State Whenever Dainik Bhaskar enters a new state, they conduct research to study the customers of the state very deeply. For example, in 1996, when they wanted to enter Rajasthan, they conducted a research and met 2 lakh people of the state who were either reading newspaper or can read newspaper. They found various new things about Rajasthani people which are different from their previous customers (i.e. Madhya Pradesh people). Some of these things are: Rajasthani people use the word “जने” instead of “व्यक्ति.” They prefer to use English numerals “1,2,3,4,…” instead of Hindi numerals, “१,२,३,४,...” in the newspaper because they use English numbers in their daily life. In 1996, there was Parda system in Rajasthan. So, women cannot read newspaper by opening it completely like men do. They need to fold the newspaper to read it. To make reading newspaper convenient for Rajasthani women, Dainik Bhaskar comes up with a women magazine, whose size is so small that women can read it in their ghunghat. ## Retaining the Customers With the increasing competition and changing customers’ behavior, it becomes difficult to retain customers. Mr. Girish Agarwal gives following tips to retain your customers: - Do not take your customers for granted - You need to understand your customers and his behavior on daily basis - Take regular feedbacks to understand the customers Dainik Bhaskar does following to connect with and retain its customers: - They work on the philosophy, “By the People, To the People, and For the People.” - So, they involve their customers in designing their newspapers. They ask their customers what they need in the newspaper and design their newspaper accordingly. - They take regular feedback from their customers. They hire research agencies for this. - Their 13,000 employees are also their customers so they take feedback from them as well. - Customers used to mail them their feedbacks. They have a complete team to read each of these mails and solve the customers’ issues. Examples: 1. You went to a shop but you do not want to visit it again. There must be a reason behind it. The reason can be you didn’t get too much variety, behavior was not good, high price or the next shop has better products, price, and behavior. So, you switch to another shop. When you are doing so, then your consumer can also do this to you. 2. People used to shift to new brands instead of going to a local jeweler, whose shop is very old and even his ancestors has worked on this shop. Why is it so? This is because you must be lacking somewhere. Maybe the competitor’s brand or showroom or sitting space is better than the local jeweler shop. 3. If you take your relationships with your family, friends, or wife for granted, your relationship will broke. You should maintain your relationship with your existing customers to retain them. ## Digital Customers Some people read news in the printed newspaper as well as on digital mediums. However, some people read news only on digital mediums. Dainik Bhaskar addresses the requirement of newspaper customers as well as digital customers. For digital customers, they have news and other information on their websites. However, digital customer is different from the printed newspaper customer. A printed newspaper customer reads the newspaper seriously whereas a digital customer seeks entertainment (like Bollywood Masala and Jokes) along with the news. So, Dainik Bhaskar provides content according to the requirement of its customers. They have employed young people for the digital customers to understand them better because digital customers mainly include youth. ## Future in Digital Digital is future for business. So, Dainik Bhaskar is investing Rs. 50 crores every year in it. Dainik Bhaskar is doing two things in digital: They are making their print people digital savvy. They are asking their generalist to make stories for print as well as digital media with different angles. They are also adopting new technologies. For example, they have launched a new mobile app in which customers can read, listen, and watch news. When Mr. Girish Agarwal was asked about the main reason for the success of Dainik Bhaskar, he says, “relationship with their customers.” He says that even if you made the best product or service but you are not connected with your customer, then you can’t be successful. ### Key Learning - Conduct research to study your customer - Identify the need, interest, concern, expectations, aspirations, and intentions of your customers - Design your product according to the customers’ requirement - Take regular feedback from customers - Try to enter the digital medium as it is the new future of business