Women on wheels

It's not only fashion czars, the advertising world, banks, insurance companies, or sellers of FMCG goods that are wooing women; the automobile sector, particularly two-wheeler makers, too, seem to have changed gears to
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By Sandeep Suman

Why should boys have all the fun?" This isn't a feminist slogan but a tagline from Hero Honda to promote its first-ever scooter, the Pleasure, built ground-up for girls and women. The days couldn't be far off when we might hear "Hamara Bajaj" being sung as "Hamari Bajaj" for its scooters, the diminutive Sunny Zip and the underselling Saffire. Bollywood star Preity Zinta is endorsing the TVS Scooty; and Hero Honda roped in actor Priyanka Chopra to inaugurate an entirely women-oriented positioning for the Pleasure. Although Honda Motorcycle and Scooters India (Pvt) Ltd (HMSI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Honda Motor Company Ltd, Japan, has the Activa and its 'designer' partner, the Dio, while Kinetic has rolled out the Nova, the Zing 80 and the oddly-named Kine, all the offerings are unisexual and not geared, in a manner of speaking, at men alone.

Although most women still go in for gearless scooterettes, there is a growing minority that is buying the bigger offerings that women had earlier been considered too frail to plump for. While most scooters—whether for men, women or both—are going gearless, they are also getting bigger, faster and more powerful, as Kinetic Motor's buyout of Italy's Aprilia and joint venture with Taiwan's $1-billion auto giant, Sanyang Industry, go to show. After motorcycles, its the gearless scooter segment that is dominating the two-wheeler segment.

To keep the attention of this segment focussed, traditional advertising is not enough. That is what the Munjals-led Hero Honda realised when it launched "Just4Her", the first exclusive showroom in Delhi for women customers of the Pleasure. This is just the beginning. Hero Honda is opening 22 "Just4Her" outlets in 20 other cities. These USP of these exclusive stores is special facilities for women customers.

Says Hero Honda managing director Pawan Munjal, "The scooter segment in India is over one million units, and the segment has been witnessing an impressive growth for the past few months. Further, there is a huge untapped segment of women customers, which offers immense growth potential. With this launch, we are now ready to extend our products and services to this vast customer profile."

Apart from female service supervisors and sales executives, "Just4Her" outlets also provide ‘anytime’ pick-up and emergency services—on, absurdly enough, a 12-hour basis. (So, ‘anytime’ pickup is actually just hardsell.) Additionally, if the actual user of the scooter is a woman, she will be eligible to join the "Lady Rider Programme"—the first-ever women's riders club initiated by the industry. (Enfield beat them to the concept years ago, but the Bullet club members tend to be hulking, oil-and-grime-under-the-fingernails, hoo-ha, backslapping men kind.) The Lady Rider Club offers special benefits to its members, including milestone rewards, personal accident insurance, participation in Winner of the Month jamborees, and invitations to special events, and loads of other such perks.

On the "Just4Her" concept, Munjal says, "Women customers need to be handled more delicately. That is why we are making special efforts to ensure that they feel comfortable visiting our showrooms both during the purchase process and thereafter. It's going to be a unique experience for them."

Auto expert Murad Ali Baig calls this tactic "concept selling" in order to fuel sales and grow the brand name. On the one hand, he says, such exclusive showrooms attract potential woman riders; on the other, they are set to create employment opportunities for women.

Besides employment avenues, the jargon of feminism has made its way into the auto market: "the empowerment of women" is an angle that Chennai-based TVS Motors is busy promoting as if its life depended on it—as it probably does. TVS has already initiated a drive to put more and more women on wheels by enabling female students to aspire for careers they had earlier only dreamt of: the two-wheeler company is covering 1,300 schools in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal under a "contact programme", where girl students are motivated by educational initiatives to literally "ride their aspirations and make their own way", says TVS vice-president (marketing) Prasad Narasimhan.

TVS' school initiative also conducts driving classes for girls. These classes are run through dealerships in all major towns in India, and meld with road safety campaigns run with the help of local police authorities. TVS Scooty today has been "reaching out" to more than 150,000 girls and women across six states.

Narasimhan adds that apart from affordability factor, there are other social and psychological barriers that prevent women from riding two-wheelers: "Our novel drive will help them realise their potential, and that is where we expect some more women buyers for our Scooty range."
But it's still going to be a long haul. In India, the scooterette segment—led by HMSI and TVS Motors Company—has a dismal 2 per cent market penetration among women, who are actually their intended customers. (In fact, designing scooterettes over the past few years has had a distinct female sensibility to it, with the tiny runabouts not only being short-range commuter specials but also design accessories.)

Narasimhan hopes that these initiatives will pay rich dividends to the scooterette market, in general, and to the venerable but continuously upgraded TVS Scooty, in particular, which remains, despite its age, the market leader. TVS sells about 25,000 units of the Scooty every month, and does battle with the Eterno, the Activa and the Dio from HMSI and some offerings from Kinetic, which together account for another 45,000 units every month.

Says Bajaj Auto vice-president (sales and marketing) S Sridhar, "Five years from now, women will comprise a major chunk of buyers. What you are seeing today is anticipating future developments. Otherwise, 12-13 per cent of a total market of 7.5 million will look small."

According to some estimates—which, we must warn you must be taken with a pinch of salt, because these are industry figures and not dispassionate surveys—gearless scooters account for 80 per cent of total scooter sales (about 1 million a year), with 60 per cent of such customers being women.

This will mean that about 4.8 lakh scooters are already being sold to women every year.
More than 50 per cent of Scooty buyers are women. Baig says that while both men and women buy the Activa, the 100cc Pleasure's distinct positioning as a women's scooter alienates a male buyer who might have bought this scooter otherwise.

Bajaj Auto, the market leader in what pass for powerbikes in India, is taking on entrenched players such as TVS Motors and HMSI, with two launches in the gearless scooter segment—the Kristal and the Blade— They are being launched with the aim of releasing gender-exclusive products. The sub-100 cc Kristal, is meant for college girls and has the dual twin spark ignition (DTSi) system—which gives its Pulsar motorbike range its punch—a wider seat, and 22 litres of storage space; while the Blade is designed for young men.

Says Kinetic joint managing director Sulajja Firodia Motwani, "The future belongs to gearless scooters. Much innovation will be seen in terms of design and specifications, and new segments will emerge. The segment has been growing at 15-20 per cent annually. They have become popular based on their strong comfort-convenience proposition." Even Yamaha, known internationally for its superlative superbikes, has been conducting a feasibility study of the Indian scooter market, and might begin selling gearless scooters before the year-end.

Are Indian women ready for scooters? Ask the women of Pune, the locus and test-market of two-wheelers in India: they've been scooting around the congested city for more than a decade.