Tit for That
Fighting over a piece of paper?!
From the Gateway of India to the Marina Beach is a tortuous journey passing through the Arabian Sea and reaching near the Bay of Bengal after kissing the Indian Ocean. Chennai has always been the citadel of the conservative, the sober and the eclectic; a market that no non-South Indian media group has been able to fathom. But for brothers Sameer and Puneet Jain of The Old Lady of Boribunder (The Times of India), the near monopoly enjoyed by the kin N. Ram and N. Murali was a party they had to gate crash. And they have done it in style, launching a Chennai edition of The Times of India with typical elan, hype and a bruising price war. For the Jains (A la the Australian cricket team), Chennai is arguably the “Last Frontier” in their relentless quest to be the overwhelmingly dominant English language newspaper of India. For N. Ram and N. Murali, the latest media war promises to be a grim battle for survival. Even as sultry and humid Chennai sizzles with the heat generated by the duel between The Hindu and TOI, the Executive Director of Times of India Ravi Dhariwal lets slip with typical non-chalance, “We are consolidating in Chennai. Soon we will be launching in Rajasthan and Goa”. Consolidating just a week after launch? Well that’s typical Times chutzpah for you. If you believe Dhariwal, TOI seems to have already captured the Rs.500 crore market in Chennai – the third largest in India after Delhi and Mumbai.
Not that the Left leaning Hindu patriarchs Ram
and Murali are waiting with folded hands for Sameer and Puneet to ambush and then annihilate them. They have retaliated by launching their own version of a price war. “We don’t want to give it an undue advantage by the way of price of the newspaper and hence we reduced our price to Rs.2.50 from Rs.3.25. By this way the readers get an advantage of ‘Rs.27 a month,” says N. Murali, Joint Managing Director, The Hindu Group of Publications. But a question that even Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan will find difficult to answer is: Is a price tag of Rs.2.50 low enough when TOI is offering subscriptions at a throwaway Rs.1 per day? Always take claims with a pinch of salt. But some claims need to be taken seriously. While The Hindu has a circulation of Rs.3 lakh in Chennai, Dhariwal claims that the print run of TOI on the day of launch was 2 lakh.
For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
From the Gateway of India to the Marina Beach is a tortuous journey passing through the Arabian Sea and reaching near the Bay of Bengal after kissing the Indian Ocean. Chennai has always been the citadel of the conservative, the sober and the eclectic; a market that no non-South Indian media group has been able to fathom. But for brothers Sameer and Puneet Jain of The Old Lady of Boribunder (The Times of India), the near monopoly enjoyed by the kin N. Ram and N. Murali was a party they had to gate crash. And they have done it in style, launching a Chennai edition of The Times of India with typical elan, hype and a bruising price war. For the Jains (A la the Australian cricket team), Chennai is arguably the “Last Frontier” in their relentless quest to be the overwhelmingly dominant English language newspaper of India. For N. Ram and N. Murali, the latest media war promises to be a grim battle for survival. Even as sultry and humid Chennai sizzles with the heat generated by the duel between The Hindu and TOI, the Executive Director of Times of India Ravi Dhariwal lets slip with typical non-chalance, “We are consolidating in Chennai. Soon we will be launching in Rajasthan and Goa”. Consolidating just a week after launch? Well that’s typical Times chutzpah for you. If you believe Dhariwal, TOI seems to have already captured the Rs.500 crore market in Chennai – the third largest in India after Delhi and Mumbai.
Not that the Left leaning Hindu patriarchs Ram
and Murali are waiting with folded hands for Sameer and Puneet to ambush and then annihilate them. They have retaliated by launching their own version of a price war. “We don’t want to give it an undue advantage by the way of price of the newspaper and hence we reduced our price to Rs.2.50 from Rs.3.25. By this way the readers get an advantage of ‘Rs.27 a month,” says N. Murali, Joint Managing Director, The Hindu Group of Publications. But a question that even Rajnikanth and Kamal Hassan will find difficult to answer is: Is a price tag of Rs.2.50 low enough when TOI is offering subscriptions at a throwaway Rs.1 per day? Always take claims with a pinch of salt. But some claims need to be taken seriously. While The Hindu has a circulation of Rs.3 lakh in Chennai, Dhariwal claims that the print run of TOI on the day of launch was 2 lakh.For Complete IIPM Article, Click on IIPM Article
Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008
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