Product adoption cycle from the eyes of my grandfather-I
When my late grandfater decided to bring a wet grinder home (in the early 80's), there was a rebillion of sorts at my maternal home. There were two wings formed, one who loved the smell of hand touching food and the other who wanted to be in the flow (read swag) and use the wet grinder at home. Who knew a humble grinding stone and a steel container could devide families at India. People down south of India are adernt lovers of foods like Idlis, Vada’s, Dosas, and so on. These foods are made possible by grinding ingredients like soaked Rice, Black Lentils, & other grains. Till the 80’s the only way to grind these foods was on a stone which weighed over 5 kgs!
Ladies of the house used to GYM on this contraption everyday to grind pounds of idli batter. It was a strenous task to grind food on this. Yet the ladies of the home would do it, else everyone would have to sleep on an empty stomach.
Then when someone in Coimbatore (a southern city), invented a machine to grind food items like these, there was hope in the air that from now on there will be less sweat in the food (oops), making of the food.
But off late when the machines hit the market, instead of making the lives of people easy, it made it even tougher. There were some who bought it and found it difficult to get their family members to use it and there were some fighting on the thought of buying it. A majority of people would not buy it, and those who bought it never used it! Why?
Indian’s felt, the charm in the food is making it by the hand, not by a machine. It was not about the taste, or the price of the unit, it was difficult to get people get used to it. People felt the lack of a human touch to the food!
It took over 20 years for the machines to really become mainstream. I remember my home at Mysore have a manual stone grinder and my mom would sometimes use it, this was around 1998. But come 2000’s magically the manual stone grinders disappeared and the cute little machines by various companies (butterfly, ELGI, Prestige) came into being. It was a defacto rule that idli/dosa batter needs to be made on these machines. almost 90% of homes in South India have this in the corner of their kitchens The product is so mainstream these days that politicains these days offer wet grinders as a gift to people if they win!
So the adoption cycle for the wet grinders took almost 2 decades!
The question i’m trying to address in this write up is, has this adoption cycle changed? Will companies with new ideas have to wait a whooping 2 decades before seeing a mass scale product? Has the adoption cycle for the common Indian grown or reduced?
My next week’s post shall throw more light on this! Stay tuned or just follow us here.
