What made Maruti Celerio a grand success in India

India's largest car maker, Maruti Suzuki India states that Celerio was a gamble which went on to carve a great success story for the company. The company didn't even considered going for a market research before launching their Celerio product. Moreover, the company introduced the vehicle in the market's most roughest phase. Commenting on this, Mayank Pareek, COO (Marketing & Sales) said, “ At times you have to go with just that gut feeling.” And he did go by his intuitions. “ I was tense as we launched in the midst of a full-blown slowdown,” he added.

The gamble certainly paid off, as Celerio has bagged bookings over 35,000 units; significant considering the current sluggish market conditions. More interestingly, the AMT version contributes 49 per cent to this massive response from Indian buyers. Compared to last year's March records, this year Maruti posted a 5.5 per cent decline in total sales. And even the small segment cars could not help carmakers overcome the downfall, as it too registered a decline of 11 per cent in comparison to last year's data. Talking about the gearless vehicle, Mayank Pareek said, “This is the right time to go gearless and the response to Celerio has proved us right. For more than 50 per cent of buyers, this variant is their second car.”

The major reason behind Celerio's success is taken to be the changing socio-economic conditions, and also the altering demographic profile helped a lot with this. The ease and comfort associated with gearless cars made them so popular amongst the Indian buyers. For a long time, the Indian car market has been skeptical about automatics; also their pricier tag made them not-so-popular in India. Automatic transmission driven cars were viewed as problematic from every dimension, be it with high price tag or with their high maintenance costs. And then there's a general Indian perception- higher fuel efficiency, higher are the chances behind car's success, and certainly automatic cars could not stand upto the expectations of Indians.

So, how Maruti played its cards considering all these mentioned conditions and came up with such an amazing product. Well, it just got its 3 Ps hit at the right target- Product, Pricing and Positioning. Celerio automatic is one such product which has been designed with fuel economy that matches that of manuals, thus catering the needs of Indian buyers. At the positioning front, the car has been designed to serve the convenience of the driver- just start and go. Also, now the car with automatics is busy dictating, which was earlier done by drivers with manually operated transmissions.

Source- ET

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