Hero Honda focuses on CRM; may slowly slash advertising

Mohini Bhatnagar
23 April 2003

Mumbai: Hero Honda Motors, the joint venture between Munjal promoted Hero Motors and Honda Motor Co of Japan, is focusing on its customer relationship management (CRM) programme to drive growth.

The company has secured over 1 million members in the last three years with the Passport Programme, which involves offering members a small card/booklet that looks like the Indian passport, complete with ''visa'' stamps for points, similar to those offered by credit card companies and airlines. The only difference in this programme is that the member need not always spend money to obtain points, say company officials.

With the passport programme, each time a Hero Honda customer visits a service centre, he gets points and depending on the profile submitted by the customer, he gets benefits like free passes to a cricket match sponsored by the company.

Hero Honda Motor India vice-president (sales and marketing) Atul Sobti says under the programme a customer can collect points by merely visiting the service centre, which he would have done in the normal course of things. "Hero Honda scheme rewards customers even for free services."

Whatever you do as a normal customer entitles you to some gift, he says. "We prefer the Passport Programme because we can talk to our customer on a one-to-one basis, rather than put up a big ad and hope that out of 10 lakh people, 1 lakh will respond. The company will, in the long run, increase focus on the CRM programme and cut down on print and TV advertising to expand the programme and its freebies."

Membership to the programme comes for a nominal fee of Rs 95 for three years. Not just this, along with the programme a customer gets a Rs 1-lakh accident insurance policy for which Hero Honda has tied up with New India Assurance Company.