Dainik Bhaskar - Expansion Outside Madhya Pradesh

Expansion Outside Madhya Pradesh

By 1995, Dainik Bhaskar had displaced Naiduniya as the No. 1 newspaper in Madhya Pradesh (MP). The newspaper decided to expand outside MP, and identified Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan, as the market with the highest potential.

Dainik Bhaskar's target was to enter Jaipur as No. 2 newspaper (in terms of circulation) on Day 1, with 50,000 copies. To achieve this target, it did a survey of 200,000 potential newspaper buying households in Jaipur. Instead of outsourcing the task of surveying households, it set up an in-house team of 700 surveyors. The team was highly trained in customer engagement, and was trained by experts in body language, grooming, posture, approach methods, social norms and rules etc. Based on survey feedback, they went back to each of the households surveyed, to show them a prototype of the newspaper and gave them the option to sign for an advance subscription. The customers were offered a subscription price of Rs. 1.50 (as against the newsstand price of Rs. 2) and a refund in case of dissatisfaction. When Dainik Bhaskar's first launch outside MP happened in Jaipur on 19 December 1996, it entered the market as No. 1 newspaper with 172,347 copies. Rajasthan Patrika, the former No. 1, had a circulation of just 100,000 copies at that time.

The newspaper's next target was Chandigarh. It launched a customer survey in January 2000, covering 220,000 households. At that time, the English language newspapers in Chandigarh outsold the Hindi newspapers by six times, with The Tribune as the leader (50,000 copies). Dainik Bhaskar's survey found that people in Chandigarh preferred English newspapers because of better quality. As a result, the newspaper concentrated on design, and incorporated the local Chandigarh dialect in the design, mixing Hindi and English. Dainik Bhaskar's second launch outside MP happened in Chandigarh in May 2000: it entered the market as No. 1 with 69,000 copies.

In June 2000, Dainik Bhaskar entered Haryana, again as No. 1 on first day, with 271,000 copies.

For its fourth launch outside MP, Dainik Bhaskar identified Ahmedabad, Gujarat as the city with highest potential. It surveyed 12,00,000 households, with a team of 1050 surveyors, 64 supervisors, 16 zonal managers and 4 divisional managers. The surveyors were gathered largely through posters at colleges and word-of-mouth publicity, instead of expensive print and TV advertisements. Nearly 40-50% of the surveyors were later absorbed in Dainik Bhaskar or Divya Bhaskar, while the rest were given a certificate of appreciation. The team was trained to reach out to 8 lakh households in Ahmedabad and 4 lakh households in adjoining districts, in a time span of 40 days. The newspaper was launched in Ahmedabad on 23 June 2003, under the name Divya Bhaskar, as No. 1 with 452,000 copies (a world record). Within 15 months, it entered two more cities of Gujarat: Surat and Vadodara. To counter the Bhaskar's group's threat, the leading Gujarati newspapers came up with color pages, price reductions and several high-value customer offers. However, by 2009, Divya Bhaskar became the largest circulated Gujarati daily with 11.5 copies.

Dainik Bhaskar's pre-launch door-to-door twin-contact launch programme has been recognised as an Orbit-shifting innovation™ by Erehwon Innovation Consulting. It has won Business Process Innovation award by Marico Foundation, and is a case study in several B-schools including IIM Ahmedabad and SPJIMR.

In 1996, Dainik Bhaskar had a circulation of 350,000 copies in Madhya Pradesh (MP). By 2004, this figure rose by more than 1000% to become 3.5 million in six states (including 2.5 million in Hindi and 1.2 million copies of Divya Bhaskar in Gujarati). In 2006, it was launched at Amritsar and Jalandhar simultaneously, with 178,000 copies. - Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.