RIP Dharampal Gulati, businessman, visionary and branding expert extraordinaire

“Dharampal Gulati, the 97-year-old owner of MDH Spices and the face of the company’s advertisements, passed away early on Thursday,” said The Hindu, as they announced the death of the industrialist and a businessman.

And a visionary. And a brilliant marketing mind.

Why do I say he was both a visionary and a brilliant marketing mind? Let’s take a quick look at the genesis of the company he created.

“Spices have a long and ancient history, especially in India, where they are a part of life and heritage. In every home & in every province across the country, different spices and blends are used to create different and distinctive tastes in dishes. Several decades ago, housewives used to grind their spices manually at home and make their own blends for use in their cooking. To make this process easier for the housewife, ’MAHASHIAN DI HATTI’ (MDH) visualised the concept of ready-to-use ground spices,” says the MDH website the in ‘About Us’ tab.

That makes one stop and think. Dharampal Gulati created a CATEGORY, not just a business. He created an entire category – a category so ingrained in the consumer mind that we forget that, once upon a time, ready-to-use spices didn’t even exist.

At the same time, he created another category — packaged and branded spices.

We ooh and aah when we read about the geniuses and the visionary companies that have created categories in the past few years – categories such as ready-to-serve and ready-to-cook and we admire the foresight of these companies. But it’s important to remember that these ‘recent’ categories were created, well, recently. And by teams of MBAs and well-educated professionals with access to case studies, who were well travelled and abreast of global practices.

Gulati didn’t have any formal education — he studied only up to class V.

Yet he figured out a way to build credibility and trust – because the category that he created needed these virtues.

With an entire population that was, till the advent of MDH, used to grinding and powdering spices at home, the ready-to-use spices must have been a temptation to consumers – tinged with fear.

Fear of adulteration. In a country like India,  trust is a huge element when it comes to non-packaged food. You buy ‘open’ oil from a kirana that you trust. You buy fresh, ground atta from a mill that you trust. And so on.

You want to be sure that the product that you buy is not adulterated.

And how do you, as a marketer, convince the customer that the product she is buying is safe?

You say so.

YOU say so.

Dharampal Gulati, whose firm is over 100 years old (the traditional family business began in 1919 trading in spices), had credibility thanks to to the family business that his father started.

He was known.

His FACE was known.

And Gulati knew the power of being known and recognized.

He could have got the world’s greatest branding agency to create an identity and the packaging, but the world’s best designed logo couldn’t achieved a fraction of impact compared to the impact achieved by the early customers seeing Gulati’s face on the packaging and in the advertising.

The face did what hundreds of words written by clever copywriters couldn’t do: told the consumer that the product could be trusted – because Dharampal Gulati said so.

RIP Dharampal Gulati. Businessman, visionary and branding expert extraordinaire.