if you look close enough.. even the tank is trademark pulsar....

Pulsar is written on the tank...you can see it if you move your mouse cursor over it.

Stunner has been selling close to 11k bikes per month (barring the last 2 months where the sales dropped due to the labour unrest)

Bajaj has been beating that by Discover 135 only selling close to 30k bikes

HMSI is not that big (and interested player) in bikes currently. Generally they sell around 40k BIKES per month which isnt a major concerning factor for the competitors.

And the bike which you are calling dead still sells much better than most of the competitors 125ccs. Do they need any mention!


Regarding the branding, I still feel Pulsar brand would ensure more profits and bigger sales but on the longer run might cause Bajaj a little concern. Sprint is a decent enough name!

whichever the bike will be from bajaj, i can surely say one thing that it will be a torquier machine (as itz title says "goodbye traffic")

Pulsar on the tank

OK after going through this entire thread I wonder what all this cribbing is for....
and no offense to anyone but i am sure the management guys at bajaj are more knowledgeable than any of us here. The whole family boasts of graduates from harward and what not.... having got a fair bit of knowledge from being in more than a few b-school courses myself, let me give u the explanation for some of the issues that i frequently saw in this thread.

ISSUE 1
Why is Bajaj naming it pulsar when it can name it a million other things?
The answer to this in the management/marketing world is BRAND CONSISTENCY. It is what the brand portrays itself to be on a regular basis. Let me elaborate this with a common example. You have a Rahul Dravid and you have a Robin Uthappa. Both good batsmen in their own rights. Now Rahul Dravid is called a great batsman while uthappa is sitting at home reading it on the newspaper. Agreed they came in at different time periods but the fact that dravid is great is coz he has demonstrated on a consistent basis that he can perform. Uthappa on the other hand has blasted certain oppositions but his lack of consistency has made selectors/public think that he is a not so good batsman.

The same with Brands..... You have to imbibe in your consumer that your brand overall is of good quality- meaning fulfilling the customers expectations in terms of Price, fitness for use,performance,reliability and delivery.

The brand thats best suited for explaining brand consistency is apple. They are the same throughout their price range. Looks, logos, performance,quality...you name it its the same throughout. There was a time when apple was getting its ass whooped by giants like ibm and microsoft and along came a man called steve jobs. The first time apple started with their brand consistency was with the imac... not so popular in its time but was elite nonetheless. Now years down the line apple has stayed consistent. itunes,ipod,imac,itouch,iphone and the list goes on. So you see a consistency here? The same with their interfaces and functions of all these devices. the look and feel in all of them are the same.Along the way apple has produced certain horrible products too but they still sold. Why? coz it was apple and it was a apple idevice. example the macbook air. Big flop still sells like hotcakes.Thats how much trust the consumer has in the brand

Now coming back to Bajaj. Like someone pointed out earlier the pulsar brand is well established for performance and reliability over the years. So what bajaj is doing is trying to use the brand value to create a consistency among its production line. People know pulsar brand is a premium. So they will trust bajaj more than if they sold it with a new product name. How long has yamaha been in india? and how many models did they have along the way? Until they brought out models in well known names like the fazer, fz, rseries noone even turned towards them. What made people suddenly think that a company that produced crap bikes for years would suddenly give them a competition killer all of a sudden? ANS: Brand recognition...Everyone in the world knows the rseries and what is it known for performance. So even though they give you a tiffin box for an engine in a scale model of the r1 everyone bought it and at a premium. This strategy has been adopted by many automakers round the world. In the world of bikes... kawasaki started it with the Ninja series- Bikes in 250,500,636,650,750 and so on. yamaha has its rseries..suzuki has its gsx series and honda with the CB series. So its nothing new.

So the conclusion is that it is the right step taken by bajaj to establish the brand for years to come.

ISSUE II

Commuter vs Premium Biker

Not so long back the fastest indian bike was the HH CBZ? with a mere 150cc engine. At that time that was the only premium and the rest were all commuters. Then came the pulsars and the zma and all of a sudden u had anything sub 150 as commuter. Now that there are more bikes >180cc even the 150's have become a commuter. Its a good sign that the indian biking scene is becoming better by the day. But the fact still remains that the majority are on commuters if u take the real definition of a commuter into consideration. In the western countries a 250 is a starter... 250 to 600 and in some cases upto 650 are commuters and anything above that is a premium. Now a guy riding a zx10r can complain that the guy in the 250 is stealing the ninja brand name but thats not true. The ninja brand name is synonymous to performance and that is exactly what kawasaki has portrayed these bikes to be in their own segments. When a guy sees the name ninja he knows its a premium machine in its segment. Same way if a p135 is launched that means that wants to be on top of the food chain in the 135 segment. A p200 owner still remains premium in his own segment and is in no way affected by the 135 sporting the same name. And this also brings us to issue III

ISSUE III.
Why more than one model in 135. The reason is its aimed at different target markets. Like i said earlier a Pulsar 135 is king of the 135 segment(aimed to be) while the disc135/xcd etc are aimed at a totally different market. The target for the p135 would probably be guys in their high school/junior college getting their first bike/ or a young executive who wants some punch from the bike but still wants it to be a commuter. The disc/xcd could be aimed at the more economy minded ppl... Kinda what brother kawasaki does with the two 600's the ninja zx636 and the ninja 650. Youd think the 650 is better but the 6r will kick ass anyday. Then is kawasaki spoiling the name of the 650? Nope..coz the 650 is a performance commuter and the 6r is a supersport. The 650 is for ppl who want a relaxed ride, wind in the hair types with commuting as their main goal. The 6r is pure adrenaline. That also explains having so many models with just a slight difference in cc. But compare the whole package and you know what the use is.

So what bajaj is doing here is indeed a touch of masterclass( as payeng put it) indeed in terms of business for the company since they are aiming at the long run instead of giving something great now and failing later( remm dravid vs uthappa?).The way they are going i wouldnt be surprised if they become a major global player in the next few years. As a power hungry young rider the urge for more power is indeed acceptable but you cant expect a fire cracker maker to make a bomb in a short period of time. Give them time and youll see the benefits. Hope they bring out the big gun soon. Until then be happy with what you have and what you can have and stop cribbing about what a guy lower than you is getting. Its childish like satyen said.

Cheerz

anirudh, hats off for your truly convincing literature ... 1(ek) number

those management guyz are surely knoweldgeble than most of us but those yAMAHA,SUZUKI,..... are even more knoweldgeble than those bajjaians..
itz only a point of public satisfaction ,, how much bajaj guyz are able to cop up with indian customers demands is the thing that calculates their managing capabilities and lookin at scraping P200,xcd and more are coming in lines,, one can easily predict about the intelligency of bajaj...

but at the end i like bajaj and proudly own a P180ug4

@neo: Thanks buddy!!

yamaha and suzuki are grandfathers when compared to bajaj.....but everyone knows whoz kicking butt in the indian bike scene....It took yamaha so long to just grab a piece of the pie and suzuki are yet to kick off. Id say bajaj and tvs have done an amazing job for being such young bike manufacturing companies. And if there is a question of brand vs model its the brand anyday... certain compromises have to be made along the way.. if continuing those models is doing more bad than good to bajaj then they have to kill those models.. Dude if bajaj was so stupid they wudnt have got so far wud they?

that bike has kick so it is definetly smaller bike

i was waiting for sumthing like 200 to be reborn all i get is this small crap im dissapointed ...still have my fingers crossed for the auto expo to reveal something bigger

Really inspiring article.
Teenagers can really go for this bike. So we find lot of p135 in Schools and Colleges Bike Stand

The way they are going i wouldnt be surprised if they become a major global player in the next few years,

OK OK

Well for starters they own about 40 odd percent stake in one of the hotest bike companies in the world, they are in top 5 sellers in the world, they have a good in house R&D lab going and that is earning them partners like Renault and all... oh and i forgot they kinda top the charts for Indian bikes being sold outside India..... so what was your comment about the global player again?

It's a 4 Valve!!

I don't understand why a few owners of bigger Pulsars are unhappy with the possibilty of a new Pulsar 135 cc?

I was almost about to book a Passion Pro for myself, and then I came across this new about a new Pulsar 135. I have now decided to wait and see. This new Pulsar 135 is now certainly in my consideration, depending on the final pricing of course.

Wouldn't the current Pulsar owners be happy that their own family is growing in strength and not another 100 cc family?


And by the way, I think that this wouldn't be a slow commuter bike. Please look closely at the tank flap. The letter 4 is cearly visible. Which means that this might be a 4 VALVE ENGINE

Oh Bajaj now please don't price it too high.