Adgully Exclusive | Creating impact with compact: i next's Alok Sanwal

The daily tries to capture that pulse of the category of the audience in the age group of 18-35 years of age. Its key USP being that it caters to the youthful audience and that it clearly wishes to provide information to the urban audience. The cumulative circulation of i next across its 12 editions is about 3.85 lakh copies and on Sundays it rises upto 4.2 lakhs.

Adgully caught up with Alok Sanwal, Project Head and Editor, i-next, to find out more about the daily's plans and success path.

Talking about the ways in which the daily has tried to make inroads into the readers' lives, Sanwal says, "Issues like education or career are key focus areas for a young audience's attention. The other factor that binds the young population together is social networking- meeting, sharing views and exchanging ideas. Besides the third vital factor for this TG is information and entertainment. We have just acted upon the aforementioned key domains and all are engagements with our audience they have also largely been hinged around these three areas."

As almost 50% of the Indian population comprises of youth, i next recognizes itself as a mass-niche product offering. However, Sanwal further points out that, "Gradually any mature product category goes into fragmentation. Either there will be a price point fragmentation or there will be genre-wise fragmentation or the fragmentation might be based on the audience profile. Frankly, we have a long way to go in terms of absolute niche in terms of dailies. But TG specific and age specific fragmentation is slowly catching up and many dailies are doing it. Initially they might do it in a form of a broadsheet or a compact and then gradually they can move ahead within compact further identifying their TG."

Talking about the growth path that he has charted for i next, Sanwal says, "There is an organic growth which is very likely for a daily like us and that is to speedily expand markets. The other thing that is important for us is that we keep the core focus of our brand in mind and we do a little bit of a lateral growth. We might get on the net, which is already on the card."

In terms of an overall response Sanwal says that there has been a very high product acceptance. Besides the fact that i next is a bilingual daily and since it is the first of its kind, its success opened up the market which responded positively to the launch of the daily.

So now since the target market has reacted well to the idea and the concept of the daily, are there any plans to venture into new media?

"We have three initiatives currently that we are working on; web is a very important domain for us. Currently our website is under construction, MMI which is the digital division of Jagran Prakashan is working on that, the alpha launch of the website is on the 15th of January next year. Secondly we understand that our target audiences are into social networking, so we have worked on it through in-print and off-print initiatives. Besides we are also looking at mobile as an important medium of reaching our audiences. 30-40% of content is going to be very different from our print version, and will be updated 5-6 times in 24 hours," Sanwal contends.

i next will also look at populating its readers on social networking sites and link them to the website. But it would at the same time want to provide end users a news forum within the website.

Acknowledging some of the challenges, Sanwal says, "The main challenge for us is that we still are a broadsheet market. So the level of acceptance of the compact size dailies amongst the advertisers is at an average level. But we are looking at increasing the awareness amongst the advertisers and I guess it will grow almost as much as ten folds. The other thing is that many new players might enter the market in the times to come, and we will have to try and be ahead of them and constantly keep innovating. But amongst the challenges lie the opportunities."

But the advertisers do approach the daily to go ahead with innovative and engaging initiatives. Currently i next is doing an activity with Britannia and which is called Health Meter. The initiative will have 60 thousands kids in the age group of 2 ½ to 7 ½ and who will be provided with a health check-up.

"We have also organized Bikeathon in association with the brand Hercules, which was basically a bicycle riding marathon. This entire initiative was carried out in 12 cities and had around 40,000 participants. And we keep getting newer clients who come upto us with a very specific proposition and we have a clear business model to address it," Sanwal adds. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]