Titan Tanishq: the real problem was trust
In its early years, Tanishq, the jewellery brand of Titan, found it hard to pull buyers away from their family jewellers. It would have been easy to blame designs, prices or advertising, and to spend money fixing those.
The bigger issue sat underneath. Families bought gold on trust, and most had no way to check purity. Tanishq tested 10,000 ornaments picked at random from the market and found that about 65% were below 22 carats.
So the problem to solve was not “how do we sell more jewellery?” but “how do we make purity visible and believable?” In 1999, according to the ICMR case study, Tanishq put Karatmeters in its stores: imported X-ray machines, costing about ₹10 lakh each, that read the gold content of an ornament in about three minutes. Its then chief operating officer, Jacob Kurian, described the aim as moving customers “from blind trust to informed trust”.
- Ask customers what they worry about but cannot check.
- Make that thing visible and easy to verify.
- Teach customers, then let them judge for themselves.
Chapter 1: Why smart people solve the wrong problem
The most expensive mistake in business is solving the wrong problem well.
- Tell a symptom from a real problem
- Spot the five traps in your own meetings
- Stop money being spent on the wrong fix
This article is adapted from the book. Examples marked “Example” use invented names and numbers; company stories are based on public sources listed in the book. For general learning; use your own judgement for your situation.
