Everyone among us in our day-to-day life come across lots and lots of inspiring stories of people, Companies or Brands isn’t it?
AMUL as a brand needs no introduction. Who among us is unfamiliar with this brand.
Before the emergence of Amul, India was severely deficient in milk and met this considerable demand, milk was Imported from other countries, e.g., New Zealand, but now things are completely opposite. Amul reversed the whole Scenario. As of now, India exports milk to other countries. Currently, They are ruling the dairy industry. Be it milk, butter, milk powder, yogurt, or any other milk product, it is totally dominating the market.
AMUL is an Indian dairy cooperation society based out at Anand lying in Gujarat. It is managed by Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF).
My dear reader now gets ready to take a ride through a unique and inspiring story of Amul, right from its beginning to its growth to date with upcoming content.
How Amul actually Started
Over the past years, Amul as a brand has gained high favoritism amongst India’s people and has even become the taste of India exactly as the tagline suggested.
You must be excited to know about its startup, foundation, and so on. So, am I to share the same with you. Having a girl in a dotted dress as an advertising mascot has become more like emotion for every Indian giving a nostalgic childhood feeling. It basically started in 1946.
A 15-day objection by the Kaira union versus the Polson dairy became the root cause for its foundation. Now here the question arises why this protest? This movement was that Polson dairy collected milk at low rates from local farmers of the Kaira district then sold it to the Bomboy government.
Everyone except the farmers gained profit from it. This triggered the farmers, and as a consequence, they called out for a revolt against it. They took their plea to Sardar Patel as he advocated the farmers’ cooperative at that time. He took their matter into his consideration and suggested them to start a cooperative of their own.
For this, they needed to grant permission from the government. He told the farmers if the government did not agree to this, stop boycott selling their milk. They could go for such demand only if they were ready to bear on some loss. They thought his advice was right, they quickly agreed to it. After this, they claimed that the government put their demand down, but they decided to it.
All of this eradicated the middlemen completely, and eventually, the profit soaked by them reached directly to farmers. This is how the foundation of the Kaira district co-operative milk producer’s union limited, now known as Amul, was laid. This union started processing milk from farmers (with 250lt/day), and by the end of 1948, this number rose to 432 farmers with the production of 5000 lt/day.
As it started growing tremendously it came up with some problems as well. A significant problem was excess production that became cumbersome for the Bomboy milk scheme to absorb and manage. But I feel that this was the real turning point for Amul. Because of this constraint, a large plant was set up to process all the excess milk into other milk products.
Founders of AMUL
The honor of placing the foundation stone of AMUL goes to two people, viz
Now talking about the present currently, Amul is owned by Ramsingh Parmar. Just as a bonus point, let me inform you that the present MD of Amul is RS Sodhi.
How AMUL got its name
As this brand reached heights of success, Verghese Kurian wanted the brand to be appropriately named to gain popularity and get new regions.
He tried hard, but nothing helped him. Only after his chemist suggested the name Anand Milk Union Limited, abbreviated as “Amul.” Amul is procured from a Sanskrit word, an “Amulya,” which priceless or precious. This is how our favorite brand got named, and the rest is history
White Revolution
You must have encountered the term ‘White Revolution’ a lot of times. Here I am giving a quick idea about what it actually is and how it started. The white revolution, also called “operation flood,” is basically associated with a high surge in milk production. This mega operation was launched in the 1970s by Dr. Verghese Kurian, now entitled the White Revolution’s father.
The White Revolution’s main motive was to make India self-sustained in the production of milk, and its consequences were enormously fruitful. White revolution evolved India as the largest milk producer globally, with a massive output of 3.3 million liters’s a day! Isn’t that just unbelievable?
This astounding number is reached only because of the collective efforts of 764954 producer members. Talking about the significant milk-producing states, UP, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana are ruling the list.
India is now the largest producer of buffalo milk in the world as well.
Success Model or The Co-operative Model
Amul has reached vast heights of success over the years, providing the best quality milk products to the entire country and other parts of the world. Amul has reached that level of fame where there is no looking back. The main base for its success is its robust business model.
The Business Model
This model is the critical concept for their working strategy. Basically, it has a three tiered structure that includes town social orders, region level dairy, and a state-level organization. Every level is financially free from others.
Let me explain it’s working correctly.
Every single producer of milk of the village is a member of this village dairy cooperative society. Then as a traditional general procedure, these members elect their representatives. These elected representatives together manage district milk unions. Then district milk unions take charge of milk and its products along with their processing.
After this, they sell their products to the state milk federation, hence completely cutting down middlemen’s needs. In the next step state milk federation act as a distributor that facilitates selling the milk and its products directly into the market. As such, revenue is shared downwards in a similar manner.
Right from the beginning, there was an assumption that this method would directly profit and change poor farmers’ conditions and ultimately add to society’s improvement.
Amul and GCMMF thought that they can’t rely on the market to develop improvements on market powers and that active negotiation was required. Then two fundamental necessities were distinguished. The first one was that continued development for a long duration would depend upon coordinating free market activity. The second one was that the business and powerful administration feasibility would need skilled, accomplished, and experienced executive controllers and technocrats.
Amul followed the umbrella strategy. They act as the leading brand for many items created by different market associations like milk powder, fluid milk, consolidated milk, cocoa items, ghee, desserts, etc. Some of the variations in sub-brands of Amul are Amulspree, Amulya, Amulspar, and Nutramul.
Mineral water is sold out under the Jal Dahra brand. Natural beverage products are assembled under the name safal, while the palatable oil items bare under Dhara and Lokdhara brands’ names. Amul and GCMMF maintained an appreciable distance from association clashes. They created an opportunity for sub-brands to coordinate properly in creating new items.
The Farmer Friendly Cooperative
Farmers have perpetually been a prime priority of Amul. They’ve still been trying to put the welfare of farmers first no matter what. Conditions of farmers improved significantly, and their struggles were minimized as they started getting desired values and profit. Amul gives around 80% of its earnings to the farmers as they understand that they basically form their company’s backbone. Along with farmers, Amul pays much attention to the cattle in a much grateful way.
Unlike other cooperatives, Amul is owned by farmers of the village who work for its success and growth strenuously. Artificial insemination played a crucial part in providing the highest quality of milk. It resulted in the formation of the best possible breed of cattle. Such facts also played their role in laying the strongest and successful foundation and immense growth of Amul.
Women Empowerment
As I have discussed just earlier that Amul emphasized the betterment of the lives of farmers. Among them, prime importance was given to women farmers. Women did very well in this business. They played a vital role in flourishing Amul. One peculiar example in this context is Kunaben Patel of Gujrat. She is the one who was honored with the award “Pride of Gujarat” by the CM of the state. This achievement was attributed to the massive part in proving that this is a viable and stable business. Kunaben made an incredible amount of 84 lac from dairy farming.
Women in Gujarat have attained some sort of financial independence that leads to their empowerment personally. It enabled them to take part in domestic matters actively and make profitable and efficient decisions. According to reports, the number of female members has increased impressively from 0.22 million in 1981 to 3.7 in 2008.
This cooperative movement model has raised several female entrepreneurs enabling them to contribute equally to their families financially. Due to their crucial role at the ground level, women have become the sole reason for the success of Amul. Due to the significant improvement of Amul at different social groups, it was appreciated in India as well as outside India.
KEY FACTORS BEHIND SUCCESS OF AMUL
1. Innovative strategies/ State-of-the-art:
As a brand, Amul has always been innovative in almost every way, be it creative marketing campaigns, launching new products, or challenging the primitive social trends to develop advanced ones.
In the 1960s, Amul matured the first brand in the international market to produce skimmed milk powder from buffalo milk. With its three-tiered cooperative model, Amul changed the traditional and primitive operations with advanced, more sophisticated, and cost-effective structure.
In 2014, Amul won the “World Dairy Innovation Award” and “CNN- Innovating for Better Tomorrow Award.”
2. Advertisement Campaign- The AMULGIRL
Sylvester da Cunha was hired as MD of an advertising agency in 1960 to design a Mascot for Amul butter. Sylvester da Cunha framed the campaign as a series of hoardings with topical ads related to daily life issues. It gained quite popularity and made its place in Guinness World Records for being the longest-running ad campaign in the world.
It was then in the 1980s when scriptwriter Bharat Dabholkar and Cartoonist Kumar Morey were involved in sketching for Amul’s ads. But B. Dabholkar disregarded the trend of using celebrities in ads. As Verghese Kurian has created a free atmosphere for them, it encouraged B. Dabholkar to develop better ad ideas. These concepts lead to the creation of the famous Amul girl as an advertising mascot. Which is being used by Amul to date to promote the brand.
Amul has been smartly using this sketch for their longest-running ad campaign. In a dotted, this girl has been used to insert an element of fun and humor in its ads. Thus, this mascot became quite a favorite of Indian people, which has led to colossal customer engagement. This Amul girl is often considered one of the most influential advertising concepts.
3. Well Maintained Supply Chain and Efficient Coordination
It is completely connected with the Amul model based on the three-tier cooperative structure that has been discussed earlier. The greatness that lies in this model’s success is attributed to the fact that Amul was the first company to follow such a model. It ensured efficiency, swiftness, and transparency in operations. All of this helped Amul to become one of the most successful dairy cooperatives in the world.
Now talking about the coordination, Amul has followed the best-coordinating strategy that helped in its tremendous growth. Amul basically follows “branded house architecture” method wherein no matter what it promotes, it is done under a familiar brand -Amul. This is like the umbrella method we know about. Its primary focus is towards promoting mainly parent brands other than the individual sub-brands or products. This enabled Amul to gain more recognition and cutting down to lesser expenditure on ads and marketing costs.
Healthy and flawless coordination is a prerequisite when there are a lot of associations in any inventory network. Likewise, this also played a crucial component in making Amul an unbeatable success.
4. Best Quality Produce
While counting on the factors of success of Amul, how can we just ignore one of the fundamental pillars of Amul that is the best ever quality of the products they manufacture!
For years Amul is providing the best quality products to us tirelessly. They never fail to please their customers, be it. The case of best taste, nutritional value, safety, or consumer trust. Amul always keeps improving
Revenue and Current Scenario of Growth
Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd has recorded a turnover of ₹38,542 crores for the financial year 2019-20, accounting for a growth of 17 percent over the previous year.
In the past decade, the sales turnover had bounced by approximately five times from ₹8,005 crores in 2009-10 to ₹38,542 crores in 2019-20. This surge is ascribed to the dairy major’s speedy proliferation in product portfolio and processing capacities. The combined turnover of the dairy and all the products sold under their name is $ 7B, as revealed by the dairy Cooperative after its 46th Annual General Meeting held recently in Anand.
In 2011, Amul was ranked as the 18th largest dairy organization globally, which is currently revamped up to class 9.
CESSATION
It is really inspiring for many of those people there who want to start their own business or want to do something good, awe-inspiring. It is a very significant achievement for Amul, what it is today and where it started from. A small brand to help poor farmers in Anand Gujarat is now a big Indian brand. It is now India’s largest milk-producing brand.
From this story of Amul, we can conclude that there might be no doubt Mani’s hardships or hurdles in your way to being successful. Still, there is at the same time nothing that could stop us from achieving whatever we want to accomplish in life except Almighty. From the success story of Amul, it can be concluded that hard work can help us achieve great heights in every field of life.
Amul really proved that where there is unity, there is always a great win. Starting from few farmers now has gained farmers’ trust and have United them to win the battle against the Monopoly.
Amul has proved that it is not just a brand or business unit but also an emotion that farmers represent to the whole nation. It has given farmers a ray of hope to dream and live a peaceful and happy life. It should be the mission of every company or a brand to think about their customer’s well-being, not just play with their health to get profit.
Like Amul products, we can get the best of everything in our nation live a healthy life. Amul has proved that it is really well deserved to be today’s achievements, and its achievements are really worth appreciating. In the end, I would like to thank Amul for its pure and hygienic products that they are producing.
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