Learning how a fuel becomes a household habit

My mother tested the regulator on our LPG cylinder with soapy water every Sunday morning in our Nagpur kitchen. If a bubble formed, she shut the valve, opened the window and sent me to the distributor's office two streets away. She never read a safety leaflet. She had been shown once, by a delivery man, and she repeated what she had seen for thirty years. Much of my career has been an attempt to make a safety habit travel as reliably as hers did.

I studied chemistry at Wainganga College of Science in Nagpur, graduating in 1996, and took an MBA in marketing at Kanhan Institute of Management in Pune in 1998. My first employer, Agnivo Appliances, sent me back to Vidarbha as a management trainee selling gas stoves and pressure cookers to dealers in district towns. In 1999, in Yavatmal, a dealer showed me a register of families waiting for an LPG connection. They wanted our stoves and could not use them. It was my first lesson that a product's market is set by the infrastructure behind it, and that a dealer's credit, not a brochure, decides what reaches a home.

In 2003 I joined Tarangini Water Systems, the Indian subsidiary of a fictional Singapore-based water-treatment group, as a brand manager. Home water purifiers were then an unfamiliar purchase outside the large cities, and we sold them through demonstrations in living rooms. I learnt that the technician who installs a product teaches the customer more than any advertisement, and that a category grows on the second visit, when the filter is changed, as much as on the first sale. By 2009 I was running marketing for western India.

Prajval Fuels, a family-promoted LPG marketer in Mumbai, hired me in 2009 to lead marketing of bulk and packaged gas to factories, hotels, restaurants and autogas stations. Industrial buyers taught me a harder lesson. They had been surprised by price revisions so often that they discounted every rate we quoted. I began sending a price notice, with its reasons, a month before each change. Customers did not always like the price. They stopped doubting the notice.

In 2014 I moved to Vadodara as general manager for domestic and commercial gas at Narmadeya Gas Limited, a listed city gas distributor with more than nine lakh household customers. There I found 52,000 homes where the pipe had been installed but gas had never flowed. Each had been counted somewhere as a connection. Bringing 31,000 of them into use took three years of kitchen visits, landlord letters and meter repairs. It also showed me how easily a utility can report activity as adoption.

I joined Indhanvi City Gas in July 2018, a year after it was founded, as its first authorisations arrived. I built its brand, its acquisition model and its contact centre from a team of six, and became chief marketing officer in April 2021. Our cities are not metros. Most households cook on LPG they trust, many of them on connections received under the Ujjwala scheme, and a piped-gas campaign that leans on modernity alone sounds like a new expense. What persuades them is a neighbour's kitchen, a clear bill and a fitter who explains the meter valve.

I lead 164 people across brand and communication, domestic and commercial acquisition, industrial business development, CNG retail and dealer management, customer service and a small insight team. I report to our managing director and chief executive, present to the board and report each quarter to its Health, Safety and Environment Committee. I ask my team for two disciplines. The first is to count what customers do, not what they sign. The second is to test a message on the doorstep before we spend on broadcasting it. Our insight team runs holdout towns for every major campaign, and I report the campaigns that showed no effect alongside those that did.

Inside the industry I am known for opinions that slow visible growth in the short term: that registrations should not be reported as connections, that safety communication should be judged by what a household can do rather than what it remembers seeing, and that industrial customers should be shown our price formula. I hold them because I have watched the alternatives fail, in someone else's network and in our own. I am now preparing for a role alongside my executive one: a single independent directorship, where a utility marketer's habits could help a board judge whether its customers truly understand what they are buying.

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