Why are there tons of Pulsars in the portfolio? Rajiv Bajaj answers this in his recent interview to a TV channel…
The game began in 2001 when Bajaj debuted the Pulsar brand in India – in two cubic capacities – 150 and 180. Ever since then, Pulsars have really been doing phenomenally well. Bajaj expanded the line-up with 200s and 220s.
Then came the next decade and we saw the introduction of the tech-laden new-generation Pulsar platform – that had motorcycles like the NS200, RS200, NS160 and eventually the NS125 as well. Obviously, Bajaj wanted to transform the complete buyer set to the new-gen models – however, that simply did not happen.
It was in 2021 (the current decade) when Bajaj added another generation of Pulsars to the portfolio – that expanded the capacity to 250cc. So, we have the Pulsar N250, F250, N160 and the P160 from this set. The P150 has been discontinued and it has been replaced by the N150 in the market.
Amidst all this, Bajaj also dropped one segment below and the Pulsar reached the 125cc segment – which is currently the largest selling Pulsar model in the lineup. If that is not all, Bajaj has officially announced that there will be a ‘biggest-ever’ Pulsar launch soon. Expected to be the NS400, it will obviously be based on the Dominar 400 platform.
That makes it a full truckload of Pulsars that are currently in the market and quite often there have been remarks that so many Pulsars end up confusing customers.
Rajiv Bajaj has his own belief though. In a recent interview to a TV channel, he has cleared that the segment that Pulsar participates in is roughly 400,000 unit strong (per month). He elaborates that this is bigger than the complete industry size of most of the 2-wheeler markets in the world.
Hence, rather than overpopulating the market with so many Pulsars, Bajaj believes, it is super-segmenting it! Here is it in his own words..
…And if you’re tempted to think that we are overpopulating the market, we are not because rather than premiumisation, I like to use the term super-segmentation. We can see that the segment that Pulsar participates in, which is about 400,000 motorcycles every month, is massive, it is perhaps bigger than the industry size of most other markets in the world. So there’s a great opportunity to super-segment this and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the Pulsar.
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It appears that Bajaj has accepted the peoples mandate and after multiple misses, it has dropped the idea to transform sales from one generation to the next. Instead, the strategy is to overwhelm buyers with Pulsars at each price point of the segment and let people buy whichever Pulsar they want. Eventually, the customers remain in Bajaj’s fold!
What do you think of this strategy – Is Bajaj correct in its analysis? Or do you think insane amount of Pulsars will backfire some day…?
