The one with the curious name is the runaway leader, setting benchmarks in programming, standardisation and localisation. It doesn't hurt to be part of a formidable family.
It was an awkward moment, recalls A P Parigi, the managing director of Entertainment Network India Limited (ENIL). The year was 2001 and ENIL, the Times Group radio company, had just launched its first radio station in Indore.
"At the launch, people were congratulating me as the CEO for the brand name of Radio Mirchi. It was embarrassing because the name was given by Times group managing director Vineet Jain in the face of stiff opposition from the rest of us."
Parigi, who has moved to a bigger role in the organisation -- he's on the ENIL and Bennett, Coleman & Co boards and manages key investments for the group -- confesses that nobody in the radio team was convinced about the branding "which, surprisingly, had an instant connect in Indore".
But Radio Mirchi also enjoyed the first mover advantage in the private FM radio category.
Last fortnight, ENIL declared its financial results for the year 2007-08. The Radio Mirchi part of ENIL's business (it also has events, out-of-home media and films) generated a profit of Rs 57 crore (Rs 570 million) on revenues of Rs 229 crore (Rs 2.29 billion).
Apurva Purohit, the CEO of rival Radio City, is not very impressed. "It depends on how you define profitability," she says. "FM networks have ventured into new markets."
Some others, though, are ready to applaud the financial performance of ENIL, which was listed in February 2006. "Almost all other stations must still be losing money," says Manajit Ghoshal, chief financial officer, Mid-Day Multi Media, which operates six radio stations.
The bottom line is shored up by the 48 per cent share of the private radio market that Mirchi's 32 stations have garnered. Says radio consultant Sunil Kumar: "The company understood the Indian audiences like no one else
did. It created a mass product that was copied by others. It got the right mix of content standardisation and localisation for its stations. Lastly, the company managed to retain its top talent."
Shedding baggage
Parigi, when he was the CEO, decided to build a team consisting executives without any media experience. He himself sauntered into Radio Mirchi in 2,000 fresh from building the mobile phone brand of BPL. Prashant Panday, the current CEO, came from cosmetics maker Revlon.
"We did not want people with domain knowledge because we wanted new concepts," says Panday.
The offices were given a campus feel with the use of bright reds and greens. "We encouraged a chilled out attitude. The noise and energy levels in the office are high and we work hard to maintain that," says Panday.
While Radio Mirchi may be 'hot', its attitude towards people is 'cool'. It threw a party to cheer up about 100 people who were interviewed but didn't get selected as radio jockeys. Those selected were thrown into rigorous training.
In 2007, when 22 stations were to be set up, Mirchi set up a training academy within MICA, Mudra's advertising institute.
With job rotation, promotions and training, the company has managed to keep its top talent intact. When two creative heads were at loggerheads recently, they were locked into a room for a day to sort out their problems.
Of the top 120 people (out of the total 880) barely four or five have quit. "Even the overall attrition rate in the company is 10 per cent compared to the industry norm of 40 per cent. A stable brass guarantees consistency in policies -- human resources, programming and marketing," says Panday.
Pieces of jigsaw
At Mirchi, the marketing decides how the brand needs to be developed and its findings form the basis of programming. The demographics of a city that Mirchi enters are first analysed by the marketing team. "We need to know the language of the music in that place and its language of communication," says Tapas Sen, chief programming officer.
His belief, borne out by market research, is that people like to hear radio in the language they think in. "We arrive at a conclusion through market research and focus group studies. We are strong on market genetic coding," says Sen, sounding more like a marketer than a programming head.
But the marketing may err. For its nine stations in the south, the choice of language for music and communication was clear; it had to be local.
However, Bangalore confused them. The Kannada speaking RJs played Bollywood hits which failed to impress the listeners. Mirchi quickly switched to Kannada music to become the number one channel in the city.
Sen insists that research is a good indicator of a market. The marketing team told Mirchi to keep Marathi-speaking RJs for Pune but Hindi-speaking ones in Nagpur.
"Though located in Maharashtra, Nagpur consumes its media in Hindi."
Clearly, Mirchi maintains