Vespa Scooter - Positioning Strategy

                                           Vespa Scooter The Ultimate in Positioning

What does Vespa mean in Italian? Most students don’t give the correct answer. Vespa in Italian means a wasp. An insect that can string and get away fast.

That was what the original Vespa was, a nippy beast that aimed and ruled the world of scooters. Made by the Iconic Piaggio & Company Vespa the scooter was elegant and designed as a unisex transport option for men and women. The dead giveaway is the design that allows women especially women who wear skirts and sarees to easily mount the vehicle and drive it.

The brand started to popularize itself as a style icon after Audrey Hepburn side saddled Gregory Pecks Vespa in the movie Roman Holiday. This resulted in catapulting the sales to over 1,00,000 in that year.

So, the initial ads had mostly women proclaiming their allegiance and singing paeons of glory about its ease of usage. Later it slowly started showing both men and women using it with the positioning tack being a twosome vehicle. Later on, it became a family vehicle.

When Vespa was introduced in India Bajaj faced a peculiar problem. Not many women rode scooters (in fact in the initial stages women were not driving any mechanical contraption except the bicycle).

Bajaj quickly changed tracks and projected Bajaj as the ultimate vehicle for the “Indian Man”. The motorcycle was for the rugged Indian and the Bajaj Vespa was the sophisticated urban equivalent driven by the man of the house and the wide and children demurely sat behind him.

The promotion was so spot on that Indian men took the persuasion seriously to the heart. And the product supported their beliefs. Bajaj Vespa was heavy, quite cumbersome, had unwieldy gears and it was not easy to master. And the master stroke. Bajaj scooter must be bent and shaken vigorously everyday morning for it to start. Something that only the akkada trained female wrestlers’ Indian women wrestlers could attempt. It was not for normal women. 

Thus, the unisex positioning was completely abandoned. First, it was Kinetic Honda that took the position and in later years it was Hero Activa that completely dominated this mind space. 

Today the unisex choice for scooters is firmly the Hero Activa and in that category, Bajaj has no product offering either in the male scooter category or in the unisex category.

Of course, Bajaj Chetak is trying to come back in an electric version and it remains to see if its ploy succeeds.