Why Awaken Chetak? As a product category, scooters have undergone an image makeover over the last decade.

Scooters have metamorphosed into vehicles with more refined engines and contemporary styling. The Scooters segment has grown at a rapid pace over the last five years, having recorded a volume CAGR of 18% to reach 2.1 million units in 2010-11. During this period, its share in the total domestic Two Wheeler market has also increased from 13% in 2005-06 to 18% in 2010-11, which happens to be the fastest growing category of two wheelers.

Also currently the scooter market in India is highly concentrated with Honda occupying around 43% market share in 2011 followed by 22% by TVS. This gives Bajaj Chetak a huge chance to exploit the opportunity of playing a strong competitive option to these players. The opportunity can be gauged by the entry of various scooters in the recent times, Mahindra Duro, Hero Maestro and the latest entrant to unveil its scooter plans is Yamaha. Vespa which along with Chetak ruled the Indian streets for many a decade is already on its revival path with its global look. Hence it makes perfect sense for Bajaj to bring back its iconic Chetak to life which has strong association and resonance with the Indian consumers. Why brand Chetak died? Chetak as a brand never actually died, it was always the preferred brand in the scooter category. Its failure can be attributed to decline in the scooter category as a whole, owing to introduction of stylish and fuel-efficient vehicles. Growth rate of scooters declined to 8% while sales of bikes was increasing exponentially at 25%. Also Bajaj never paid much attention to product development; the R&D spend was as low as 1% of revenue during the start of 21st century. As a result customers were served with the same Chetak for almost 30 years with very late upgradations like 4 stroke engine and similar scooter to Chetak named Super in 1994

So for Rajiv Bajaj it was an obvious choice to focus on its star sellers at that point of time i.e Pulsar and Boxer, Chetaks market share further declined with introduction of Activa and other players from TVS and Honda. Relevance of Brand Chetak The Hamara Bajaj ad campaign of Bajaj Auto is still afresh in the memories of Indian riders. But with time the geared scooters seem to have lost the ground paving way to the gearless scooters. Bajaj may continue to bank on motorcycles, but sales trends over the last six years indicate that scooters sales are back on track. From the highs of 83.5% in 2006-07, for instance, the share of motorcycles in the two-wheeler market slipped to 75.1% in 2011-12. A lower compounded annual growth rate of 9% for motorcycles over the last five years, compared with 18% and 17% for the scooters and mopeds, clipped the share of motorcycles. The rebirth of Chetak in a new trendy gearless Avatar with a sleek and sturdy design to cater to the target segment of contemporary Indian male

Target Segment: Males (20-40 years) 33% of Indias population of 1.2 Billion is in the age group of 20-40 of which 206 million are males which form a key target segment for scooters in the 125cc+ segment. Chetak is to be positioned as a scooter that combines new age style, performance with the age old reliability of Chetak