The white synthetic resin he started manufacturing four years later at the company’s first plant in Kondivita Village, Mumbai, is today a generic term for adhesives, a go-to resource for anyone looking to glue things together. The original product was solidly utilitarian—a synthetic resin adhesive that was a much better substitute for earlier natural adhesives made of starch, which had to be first melted before they could be used.
But like all visionaries, Parekh saw infinite possibilities for the product in the retail market.
Born in Mahuva town of Bhavnagar district in Gujarat a 100 years ago, Parekh got his law degree from Government Law College Mumbai, though he didn’t practice law. Instead, he went to work in a dyeing and printing press in Mumbai followed by a stint in a wood trading firm.
After that early apprenticeship, he set himself up as a chemicals trader before a chance meeting with a distributor for Hoechst products in India led to a partnership with the German chemical giant. But when Hoechst decided to set up its own manufacturing facilities in India, it was time for Parekh to move on. With his brother Sushil, he started Parekh Dyechem Industries in 1954, which would be renamed Pidilite in 1990, three years ahead of its public listing.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
-Balvantray Parekh
Power of marketing
By then, Parekh had turned a product with a limited customer base into a mass market product through some of the most creative and memorable marketing campaigns ever seen in India. He roped in an ad agency Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), which designed the now-famous logo of the two elephants and a few years later, its maverick genius Piyush Pandey came up with the tagline “Dum laga ke haisha“.
What followed was a series of advertising campaigns that were quirky and funny in style but relatable to real-life scenarios. A 1985 ad showed a number of people using Fevicol to join together different objects such as a chair to a table and a bicycle to a tree and in 1987 came the Fevicol Express featuring a train carrying a variety of objects, all held together with Fevicol. It was a funny and creative way to exhibit the adhesive’s strength and reliability, a theme that’s run through all its advertising over the years.
Often, the contextual references were to topical events. Thus, during the cricket World Cup Fevicol released a series of ads celebrating India’s wins, often with humorous takes on the matches. One ad showed a fielder taking a spectacular catch, with the tagline “Fevicol ka jod, mazboot jod“.
In 1997, Pidilite was rated among the top 15 brands of India in the FE Brandwagon Year Book, just one of many such accolades the company has bagged.
Also Read: How Ashoke Mukherjee brought high-fidelity sound to India with Sonodyne
Man of many interests
Typical of business leaders of his generation, Parekh’s life encompassed more than just making money. A voracious reader he had a deep interest in literature, science, law, and medicine and boasted a personal library which reflected these diverse interests.
Often described as a man with a “humane, scientific temperament”, he was deeply interested in general semantics, which explores the relationship between language, thought, and behaviour.
Parekh had turned a product with a limited customer base into a mass market product through some of the most creative and memorable marketing campaigns ever seen in India.
Keen to create an institution that could spread the message of Alfred Korzybski, the originator of the discipline of General Semantics, which he said had helped him a lot in his business and in his own self-development, in 2009 he established the Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences in Baroda, Gujarat.
The centre’s many academic activities include the annual Balvant Parekh Memorial Lecture which has featured such diverse speakers as Janice Misurell Mitchell, Composer, Flutist and Vocal Artist and Faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bhikhu Parekh, Emeritus Professor at the University of Hull and the University of Westminster.
Unassuming yet charming, humble yet audacious, Parekh would have patiently sat through the various lectures whether they were about The Role of Intellectuals in the Age of Conformity or A Philosophical Look at Black Music and Its Recent Afro-Indo Mixtures. A smile, a nod by way of encouragement was what the speaker would have received since Parekh lived his life on the basis of Albert Einstein’s quote: “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
By 2013, when he passed away, Parekh had passed on the baton to his two sons, Madhukar Parekh and Ajay Parekh, in a rare example of a smooth intergenerational transition of an Indian family business.
Read more| Jamnalal Bajaj and the alchemy of business philanthropy