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Needed A More Honest Vocabulary!
India My Land

Needed A More Honest Vocabulary!

Are we getting trapped by our own spin doctoring? The television footage from Davos showed Indian leaders talking of the steady onward march of the Indian economy, with healthy investment and household consumption growth. Meanwhile back home, corporate bankers were privately foreseeing tough times ahead, because the ‘mood’ (spin word for confidence?) of Indian large corporates was not upbeat. Reasons given were the usual suspects of political and policy uncertainty, bad governance and corruption, food inflation, high interest rates etc. But FII analysts are beginning to ask some very hard questions indeed. One set of questions is around why Indian companies are choosing to invest overseas rather than in India; did they not believe in the India story? The politically correct – and truthful – answer is that India Inc. must have a global footprint too, and if this is a time offering an opportunity to do so, then why […]

February 19, 2011
Growth and Inequality
India My Land

Growth and Inequality

Inclusive growth is when more and more Indians benefit from the growth of the economy, by way of better incomes and a better quality of life. Has this happened so far? The answer is yes, it has happened to a certain extent, but has not happened enough. To say that there has been no “trickle down” at all to the common man, of the benefits of economic growth is belied by all available statistics of income and consumption. Practically, everyone is earning more today than they were the previous year or the year before that, or even the generation before that. Yes, those who were at the top half of the income ladder to begin with, have had their incomes grow much more than those who were in the bottom half. But the rising tide has lifted the average income of the bottom 25% of Indians also. But this unfortunately […]

March 14, 2013
The Helping Hand
India My Land

The Helping Hand

Unlike her Bombay counterparts, Yellamma doesn’t worry too much about job descriptions. Her paradigm is different. She offers head massages to all my mother’s visitors, some of whom accept and tip well. After my initial splutter at this, I thought she had managed what retailers in malls struggle to do – monetise footfall! She offered me an oil massage too, and suggested moving into a room at the far end of the house to relax better. I thought happily about a conversation that I had with the chairman of an MNC making premium beauty products, who said that they had to recalibrate their notion of luxury and pampering for India; customized massages to home are available only to the very affluent in America, but easily accessible to middle-class India. My happiness was rudely interrupted by Yellamma using the opportunity to tell me to recommend a salary raise for her, in […]

February 12, 2012
Willing Spirit, Weak Flesh
Consumer Trends

Willing Spirit, Weak Flesh

It isn’t easy to imagine the sort of pressure on public goods when a billion people – mostly young, slowly getting richer – aspire for a better life, especially when infrastructure and public goods are already of poor quality and in short supply. This is the environment in which the great Indian consumer story will “live” for the next several years, shaping consumer behaviour and throwing up unique market opportunities quite different from those of the past two decades. Toilets; affordable housing; health care; old-age homes; schools and colleges; power and water; police; garbage clearance; bandwidth; buses, trains and metros; playgrounds and parks, and many such improvers of life are just not available. Domestic tourism is burgeoning, thanks to more money, but there are no decent public conveniences. Next to premium Mumbai apartments with breathtaking sea views, the rocks in low tide are an unending public toilet for people living […]

February 12, 2012
The Old Order Has Changed
India My Land

The Old Order Has Changed

One of her case studies was about a TV advertisement of a leading brand of household liquid cleaner in the UK, which had the male voice-over saying, “Kills one hundred percent germs-DEAD”, and a visual showing the woman cleaning the house. She explained that one of the reasons the brand was losing market share was that its ad was out of sync with the rise of feminism. The ad had the male, authoritative voice-over coded as “master” and the workabee female coded as “servant”. A decade or so ago, a popular Indian toilet cleaner brand ran an ad with a woman relaxing with the newspaper and the husband saying appreciatively, “That’s my wife cleaning the toilet”, and explaining how easy it was to achieve great cleaning with no effort. Today, while toilet cleaner ads still talk to the woman and explain the wonders of U-bends and germs to her, it […]

February 4, 2012
The Consumption Journey
Consumer Trends

The Consumption Journey

Think local; it’s pointless to use western standards to measure India’s consumption base. India’s domestic consumption story has been told in terms of income based number crunching on the size of India’s middle class, and sales data from companies. After rural consumption came to the rescue in 2008-09-10, the story of rural consumption being the bulwark of future consumption has gained currency, almost as if the urban frontier has been conquered. Facts viewed through the lens of households help to do a reality check on existing mental models and numbers about India’s consumption story but are hard to get. We therefore welcome the new 2011 edition of the Indian Readers Survey (IRS) report, Guide to Indian Markets. Based on a rolling annual all India sample of 250,000 households, it is a standard market planning database, vetted by the Media Research Users Council (MRUC) and conducted by Hansa Research for over 10 […]

January 30, 2012
Yoganatomy
C'est La Vie

Yoganatomy

You might not understand it, but ‘sabar’ yoga might be a most useful life lesson. At the swanky T3 terminal of Delhi airport, I had a “we are like that only” moment. There was a large-ish crowd hanging around a huge mental sculpture, an upward sloping elliptical frame with larger than life human figures fixed on to it. They were going around it, aiming their cellphones, and furiously taking pictures. I used to be amused with Japanese tourists and their cameras, but we Indians have stolen a march over them when it comes to no-frills pragmatic consumption of even something as aesthetic as photography. It took a while to figure out that the sculpture was depicting the surya namaskar sequence and attracting more of middle-class India’s attention than shops selling foreign brands. Maybe we should just chill a bit on the FDI and death-of-the-kirana panic attack. Yoga has made a […]

January 15, 2012
What Consumers Really Want
Consumer Trends

What Consumers Really Want

With more competition and more cautious consumers, companies will need smart marketing moves It is business plan season again. Most managers will argue for their new targets based on some rule of thumb linking overall market growth of their sector to GDP growth. Aiding them will be analysts’ views – mostly people who believe that all markets follow the same logic as the stock market – on whether consumer demand is ‘still strong’ or ‘softening’ based on quarterly results of companies and year-on-year comparisons. Using the health of consumer demand to assess the health of GDP growth, and using that, in turn, to predict consumer demand, is a bit confusing to some of us. Intuitively, the idea is sound that even with low GDP growth, companies can find healthy consumer demand for their business by persuading consumers to buy from them.. That is why our IT companies have healthy top […]

December 26, 2011
Kirana RIP? Not Yet
Policy Perspective

Kirana RIP? Not Yet

The small-store owner is too important, nimble and innovative to be bumped off by big-box retailers The arguments for and against FDI in retail are, at a generic level, valid on both sides. However, since the devil is usually in the detail, the facts about India’s small retailers and suppliers, the conditions stipulated for FDI, and recent experience with the effects of domestic modern retail need to be viewed together before the likely outcome pronounced. The big fight is about whether this new policy will kill small shops, massively destroy livelihoods and take away GenNext’s opportunities. Facts suggest otherwise. Consider the kirana, the one most feared to be at risk. About 5-6 million of the 8 million FMCG-stocking kiranas are in rural India, and are totally safe, as the new ones can only come into the top 53 cities. R Sriram, founder of Crossword and retail expert, tables two insights. One, in many […]

November 28, 2011
Solving the Income Data Puzzle
Demand Drivers

Solving the Income Data Puzzle

The problem with Income Data in India Income data in India has always been a contentious issue. There is a lot of intuitive discomfort that we have with the numbers, especially when you have to explain them to someone from overseas who is evaluating the potential of the Indian market with a view to investing in it. “How can any one who earns so little, afford to buy so many things, and still manage the living expenses of a family of five?”, they ask, puzzled! We can definitely vouch for the fact that the income data is generated by reputed, world class organizations, using rigorously designed, huge sample size surveys that would satisfy any survey data excellence standard, anywhere in the world. So, there is no “survey science” flaw on which to hang our discomfort with the data. Obviously something isn’t adding up. For example, consider the NCAER data (2001-02, […]

November 12, 2011
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