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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
Sincerely Yours
C'est La Vie

Sincerely Yours

BIG BAZAAR is a brand that is a symbol of middle class abundance, aspiration for a better living curiosity and thirst for new consumption experiences, and in general of middle India modernity and sophistication–not westernisation but better Indian ways of doing things. If Infosys represents the journey of India abroad in the productivity and earning space, Big Bazaar represents the journey of India at home in the consumption and spending space. Big Bazaar brand’s relationship with its customers is what makes it so special. An old brand health question used to be not “what do you think of the brand?” but “what do you think the brand thinks of you?”. Big Bazaar thinks you are worth it even if you are not “hi-fi”; it doesn’t expect you to speak good English, know how to read signs in straight aisles and work with checklists. It doesn’t laugh at you because you […]

September 15, 2011
Calibrating SEC Classifications In Terms Of Relative Purchasing Power
Demand Drivers

Calibrating SEC Classifications In Terms Of Relative Purchasing Power

India is far too complex a market with multiple determinants of consumption behaviour, that no single consumer classification system works well for all kinds of product categories, and for all kinds of strategies. Income is one basic classificatory system which we have discussed earlier. The SEC (socio Economic Classification) system for classifying consumers is a favourite and, some would argue, more robust alternate system used by marketers and market analysts to classify consumers based on their propensity to consume. More robust because it is closely correlated with income, and easy to accurately elicit from respondents, no matter how poor or illiterate they are. The Urban SEC system (classes A to E) is based on the occupation and education of the head of the household, while the rural SEC (R1 to R4) system is based on the education of the head of the household and the type of house lived in. […]

September 12, 2011
The Fuel that Fires Anna-ism
India My Land

The Fuel that Fires Anna-ism

But the Anna-ists have invented yet another category of social activism that wants to job-share with the government in law making – we draft the Bill, you pilot it through Parliament; you implement it as a government, but we monitor your implementation. Even if the Anna-ists calm down soon and this bout of activism fades, it reveals a lot about some of the fundamental changes that have taken place in India recently, which has taken many people by surprise, including the government of the day. And this question is one that has been engaging the more thoughtful print media compared to the frenzied electronic media with its ball-by-ball commentary on television. For a start, a lot of people were wondering why the middle class is not revolting about rising prices. Yet when it comes to corruption, there is an uproar. There has been a general consensus on and disapproval of […]

August 20, 2011
Urban India’s rising resentment
Policy Perspective

Urban India’s rising resentment

There is resentment building up in the “aam janta” in urban India that the government and policy-makers need to understand better. If for nothing else, at least to promote more empathy and to handle the situation more sensitively to prevent the anger from spilling over onto the streets. In India, big waves are often caused by confluences of little ripples, and there is one brewing that needs to be diffused. The increase in petrol prices, the likely steep rise in LPG expenditure, the increase in the EMI burden and prolonged food inflation, all coming together, destabilises most sections of urban India, barring the very rich and the very poor. The least of the problem is that people will now, like in the old days, have to watch their budgets more closely and make tough “not buying” decisions. That would perhaps be the case with the top 30 per cent of […]

August 20, 2011
Sari State of Affairs
C'est La Vie

Sari State of Affairs

Unlike the designer weaver establishments I had been taken to see in the past, the poverty was appalling and the younger people had obviously deserted the profession, leaving a predominantly older group behind, and few younger women. The physical labour was very hard and I felt that all this sweat was just not worth the beauty of the sari being woven; the more intricate the weave, the more it meant that the man or the woman with an emaciated body and a barely subsistence-level hut would have to work. I was told that the younger generation prefers regular jobs to all this back-breaking work, and I thought with surprising relief, “Thank God, there is some progress”. I did ask myself why anybody in this day and age of gadgets and robotics and artificial intelligence should actually do so much manual labour. If you asked the question, “Does anything else done […]

June 26, 2011
Spooking Ourselves into a Slowdown
Business Strategy

Spooking Ourselves into a Slowdown

Dear Corporate India, why is there so much overt panic about an impending “slowdown” and “policy paralysis” at the centre and unfriendly (to whom?) rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)? It seems to echo the days of the global meltdown when a puzzled foreign investor asked me how it was that all the companies he had met, collectively said things were in a bad way, but individually and privately said things weren’t too bad. Maybe it’s just the business media that doesn’t seem to have a handle on things! Thursday’s headlines in one paper was about such a collective view of bankers about bad times, but Friday’s interview by the head of HDFC Bank – a balanced and mature high-performing organization by any yard stick – was very calm. He said, “Bad debts come when you have a tremendous fall in growth rate that is unexpected. Half […]

June 18, 2011
Super Grooms for Super Brides
C'est La Vie

Super Grooms for Super Brides

My take on this is that parents are now a lot more democratic, and there is little danger that they will force their children to get married to anyone that they don’t want to. The children know this and are outsourcing the hard work of dating and finding their own spouse to their parents. As my friend, adman and cultural analyst, Santosh Desai, says, the dating market has not developed. The mating market has just got more de-controlled. Young people have a word for it – they call it “engineered marriages”. Looking at the surveys in magazines on sexual attitudes and behaviour of GeNext, it seems that there are indeed two “value spaces” that co-exist, one new, one old, one the world of dating, the other, the world of marriage. It isn’t necessary that the dating pool is the one that needs to be waded into, in order to get […]

May 22, 2011
Blind Spots and Slippery Slopes
Corporate Governance

Blind Spots and Slippery Slopes

I read the most brilliant article in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled “Ethical Breakdown” that resonated a great deal with me, and I want to share it, because I suspect that many of us are thinking a lot about the “difficulty of being good” – that lovely phrase which has become my touchstone ever since I read it on the cover of Gurcharan Das’ book. The article deals with the question of why good people do unacceptable things, and why it doesn’t get spotted and stopped early on. Think board dynamics; where we sometimes unthinkingly classify asking questions or insisting on more analysis as disruptive or demoralising behaviour, when the sense of the house is that it is a good decision and there is a time-bound pressure to it so why not go ahead; or in not being appreciative enough of good outcomes that have been […]

May 21, 2011
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