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Spotlight On Rural Consumers
Consumer Trends

Spotlight On Rural Consumers

Marketers need to change their mental models of the nature of village economy and rural consumers By Rama Bijapurkar & Rajesh Shukla Consumer demand in India is the aggregate of the demand of several mini-consumer Indias, each with its own distinctive demand pattern, its own degree of exposure to different environmental forces and its own response to these forces. And like a kaleidoscope, with every jerk, the pieces regroup, and a new picture emerges. With the most recent and very sharp jerk, the new picture of consumer demand seems to be one in which rural India is far more dominant than it has been in these past few years of strong urban volume and value growth. The glimmer of a rural silver lining to the dark clouds of reduced urban consumer spending is caused by several factors: a good monsoon, relative insulation from the gyrations of the stock market, the […]

December 4, 2008
Reflections On The Night Of Terror
India My Land

Reflections On The Night Of Terror

It was sheer luck, providence, kismet, that some of us live to tell this tale, while many of us were not so lucky at all. The pain on the faces of their loved ones is devastating for all of us watching – a pain that seems to come all too frequently nowadays. While television stations are going up the learning curve with each such episode, the Government seems to have not learnt at all. Not even learnt that we need a different Home Minister, someone better equipped to do such a big, important, and complex job. These past few days, as we weep with the victim’s families, and listen in horror to friends tell of watching people being killed in front of their eyes, my mind has been screaming, “It is NOT the economy, stupid”. Who cares where the Sensex is, when we have senselessness all around us. Who cares […]

December 1, 2008
Iim All Yours
C'est La Vie

Iim All Yours

The Bhargava Committee Report: A Leap Backwards (PART II) How the Bhargava Committee Report surrenders all significant control to the government After the emasculation of the IIMs through two tier board control and a careful process of selection of the “right” board members, comes the bit about the “co-ordination” that the pan IIM super board will do amongst the IIMs, bringing them all down to the lowest common denominator. The report preaches the doctrine of ‘sameness’ across all IIMs, ignoring the idea that strategically, differentiation is what makes the larger IIMs collectively more competitive. IIM C chose a more analytical, quantitative orientation while, IIM A, pursued a more generalist program, inspired by its original collaborator, Harvard Business School. IIM B has gone the functional and sector specialization route. In recent times, IIMA has chosen to launch a one year executive MBA and a one year program for policy makers and […]

November 22, 2008
The Great Leap Backwards
C'est La Vie

The Great Leap Backwards

The Bhargava Committee Report: A Leap Backwards (PART I) The IIM review makes a case for tightening the government’s tentacles The report of the IIM Review committee is finally out. If this were a student report it would get an A on “describing the current problems”, a C on all the sections they call “our analysis” – a C and not a D because some of the arguments made in the analysis are brilliantly tautological. As we tell our IIM students, if the analysis gets a D, don’t even bother to check your grade on ‘quality of recommendations’ – even if they make sense by some fluke, please go back and do your analysis – diagnosis again, with more rigour and depth. On integrity and intent, this report gets a straight F. The key thrust of the recommendation is that the boards governing the IIMs be configured in such a […]

November 21, 2008
Prognosis on Consumer Spending
Corporate Governance

Prognosis on Consumer Spending

We are spooking ourselves into a slowdown that is even slower than is warranted by the reality of how much our consumers’ disposable income and their mood has actually been hit. Gloom and doom feeds on itself, and then it makes companies even more pessimistic in their marketing conduct as they shift from coaxing consumers to buy (as they usually do in the normal course of their business) to conserving their own cash and not taking chances on sales growth generating expenditure. The last several quarters saw unprecedented rise in input costs, but companies decided to absorb much of it and opt for margin pressure rather than pass it on to the consumer and risk decreasing consumer demand. Their bet was on a steady future increase in consumer income and desire to consume, hence top line growth would more than offset the margin drop, and profits growth would be safe. […]

October 27, 2008
Made in India
India My Land

Made in India

A few weeks ago, the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM Ahmedabad organized a conference where alumni entrepreneurs were invited to share their experiences with the centre and with students interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Most of us would assume that very few people showed up on either side, since the popular perception of IIMA is that it is the bastion of straight-and-narrow corporate executives, and not the breeding ground for off-the-beaten-track entrepreneurs who march to the beat of his own drummer. Factually, the audience comprised about 150 alumni entrepreneurs and over 250 eager beaver students who came to learn whatever they could and to ask questions like “Is 5-6 years of work experience in a company a good thing before striking out on your own” and “how do you know when you are ready to take the plunge”. At the conference the CIIE also released a book […]

August 1, 2008
The Prognosis for Consumer Demand
Demand Drivers

The Prognosis for Consumer Demand

After the last edition of this column about the human face of the economy, and its implications for economic policy, someone asked why a consumer markets person was writing about the economy now. That is exactly the point that was attempted to be made in my last column and re iterated again here – that The Economy is not just about invisible macro forces or numbers like exchange rates and indices of industrial or agricultural production; but that it is also about how different people or groups of people actually get affected, how they think about their situation, and the spending / saving / investment choices they make as a result of that. When conference rooms debate whether there is an economic slowdown, if they are B2C companies, they are speculating about the spending and saving / investment choices and compulsions of rich and poor individual people; and if they […]

July 28, 2008
Should Ranbaxy Have Sold Out?
Business Strategy

Should Ranbaxy Have Sold Out?

Rama Bijapurkar, Independent Director and Market Strategy Consultant If we want opportunity for Indian companies to grow abroad, we have to open up our backyard Should Ranbaxy have sold out? To begin with, please let us use the phrase “sold”, and not “sold out”. The dictionary meaning of ‘sell out’ is betrayal. That sort of prejudges the case! No, I do not believe that the Ranbaxy sale is a setback to the rise of Indian MNCs. Let’s define what we mean by the emotionally loaded phrase “a setback to the rise of Indian MNCs”. It means that the phenomenon we all desire, of seeing more and more Indian companies expand their business operations to different countries around the world, will not pick up steam and grow exponentially. Worse still, it could slow down, or, even worse, could come to a grinding halt. So the question is, will the act of Ranbaxy promoters […]

June 17, 2008
Let a thousand Indias bloom
India My Land

Let a thousand Indias bloom

Lots of debate is happening around how to build “Brand India”. There are two commonly voiced dilemmas. One, that some of the harsh realities of India are so harsh (poor infrastructure, poor human development index, poor responsiveness from Government to potential investors, corruption etc.), that they will always appear as ugly black warts, marring the credibility of any ‘beautiful India’ or ‘powerful India’ branding that we do. The other dilemma is that there is no single India, and that it is impossible to reflect, under a single brand, the ancient heritage and the modern accomplishments, tourism’s “incredible India” and ITES’s 24×7 “industrious India”, manufacturing’s “innovative India” and the magic of handcrafted artisan India, the budhist stupas and Nehru’s temples of modern India, yoga, medicine and the IITs. The answer to the first is simple – yes, we need to work on our warts, but even as we do so, we […]

April 13, 2008
Governance Models for IIMs & IITs
Corporate Governance

Governance Models for IIMs & IITs

The HRD minister must be congratulated – and thanked – for wholeheartedly accepting the propositions that educational institutions should be governed by their governing boards; and that there is nothing wrong with a plan that delivers self-sufficiency with social justice. We look forward to this being the direction in which he will encourage all educational “navaratnas” to move. The purpose of this article is to provide facts and perspectives in order to frame the debate on governance of IIMs and IITs and the role of MHRD. It would be a waste of this space to further stir up the already muddied waters of the fee increase issue. Suffice it to say that social justice is not served by subsidising people who have an average starting salary of around Rs 17 lakh and access to pre-approved loans with banks who deem them creditworthy based on where they are going, and irrespective […]

April 7, 2008
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