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Retailing Fever: Bring in the Customer
Business Strategy

Retailing Fever: Bring in the Customer

If supply chain perfection leads to a lower cost or better quality or both, then it must be translated into a customer benefit of a unique price performance point, says Rama Bijapurkar THERE is a retail fever raging through India, and as in the dot com days, you cannot go a hundred yards without running into someone who plans to get rich on retail or has got rich on retail. The game, as was the case in dot com, is about a temporary suspension of good sense on current and future valuations because of the blind belief that there is a gold mine accessible to anyone who has made the effort to buy a pick and a shovel. This is further exacerbated by the FDI rules and their mosaic of exceptions. The unquestioned assumption nowadays is that with the creation of more and more supply, more and more consumer spend […]

January 29, 2007
“Rural Academies: Way to Go”?
India My Land

“Rural Academies: Way to Go”?

This is an exciting strategy because it is both holistic and flexible, and because it is extendable with easy to make changes, for different employer requests and different community constraints, says Rama Bijapurkar It’s always nice to begin a new year with a note of real hope and inspiration, and here’s the story I have to tell of the Rural Retail Academy, a vocational training initiative from Andhra Pradesh. The first batch of 700 rural youth have “graduated” from three academies, with 90% placement in large and well known retail companies like Future Group, McDonald, Food World, Spencer’s and Reliance, at salaries of Rs 3,000 plus per month. What is even nicer is that this is a government initiative, which is built around the mantras of “being totally market driven” and “private sector partnership”. And nicest of all is the gender ratio of the graduating class – 40% women! Three […]

December 14, 2006
The Crisis of Supply
Demand Drivers

The Crisis of Supply

The confusing part about the Indian market is that the issues affecting its health and wealth shift suddenly, and we are often caught unawares. From the beginning of liberalization, consumer demand has been the number 1 problem issue for us. Not enough of it, not for the price – product configurations that the rest of the world buys, truant monsoon dependant rural demand, flighty urban demand because new categories emerged faster than income growths and a premature hype about the middle class leading to exaggerated expectations and over creation of capacity. India Inc. went from era 1 of euphoria in the first half of the 90s with the unleashing of pent up demand to era 2 of despair in the mid to late 90s with demand growth way below expectations and new capacities built with high cost borrowings. Then came era 3 in the late 90s and early 2000s, with […]

October 30, 2006
It’s a Global Problem: Innovate the Solution
India My Land

It’s a Global Problem: Innovate the Solution

I had a set of questions posed to me by the ET team: Why do career women in India struggle so hard with their work – life balance? Are lessons from Nooyi’s experience relevant to Indian career women? Who needs to change first, India Inc or the women? They requested that I write a “sharp piece” – which I think means cut out the politically correct BS and get straight to the heart of the matter as you see it. And so I shall, based on the many exchanges I have had with career women around the world, and from my own experience with five “proper” jobs in big and small organizations and then working for myself, while doing the maa, bahu, biwi, beti roles in the forever soap opera that is the typical Indian extended family. First, Indian women are not more beleaguered or less evolved than their counterparts […]

August 14, 2006
The Message of Rang De Basanti
India My Land

The Message of Rang De Basanti

The block buster success of the movie Rang De Basanti forces us to re-examine the picture that media and social commentators have been drawing about India’s urban, educated gen next – that of a bunch detached and disengaged from their national context and interested only in maximizing material well being. My nephew who goes to a snooty Mumbai school where the latest on Nike attracts more discussion than the latest on Narmada, says that his friends loved it and discussed it a lot. A young lady who went abroad at 17 says that she and her Indian friends in college saw it and wanted to head back home. Kamlesh Pande the writer of Rang De Basanti (RDB), says that he was surprised at the way he was cheered at a college convocation and had loads of young people who said “thank you for opening our eyes with RDB”. Several young […]

May 1, 2006
Indian Consumers And The Market
Demand Drivers

Indian Consumers And The Market

CONSUMER window data on markets is exceedingly useful, since it analyses markets as a collection of people who buy products, and not as a collection of products sold by a set of competitors. Unfortunately, such data is also difficult to come by. So, when such data comes along that is recent, nationally representative, low-priced and high-quality, my advice is to snap it up immediately! The Guide to Indian Markets 2006, by Hansa Research and Media Research Users Council is one such report, based on the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) of 2000 and 2005, an all-India study, with a large and rigorously designed and selected sample of about 1,65,000 households in urban India and about 75,000 in rural India. In each household, the housewife has been interviewed for details of household demographics, FMCG consumption, and ownership of durables, and a randomly selected adult, aged 12 years or above, interviewed for media habits. […]

May 1, 2006
Vive la Difference!
India My Land

Vive la Difference!

The two of us, writing this piece, are battle hardened though somewhat exhausted sufferers of a debilitating physical and mental condition. It is called “trying to be super woman-itis”. Some symptoms of this are “muthering heights”, and “we are just like men in the work place”. But we are now going through treatment for all these, and what better timing than International Women’s Day to tell it like it is and bring relief to millions of other sufferers like us, professional women who are also home makers and family nurturers, and for whom life is a giant balancing act. We spent most of our working lives believing that we were doomed to disaster if we were to even admit to ourselves that there were special, gender specific issues that affected us working women cum home makers; and that even if we admitted it to ourselves, it was professional harakiri to […]

March 8, 2006
Paying for Basic Consumer Data
Corporate Governance

Paying for Basic Consumer Data

Even as large companies in India loudly proclaim their worship at the altar of consumer centricity, their reluctance to pay for fundamental consumer related, consumer based market structure data bases is low. The market research industry agrees with me– they say that serious analysis of fundamental, consumer data on demographics, living conditions, spend patterns, consumption and ownership, collected on an all India basis, across rich and poor, rural and urban households does not have as much demand as it ought to, given the level of business interest and business speak about consumers. And it isn’t because the price is prohibitive. India has the lowest cost survey data compared to anywhere in the world, and of very high quality.I am not referring to market research budgets, which are showing healthy growth. The fact is that a lot of market research spend is on product and marketer performance related issues like customer […]

February 14, 2006
Creating Active Citizenry
C'est La Vie

Creating Active Citizenry

I am a great fan of Pavan K Varma. In a recent interview about his book “Being Indian: The Truth about why the 21st Century will be India’s”, he says that we Indians are a bundle of contradictions. “We are focused and will work towards a goal despite formidable obstacles. So we are resilient , ingenuous, ever hopeful”. If you have trouble believing this, just look at the epic proportions to which we take the saga of standard 10, 12 and college admissions. Rich or modest in income, the drama is the same. It’s a discourse which we all are a part of, that says “just do it, never say ‘can’t’, at this time of life, ‘chalta hai’ is not an option”. And guess what? Very few of our children rebel against it. Otherwise the coaching class and entrance test industry would be out of business. In fact Verma agrees […]

January 15, 2006
The Anatomy Of Social Tension
India My Land

The Anatomy Of Social Tension

So, what did I learn in the past year? Other than the fact that the problem of traffic in any given city is inversely proportional to the quality of shopping in that city; or that the MPs seem to work on a cost plus basis to price their questions, rather than on a perceived value basis – hopefully! I learnt yet again, that India changes so insidiously that you can never see the change that you are watching out for, until it comes and bites you in the butt in some other form. Over the years, whenever I have shown the income distribution and income growth pattern of post-1992 to foreigners, they invariably ask, “so will there be a lot of social tension, as some get more visibly prosperous than others”? I have always dismissed this idea as a typical, materialistic “western mind” conceptualisation of life, that says everyone must […]

December 26, 2005
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