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The Story of India: View through the “Stand Alone” Lens
Demand Drivers

The Story of India: View through the “Stand Alone” Lens

Everyone who has been on ‘marketing India’ road shows, especially in the West, cannot but help notice that while ‘India interest’ in the eyes of the world is increasing, India skepticism is not declining. Also familiar is that India gets less than its due, when balancing the good news and the bad news about it; while China gets more. The questions that get asked about India at the end of very well crafted, informative and sensible speeches from captains of industry or opinion leaders are always in the realm of “yes but…” I wonder if it is something to do with “aukaat” – the developed world feels that we should stay within our aukaat, and worry about our caste system, our perceived absence of civil society, our crimes against women etc, rather than stake our claim to the “who’s who’ of the new economic and hence political world order. But […]

July 1, 2004
Helping the IIMs to Surge Ahead
Corporate Governance

Helping the IIMs to Surge Ahead

Thank God for cosmic chaos. For delivering institutions of higher education from a regressive regime with anachronistic ideas. Thank God for the new HRD minister and his team who believe in logic, dialogue, and the sanctity of governing boards. The IIMs now have a window of huge opportunity to sell a plan to get them well on the path to world class, and get the resources and the changes needed to make it happen. There is now a really urgent need for the IIMs, especially the big three, to redeem the faith and the enormous support that they have received from the new ministry, from their governing boards, from their alumni and well wishers, and from the media. There can be no disagreement from everyone, inside and outside, who participated in this battle, that this is the time to open a discontinuous new chapter of big, hairy, audacious goals, and […]

June 14, 2004
The Consumer Vocabulary / Explanation for Anti Incumbency
India My Land

The Consumer Vocabulary / Explanation for Anti Incumbency

Ever since election results were out, there has been an avalanche of comment by politicians, political watchers, journalists, pollsters, intellectuals, advertising and marketing experts and more, analysing the who – what – why of the results. But conspicuous in its absence has been the voice of the voter. “What”, some might say in horror. “This whole thing is about the voice of the voter”. But as I said in as earlier article “Let’s have real vox pop please”, in a business we would insist that market share and sales data numbers, especially when unexpected, be explained through the lens of individual customer attitude and behaviour i.e. what customers did, and what they thought, which made them do what they did. The election result is like market share and sales data. Real explanations are what we are yet to get – too few facts straight from the horses mouth i.e. from […]

May 14, 2004
Pain and Gain of Urban India
Demand Drivers

Pain and Gain of Urban India

There is no dearth of empirically valid, statistically sound and anecdotally familiar sales and survey data on what characteristics different types of markets in the country have, and how they have been behaving in terms of what and how they buy. Contradictions and counter intuitive findings abound, which we cannot explain away as data errors. “Tier two towns hold lots of potential – do you know that in Valparai, we sell more X YZ than in Hyderabad? And by the way Hyderabad is visibly wealthy”. “UP may be poor but we actually sell as much there as in Gujarat “. “Delhi is actually richer than Bombay, but Bombay has a different character”, “Bangalore and Hyderabad are both very happening markets, but frankly, I would place my bets on Hyderabad ; actually maybe on Bangalore; they are different but I can’t place my finger on it”; Bangalore is a better quality […]

May 1, 2004
It is time for Version 2 of FMCG Marketing
Business Strategy

It is time for Version 2 of FMCG Marketing

The pundits (pun intended) at the Economic Times have said a lot these past few days about ‘vindis and levers of change’ culminating in the Saturday editorial “will reorganization do the trick at HLL”. I am not sure that is the fundamental question that needs to be debated. The reorganization signals continuity with change, and a renewed vote of majority share holder confidence in the old order (the new management team is the old management team, with some increases and decreases in roles, some departures, no outside additions, and certainly no dramatic experiments with organization structure, as far as one can see). What needs to be debated, is the more central issue facing the company, and indeed the category. As discussed in the editorial, the central issue seems to be that the once famed value advantage that HLL offered consumers, is eroding ( “value” defined simply as “Sum total of benefit […]

April 19, 2004
Supply Side Sluggishness?
Business Strategy

Supply Side Sluggishness?

We have watched and waited, this past decade, for the Indian consumer and for Consumer India to ’emerge’. As I have said before in this column, we have been, metaphorically speaking, waiting for Kalki, the next avatar of Vishnu, to come and rescue us. I am convinced that Kalki is already here, only we don’t recognize it. One frequent ‘waiting for Kalki’ question is “when will the per capita income of this country get to X, which is the magic number when consumption will ‘take off’. The depressing data answer to this question is that with the slow and steady income growth we will have, in about ten years, we will hit the 1000 USD per capita GDP number. But since everything we say of India the opposite is also true, the other answer is to look at the most aggressive, “we try hardest’ market of FMCG. Even as early […]

February 16, 2004
Can We Have Some Real Vox Pop Please?
India My Land

Can We Have Some Real Vox Pop Please?

I certainly don’t want to be a party pooper but I do feel uneasy reading the results of the Census of India and assorted Development reports side by side with the India Shining campaign and the English newspapers talking about the ‘feel good’ factor. I know both are true, and I know which one I want to believe as the larger truth that the good macro economic numbers translate into. But I can’t help thinking that there are human beings that all these macro statistics represent and that we haven’t really heard what they have to say. In a business, we would insist that sales data be backed up with data from the customer level on performance, both behavioural and attitudinal – percentage usership, repeat purchase rates, brand perceptions and loyalty, customer satisfaction levels, etcetera. What makes me uneasy is the impression I have that we haven’t heard the voice […]

January 14, 2004
But Are Marketers Ready, Asks Rama Bijapurkar
Business Strategy

But Are Marketers Ready, Asks Rama Bijapurkar

Consumer India has always been pretty tricky to double guess. Just when we believed that consumer spending was firmly on a high growth trajectory – based on the wonder years of 1993 – 98 – it spluttered and slowed to a crawl. For the next few years, marketers tried everything they knew to speed it up again. They dropped prices while improving product and service quality. “Buy-one-get-one-free”, they offered. But that only helped them get volume growth at the expense of operating margins. The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector had a terrible time with some product categories actually shrinking in size, while consumer durable manufacturers struggled to reconcile capacity with demand. Sure there was a fast growing yet minuscule population of the very rich, which continued to lap up everything from plasma TVs to Mercedes cars – but that was cold comfort for the majority of the marketers. After much […]

December 28, 2003
Privileged Midnight’s Children, It’s Time for Serious Nation Building
India My Land

Privileged Midnight’s Children, It’s Time for Serious Nation Building

I am writing this especially for my age cohort and culture class, ‘privileged midnight’s children’, and articulating what many of us already feel.*(An Age Cohort comprises a group of people born at roughly the same time in the same place or country, and consequently experiencing the same major economic, political and social upheavals at about the same stage in their lives; their lives are punctuated by the same crises, they share the same nation-memories and they encounter every new decade, each with its own particular challenges, at similar stages in their lives). Born in the first 15 years after independence, the first generation of independent India, we have seen the pain of misguided socialism, the horrors of the emergency, and the humiliation of being dismissed as second class citizens by the first world. We are now more confident of our own identity and talent, and can transact as equals, with […]

August 18, 2003
The New Change Wave – ‘Womanism’
Consumer Trends

The New Change Wave – ‘Womanism’

There is a slow but definite wave of change happening – one that politicians and marketers would do well to ride on, rather than ignore. Women are on the move in India, inching their way away from being doormats, away from the socially ordained straitjacket that Hindi movies of yesteryear so glorified “yours is not to question why, yours is but to do … and die…in the finest tradition of the adarsh bharatiya nari”. I deliberately chose the words “inching their way away from” rather than “marching determinedly towards breaking free”, because that is the truth of the matter. So, why is this slow burn such a big deal to qualify as a change wave? Because, force = mass x acceleration, and the force of change caused by a large mass of people moving even at a very slow speed is huge enough to qualify as a change wave. Because […]

July 21, 2003
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