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Waiting for Kalki – I
Business Strategy

Waiting for Kalki – I

But then India has always been about mixed verdicts. Talk to a lot of business people, and the cynical will tell you “this is the end, send your children out of the country there is no future here”. The more pragmatic will draw attention to examples of pockets of peace and prosperity defined either by business segments or geographic pockets or select companies. As always, everything you say of India, the opposite is also true. Economic and political diversity is increasing between states, and there is every combination of economic performance, political ideology, and business friendliness existing. Even within states there are oases and deserts. Ask any sales manager in any business to analyse the business and he will confirm it. So that’s the first clue to surviving the short term. Waiting for Kalki in the form of 8% or more high quality growth which will bring universal salvation is […]

April 22, 2002
The China Market Opportunity
Business Strategy

The China Market Opportunity

Dominique Turcq, a McKinsey consultant, described India and China as “Asia’s Non Identical Twins” – many similarities, and yet starkly different too. This phrase leapt to my mind on a recent visit to China. While today, the economic differences between India and China are very stark (all we need to do is drive through Shanghai or look at the economic indices), the similarity in the structure and culture of these markets is very real too. This makes for a genuine opportunity (not one that is defined by hype and hope) for Indian companies to leverage their business experience and skills to create businesses in China which can be at least as large as what they have in India. Like India, China is a complex multi tiered market in various simultaneous stages of evolution – the bullock cart to car continuum, and the Government to MNC continuum co-existing, be it healthcare […]

March 18, 2002
The Quality of Market Performance
Business Strategy

The Quality of Market Performance

It is corporate results time again, and stock market analysts are busy analysing the state of the markets – the markets that they spend their time worrying about and the markets that I spend my time worrying about. I used to wonder if there really was a connect between the two, a thought that was wonderfully captured in an Economic Times headline of a few years ago: “The Sensex is driven by neither sense nor sex”! However this is a new age, and I can’t but help notice how much more involved and aware stock market analysts and fund managers are about what is happening in consumer markets. They know their retail audit data very well and have more up to date analyses of segment and category wise aggregate demand than I do; they track market shares with the same tenacity as brand managers, and they ask a gamut of […]

January 14, 2002
The Customer Religion
Business Strategy

The Customer Religion

A business leader with a wry sense of humour recently observed that since the main reason being given by almost all businesses for slow consumer sales was the delay in the festival season and the fewer auspicious dates for marriages, the Hindu calendar should figure as a key variable for annual sales forecasting. I guess a corollary to that is that one of the key routes to stimulating market growth would be to lobby with the Hindu high priests and persuade them to be a wee bit more market friendly in their interpretation of the stars! Having determined that astrology and sentimentality (of the consumer confidence kind) can’t be cured in the short term at least, corporate speak is now about surviving and emerging stronger from this continuing slowdown, through “better customer understanding” and “innovation”. I would have felt a lot better if the connection between the two were made […]

November 14, 2001
Batting Blind: The Case of Household Income
Demand Drivers

Batting Blind: The Case of Household Income

It is a relief now to be able to confess that it has been very tough explaining to potential foreign investors how on Rs. 50,000 a year, a family of four can live, eat, educate children, and still buy consumer durables. Or how 60% of those with an income of Rs 10,000 to 12,000 per month have two wheelers and 25% have cars. It is also tough convincing MNC consulting firms that they should not be making forecasts on India applying their empirical data from other countries (e.g. the threshold level of income beyond which consumption “takes off “) to our income statistics. How have we been managing so far? Has the whole marketing community really been batting blind? Not quite blind. There are two popular sources of income data, NCAER’s MISH survey and ORG-MARG’s IRS survey. Both these surveys produce income data which is reliable (if you do it […]

August 24, 2012
India Needs a Communication Strategy
India My Land

India Needs a Communication Strategy

We have all watched with a mixture of upset and grudging admiration, the way Musharraf communicates to the world, via the media, far better than the way India does. While we clearly don’t want to be like him or say the same things as him, surely an equally forceful, equally unambiguous, equally engaging and attention getting communication from India would help us in the eyes of the watching world? We have a collective national disdain for what we call ‘media warfare’ and ‘spin doctoring’. But it is a fact of life that communication received through the idiot box today shapes perceptions of not only idiots but of wise men, as well. And shapes views not only on the issue at hand but leaves a residual impression about the brand that is talking, which in turn shapes the way future communication from the brand is received. Think about the communication from […]

August 14, 2001
Repositioning the India Brand
India My Land

Repositioning the India Brand

Here we are, 54 years old and a decade after liberalization  fighting for our ‘rightful’ place in the world, distressed with the world’s perception of the India brand. Sure there are a lot of things wrong with us, but there is enough right with us that we are not getting credit for. Our hypothesis is that this is because we have not proactively managed our brand perception, in a scientific and focused manner. Our brand speaks in many voices, sending out mixed messages, suffering from not being anchored around a clearly articulated brand vision or positioning statement that all spokespersons of the brand have internalized. Worse still, we think about and talk about our brand using a set of descriptors that are obsessively ‘inside – out’ and ‘product centric’, like “the world’s largest democracy”, “a billion people”, “a functioning anarchy”, “unity in diversity”, “having an ancient heritage” etc. If this were a […]

August 14, 2001
The Business of Branding
Business Strategy

The Business of Branding

The last time I wrote in this column about the telecom business, a senior person from within the business called saying he wanted to salute my courage – the ‘fools rush in where telecom experts fear to tread’ sort of courage. I probably have a death wish, so here I am again, venturing an opinion on the ‘hot topic’ of Reliance Infocom’s proposition to consumers, and what works and does not work with Indian consumers. In my line of work, there is a lot of agonizing about whether enough alternate ways of playing in any market have been explored. Yet there is a significant gap that exists between the aspiration of ‘changing the rules of the game’ and the actual development of a revolutionary business strategy to achieve it. The same old way of looking at consumers – same old segmenting variables, same old pricing paradigms, same old obsession with […]

June 14, 2001
A Consumer Centric Analysis of Market Growth
Demand Drivers

A Consumer Centric Analysis of Market Growth

An expanding bottom with a svelte top is obviously not the kind of figure that analysts and economy watchers like to see. And of course the one thing in short supply in most of the analyses and theories about the consumer goods slowdown is consumer level data. Understanding the dynamics of the demand slowdown and taking a point of view on whether it is temporary or long term requires consumer centric analysis of “who is buying (and how many such are there)” and “who has bought and who (and how many) are left to buy”. ‘Grassroots’ level insight will not come from “what is the trend of how much product has been sold in which pop strata” accounting analyses or from macro questions like “will a good monsoon revive consumer demand”. I want to illustrate this with just one example of some very basic consumer centric data taken from ORG […]

May 1, 2001
When The Going Gets Tough
Business Strategy

When The Going Gets Tough

It is the winter of our discontent again, as the pendulum of consumer demand journeys from the ‘there’s lots more where this came from’ end to the ‘Wonder where it disappeared’ end. For many of the A league companies, even the game of maintaining bottom line growth, despite flagging top line growth, has been played out. There is a limit to which the costs or operational efficiencies can be extracted from a given business system. For many less agile companies, the red ink is happening, as the overall growth of their market slows down, and their more aggressive competitors gobble up market share. There is bad news affecting all our four consumption sectors. Negligible agricultural growth affecting rural consumption, stock market crash and slow industrial growth affecting urban consumption, the US slowdown affecting the infotech dependent consumption sector, the belt tightening that the Government is doing affecting government job dependent […]

April 14, 2001
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