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Rescripting the India Brand
India My Land

Rescripting the India Brand

The image of the India brand in the eyes of the outside world is poor, and like everything else about India, fragmented. The ‘Political India’ variant of the brand is not powerful enough to get us our security council seat, or brand Pakistan a rogue state. The ‘Economic India’ variant is not powerful enough to be the unquestioned destination for global investment, or be unequivocally acknowledged as a future engine of world business growth. A few infotech entrepreneurs are improving the image of “Economic India’, but the world seems to perceive ‘Infotech India’ as yet another variant, and is not transferring its goodwill on to the parent brand. Similarly the ‘Well Educated Indian’ brand has an image that we can be proud of, but as Swaminathan Aiyer wrote, Indians win, but India loses. The sadness is that anybody else having the ‘product features’ that we do (large chunks of the […]

August 14, 2000 0 Comments
Demon Slayer and Beautiful Beloved
India My Land

Demon Slayer and Beautiful Beloved

The marketing person in me admires Devi, who dispenses knowledge, militancy or money depending on which altar her devotee feels like workshipping on that day! Her brand variants are endless, and clearly differentiated. No lemon or lychee flavour marginal difference between them. She wields one ldnd of power because she is Mahishasura Mardini, the demon slayer, and a clearly different one because she is Madhusudana Kamini, Vishnu’s beautiful beloved, on which basis she extracts a lot of favours from him. She is the stoic Parvati and the food giver Annapoorna who, when slighted, can go on strike and make even the most powerful come to her, begging bowl in hand. She is the emotionally blackmailing, fasting-without even eating a leaf-Anarna. I always wonder though how she manages the variants of Mahishasura Mardini and Madhusudana Kamini without accidentally using the wrong variant for the wrong market. I also love the fact […]

July 15, 2000 0 Comments
Car Wars
Business Strategy

Car Wars

Maruti has had a lot of unsympathetic press lately, and the media post mortem of its strategy is not yet over. When Titan decimated HMT, the ‘timekeeper of the nation’, there was no editorial saying “Titans of industry can suddenly look like endangered species if the evolutionary tide of the market moves away from them”(Business Standard, July 5, 2000). The mechanical to quartz shift in the watch market definitely was an evolutionary tide, the like of which has not happened in the car market. Another evolutionary tide, the scooter segment of the two wheeler market collapsing, did not earn Bajaj Auto the screaming headline “market share hits an all time low” (Economic Times, June 24). When Colgate’s 60% plus market share was getting gobbled by Hindustan Lever, there was not much mention of “humbled giant” and “fall of the mighty”. Incidentally, the outcome of that battle suggests that a fundamentally […]

July 10, 2000 0 Comments
2B or 2C
Business Strategy

2B or 2C

It used to be said of a prestigious men’s college in Delhi that when it rained in Oxford they would open their umbrellas here, in reflex. The dotcom industry seems to be in the same mode nowadays. When B2C sneezes in America, everyone here seems to develop a full blown cold, complete with cold feet! “B2C is out”, is the buzz we have been hearing of late from consultants, funders, and valuation focused dotcom companies, scrambling to re-incarnate themselves as B2B. Yet there is a parallel conceptual discourse going on that suggests the opposite. For example, in the June 8th issue of Economic Times there was an interview with a global management consultant who said “Any area where the gap is huge between the customer’s desires and the realities holds good potential”. In India there are several areas with yawning gaps that we know about and experience all the time. […]

June 12, 2000 0 Comments
The Kaleidoscope Of Consumer Demand
Demand Drivers

The Kaleidoscope Of Consumer Demand

Consumer demand in India has been behaving in a fairly capricious manner – or so it seems when viewed at an aggregate level. Every few years, and of late every year, the composition of who is buying, and what they are buying changes quite significantly, a bit like a kaleidoscope where with every shake, the resultant picture has totally changed. The usual explanations of bad monsoon, stock market sluggishness, saturation of larger markets, low consumer confidence don’t seem to apply across the board to all products! In a period of economic slowdown and depressed consumer sentiment, television sets sales increase handsomely, and despite poor agricultural performance, motorcycle sales in rural areas have runaway growth. And nothing seems to last long enough to qualify for a trend that is explainable. Some years, there is sharp growth in demand for rural low priced products, except that in the next year, the urban […]

May 15, 2000 0 Comments
The Human Face Of Markets
Demand Drivers

The Human Face Of Markets

Newspapers during the Republic Day week reminded me of the opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities. The spring of hope and the winter of despair, the best of times and the worst of times etc. etc.. They described an India in which live a few world respected dollar billionaires, many more who are speeding (or trudging) along the ‘three way fast lane’ towards prosperity, and a vast majority waiting on the side for a ‘safe pedestrian crossing’, with the mounting ‘fury of the patient and the long suffering’. They provided ample confirmation that the pain of liberalisation is being borne by one set of people and the pleasures by another. One newspaper article talked of how brainy youth from South India are much in demand in Silicon Valley, and special legislation was brought about in the US in 98-99 to enable more of them to work there. Another […]

February 1, 2000 0 Comments
Phase Two of Consumer Demand
Consumer Trends

Phase Two of Consumer Demand

Everyone is heaving a sigh of relief that the dark clouds of sluggish consumer demand are finally lifting. However, the mood in corporate corridors is one of qualified optimism. There seems to be a consensus that while there is a clear resurgence in consumer demand, the heady growths that we saw in the first half of the nineties will never return – happy times are here again, but the golden days are gone forever. According to me, the main challenge going forward, is not about learning to be pragmatic and accepting the inevitability of slower growth rates; nor is it about changing the definition of what good corporate performance is, or building muscle and redoubling marketing effort to try and achieve past growth rates. The main challenge stems from the fact that the source and nature of future consumer demand growth will be quite different from that of the past. […]

December 14, 1999 0 Comments
India: Understanding the Process of Change
Consumer Trends

India: Understanding the Process of Change

Corporate India has been acutely aware that they must keep a close watch on their marketplace, since change is in the air. Yet, despite constantly being on the look out, many companies have been caught unawares by the changes that actually happen in their market place. Every time they looked, it seemed like it was business as usual, and suddenly, one day, it became a totally different world, with dramatic shifts in market structure and definite changes in consumer behaviour, causing them to suddenly scramble and gear up, post facto. “When did we blink”, is the question often asked, and the answer is never obvious. Now, galvanised by millennium fever, there is redoubled effort to understand the nature and the distance of the journey Consumer India has made in the past decade, and to ‘see’ what the road ahead could look like. Most participants in such exercises have confessed that […]

October 14, 1999 0 Comments
e-Hype: The Great Indian Middle Class revisited?
Business Strategy

e-Hype: The Great Indian Middle Class revisited?

The whole discourse on ‘Internet India’ in the media and in business forums leaves me with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. It sounds a little too close to the “size and opportunity of the Great Indian Middle Class” saga that was enacted out not too long ago. Small current markets were forecasted to grow to huge numbers, born out of the analogy school of forecasting that applied ‘elsewhere’ metrics of penetration, per capita consumption and growth to the humongous numbers of people in India. To the quantitative analysis, we then added the qualitative element – the Indian consumer, we believed, was ’emerging’ and the ugly duckling was about to become the beautiful swan. The result was a very seductive picture of market opportunity that was expected to happen with a momentum of its own, powered by the ‘who can resist progress’ compulsion. What followed, as they say, is history. […]

September 14, 1999 0 Comments
The Reality of the Indian Market
Demand Drivers

The Reality of the Indian Market

It is perhaps time to take stock of all that we have learnt in these past six or seven years about the nature of the Indian market, now that it has emerged from its shackles of socialism, monopolies and hardly visible income growths. Lesson 1: First and foremost, a generic model of market structure has emerged, with five tiers of demand, ranging from “anywhere in the world consumers who just happen to be in India” to “just escaped from poverty and entering the arena of consumption”. In order to fully exploit the potential of this multi tiered consumer base, there is no escape from a multi pronged product strategy, ranging from “as good as anywhere in the world quality at world prices”, all the way to “adequate quality at affordable prices”. The slight diversion that we took in the recent past, in believing that there was a huge and homogenous […]

September 1, 1999 0 Comments
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