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The Real Ice Phenomenon
Consumer Trends

The Real Ice Phenomenon

The “ICE age Indian consumer” is now a mandatory topic at most marketing conferences and meetings. There is a disturbing mental model that seems to be embedded in the popular view – that of a person who is Internet savvy, cell phone and broadband happy and hangs out at interesting sites both real and virtual. Often the word ICE and Netizen are used interchangeably. The dominant logic seems to be that this is a small yet significant number; so what if it is just the tip of the Consumer India iceberg, its growth rates are astounding and this will soon gather critical mass and define the mainstream consumer. Sounds scarily like the Great Indian Middle Class story, revisited! But what is more disturbing is that in the preoccupation with the tip of the ICEberg, we seem to be missing the main event of the ICE age and focusing on the […]

January 23, 2001
Prospects for the Consumer Goods Sector
Demand Drivers

Prospects for the Consumer Goods Sector

The FMCG sector slowdown that everyone is talking about needs to be viewed in perspective. Is it really a slowdown caused by a deteriorating economic condition, or is it merely the morning-after, after a particularly good night before? I think it is the latter – what we are seeing is the concluding chapter of phase 1 demand, dying gasp and all. The fundamentals of Consumer India seem fine. In fact, it seems like urban India, at least, is definitely headed for consumption ‘take off’ in the next five years. However there are corrections that are happening now which are tough. As one CEO said recently, there is no doubt that the long term looks good. The short term is the difficult bit. One thing is clear – the golden days of runaway growth are over and slower growth rates are a fact of life. We need to re adjust our […]

October 1, 2000
Is the Future Happening?
Demand Drivers

Is the Future Happening?

Is the Future Happening? The Economic Times – September 2000 The marketing of India as an investment destination is moving into high gear again. ‘Indian market opportunity ‘ has been a traditional pillar of our sales pitch, and over the years, we have moved from hype to hope and now, with eight years of post liberalisation market understanding, it’s time for review and realism. When we first started selling India in the early nineties, statistics about the affluence of the consumer base and the current market size were embarrassing. The sales pitches were perforce about ‘what can happen”, rather than “what it is now”, a picture painted about a huge ‘middle class’ consumer base hungry for products and services that they had been deprived of. The “suppressed demand” theory was soon proved wrong, and the sales pitch moved on to saying that over the years, as incomes grow and consumers […]

September 1, 2000
Is the Future Market Happening?
Demand Drivers

Is the Future Market Happening?

Is the Future Market Happening? The Economic Times – September 2000 The marketing of India as an investment destination is moving into high gear again. ‘Indian market opportunity ‘ has been a traditional pillar of our sales pitch, and over the years, we have moved from hype to hope and now, with eight years of post liberalisation market understanding, it’s time for review and realism. When we first started selling India in the early nineties, statistics about the affluence of the consumer base and the current market size were embarrassing. The sales pitches were perforce about ‘what can happen”, rather than “what it is now”, a picture painted about a huge ‘middle class’ consumer base hungry for products and services that they had been deprived of. The “suppressed demand” theory was soon proved wrong, and the sales pitch moved on to saying that over the years, as incomes grow and […]

September 1, 2000
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
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
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
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
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
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
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