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Indians are pragmatic value seekers
Consumer Trends

Indians are pragmatic value seekers

Are Indians nowadays saying “proud to be Indian, buy Indian”? And have they made a U-turn on their earlier craze for “phoren” and “imported”? No one can accuse Indians of being that simple and unequivocal! Of course, Indians are far prouder today of being Indian than they have been in the past 50 years. The world is now much more respectful of India. All Indians, especially the consuming class (the richer half), have experienced improved living conditions and progress on many fronts. Consumer India has ample evidence of “Made in India” products changing from a limited range, cheap and shoddy, to a wide array, as good as what you can buy outside and often cheaper. But does this mean that saying “not from an MNC” or adding a dollop of Indianness to the marketing mix is today’s magic mantra of ensuring consumer preference? Of course not. We are now proud […]

September 4, 2016 0 Comments
The Context and Contours of Consumer Behaviour in New India
Consumer Trends

The Context and Contours of Consumer Behaviour in New India

When the prime minister announced the ambitious push to ‘Make in India’ and companies were thinking of setting up manufacturing hubs in India for the world, a la China, the irony was not lost on many. Here we are in one of the world’s most attractive consumer markets, and we are searching for opportunities to manufacture for the rest of the worlds’ consumption. A couplet by Sant Kabir came to mind, where he describes the musk deer which smells the intoxicating musk emanating from its own belly, and spends the rest of its life searching all around for the source of the scent! The Indian consumer market has high gain and high pain. It is very heterogeneous, very modest in income, very high in aspiration and scattered over a very large number of villages and towns. Multinationals entering this market have struggled with their strategy, expectations and had its hopes […]

August 2, 2016 0 Comments
The renaissance
Consumer Trends

The renaissance

How marketing dominated, declined and then resurrected through the decades. The 1980s were glory days for marketing in India. The skills were world class though the products they sold were not! The finest talent joined marketing companies, ad agencies and research agencies. Testimony to this is how successful this cohort has later been on the global stage. India’s marketer of the 1980s innovated, adapted, brought science and art and slog to the marketing function. The first socio-economic classification of consumers was done in the 1980s; media planning models were state-of-the-art, though run on lumbering mainframes; advertising had a good mix of left brain brand planning and right brain creativity; and market research pioneered methodology to interview illiterate villagers, built algorithms to forecast market share and election seats and develop the discipline of qualitative research. Brands were built, nurtured and renewed over decades with caring and consumer insight. Distribution systems, with […]

July 18, 2016 0 Comments
IIM bill: Degree of unfreedom
Policy Perspective

IIM bill: Degree of unfreedom

Slogans of ‘Make in India’ and ‘Minimum Government’ won’t ring true if IIMs are being strangled. The bill says that there will be a ‘coordination forum’, whose role is to ‘facilitate the sharing of experiences, ideas and concerns with a view to enhancing performance of all institutions’ and ‘deliberate on matters of common interest’ and, more frighteningly, to ‘perform such other functions as may be referred to it by the Central government.’ The prime minister needs to explain to the ministry of human resource development (HRD) the meaning of his “moola mantra” and election promise “minimum government, maximum governance”. The proposed new IIM bill from the HRD ministry does the opposite. It claws back a lot of existing autonomy of these institutions and reduces IIM boards to the rubber-stamping handmaidens of the ministry. This new move to take greater government control comes despite the lack of evidence of the need […]

June 25, 2015 0 Comments
There Are Good Days and Bad Days
C'est La Vie

There Are Good Days and Bad Days

Rama’s husband Ashoke Bijapurkar, adman and consultant, passed away on February 11, 2015 after a cardiac arrest. Rama is a market strategy consultant and an author. Friends sent me Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook post, which I read with tearful resonance, like so many others around the world. Hit with a tsunami that erased my life as I knew it from the age of 20, I still yearn for, as she puts it, ‘Option A’ (her late husband). I admire her for being able to share coherently her innermost thoughts and feelings of the first month without Dave. I know that she has young children and the hard work of raising them ahead of her. As I sit down to write this exactly four months after Ashoke passed away on February 11, I am grateful that I am not young and my days of heavy lifting, be it professional, societal or familial, […]

June 21, 2015 0 Comments
Marketers must revise their rural marketing formula based on hard facts, say consultants
Business Strategy

Marketers must revise their rural marketing formula based on hard facts, say consultants

By: Rama Bijapurkar and Rajesh Shukla Rural consumption expenditure is 56% of all India expenditure as we speak, and growing faster. So is rural marketing as we once knew it dead? Some marketers say that in their experience the rural-urban divide is blurring, and the whole idea of rural marketing as we knew it (haats, wall paintings, mobile vans, paisa packs, street corner demos on benefits and methods of usage, etc.) are now obsolete; that media, physical distribution, exposure to the world, income levels, access to ecommerce have drastically improved, so let’s officially end the era of specialists in rural markets. This is true if you drive through many of the more developed states with easy road and public and private transport connectivity to the nearest large town with jobs, more rural educational facilities and higher incomes thanks to non-agricultural jobs and to better paying crops. Yet others have adopted the […]

March 18, 2015 0 Comments
Gold monetisation: Make your metal work for you and the economy
Consumer Trends

Gold monetisation: Make your metal work for you and the economy

By: Bijapurkar and Rajesh Shukla Explaining Indians’ love of gold to foreigners is hard. We are the world’s biggest gold consumer, pipping China to the post, and consuming 842 tonnes of gold in 2014, 75 per cent of which was in the form of jewellery. It is very hard to explain to puzzled foreigners the psychological and emotional feelings of well-being and security that comes from owning or wearing gold. Whenever I buy gold jewellery, my friends from the cold analytical world of finance give me an estimate of the likely rate of return I would get over a period of time and demonstrate how it is a foolish investment more so after the jeweller applies his weight discount for the solder and wastage. But such rationality cannot overcome millennia of the positive symbolism for gold. While my domestic help scrimps and saves to buy gold for her own social […]

March 16, 2015 0 Comments
The consumer is ready; are companies?
Consumer Trends

The consumer is ready; are companies?

The Indian consumer is feeling very good right now. Across the rich and poor, and those who live in both urban and rural India, there is a strong belief that the good times are around the corner (echoing the Achhe din aane wale hain slogan on which the Bharatiya Janata Party rode to power last year). Since October 2014, when this survey was done, inflation has eased further, and there has been a decrease, albeit one that could be temporary, in fuel prices, while food prices have cooled. In short, there is no reason for the optimism evident late last year to have dissipated by now. This sentiment has translated into confidence that incomes will improve or, at worse, stay the same. Sure, there are those who remain uncertain, but across the board, the indicators do suggest that the Indian consumer is ready and waiting. In the context of some […]

February 25, 2015 0 Comments
New residents in search of the new city
India My Land

New residents in search of the new city

An even more disheartening statistic is that, in the top 53 cities, about 16 per cent of the population lives in slums. Indian cities once used to have distinctive characteristics. There was beavering Mumbai, epitomised by the hordes milling in and out of train stations, and cabbies who would not bother to give up precious billable hours to molest a passenger, and the rich and famous living discreetly. In contrast, there was middle-class, government Delhi and powerful, political Delhi, where everyone understood their place in life and how best to signal it loudly. Kolkata was the bastion of genteel poverty and good manners, as seen from its decaying buildings and the way it cared for its women. Unlike Delhi, where women were traumatised with male harassment, in Kolkata, women were offered seats in crowded mini-buses and were treated like everybody’s mothers and sisters on the street. I once got into […]

January 6, 2015 0 Comments
Demand Drivers

Bridging the income gap

By: Rama Bijapurkar and Rajesh Shukla Inequality in India has reduced in the last decade but the key to reducing the still yawning spread in incomes is supporting an entrepreneurial ecosystem with gusto. (Illustration: Ajay Thakuri) ABOUT: Among the keenest watchers of Indian consumers, Rama Bijapurkar and Rajesh Shukla are co-founders of People Research on India’s Consumer Economy, a not-for-profit research centre on India’s consumer economy and citizen environment. Bijapurkar has served on boards of several Indian companies and is author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-Before World. Shukla, formerly director at NCAER Centre of Macro Consumer Research, is author of How India Earns, Spends, Saves.  The discussion inside India on inequality has become very complex and fragmented. Lost in the maths and the economic theory, the ideology and the international comparisons is the “people view”. It’s the tower of Babel and the championship of siloed thinking out […]

January 4, 2015 0 Comments
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