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Alyque Padamsee: Always a champion, never a challenger, he strode the ad world like a colossus
C'est La Vie

Alyque Padamsee: Always a champion, never a challenger, he strode the ad world like a colossus

To say that he was brilliant, impossible, dazzling, utterly his own person and the definer of Indian advertising is an understatement. Like he said in his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger” Alyquee Padamsee died at the age of 90. (Source: directordhruv/Instagram) They just don’t make ad men like they used to. The charismatic Subhas Ghoshal, the charmingly intellectual Subroto Sengupta, the visionary people magnet Prashanta Sanyal. And now, joining that list of ad men who have died but will live forever, through legends about them, is Alyque Padamsee. To say that he was brilliant, impossible, dazzling, utterly his own person and the definer of Indian advertising is an understatement. Like he said in his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger”. And no-one could even come close to challenging the pedestal that he occupied—the world that he strode like a […]

June 12, 2018
Dear Gen Now
C'est La Vie

Dear Gen Now

Setting up #MeToo as an all-or-nothing issue will make us ignore the considerable gains already made. My reply is that setting this up as an “all or nothing” issue will make us not notice the considerable gains that have already been made or the never-before foundation we now have that we can build on. Here is the sad truth. If you randomly pick any Indian woman who has stepped out of her home into the wider world of work, be it four or 40 years ago, there is a good chance that she will have a story of experiencing gender-based harassment in the workplace. Of being at the receiving end of behaviour from men in positions of power or co-workers, which made her life miserable. It breaks my heart (though it doesn’t shock my mind) that even so many decades after my generation entered the workplace, the situation remains pretty […]

October 16, 2018
Dear Gen Now
Consumer Trends

Dear Gen Now

Setting up #MeToo as an all-or-nothing issue will make us ignore the considerable gains already made. My reply is that setting this up as an “all or nothing” issue will make us not notice the considerable gains that have already been made or the never-before foundation we now have that we can build on. Here is the sad truth. If you randomly pick any Indian woman who has stepped out of her home into the wider world of work, be it four or 40 years ago, there is a good chance that she will have a story of experiencing gender-based harassment in the workplace. Of being at the receiving end of behaviour from men in positions of power or co-workers, which made her life miserable. It breaks my heart (though it doesn’t shock my mind) that even so many decades after my generation entered the workplace, the situation remains pretty […]

October 16, 2018
A More Efficient Bharat
Business Strategy

A More Efficient Bharat

Rural India has already powered India’s domestic consumption growth for over a decade now and accounts for over half of Indian household spends 17 April, 2017 by Rama Bijapurkar Rural India has already powered India’s domestic consumption growth for over a decade now and accounts for over half of Indian household spends. In many states rural growth has far surpassed urban growth and the difference between urban and rural spending has been narrowing steadily. So why all the sudden excitement and buzz these last two years, about tier-2 and tier-3 towns’ consumption zooming, and about Bharat powering India’s growth? Probably because this story is being told from the supply side and the average supplier, who is not HUL or Airtel or Pepsi, has finally ventured into seriously addressing these towns and has been pleasantly surprised at the response from them (and more response begets more marketing effort and a virtuous […]

April 1, 2017
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
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
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
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
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
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
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