The Economic Times - March 2, 2012
Renaming ‘the poor’ as ‘modest-income’ consumers (MIC) helps remind us that these are regular consumers, who do have a little money apiece to spend. The task of making markets work for them is to enable their money to stretch and buy them the things that they need. Some ways to achieve this: Remove additional middlemen, who thrive in MIC areas, where because the total demand is too low for viability, regular company distribution channels stay away; middlemen also provide the service of breaking economically viable large packs and selling smaller parts, but at higher price per gram e.g. biscuits or edible oil. Removing the middle man, yet offering the same quality and price as for other customers, is the challenge to make markets work better for MIC. Financial services are creating techheavy, people-light systems to do this. Hindustan Unilever is creating new, low-cost, company-controlled, lastmile channels like Shakti Ammas. Indian […]
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Business Standard Mumbai, Weekend 18 June, 2011
Dear Corporate India, why is there so much overt panic about an impending “slowdown” and “policy paralysis” at the centre and unfriendly (to whom?) rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)? It seems to echo the days of the global meltdown when a puzzled foreign investor asked me how it was that all the companies he had met, collectively said things were in a bad way, but individually and privately said things weren’t too bad. Maybe it’s just the business media that doesn’t seem to have a handle on things! Thursday’s headlines in one paper was about such a collective view of bankers about bad times, but Friday’s interview by the head of HDFC Bank – a balanced and mature high-performing organization by any yard stick – was very calm. He said, “Bad debts come when you have a tremendous fall in growth rate that is unexpected. Half […]
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The Week - 31, August 2009
“Taking Jugaad from grassroots to global. The good news is that India now firmly believes that Indians have an innate innovation streak and that it is something worth nurturing.” The world over, businesses are obsessing about innovation. The developed world worries about disruptive innovations coming from emerging markets and hurting them in their home markets; while the emerging world, despite all the domestic challenges they face, is trying hard to prove them right. But what actually is innovation? A good, simple, working definition is that innovation is about new and unusual ways of thinking which, when implemented, can solve the hard-to-solve problems; or more generally, can help improve the outcomes of actions, resulting in greater financial and / or social value. Really successful innovations, by definition, have a larger impact, and can help transform businesses, societies and countries. A combination of greed and fear has forced India Inc. to actively […]
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The Economic Times - March 3, 2009
The tough decision for this month’s column was whether to write about the prognosis for consumer demand in India, post the global meltdown, India slow-down, e-sops (as the ET elegantly described vote inducing election expenditure); OR whether to write about what lessons placement committees (mostly comprising students) of top tier MBA schools ought to learn and act on, after the 2009 stressful placement season. This column opted to discuss the latter, because we want to urge future leaders of India Inc. to use their intellect and education to courageously depart from the past and do things differently for the different world of the future. If they are content being status-quo-ist in their placement models with the justification of “hamare khandaan ke purane rivaaz hain”, they are out of step with the mindset that winning companies of India Inc. and the world want and need. Closer home, students running placement at […]
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Financial Express - 24th March, 2009
“Nirma, Nokia, Nano: Market creating products that truly understand the India Consumer.” Sasta, Sundar, Tikau, the mantra for success in the Indian market, has just got a new benchmark, and a new poster child: The Nano. Nirma took the Indian market by storm, as did Nokia, and as we hope, will Nano. What they all have in common is that (1) they are market creators unfettered by analyses of what the current market size is and what it is forecasted to grow to, (2) they recognise that current product markets are the size they are not because Indians are too unevolved to have desires, but because they don’t have enough money and (3) they start with a potential customer base (and not a current industry size), they define a price and a quality that customers will accept, and then challenge themselves to deliver it profitably. It is here that many companies, […]
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