The Economic Times - January 2005
I have had an epiphany. The other day, we were at lunch – a senior Indian business leader, an erudite foreigner who advises CEOs all over the world on globalization, and yours truly. The debate was about the size of the Indian market. 50 million? 200 million? What income level qualifies people to be consumers? Black money, wrong income reporting, and data denial was on the menu. And that was just the starters. I had a feeling of deja vu. When will we ever break out of getting our knickers in a twist on data about India, and move to acceptance, understanding and insight? Can we accept that the data about India, especially Consumer India, is confusing and inconsistent in what it tells us? And that this is not because we lack a sophisticated understanding of complex data collection or interpretation, or because we can’t discriminate between dodgy data and […]
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The Economic Times - July 2004
Everyone who has been on ‘marketing India’ road shows, especially in the West, cannot but help notice that while ‘India interest’ in the eyes of the world is increasing, India skepticism is not declining. Also familiar is that India gets less than its due, when balancing the good news and the bad news about it; while China gets more. The questions that get asked about India at the end of very well crafted, informative and sensible speeches from captains of industry or opinion leaders are always in the realm of “yes but…” I wonder if it is something to do with “aukaat” – the developed world feels that we should stay within our aukaat, and worry about our caste system, our perceived absence of civil society, our crimes against women etc, rather than stake our claim to the “who’s who’ of the new economic and hence political world order. But […]
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The Business World - May 2004
There is no dearth of empirically valid, statistically sound and anecdotally familiar sales and survey data on what characteristics different types of markets in the country have, and how they have been behaving in terms of what and how they buy. Contradictions and counter intuitive findings abound, which we cannot explain away as data errors. “Tier two towns hold lots of potential – do you know that in Valparai, we sell more X YZ than in Hyderabad? And by the way Hyderabad is visibly wealthy”. “UP may be poor but we actually sell as much there as in Gujarat “. “Delhi is actually richer than Bombay, but Bombay has a different character”, “Bangalore and Hyderabad are both very happening markets, but frankly, I would place my bets on Hyderabad ; actually maybe on Bangalore; they are different but I can’t place my finger on it”; Bangalore is a better quality […]
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The Economic Times - October 2001
It is a relief now to be able to confess that it has been very tough explaining to potential foreign investors how on Rs. 50,000 a year, a family of four can live, eat, educate children, and still buy consumer durables. Or how 60% of those with an income of Rs 10,000 to 12,000 per month have two wheelers and 25% have cars. It is also tough convincing MNC consulting firms that they should not be making forecasts on India applying their empirical data from other countries (e.g. the threshold level of income beyond which consumption “takes off “) to our income statistics. How have we been managing so far? Has the whole marketing community really been batting blind? Not quite blind. There are two popular sources of income data, NCAER’s MISH survey and ORG-MARG’s IRS survey. Both these surveys produce income data which is reliable (if you do it […]
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The Economic Times - May 2001
An expanding bottom with a svelte top is obviously not the kind of figure that analysts and economy watchers like to see. And of course the one thing in short supply in most of the analyses and theories about the consumer goods slowdown is consumer level data. Understanding the dynamics of the demand slowdown and taking a point of view on whether it is temporary or long term requires consumer centric analysis of “who is buying (and how many such are there)” and “who has bought and who (and how many) are left to buy”. ‘Grassroots’ level insight will not come from “what is the trend of how much product has been sold in which pop strata” accounting analyses or from macro questions like “will a good monsoon revive consumer demand”. I want to illustrate this with just one example of some very basic consumer centric data taken from ORG […]
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