Matters came to a head when mother asked me to wear a half sari to Miranda House. The native place became my official enemy. Copious explanations were given about our “back home” to neighbours in the cantonment, to explain exactly what kind of ‘madrasi’ we were-and were not (“No, no, we don’t use coconut oil and eat fish, we are not from Kerala. In ‘our parts’, we cook in til oil, eat lots of red chillis”). And every year, when my father got his annual leave and ltc, the “native place” loomed large, as did the furrows on my mother’s forehead. That’s when our Telugu would have to be brushed up, my clothes reviewed for modesty, the hateful long silk skirts (pavadais or “park-in-ee”) brought out of the trunk, and a string of dos and don’ts dinned into me. Don’t be rude, don’t be forward, don’t say you don’t like […]
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Livemint.com - December 4, 2008
Marketers need to change their mental models of the nature of village economy and rural consumers By Rama Bijapurkar & Rajesh Shukla Consumer demand in India is the aggregate of the demand of several mini-consumer Indias, each with its own distinctive demand pattern, its own degree of exposure to different environmental forces and its own response to these forces. And like a kaleidoscope, with every jerk, the pieces regroup, and a new picture emerges. With the most recent and very sharp jerk, the new picture of consumer demand seems to be one in which rural India is far more dominant than it has been in these past few years of strong urban volume and value growth. The glimmer of a rural silver lining to the dark clouds of reduced urban consumer spending is caused by several factors: a good monsoon, relative insulation from the gyrations of the stock market, the […]
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Economic Times - February 15, 2008
Consumer demand is now no longer about undesirable habits of rich folk but about driving GDP growth. Being morally purified, it now attracts a great deal of discussion and analysis, especially as we run up to another budget, a key theme of which is about stimulating consumption. Yet most of the discussion and analyses are totally supply sided and product-centric and obsessed with WHAT is being spent on, rather than on WHO is spending and how they decide to. Consumer demand is about how much people choose to spend, on what their consumption ability, aspiration and priorities are, in turn determined by their world view and life stage and socio cultural group. It is therefore simplistic to think about stimulating consumption in terms of spread sheet projections of past sales trends, suggesting how much excise duty to cut on what product categories or about cutting income tax (given that most […]
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The Economic Times 30 April, 2007
There is a whole new market opportunity that threatens to grow for the next five years, and become a big money spinner – the commuting market. More and more people in more and more cities, are stuck in ever increasing traffic and commuting longer and longer hours each day. The fact that there are a lot of unfulfilled consumer needs is glaring at us, and the suppliers haven’t even got there yet! This market is up for grabs for anyone who has the competence to translate these needs into crafting imaginatively designed and distributed products that can make the customer’s life better. Many of these are people who are money rich, time poor and travel by car. A wonderfully well focused target group that cuts across gender, age and occupation, this is a marketer’s dream come true! What’s more, it is a ‘guaranteed to grow’ need segment! With such a […]
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Economic Times November 21, 2005
At my last two speaking engagements, people said they were surprised by my non-optimism (read that as ‘gung ho’ ness) about what’s happening in Consumer India. One of them was on whether values in India are changing (answer: some changes, mostly morphing change, “this as well as that” compromises, new ways of doing old things; let’s not confuse changes in ritual with changes in religion). The other was about what I saw as the latest in Consumer India, viewed through the economic – demographic – consumption lens. I said that none of the data that I had seen had fundamentally changed my view of the past few years that it was forging ahead on the consumption track, with all lights green and no stop signs visible; But though full throttle, it was a large mass moving at a modest speed with modest and modestly increasing acceleration; few rich getting richer […]
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