Batting Blind: The Case of Household Income
Demand Drivers

Batting Blind: The Case of Household Income

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 […]

August 24, 2012 0 Comments
India Needs a Communication Strategy
India My Land

India Needs a Communication Strategy

We have all watched with a mixture of upset and grudging admiration, the way Musharraf communicates to the world, via the media, far better than the way India does. While we clearly don’t want to be like him or say the same things as him, surely an equally forceful, equally unambiguous, equally engaging and attention getting communication from India would help us in the eyes of the watching world? We have a collective national disdain for what we call ‘media warfare’ and ‘spin doctoring’. But it is a fact of life that communication received through the idiot box today shapes perceptions of not only idiots but of wise men, as well. And shapes views not only on the issue at hand but leaves a residual impression about the brand that is talking, which in turn shapes the way future communication from the brand is received. Think about the communication from […]

August 14, 2001 0 Comments
Repositioning the India Brand
India My Land

Repositioning the India Brand

Here we are, 54 years old and a decade after liberalization  fighting for our ‘rightful’ place in the world, distressed with the world’s perception of the India brand. Sure there are a lot of things wrong with us, but there is enough right with us that we are not getting credit for. Our hypothesis is that this is because we have not proactively managed our brand perception, in a scientific and focused manner. Our brand speaks in many voices, sending out mixed messages, suffering from not being anchored around a clearly articulated brand vision or positioning statement that all spokespersons of the brand have internalized. Worse still, we think about and talk about our brand using a set of descriptors that are obsessively ‘inside – out’ and ‘product centric’, like “the world’s largest democracy”, “a billion people”, “a functioning anarchy”, “unity in diversity”, “having an ancient heritage” etc. If this were a […]

August 14, 2001 0 Comments
The Business of Branding
Business Strategy

The Business of Branding

The last time I wrote in this column about the telecom business, a senior person from within the business called saying he wanted to salute my courage – the ‘fools rush in where telecom experts fear to tread’ sort of courage. I probably have a death wish, so here I am again, venturing an opinion on the ‘hot topic’ of Reliance Infocom’s proposition to consumers, and what works and does not work with Indian consumers. In my line of work, there is a lot of agonizing about whether enough alternate ways of playing in any market have been explored. Yet there is a significant gap that exists between the aspiration of ‘changing the rules of the game’ and the actual development of a revolutionary business strategy to achieve it. The same old way of looking at consumers – same old segmenting variables, same old pricing paradigms, same old obsession with […]

June 14, 2001 0 Comments
A Consumer Centric Analysis of Market Growth
Demand Drivers

A Consumer Centric Analysis of Market Growth

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 […]

May 1, 2001 0 Comments
When The Going Gets Tough
Business Strategy

When The Going Gets Tough

It is the winter of our discontent again, as the pendulum of consumer demand journeys from the ‘there’s lots more where this came from’ end to the ‘Wonder where it disappeared’ end. For many of the A league companies, even the game of maintaining bottom line growth, despite flagging top line growth, has been played out. There is a limit to which the costs or operational efficiencies can be extracted from a given business system. For many less agile companies, the red ink is happening, as the overall growth of their market slows down, and their more aggressive competitors gobble up market share. There is bad news affecting all our four consumption sectors. Negligible agricultural growth affecting rural consumption, stock market crash and slow industrial growth affecting urban consumption, the US slowdown affecting the infotech dependent consumption sector, the belt tightening that the Government is doing affecting government job dependent […]

April 14, 2001 0 Comments
Enriching The Consumer Base
Business Strategy

Enriching The Consumer Base

The traditional marketing paradigm is about extracting money resident within the consumer base (‘capturing customer surplus’ is perhaps a more politically correct phrase.) However, watching growth aspirations of companies outstrip the growth in purchasing power of the Indian consumer base, I do believe that the time has come for companies to adopt an additional marketing paradigm – that of enriching the consumer base. The idea is that companies, individually or collectively, should invest significantly in feeding the goose that lays the golden eggs, or to use a more rural market analogy, put nutrients back into the land that they reap from, even though they are not in the animal feeds business or in the soil nutrients business. The idea also is that companies should accord the ‘enrich’ activity the same seriousness as the ‘extract’ activity – as a key element of the marketing strategy, and not just something that is […]

February 14, 2001 0 Comments
The Real Ice Phenomenon
Consumer Trends

The Real Ice Phenomenon

The “ICE age Indian consumer” is now a mandatory topic at most marketing conferences and meetings. There is a disturbing mental model that seems to be embedded in the popular view – that of a person who is Internet savvy, cell phone and broadband happy and hangs out at interesting sites both real and virtual. Often the word ICE and Netizen are used interchangeably. The dominant logic seems to be that this is a small yet significant number; so what if it is just the tip of the Consumer India iceberg, its growth rates are astounding and this will soon gather critical mass and define the mainstream consumer. Sounds scarily like the Great Indian Middle Class story, revisited! But what is more disturbing is that in the preoccupation with the tip of the ICEberg, we seem to be missing the main event of the ICE age and focusing on the […]

January 23, 2001 0 Comments
Prospects for the Consumer Goods Sector
Demand Drivers

Prospects for the Consumer Goods Sector

The FMCG sector slowdown that everyone is talking about needs to be viewed in perspective. Is it really a slowdown caused by a deteriorating economic condition, or is it merely the morning-after, after a particularly good night before? I think it is the latter – what we are seeing is the concluding chapter of phase 1 demand, dying gasp and all. The fundamentals of Consumer India seem fine. In fact, it seems like urban India, at least, is definitely headed for consumption ‘take off’ in the next five years. However there are corrections that are happening now which are tough. As one CEO said recently, there is no doubt that the long term looks good. The short term is the difficult bit. One thing is clear – the golden days of runaway growth are over and slower growth rates are a fact of life. We need to re adjust our […]

October 1, 2000 0 Comments
Is the Future Happening?
Demand Drivers

Is the Future Happening?

Is the Future Happening? The Economic Times – September 2000 The marketing of India as an investment destination is moving into high gear again. ‘Indian market opportunity ‘ has been a traditional pillar of our sales pitch, and over the years, we have moved from hype to hope and now, with eight years of post liberalisation market understanding, it’s time for review and realism. When we first started selling India in the early nineties, statistics about the affluence of the consumer base and the current market size were embarrassing. The sales pitches were perforce about ‘what can happen”, rather than “what it is now”, a picture painted about a huge ‘middle class’ consumer base hungry for products and services that they had been deprived of. The “suppressed demand” theory was soon proved wrong, and the sales pitch moved on to saying that over the years, as incomes grow and consumers […]

September 1, 2000 0 Comments
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