The Customer Religion
Business Strategy

The Customer Religion

A business leader with a wry sense of humour recently observed that since the main reason being given by almost all businesses for slow consumer sales was the delay in the festival season and the fewer auspicious dates for marriages, the Hindu calendar should figure as a key variable for annual sales forecasting. I guess a corollary to that is that one of the key routes to stimulating market growth would be to lobby with the Hindu high priests and persuade them to be a wee bit more market friendly in their interpretation of the stars! Having determined that astrology and sentimentality (of the consumer confidence kind) can’t be cured in the short term at least, corporate speak is now about surviving and emerging stronger from this continuing slowdown, through “better customer understanding” and “innovation”. I would have felt a lot better if the connection between the two were made […]

November 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
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
Car Wars
Business Strategy

Car Wars

Maruti has had a lot of unsympathetic press lately, and the media post mortem of its strategy is not yet over. When Titan decimated HMT, the ‘timekeeper of the nation’, there was no editorial saying “Titans of industry can suddenly look like endangered species if the evolutionary tide of the market moves away from them”(Business Standard, July 5, 2000). The mechanical to quartz shift in the watch market definitely was an evolutionary tide, the like of which has not happened in the car market. Another evolutionary tide, the scooter segment of the two wheeler market collapsing, did not earn Bajaj Auto the screaming headline “market share hits an all time low” (Economic Times, June 24). When Colgate’s 60% plus market share was getting gobbled by Hindustan Lever, there was not much mention of “humbled giant” and “fall of the mighty”. Incidentally, the outcome of that battle suggests that a fundamentally […]

July 10, 2000 0 Comments
2B or 2C
Business Strategy

2B or 2C

It used to be said of a prestigious men’s college in Delhi that when it rained in Oxford they would open their umbrellas here, in reflex. The dotcom industry seems to be in the same mode nowadays. When B2C sneezes in America, everyone here seems to develop a full blown cold, complete with cold feet! “B2C is out”, is the buzz we have been hearing of late from consultants, funders, and valuation focused dotcom companies, scrambling to re-incarnate themselves as B2B. Yet there is a parallel conceptual discourse going on that suggests the opposite. For example, in the June 8th issue of Economic Times there was an interview with a global management consultant who said “Any area where the gap is huge between the customer’s desires and the realities holds good potential”. In India there are several areas with yawning gaps that we know about and experience all the time. […]

June 12, 2000 0 Comments
e-Hype: The Great Indian Middle Class revisited?
Business Strategy

e-Hype: The Great Indian Middle Class revisited?

The whole discourse on ‘Internet India’ in the media and in business forums leaves me with an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. It sounds a little too close to the “size and opportunity of the Great Indian Middle Class” saga that was enacted out not too long ago. Small current markets were forecasted to grow to huge numbers, born out of the analogy school of forecasting that applied ‘elsewhere’ metrics of penetration, per capita consumption and growth to the humongous numbers of people in India. To the quantitative analysis, we then added the qualitative element – the Indian consumer, we believed, was ’emerging’ and the ugly duckling was about to become the beautiful swan. The result was a very seductive picture of market opportunity that was expected to happen with a momentum of its own, powered by the ‘who can resist progress’ compulsion. What followed, as they say, is history. […]

September 14, 1999 0 Comments
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