Understanding Our Social Transition
Business Strategy

Understanding Our Social Transition

Over the past five years, ever since the India story started getting more credible, one has been asking annoyingly often by foreign business audiences about the caste system and whether rising inequality would cause severe social tension and breakdown of law and order and constitute a major country risk. One did not believe that this was the correct interpretation of events, and wrote earlier in this column that the anatomy of social tension in India was not street wars and bloody violence, but institutions at loggerheads with each other, through every institutional and constitutional means available. But after reading about the growth of the Maoist belt, one thought that maybe there were things one wasn’t seeing, and started to examine this issue from the other side of the table – the poor people themselves (the politically correct term nowadays, is not poor or have-not, but people at the bottom of […]

November 26, 2007
Winning in the Indian Market
Business Strategy

Winning in the Indian Market

If the ET awards has a category for the non-Indian multinational that built a businesses in India of the scale, scope and profitability of either ICICI, Bharti or Infosys, it is a reasonable guess that the jury would not have had the problem of plenty to choose from. While it could be argued that the same holds true for Indian companies too, the fact is that the golden greats from overseas have far larger war chests, far deeper competencies and all the benefits of an already global business. Why then has Indian market not been over run by MNCs from outside? Why are there not many, many more Nokias, LGs, Samsungs? At a pinch, we can count Honda in that list, although it is the Hero Honda JV that has changed the landscape of personal transportation in urban and rural India. Maybe Hindustan Unilever can also be counted in this […]

October 19, 2007
Retailing Fever: Bring in the Customer
Business Strategy

Retailing Fever: Bring in the Customer

If supply chain perfection leads to a lower cost or better quality or both, then it must be translated into a customer benefit of a unique price performance point, says Rama Bijapurkar THERE is a retail fever raging through India, and as in the dot com days, you cannot go a hundred yards without running into someone who plans to get rich on retail or has got rich on retail. The game, as was the case in dot com, is about a temporary suspension of good sense on current and future valuations because of the blind belief that there is a gold mine accessible to anyone who has made the effort to buy a pick and a shovel. This is further exacerbated by the FDI rules and their mosaic of exceptions. The unquestioned assumption nowadays is that with the creation of more and more supply, more and more consumer spend […]

January 29, 2007
Can India Inc. Build Global Brands?
Business Strategy

Can India Inc. Build Global Brands?

The question is not whether Indian companies have the capability to build global businesses i.e have appropriate products and price points to fulifl consumer needs in markets around the globe, with whatever is the most efficient way to supply to and serve these ma rkets. But of course this capability does exist across several industries, and there are many vibrant examples of this. But the question to debate is whether they have built or have the capability to build global brands. What’s the difference between brands and businesses? Brands are where you talk your business walk. Your customers and potential customers recognize your name and recall it whenever they think about the business arena you exist in. And firmly attach certain positive (and sometimes negative) rational and emotional benefits to the name, which travel with the name, no matter what category of products or services the name is attached to. […]

December 7, 2005
Buying Sales by Bribing Consumers
Business Strategy

Buying Sales by Bribing Consumers

I was reading a very absorbing leaflet about what seemed to be a very good health supplement. It explained what the supplement contained, how totally natural and safe it was, how exactly it worked, why, the research evidence available; it was totally honest and completely professional in tone – all in all it was a great product and a superb piece of branding. Then, suddenly, it said on the last page “lucky draw – win a holiday to Goa”. Made me wonder about everything I had read and thought so far. A potential-to-win brand with a totally un confident brand owner! There is a disturbing trend of marketers of all hues, across all categories, to offer all manner of sops, almost all of the time, to get consumers to buy their products. Disturbing, because the dominant marketing logic of the day seems to be that when there is a slow […]

May 23, 2005
It is time for Version 2 of FMCG Marketing
Business Strategy

It is time for Version 2 of FMCG Marketing

The pundits (pun intended) at the Economic Times have said a lot these past few days about ‘vindis and levers of change’ culminating in the Saturday editorial “will reorganization do the trick at HLL”. I am not sure that is the fundamental question that needs to be debated. The reorganization signals continuity with change, and a renewed vote of majority share holder confidence in the old order (the new management team is the old management team, with some increases and decreases in roles, some departures, no outside additions, and certainly no dramatic experiments with organization structure, as far as one can see). What needs to be debated, is the more central issue facing the company, and indeed the category. As discussed in the editorial, the central issue seems to be that the once famed value advantage that HLL offered consumers, is eroding ( “value” defined simply as “Sum total of benefit […]

April 19, 2004
Supply Side Sluggishness?
Business Strategy

Supply Side Sluggishness?

We have watched and waited, this past decade, for the Indian consumer and for Consumer India to ’emerge’. As I have said before in this column, we have been, metaphorically speaking, waiting for Kalki, the next avatar of Vishnu, to come and rescue us. I am convinced that Kalki is already here, only we don’t recognize it. One frequent ‘waiting for Kalki’ question is “when will the per capita income of this country get to X, which is the magic number when consumption will ‘take off’. The depressing data answer to this question is that with the slow and steady income growth we will have, in about ten years, we will hit the 1000 USD per capita GDP number. But since everything we say of India the opposite is also true, the other answer is to look at the most aggressive, “we try hardest’ market of FMCG. Even as early […]

February 16, 2004
But Are Marketers Ready, Asks Rama Bijapurkar
Business Strategy

But Are Marketers Ready, Asks Rama Bijapurkar

Consumer India has always been pretty tricky to double guess. Just when we believed that consumer spending was firmly on a high growth trajectory – based on the wonder years of 1993 – 98 – it spluttered and slowed to a crawl. For the next few years, marketers tried everything they knew to speed it up again. They dropped prices while improving product and service quality. “Buy-one-get-one-free”, they offered. But that only helped them get volume growth at the expense of operating margins. The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector had a terrible time with some product categories actually shrinking in size, while consumer durable manufacturers struggled to reconcile capacity with demand. Sure there was a fast growing yet minuscule population of the very rich, which continued to lap up everything from plasma TVs to Mercedes cars – but that was cold comfort for the majority of the marketers. After much […]

December 28, 2003
More Telecom Lessons
Business Strategy

More Telecom Lessons

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 […]

April 21, 2003
“Mass or Class”?
Business Strategy

“Mass or Class”?

Before CK Prahalad described the ‘poor’, as an opportunity in the Harvard Business Review, and coined the elegant phrase ” the bottom of the pyramid” to describe the large mass of poor people in the world, companies and their consultants used to spend lots of time and effort trying to define the size of the Indian market – is it 400 million people? Or a mere150 million? Consulting firms used say that international experience shows that markets “take off’ when per capita income of about 2000 USD PPP is achieved. Today, the line seems to be “there is a lot of pent up demand in the lower income, and if you find the right strategy to tap the bottom of the pyramid, then the market in India could explode”.  Is this new untested wisdom? As far as I remember, back in the1980s, Nirma was the first to recognize it. They […]

March 24, 2003

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