Menu
Estimates of India’s middle class are as many as the number of people engaged in this quest. Perhaps this is because of a lack of clarity on what characteristics the ‘middle class’ must have to qualify for the label A FAVOURITE pastime ofIndia’s business analysts and media over the years has been to estimate the size of India’s middle class — a critical indicator of the current and future health of India’s household consumption, and hence India’s economy. Estimates of India’s middle class are as many as the number of people engaged in this quest. Perhaps this is because of lack of clarity on what characteristics the middle class must have in order to qualify for the label, despite all the literature on the subject from scholars around the world. The result is several groupings of heterogeneous households all labelled “middle class”, based on other-country benchmarks or subjective judgments with […]
IN PART I of this article published on June 13, we showed that India’s genuine middle class is much smaller than is commonly presumed. To realise the country’s economic ambition, a large, expanding, and increasingly prosperous genuine middle class is needed — one that has income stability, resilience, and the ability to grow its income steadily through value-added work. Why is the middle class stunted? We believe that it is both the cause and consequence of the widespread informal sector that is commonly estimated to account for 90% of employment, but generating only a third of the value added in the economy. It is huge with limited efficiency because of its many constraints, and is a low-productivity trap that chokes off the formation ofa genuine middle class in India. Typically, informal workers either work as individual casual labour or in micro enterprises with very small operations, having fewer than 10 […]
Rama Bijapurkar writes: It is this journey that lies behind the blockbuster stock market debut of online beauty products retailer, Nykaa. You could Google in privacy and figure out how to unwrap the power and magic of makeup without being deterred by social judgement. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) The stupendous stock market debut of India’s online beauty products retailer Nykaa shows, among other things, the enormous investor confidence in the future relationship between Indian women and cosmetics and makeup. Having studied the attitudes to beauty and sexuality of Indian women in pre-liberalisation, pre-internet (almost prehistoric) times, the line that springs to mind is the one from the 1960s Virginia Slims ad: “You’ve come a long way, baby”. In the mid-1980s, the market research agency I worked for was commissioned by Lakmé, the pioneering company that brought makeup to Indian women as early as 1952, supposedly at the instance of Jawaharlal […]
The fact is that pragmatic consumption remains the hallmark of most of Consumer India’s spending.(AP Photo for Representation) With income growth in the last thirty years and more supply at various price points, and better access to credit, there are a whole class of “have-somes” who are consuming now. The last three decades have brought consumption front and centre into Indian lives, irrespective of age or income. The major life focus of all Indians is to strive to earn more and save more in order to buy a better quality of life for themselves and their family. The tenet that consumption is wasteful and best done in moderation has been replaced by “it’s OK to want it, now let’s see how we can afford it”. What hasn’t changed, though, is belief that the Almighty needs to lend a hand too. The PayTM sign at the Kedarnath temple high up in […]
As we celebrate India’s 1991 economic reforms, it is also important to know the success stories of recent campaigns. None stand out like LPG. Representational image | LPG cylinders | Bloomberg In 2014, to get a gas connection for my domestic worker, I needed to go all the way to the chairperson of a PSU oil company and ask for a special dispensation because the beneficiary was from a lower income group and lived in a chawl in Mumbai with no rent agreement or proof of residence. “It’s a subsidised commodity so we can’t change the rules,” was the reason the oil company gave us for being so hidebound on KYC documents for address proof. She needed LPG, not just for convenience, but for earning more. She needed it to make chapatis for her entire family’s lunch dabbas and then show up for work on time before her office-going women […]
By Rama Bijapurkar, Author of “A Never Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India” We are an affiliative, clannish, inquisitive, parochial society with each of us having multiple identities and belonging to several reference groups, always seeking out “people like us”, like homing pigeons. WhatsApp makes all this easier and more efficient. The whole clan weighs in on wedding preparations, and festivals are celebrated and new babies monitored closely by many more family members scattered around the globe. I know one grandparent in small-town India who watches the prized grandchild every day at her playschool in America. I have friends who belong to at least 10 different WhatsApp groups spanning their many identities which are getting even more complexly constructed then before. The multilingual keyboard with all its features, emojis, gifs and voice messaging is making language fluency less of a barrier, as we now transact socially with different […]
This forced churning, like all forced churning, might even do the brand franchise good, and enable it to compete in a more mainstream manner and appeal to a wider audience. The loser in this is a whole lot of consumers who really wanted fairness As we wait with bated breath for the new name for Fair & Lovely to be announced, a few things seem obvious: One, it was a move suddenly dictated from London because it just isn’t Hindustan Unilever’s (HUL’s) style in all the years we have known it to miss a beat when it comes to flawless, confident and much-researched execution of any change — especially when it involves consumers and a Rs 4,000 crore brand. Representative Image In this case, HUL announced changing the name first, then announced that the new name was being legally registered (their risk assessment clearly did not show this as a possibility otherwise, […]
For food ordering apps, the lockdown has been a boon. (Photo: HT) Upper class modern millennials are the ‘weaned on Maggi’ generation, who grew up to become the Swiggy generation, even ordering in their Maggi Continuing on the theme of how Indian consumption will change after covid-19 and the lockdown, today’s column looks at urban upper class food consumption. I had said in my earlier column that consumer attitudes and behaviour will not change much except for income-driven economizing, though additional new opportunities were presenting themselves if only suppliers were ready to tap into them. Upper class modern millennials are the “weaned on Maggi” generation, who grew up to become the Swiggy generation, even ordering in their Maggi. Although there usually was a cook with the key who made something basic for sustenance, ordering in from a range of hole-in-the-wall to fancy restaurants was preferred because it was not just easy, […]
Investors are well-advised to track the supply side as carefully as they are tracking the consumer side CoronavirusCovid-19 Marketers and investors are increasingly wondering how consumption will change post covid-19 and the lockdown. The obvious answer is that everyone is going to be less well off, and consumption will shrink. In an earlier column we modelled the amount at risk. People will spend on necessities first (could include replacing a broken phone or refrigerator, not just food and school fees). For getting a piece of the “nice to have but can do without” expenditure, there will be a fierce cross category battle (buy an iPhone now, paint your house next year or downsize the wedding and give the newlyweds a car instead). The Indian consumer toggles seamlessly between ‘stretch’ and ‘settle’ behaviour—in good times, “whatever I can afford plus one price-performance level up” (stretch) and in bad times “let’s stay […]
