Despite boom, Indian consumers are totally under-served. Here’s why

Rama Bijapurkar in an exclusive article says, “We eat 1 trillion chapattis each year but still don’t have a ‘just heat and eat’ brand of acceptable tasting wheat chapattis that doesn’t burn a hole in our pocket.”  We have been gloating over our consumption numbers and how they stack up compared to the other markets; and how dizzily they have grown in the past two decades. But at the end of researching my new book, A Never-Before World, I came to the conclusion that Consumer India is totally under served and that India has a long way to go in becoming a real consumption driven economy. This is notwithstanding the percentage of GDP contributed to household consumption or the rate at which Consumer India has been shaping up TV sets, mobile phones, musical ring tones, automobiles, shampoo, bottled water, eating out, and lots of other things. The hallmark of a […]

The future of Indian consumer markets

Consumption kept the Indian economy going long after investment slowed, but over the past year, even this narrative has started to fray at the edges Will consumer spending in India shake off its sluggishness and go back to growing at a fast clip and in turn drive economic growth? The short-term answer of the next two years is that (1) the richer parts of it will step up spending in the next year and be the vanguard of growth, and since they account for at least 40% of all spending and over half of income, this is good news, and (2) however, we must be careful not to fall into our oft-repeated trap—assuming that the yo-yo upward growth that we are about to see as a result of release in pent-up demand is the right growth number to project for the future. The medium-term answer of the next five years […]

The Lamplit Sales Graph

Festivals, the world over, are usually boom consumption time-when people know they have to spend, they are in a mood to want to spend, and they do plan ahead for the expenditure. Festival sales are therefore a barometer of how good or bad consumers are feeling about the size of their wallets and about spending. In consumption-driven economies, that is a critical determinant of economic growth. If spending doesn’t happen even at festival time, it is pretty bad news and a barometer of how good or bad the consumer economy is, the same way the prices of bellwether stocks tell a story. Last year, the world watched with bated breath to see what retail sales in America would be during the holiday season of Christmas and New Year. It was this indicator that would reflect exactly how bad things really were. If people decided to economise on that most sacred […]

Willing Spirit, Weak Flesh

It isn’t easy to imagine the sort of pressure on public goods when a billion people – mostly young, slowly getting richer – aspire for a better life, especially when infrastructure and public goods are already of poor quality and in short supply. This is the environment in which the great Indian consumer story will “live” for the next several years, shaping consumer behaviour and throwing up unique market opportunities quite different from those of the past two decades. Toilets; affordable housing; health care; old-age homes; schools and colleges; power and water; police; garbage clearance; bandwidth; buses, trains and metros; playgrounds and parks, and many such improvers of life are just not available. Domestic tourism is burgeoning, thanks to more money, but there are no decent public conveniences. Next to premium Mumbai apartments with breathtaking sea views, the rocks in low tide are an unending public toilet for people living […]

The Consumption Journey

Think local; it’s pointless to use western standards to measure India’s consumption base. India’s domestic consumption story has been told in terms of income based number crunching on the size of India’s middle class, and sales data from companies. After rural consumption came to the rescue in 2008-09-10, the story of rural consumption being the bulwark of future consumption has gained currency, almost as if the urban frontier has been conquered. Facts viewed through the lens of households help to do a reality check on existing mental models and numbers about India’s consumption story but are hard to get. We therefore welcome the new 2011 edition of the Indian Readers Survey (IRS) report, Guide to Indian Markets. Based on a rolling annual all India sample of 250,000 households, it is a standard market planning database, vetted by the Media Research Users Council (MRUC) and conducted by Hansa Research for over 10 […]

What Consumers Really Want

With more competition and more cautious consumers, companies will need smart marketing moves It is business plan season again. Most managers will argue for their new targets based on some rule of thumb linking overall market growth of their sector to GDP growth. Aiding them will be analysts’ views – mostly people who believe that all markets follow the same logic as the stock market – on whether consumer demand is ‘still strong’ or ‘softening’ based on quarterly results of companies and year-on-year comparisons. Using the health of consumer demand to assess the health of GDP growth, and using that, in turn, to predict consumer demand, is a bit confusing to some of us. Intuitively, the idea is sound that even with low GDP growth, companies can find healthy consumer demand for their business by persuading consumers to buy from them.. That is why our IT companies have healthy top […]

The Business of Financial Inclusion

The discussion on financial inclusion ought to focus a lot more on building an economically viable and consumer acceptable business model, with a specially designed regulatory ecosystem appropriate for that model. Evangelism or moral pressure to force banks to serve those not so far served by them cannot help square a circle. But a new tetrahedron that is superior to both the circle and the square can be built if we abandon orthodoxy and do not constrain the business model by saying: (a) Financial inclusion has to be driven by banks because we know how to regulate them, and should not be driven by a new ecosystem that does not have an existing bank as the lead; (b) it has to be offered below a particular price point which is defined either by some fuzzy-logic comfort level or by a mandated number based on somebody’s test of reasonableness (not the […]

Innovate India’s Way To Modernity

In fact, the newer markets of the world often create a “champion’s disadvantage”, because most champion companies are prisoners of their past success formulae. They are far too deeply vested in every way in the religion and the ritual that they have built so far and the risk of change is real. The same applies to western academia, who have built knowledge based on the experiences of global businesses. Their predicaments are understandable. But it is puzzling why Indian business executives and thinkers, who do not carry any such baggage, don’t think differently and originally. Perhaps, we need to reflect on whether there is an incumbent advantage or disadvantage for reigning champions of the developed world. If they have an incumbent disadvantage, then the new kid on the block (Indian business) is not a challenger risking a bloody nose but a leading-edge innovator. It’s what CK Prahalad calls the “next […]

Drunken Man’s Walk

Unprepared for Our Consumption