BOOK REVIEW
Title: A Never-Before
World…Tracking the evolution of consumer India
Author: Rama Bijapurkar
Publisher: Portfolio Penguin books India 2013
Price: Rs 699/-
The Multiple Choices Of Consumer India
Rama Bijapurkar is a thought-leader on market strategy and
the quirks of the Indian consumer. She makes every one of her points with
relentless, reinforced logic and earnestness. This book, coming five years
after her well received We are Like That
Only on the same subject, charts the road ahead in the third decade after
the commencement of liberal reforms in 1991.
And, by implication, runs into a wall. Our infrastructure
remains a major road-block. We have 51% more cars on Mumbai roads with hardly a
road added in recent memory for example. So ‘guiltless consumption’ is hampered
by an ‘abysmal delivery of public goods’. Not to mention the outgrown civic
infrastructure, the filth, the pollution, the garbage, the faeces. Electricity,
water, transportation etc. are lagging demand, to put it mildly. Education and
health services run by the Government are of the poorest quality still. To do
well in India means not really needing the Government for ‘living
infrastructure’.
Bijapurkar suggests that the Indian consumer is varied
within ‘a never-before’ world, and therefore a standardised approach may not work
best. The point is made strenuously and provokes the reader to wonder about the
truth of it. It is a sad fact that uniqueness and individuality have been
assaulted, trampled on and sometimes destroyed outright by the invaders and
conquerors over a half a millennium of history.
That we have such strong flavours of cultural
diversity left is a tribute to our resilience and ability to survive.
Nevertheless, much has changed. We are influenced, in recent
centuries, mainly by the hybridised, Central Asian Mughal culture, and the
British that came after them. The British in particular were determined to
denigrate ancient Vedic and other culture as part of their imperialist ethos. Most
British colonials painted it out to be obscurantist, pagan mumbo jumbo, and
thought it their Christian duty to supplant it with their ideas and their
language. Since these were ideals developed by The Enlightenment and the
Renaissance, it didn’t do us much harm, particularly in the context of an
English speaking globalisation today. This modern education worked for us to a
remarkable extent and eventually backfired on the Raj because the same liberal
and egalitarian principles bred into the Independence movement.
Bijapurkar however has not written this book in the context
of the last five or seven hundred years. She is analysing the state of play in Indian
consumer preferences at the start of the third decade since liberalisation and
the choices it has thrown up. We are, she thinks at the beginning of our
consumption boom as GDP levels grow, and the Indian economy is poised to become
$3 trillion worth and more. The consequent discretionary spend, the impact on
choices and mobility, and the quality of life will undeniably be like
‘never-before’.
She advocates
creation of ‘niche differentiated brands’ arguing that ‘a small percentage of a
large number is large and niches can be quite big’. Bijapurkar points out India
will be a $ 3 trillion economy by 2021. It will then be one of the top five
consumer markets in the world. She says ‘matching the quality of basic living, with
the quality of consumer goods people have is one of the biggest needs and
opportunities in India’s consumption story of the future’. But the ‘quality of
basic living’ is code for infrastructure. It is an urgent prerequisite to
prevent a vital mismatch. Meanwhile, Bijapurkar is crusading here for a rethink
of classifications of the volume Indian population into a more sophisticated
matrix than ‘middle class’ and other.
So ‘better living amenities’ will not only spur GDP but
greater sophistication in demand. It is not as if some amenities have not
penetrated into the hinterland along with decent brands of FMCG goods, but the
density is less. The influence of satellite TV and the advertisements it
carries has had an immense impact on aspirations, brand recall, demand amongst
rich and poor, rural and urban people alike.
‘In a never-before way’ says Bijapurkar, ‘India is urbanizing
around its small towns and villages demonstrating urban- buying patterns and
preferences’. And ‘census towns’ are
becoming ‘unofficially urbanised’ in addition to the planned efforts.
The key thing for foreign marketers to do is adapt to a high
volume low margin market selling many of the same aspirational products they
sell in developed markets for lower volumes and higher margins. This takes a
lot of relearning and acceptance, because attempts to palm off inferior branded
product on a ‘exclusively for the Indian market’ basis usually meets with stern
rejection by the quality hungry population. Those, like Mercedes, who began by
launching discontinued old models in India as ‘appropriate’ to our road
conditions, promptly lost their place to first BMW, and then Audi. We may be
Indian but we are not stupid.
(800 words)
March 5th,
2014
Gautam Mukherjee
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