Some time ago I met the head of a food multinational, which shall not be named for obvious reasons. After the regular questions, I veered to a less-trodden territory?why is the brand ignoring a huge segment of India?s population, the 160 million Muslims, with the apparent lack of any kosher products in its portfolio? To my surprise, the chief was candid enough to admit that all of the company?s products were indeed kosher! Apparently, they weren?t advertising the fact due to the fear of any backlash from the rabble-rousers from other ?religions?.
Now the market for kosher food is worth hundreds of billions, over $20 billion in the US alone. Marketers in the US revel in the country?s diversity, with products and communication directed at ethnic groups. In India, isn?t it strange that there is not even a single local kosher food brand of note? Though the fear of divisive politics is responsible for the lack of community-based marketing segmentation, Indian marketers? lack of application on new segments stems from other reasons, too.
Marketers, of anything from soaps, shampoos, food to durables, have all this while relied on virtually century-old segments in usage, education, income, occasion, awareness etc, to target consumers. Some brave ones got into psychographic segmentation, constructing elaborate models of consumer behaviour, and basing their marketing efforts on it. But with the potential of easy picks in urban elite consumer over, and competition fierce, the sales pitch based on these constructed segments will begin to ring hollow.
In their attempt to grow, marketers will perforce push the segmentation envelope, and hopefully, in the process reflect and leverage the demographic reality of the country better than they have in the past. It?s not just community-based segmentation that has been ignored, but even gender and ethnic groups have got the short shrift as big naturally existing segments. In the name of region-based segmentation, all one had till now was a sporadic attempt in a Punjabi aata or vegetarian toothpaste targeted at Gujaratis.
Take working women as a segment, for instance. Now there are over 2.7 million educated working women in urban India, those belonging to the top-most socio-economic class (SEC) A, according to analysis done for this paper by New Delhi-based analytics firm Indicus Analytics. Though India, with all its age-old gender-led prejudices, is far off from say the US, where last year women outnumbered men at the workplace for the first time, the narrative of the educated working women with all its concomitant symbolism?female empowerment, gender equality?has been a strong cultural narrative for Indians across cities and villages.
But sadly, most consumer goods marketers have reduced this?powerful narrative to??rushing to office? and/or ?juggling home-and-office? stereotype of the working woman in their advertising to hawk anything from appliances to food brands. Surely, a segment of 2.7 million working women in urban India, over 8 lakh in four metros and Bangalore alone, with money to back her consumption-led desires deserves better treatment than meted out presently by marketers in India.
Ditto with teenagers. For all the talk of India being a young country with a sizeable population under 18 years of age, one would be hard pressed to name even a handful of Indian youth brands. No prizes for guessing why, for marketers never saw the logic of separately addressing this segment?barring an exception or two?when everyone can be painted with the same brush, and the only criteria that mattered were income and location?metro, town or village.
The stirrings of an epochal change though are becoming visible. Caught between the pincer of fast saturating urban markets and a bare-bone tariff war, telecom operators are beginning to push the envelope on segmentation, with migrants becoming a big target for most, what with their typical need for calling up their folks back in the villages, ?corridor calling? in industry lingo. In fact migrants?whose numbers run into millions, a huge segment in a country like India that is moving from its agrarian roots to urbanisation?are becoming big market for everyone from telcos to real-estate players. Tata Housing?s Shubh Griha low-cost urban housing project counts migrants as its key segment.
Indicus lists 33 relatively unexplored ones just based on SEC and lifestage in urban India. And we haven?t even started taking ethnicity into consideration here. Though rural India remains a growth beacon for a host of products or services, rising consumption here too will demand a finer slicing soon. True, some new segments will come unstuck, like the much-talked Rurban?urban dwellers with rural mindsets?and we may be some time away before marketers start attempting any overt community-based segmentation. But surely, a country and market as diverse as India deserves a much more nuanced segmentation approach.
shailesh.dobhal@expressindia.com