ONE OF my classmates had a global brand management job in a large US corporation. He once told me every time there was a global marketing programme roll-out, he used to get some sort of an objection from his India team. He jokingly told me he dreaded all mails that started with ?But in India,??
A Never-Before World by Rama Bijapurkar is that dreaded comma that challenges global brand and business practices, which are superficially adapted for India.
Her logic at some level is infallible. Nobody and absolutely nobody can have experience about the change that?s taking place in India?not even Indians. It has not happened in any other market. So creating an India strategy with deft statistical jugglery around the global market and consumer evolution data will continue to prove futile.
In the hands of the global business community, every ?civilisation? has been turned into a ?market?. So all business strategies are usually built from the ?consumption? lens, not from the lens of people, society and culture. This book primarily deals with the consumption anomalies of post-liberalised India and doesn?t always provide the underlying societal or cultural truth behind them.
But the place where this book scores is the pragmatic and insightful look at macroeconomic indicators, thereby debunking some myths propagated by consulting and investment banking white papers and a multitude of articles spawned by them subsequently in the pink papers. Especially in chapters called ?Middle class truths? and ?The third trillion?, the author effortlessly reclassifies data from the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure or National Sample Survey (NSS) and shows the real challenge of consumer India in coming years. Sample this: what is insightful and counter to popular belief about India?s household income structure is that half of well-off India (the top 40%) lives in rural India. The perception of rural India being mostly poor is also correct because in addition to half of rich India, almost all of poor India also lives in rural India?72% of rural households are in the bottom three quintiles of households by income. Having said that, 25% of urban Indian households are also in the third- and fourth-income quintiles of just about making ends meet.
These reclassifications and some related sharp questions raised around the divergence of the Indian consumer market make this book extremely eye-opening at times. Add to that the moments of powerful poignancy. When the author points out that the two extreme ends of the income spectrum get affected by food inflation and high interest rates, you tend to look at the absolute numbers and understand the difficulty of policymaking and near-impossibility of inclusive growth in the country.
The author was once asked by a Dutch researcher why in India we always refer to people as consumers and not citizens. According to the researcher, the reason was simple: Indians have far better rights as consumers than as citizens. This, apart from being my most favourite anecdote in the book, has influenced the book to a great extent. The impact of failed public goods and services in creating priorities for consumer India runs through many chapters of the book and makes for fundamentally sound logic. Somehow, the civic infrastructure and failed political systems are often overlooked (or given superficial importance) while creating a consumption-led business plan. The author asks a few difficult questions around that, which make for great reading.
If you are in the habit of reading books in search of quotable quotes, this book will disappoint you. If you are an airport back-cover reader, this book is not for you either (to start with, this book doesn?t and cannot have a back-cover summary). But if you are looking to hear a point of view around the true future of consumer India?both in terms of macroeconomic indicators and consumption patterns?this book may interest you.
My only complaint with the book is that it could have had tighter editing. The content is robust, thoughtful and provocative. It could have done away with compulsive marketing cliches like MTV Hinglish or the Mc Aloo Tikki Burger. There are some other parts where the same argument is repeated in a slightly different avatar, but the author?s tell-it-like-it-is style often compensates for this minor shortcoming.
Partha Sinha is director, Publicis Worldwide