This also, that also

We are like that only

By Rama Bijapurkar
Penguin Portfolio
Pp: 281
Price: Rs 495

One of India’s best-known consumer market watchers shatters a few myths.

It has been more than a decade since the first wave of consumer marketers came to India in the wake of a newly liberalised economy. Talk to them, and they’ll tell you that they are still searching for the promised El Dorado—the 250-million-strong Indian middle class that was expected to open up its purse strings to purveyors of everything from potato chips to sneakers to colour televisions. While some of the multinational marketers have done fabulously well (the Koreans, for example, in durables), many others have failed to live up to their global status in India.

In the past, we have had books on changing India and consumers, where Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound sought to engagingly chronicle the country’s progress since shortly after Independence and elaborated on the impact of liberalisation process in 1991. Later, Pavan Varma’s The Great Indian Middle Class commented on the role of the individual citizen in a changing world. But Bijapurkar’s work is different; it is not a casual-if-incisive commentary, but well-researched and fact-based work. There is no attempt to pontificate, but merely to analyse and synthesise. And the message is delivered in a style that’s now her trademark: direct, and with the least amount of fuss.

Sample some of her observations from Chapter 1: “The nature of emerging market economies is fundamentally different”; “emerging markets need not be virgin markets”; “emerging markets today—such as India—are not what the developed markets were in their infancy”. In shattering such myths, Bijapurkar, a former McKinsey consultant who now consults independently, dives straight into the heart of the matter on how every indicator on India is a relative measure. While key indicators such as purchasing power reveal a trend, what they don’t usually reveal is the level of aspiration. For it’s not just people, but even cities that have mindsets, she contends.

All this may appear to be a case of obvious knowledge in hindsight, but not really. In early 2000, Hindustan Lever (now Hindustan Unilever) realised that consumer spends were going up, but it possibly did not bargain for the fact that people would not spend on soaps and shampoos, but would direct their earnings towards mobiles, home loans and automobiles.

At company after company, marketers are realising that change has crept in on them unawares. So, Bijapurkar’s critics might say that her book is a tad too late, but they would have missed the point that she has been voicing these views for some years now at various fora and through her writing. In this book, she states herself with greater vehemence: ask not, she cautions multinational marketers, “what is the size of market that India offers for my global strategy?” rather, ask “what should be my local, customised strategy for the Indian market?”

Marketers needn’t get depressed, though. Bijapurkar also points to something that may be uniquely Indian (perhaps, Asian as well): the Indian consumers morph slowly, but the collective change, when it finally happens, is phenomenal. Just ask Nokia.

Unstoppable

Chris Zook
Harvard Business School Press
Pp: 190
Price: $29.95 (Rs 1,198)

It’s a classic dilemma that every company faces at some stage of its life. Suddenly, it finds itself outwitted by a newer and smarter competitor, and all the rules that it played by for years have changed. Its market share begins to shrink and so do profits, and before the company can do anything about it, investors start fleeing. It’s a familiar story in India as well, and one has seen it play out in different industries.

Unstoppable is about how companies can reinvent themselves when their core business is threatened. More significantly, it’s about how they can do that by tapping into the strengths they may have already built over the years.

Zook, Head of Bain & Co.’s Global Strategy Practice and author of Profit from the Core and Beyond the Core, says this book was prompted by the realisation that an increasing number of clients were facing more frequent threats to their core businesses.

One of the things his study of 25 different companies that have managed such reinvention revealed, he says, was that “the best blueprint for core renewal seldom requires leaps to distant and hot new markets, or mandates being the first adopter of a pioneering new technology, or demands a ‘big bang’ acquisition”. That should be good news for managers who worry about staying relevant in the long term.