Saturday, June 14, 2014


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Fashion Retail comes of Age


By Harish Bijoor

Fashion retailing is finally coming of age in India. As the entire nation of fashion retailers stop plucking just the low-hanging fruit of opportunity, and reach out at the higher branches that offer a different set of opportunities that need to be plucked  with a different set of skills altogether,  its time to sit up and take note of some changes.  Changes that speak the language of the front-ended consumer of fashion, rather than just the back-ended guy who manages the sourcing, the supply-chain and the entire process of reaching out the item on offer to the store that stocks it.

Let’s start with advertising.  Study the advertising of a nation, and you understand its people.

I follow this diktat to the core when I study a nation, its culture, its peoples, and its brand and marketing formats. Advertising used by the marketers of a nation reveals more than hides.  While the reality is that consumers must define advertising, advertising often defines consumers as well.  However, on more occasions than most, advertising of a nation is a great barometer of its people and their resultant consumer behavior patterns.
We see a fair bit of change in the current consumer behavior stances that manifest themselves at the retail shop floor. We will witness a lot of it morph even more un-recognizably in the years to come. For the purpose of this piece, though we have data and diagnostics that pertain to men, women and children as retail purchase groups, let me focus on women in this piece.

Consumer behavior patterns among women in India have changed radically and continually over the last nine decades and more. The earliest decade of it all saw literally no participation by women in what they bought.  In the early twenties, if you were to peek into the life of your grandmother or great grandmother for that matter, women just did not show themselves to be active buyers at all. The woman sat at home, and consumed just about anything that the man and men of the house brought in. There was indeed a time when it was taboo for a woman in early India to go to the corner grocer even. Women just did not expose themselves to the retailer at large. Never mind that the retailer at the corner was related to you in some way of the other. Women expressed their choice to their husbands and brothers and fathers and the men bought. At times bought tailoring everything to their own choice even.

Women came into their own in terms of expressing choice and articulating it all in purchase behavior of every kind much, much later. In many ways, the way marriages were and are conducted in India says it all. The women had little choice in the men they chose to marry. More often than not, “purchase behavior” here was dictated as well.

Today however, things are a bit different. Love marriages are in vogue, and a woman literally has the choice to marry anyone, just as long as they are of the opposite sex and are human. As this trend cascades, consumer behavior among women gets more accentuated, articulated and driving in its motion. Marketers today study consumer behavior patterns among women differently as opposed to that among men and children.

The years ahead in the tenure 2014-20 will see dramatic changes in the consumer behavior patterns as articulated by women. Expect lots. Expect the woman to be getting more and more ‘I, me and myself” centric than she is today. Today she is the benign mother, wife, daughter and daughter-in-law, overseeing everyone’s happiness. Expect this trend to shift more to the “I”. This will have women looking to buy products and services that are leveraged to their personal choices more than aggregated family choices.

Expect women to destroy and decimate the paradigm think of many a marketers. Expect the woman to stop thinking the same old pinks and bright-yellows in color choices, whether it is clothes, auto, microwaves or fans. Expect women to exhibit consumer behavior that is that much more “non-womanly”. Expect radical shifts here.  Expect lots!

Expect the woman to be making many more decisions on her own as well. She will decide on which mini-skirt to buy, just as she will decide on how short or long it must be. She will decide as well on which car to buy, which Insurance product to latch onto and which bank to operate an account out of.

However, expect 2020 to erase much of this gender divide as well.

Man today is seen to be the calculative one, and women are seen to be the impulsive ones. Marketers and advertisers don't want to break this imagery up, as it divides the sexes and their dominant appeals clearly. Any attempt to bring fuzziness here, will result in confusion. Marketers and advertisers are in many ways postponing the inevitable, one ad at a time! The death of the differentiator between the genders is going to happen, later than sooner. But till it exists, reap it to your advantage. And guess what, both the genders love it. As of now.


2014 is here. The consumer in our midst is morphing mindlessly. The consumer is amoebic as well. There is just no straight line analysis that works in understanding what will come next.
As of now, this is the day and age of Twitter. A day and age when attention spans of young people, in age and mind, is rather limited. Limited at times to just a plain 140-characters altogether. Let me therefore make this article brisk, crisp and as matter-of-fact as possible. Here goes…

In-store is an excitement. As opportunities every-where else dries up, and as opportunities every-where else gets saturated and cluttered, one finally looks in. In-store.

The In-store opportunity that lies ahead of us In India is immense. We are a nation of shopkeepers. At last count, we were a nation of 14.6 million shopkeepers. Few nations can boast of such a number.

The reality however remains that bulk of our shops are in un-organized retail. Only a nano fraction of it has been opened up in organized retail. While in percentage terms the value of output from organized retail in India is today pegged at 5.2% of the total value generated out of the Indian retail business, the reality remains that only 6000 plus stores dot the country in terms of outlets that reach out through the means of organized retail. The category remains dominated by un-organized retail. This is not even what is described as Mom and Pop retail in the markets of the West, this is really ‘Bunty &Babli’ retail. Retail that exists in the nook and cranny of the great Indian market. Spurred on by micro-entrepreneurs I will call Bunty and Babli for the moment. Retail that earns the livelihood for as many as 81 million directly affected individuals and as many as 220 million people in this country indirectly touched by the profits of ‘Bunty & Babli’ retail.
As the in-store opportunity stares back at us in India, there are two segments to track and keep note of. At one end is the big in numbers ‘Bunty&Babli’ retail, and at another is the high profile and growing in value format of organized retail. The savvy marketer of tomorrow is going to have an eye on both. The easy one of the lot seems to be the one that is all about organized retail. Here, we have established formats that come in from the developed super-markets of the world. Store formats are laid out, planograms have been researched to death, efficacy levels are proven, and more often than not, what one requires is a roll-out and ramp-up for Indian conditions where the consumer is a very much more tactile entity.

The trick in the tale is however the fact that everyone sources from the same location. How then do you differentiate and customize the In-store experience for India. Big retail has plenty to learn on this. Solution providers in this space are a wanted species. A much wanted one.


The challenge seems to however lie in the realm of “Bunty&Babli’ retail. Out here, the numbers are large, value-churn is low and profit margins are wafer thin. Business is however brisk. The way to the mass eyeball and hand-stretch in Indian retail is certainly not one to be restricted to modern organized retail alone. Instead, it is all about the small ‘Bunty&Babli’ retail format, where the largest numbers will be reached by the largest numbers of outlets. Outlets that attract a custom of just 60 customers a day even. Outlets that generate at times a daily turnover of just a plain old Rs.600 even!

One more issue to track. While in markets of the developed world is it is just fine to write off Mom and pop store retail as something that will occupy a niche of the pie forever, in India, it is just way too difficult to do this. ‘Bunty&Babli’ retail looks a forever-relevant model for a country the size of India, and a country with a buying profile that is as variegated as in India. And a big in numbers format at that.

The challenge ahead for In-store science in India is therefore one of catering to both segments well. The challenge is to ensure that one segment is not ignored at the cost of the other. In-store solutions across the spectrum of automotive, apparel, grocery and food, and literally everything else, except for luxury retail needs to have an approach that covers the big and small retail alike.

Therefore, in these set of years ahead from 2014-20, think just two big things. Think woman, and think In-store!


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Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
You can follow him on Twitter.com @harishbijoor
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
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When you can be Impatient, why be Patient?


When you can be Impatient, Why Be Patient?

By Harish Bijoor



Youth and trends? That’s really an oxymoron, dear moron!

And that starting sentence of mine, in-the-eye, in-the-face, and in the gut, is really the way they talk. “Hey Dog” is a loving appellation.  A side hug that follows, that could get your shoulder dislocated due to impact strength, is a way of bonding with you and telling you we are one. We come from the same generation, and we are headed to the same hell as well.

The young in this country are difficult to understand. Youth and trends are words that don’t necessarily go together. The youth as a category and genre defies trends. The moment something sets in and looks like a seeming trend, the category moves its cheese and chips and Coke. Trend is for the old. The young believe in change. Change that is forever, and discontinuous. And discontinuous trend is really not a trend. Difficult thing to track with method, science and meaning as well. Those who believe they are trend-spotters, who have arrived, live in a fool’s paradise. The trend you write about is as old as the day it was written. It is jaded now, and there is something new around today. Let’s wake up and smell the young sweat.


Since trends are difficult to track, and once having been tracked, have this yen to change, there is a great way of keeping in touch with the youth and what they do, what they wear, what they speak, what they eat and what they drink and how they party. Just watch them at it. Track them. Track them without them knowing you are tracking them. Catch them in their natural surroundings. By the way this is not their home, their school, their college or their spanking new entry-level offices. Instead, it is the third-place where they are letting their hair down. Catch them in their gyms, the beauty-parlors, the Cafes, the pubs, the discs and more. It is here that they are themselves. Catch them as well on twitter and Face Book. Catch them on Tagged. Catch them with their pants down with their second and third digital handles that run as “HotArun” and “HawtGAWD” and “CoolKHIMCHI” and “KoolKHICHDI” alike. Catch them on sites you never thought guys and girls like them would ever be. The foot-prints you track today must be both physical and digital. And just as there are “physical third-places”, there are “digital third-places” where they hang out as well.  And then when you have watched them 1:1 in myriad “third-place” locations, build that pen-picture of theirs. This will change in three months flat. Therefore, keep building those pen-pictures every month, month on month, and keep calibrating your mind, mood, language, tone and tenor of the youth at large. You just might be on the right track then.

This piece on youth trend is therefore not as much as telling you the trends as teaching you how to trend-track in today’s crazy youth world. Teach a man to fish, rather than give him a now-truly-dead Pomfret you caught this morning.

 I do a fair bit of it. I use a lot of it in my strategy consulting assignments as I do donning my “Keynote speaker “avatar as well. On the whole, watching people do what they do,  with science as your tool, analytics as your buddy, and consumer skills as your science, art and philosophy, one can go places.

If there is one seminal thought I want to give in this piece, it is the thought to say that this generation baffles us all marketers. I call this Gen.  “The I-Gen.”.   The Internet Generation? No! The Impatient Generation!

Impatience is the hallmark of the youth. Patience cycles have progressively become smaller and smaller. Today, patience is dead and is no longer a virtue. Impatience is the new virtue. The more impatient you are, the more of a ‘go-getter-youth’ you are. The idea is a simple one. When you can be Impatient, why be patient?
Impatience hits you in the face all around in the lives of the young. The youth is impatient with love. There are relationships on the front-burner, just as there is a parallel one on the back-burner. Multi-hob is the way to go. And in some cases there is love on the sleeve, there is love in the heart and there is love in the wallet as well.

Impatience looks large with its beady moist eyes in marriages that are on the rocks rather fast. There is impatience in sex and there is just no binding yourself tight within the confines of a marriage anymore. If sex is bad in the house, go to the Cafetaria and get it. And the Cafetaria is large and welcoming, with no strings attached. It is a veritable buffet on offer. Relationships start stretching at the seams a bit too fast.

Impatience is everywhere, and the salivating marketer is ready to cater to it. When you fracture your patella and rush to the hospital, there are two cures possible really. The patient one is to be in a cast for six weeks, and the impatient one is do what the doctor in the big hospital is recommending. Put in those nuts and bolts and be up and about in one week flat. The marketer here (in benign disguise) is the doctor recommending the high-priced quick-fix versus the low-priced plaster of Paris in blue. This is everywhere in every realm you tread in youth space. Pay the price and get the lost time back. Time is a big part of the currency game. We live with two currencies today: time and money. At times time is at a premium over money even.

There is impatience in the foods we eat, fast food versus regular food. Restaurants versus QSR’s. Quick-serve restaurants versus slow-serve restaurants, if you will. There is impatience in the yen to create wealth, just as there is impatience to spend it all. The bio-clock of the youth at large is ticking at a pace that seems much more frenetic than at any time in our marketing history to date. There seems to be very little time to live, might as well live it fast and furious. Fashion, lifestyle, entertainment and digital use is witnessing this impatience all around.


What then is the real problem at hand? It’s not what, it’s who? The marketers. Marketers In the country are an older lot. Marketers are much older than the people they market to. Marketers are good at the old marketing format: Patience Marketing. Marketers today are good at marketing to patient consumers. Impatience is a mindset they just do not understand well enough. Even if they do, there is lip-service done to it. There is also this dominant attitude and notion in the minds of older marketers (and by old I mean age 30 and above, ouch!), that this impatience is a fad, and it will pass as well.
Marketers need to learn and practice impatience then to market to the youth. Embrace impatience within your brand DNA. Pack impatience within your brand offering, and showcase it to the youth.  Resonate with this impatience and be a part of it rather than be a part that criticizes it and passes value-judgments on it, just as an older person is bound to.

Re-check your  ‘young quotient’ dear marketer, before you attempt to market to the youth effectively. When was the last time you hit a discotheque and grooved to the tune of  Timber and Dubstep?                    And do you even know what we are talking about? Ouch!

Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist  & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Twitter @harishbijoor

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Indian Retail and The Grouse Economy




The Grouse Retail Economy


By Harish Bijoor


We live in a world full of complaints. The retail world is no different.

In the beginning, the micro Mom-and-pop retailer complained about the neighborhood large store. The Micro retailer had his own grouse. He ran his outfit with the help of wife and son and daughter. His was really a ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ enterprise. In came the corner grocer of relatively larger format. While the Micro-retailer managed with a 60-sq feet enterprise, the corner grocer was all of 600 sft. He stocked variety. He stocked both grains and packaged items. He offered better lighting and a better display. He had a refrigerator to stock butter and bottled drinks as well.  Consumers of the hinterland flocked to him, and the micro-retailer remained micro in terms of size and dream alike. The corner grocer became the big bad boy of retail. Mom, pop & Child cried hoarse.

And then came the super-market.  This happened all of 35 years ago. Into the hinterland of the corner-grocer, who had grown leaps and bounds, came the local Super-market. This guy was bigger than them all. He had occupied all of 3000 sft. He offered a seamless shopping experience that brought in self-service. A customer could not only see the item he was buying, but could touch and smell as well. He could compare one with the other. He could peer keenly into the produce and package. He could be that much more informed a shopper.  He ate into the hinterland of consumers hitherto dominated by the corner grocer and his smaller cousins in the realm of the ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ format as well. The large-format super-market became the bad boy of Indian retail now. The corner-grocer cried foul. The ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ enterprise believed this was karma playing out. The smirk was now on his face.

And then came real organized retail. Organized retail spearheaded by organizations that were never imagined to be in this space. These were Indian enterprises of every kind. In came the Future Group. We had a Reliance Retail happen. In came the Aditya Birla effort. In came every other effort from every other group, (the Tatas included), that was hitherto considered an entity that had bigger axes to grind than to look into the realm of retail as a business proposition at all.

This was big fish entering the space of relatively moderately sized fish.  This fish wanted to eat it all up in a way. It protested and said that nothing would happen to the micro-format, the corner-grocer and the medium-sized super-market at all. In many ways it was right. The market opportunity was so large, and the efforts so small by these biggies as they tested the waters, that nothing really happened to eh volumes enjoyed by the rest of the retail chain. Big fish did not really eat small fish. And Darwin was right. The fittest in every category survived and thrived. Every category had a space all its own to occupy and hope to thrive in. The operative word here is ‘hope’!

But then everyone cried hoarse. Everyone complained. The bigger you were, the ‘badder’ you were! Forgive me for coining that word and giving good grammar a beating. It deserves it here.

And then we have just about emerged from the cries and the tumult on FDI in retail. Even the biggest Indian names in retail are said to be in sync with this, only to attract FDI that goes to mitigate its losses in this space. It is said that the biggest Indian names would not like to compete with a 100% Wal-Mart or a 100% Carrefour effort. The wails are still around. The complaints are still floating in a space very near to all of us.
The latest cry is from the space of the physical brick and mortar retailer. Brick and mortar retailers are now crying about the current small fact that the e-retailer is making a dent into his business. Bookshop owners are crying hoarse that consumers are browsing physical books at their stores and buying them online at a discount. Quite the reverse of what was being done a couple of years ago. As of today, I buy my vegetables at home from an e-retailer.  E-retail is not ubiquitous as of now though, and I hold that e-retail is still anecdotal in its presence, reach, acceptability and habit. Even then, the cries are all around. The complaints are all around in our psyche.

The retail world has been a complaint economy thus far then. It started thirty-five years ago, and the complaints are still around. Newer ones replace older ones.

As all of this abounds, my one suggestion to the latest complainant in the space of brick and mortar retail is a simple one. All of us need to accept the fact that Darwin has always been right for all of these 175 years. The fittest will survive. Retail that caters to the needs, wants, desires and indeed growing and forever changing aspirations of the consumer, will always survive and will always thrive. There is space for everyone.

The fact remains that India is large. The fact remains that the Indian is on the morph. The fact also remains that for every one of our 1.2 Billion people, there is a solution that needs to be different in its appeal. Each of our retail formats, from the micro-retail format of 60-sft to the e-retail format of just no square feet at all, has an appeal to a distinct set of customers. Everyone will survive and thrive.  The fittest in every space will thrive.

Just no point complaining and wailing about it at all.  Let’s laugh together. Hopefully all the way to the bank. The e-bank.

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Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting practice that operates in the realm of brand and business strategy. The company has a presence in the markets of India, Hong Kong, London, Dubai and Istanbul.
Harish is a public speaker who speaks to Corporate audiences across the globe in the realm of motivation, people-management issues, brands, marketing and business at large.
He is active on twitter @harishbijoor
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