No Rules Please,We146;re Indian

Rama Bijapurkar makes sense of the Indian consumer and shows how imported theories of how s/he buys are bound to fail

We Are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India
Rama Bijapurkar, Penguin, Rs 495

Rama bijapurkar writes well. 8220;India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the 8216;green revolution8217;, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less than a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly.8221; However, this book is not about these dichotomies. It is about the Indian consumer market and its marketing implications, based partly on material Bijapurkar has earlier written in magazines and newspaper columns. The backdrop is the India Shining growth story, present and future. Though not directly pertinent to the meat of the book, more care on macro numbers with years indicated was warranted. Is India8217;s Atlas method per capita income 538 page 27 or 700 page 34? Is overall GDP 700 billion page 33?

If there is income and prosperity growth, there should be consumption growth. Yet, initially, the hyped 250-300 million middle class didn8217;t materialise and part of the reason was a misunderstanding of the Indian consumer market. One emerging market economy differs from another and all emerging markets are not virgin markets. 8220;Consumer India is like an experienced hire in an organisation, while Consumer China is like a fresh hire. An experienced hire is more difficult to manage and mould, because he already has a set way of doing things that works pretty well and therefore he needs a lot of convincing by persuasion or clout to adopt your way of thinking or doing things.8221;

Nor are emerging markets like India what developed markets were in their infancy. Hence a marketing strategy has to be India-specific, looking at India through multiple lenses. Through 13 chapters, we are taken through these multiple lenses, the first two chapters being primarily introductory. In the third chapter, we begin with some broad-brush propositions. Consumer India is large. It is mostly poor, but is getting less poor. One should have been more careful about the 22 per cent poverty ratio for 2004-05, page 34. It has some rich people. But they are increasing in number and getting richer. However, the market is like a patchwork quilt, with consumption ideologies of the post-liberalisation generation significantly different from the pre-liberalisation one.

In the chapters that follow, we are taken through segmentation of Consumer India, initially based on NCAER8217;s five consumer categories 8212; the rich, the consuming class, the climbers, the aspirants and the destitute. Thus, Consumer India is not a monolith, but a multi-layered cake. There is the inevitable question of matching consumption/expenditure data, with income data. 8220;Consumption data from surveys is accurate and tallies well with supply side information. Here8217;s the mantra to remember 8212; consumption is like maternity, a certainty. Income is like paternity 8212; merely a matter of inference.8221; Let me reiterate that this is an exceedingly well-written book, with an abundant of anecdotes thrown in. However, this part Chapter 5 is an exception and while economists will understand what Bijapurkar has to say, the non-specialist may feel lost.

To get back to many Indias, Consumer India can be segmented into the afore-mentioned five consumption classes, urban and rural India, four age cohorts with two distinct consumption ideologies and five economies agriculture, manufacturing, government, services, IT. Marketing thus has to define the target India and cannot afford to assume that one size will fit all. To add to our comprehension, we are next taken through SEC socio-economic classification, the self-employed as a distinct consumer class, psychographic determinants and ethnicity.

After an explanation on how this is changing Chapter 8, we move on to issues that are usually not covered 8212; cultural foundations Chapter 9, young India and women Chapter 10, the rural market Chapter 11 and perhaps inevitably, the bottom of the pyramid Chapter 12. How many marketing books are likely to have data on village India? The final concluding chapter brings the arguments together and there is a foreword by C.K. Prahalad and an afterword by N.R. Narayana Murthy. A good and engrossing book.