CEO Dialogues | Experts discuss opportunities and challenges surrounding the retail sector in India
KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)
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Summary
In the first edition of PwC and CNBC-TV18’s CEO Dialogues, top executives from major companies discussed opportunities and challenges surrounding the retail sector and the consumption story in India.
India has a population of 1.4 billion people and out of that 850 million use the internet, while 600 million use smartphones. So that is a whole lot of tech savvy people.
When it comes to online activity, India has 450 million online gamers, 350 million people who do online transactions and 185 million online shoppers. However, it is not just the numbers, there are some fascinating facts about the disproportionate contribution from a small clutch of Indian consumers as well.
For instance, did you know that just 1 percent of Indians account for 45 percent of all flight passengers and the top 5 percent of Zomato users are responsible for 33 percent of all orders placed on the app. Even UPI — 6.5 percent of UPI users are responsible for 44 percent of transactions and that is mainly because of the income difference. Just 1 percent of Indians take home a staggering 22 percent of India’s income.
In the first edition of PwC and CNBC-TV18’s CEO Dialogues, top executives from major companies discussed opportunities and challenges surrounding the retail sector and the consumption story in India.
The panelists included Sanjeev Krishan, Chairperson of PwC India; Ravi Kapoor, Retail & Consumer Sector Leader at PwC India; Anuj Poddar, MD & CEO of Bajaj Electricals; Vineet Gautam, CEO of Bestseller India; Ambareesh Murty, Founder of Pepperfry; Manish Taneja, Co-Founder & CEO of Purplle.com; Satyen Momaya, CEO of Celio Future Fashion; and Geetika Mehta, Managing Director of Hershey India.
Below are the excerpts from the discussion.
Q: Take us through what you believe are going to be the emerging themes, trends, the challenges and the opportunities for the Indian consumption story?
Ravi Kapoor: Growth is a perennial question which always has answers which are differing by time and by situations. The strongest correlation is per capita GDP. The per capita GDP is the biggest correlation of the wealth of the society. What we have seen is that over 30 years per capita GDP has roughly grown at a CAGR of 4.5 percent and from 1991 onwards that has pretty much quadrupled categories across the retail spectre. So there is a straight correlation out there.
In last three years, India has been the fastest growing economy in the world. The beauty of the Indian GDP is that personal consumption is almost 60 percent of the GDP. The sector which all of us represent is roughly 10 percent of that and so what that means is we are integrally tied with domestic consumption, we are integrally tied with the growth of GDP.
Let me also take a more vantage view now. All of us have heard the positivity and the optimism around — we are getting into Amritkaal and I genuinely believe that. The nearest milestone to that Amritkaal is 2030 when we would be becoming the third biggest economy in the world, roughly translating it to $5 trillion. There are several enabling factors driving it. If you look at the population, we have a median age of 28 and the working cohort in India is going to be a billion plus — who is going to talk such numbers — go to Japan, China, these numbers are not possible today. So with that huge population, there is a huge positivity which needs to get leveraged and tapped.
Another big thing which is going to happen hopefully is the participation of women in workforce. Women are 50 percent of the population. So what we are sensing is that from 20 percent, we are expecting it to double up by 2030 – so 40-45 percent of women joining the workforce.
There are certain secular trends which continue unabated which is urbanisation. All of us sitting in this room would love India to urbanise faster and quicker. We are still just one third ubranised, two thirds of India still is living in villages, but that is going to change for sure.
The other factor is, we are a nuclear family country now. Gone are the days of joint family and nuclearisation is good for us in that sense of the word.
What we should also remember is, lot of efforts which the government is doing to create platforms for driving growth — so whether it is the investment in the hard core infrastructure of logistics — never before in the history of country roughly 2 percent of the GDP is getting spent on logistics. So that is creating those kind of pathways — all of us were talking about D2C and ecommerce and creating access to tier-III, IV and beyond, that would need that kind of infrastructure service capability.
We should not forget that GST looks like an old story but the way it has driven formalisation, the way it has driven the MSME sectors to come into the mainstream, it is super important because that is driving one key factor of formalisation.
I think all of us here are representing brands and formalisation is the only way in which brands are going to become critically more important for consumption and the story there is absolutely glass 90 percent not full because the sector is almost just 10 percent working in the organised way. So there is lot of opportunities for growth.
Having said that, there is lot of here and now versus future and that we need to balance any which ways. I must also say that there are factors which we don’t control, whether it is the macroeconomics, geopolitics or whether it is the global supply chain. I think all of us are working in a global ecosystem, so those are continuing to be challenges. Having said that there are enough and more things to do for us which we can control. Some of the broad themes I would like to touch upon — one is, how do we remember the Bharat? Because that is where the game is. We have been talking about bottom of pyramid fortune for almost 10+ years now, I think it is time that we should lift the talk. It has been shown already, we are the biggest per capita mobile data consumption country in the world, so that has happened because we have not ignored Bharat and so what do we do about it.
I think the flip side of Bharat is premiumisation. When you are talking about an urbanised country, it is very important that how do you continue to expand your business footprint in urban India and that can only happen through premiumisation. Another factor is tech. We are living in a tech world and no sector is immune from it and I think all of us understand it. There is enough and more innovation happening in the technology space. I have heard in my conversations CEOs really thinking about how GPT is going to transform some of the aspects of value chain. So it is no longer a nice to play thing on your laptops, but it is becoming an important driver of how do I change the way I work.
Lastly, I think India lifts the world of contradictions. We need to drive growth, we need to drive per capita but we need to do it sustainably. I think that is very important and the consumer sector lifts the talk because we are in the face of the consumers life. How we do packaging, recycling, manage our carbon footprint, the consumer is seeing us and we are talking to consumers and hearing it from them as well. So some of these factors are going to be super important.
Q: It is six months into the year as well, how do you see 2023 playing out? The positives are that at least on the commodity side inflation has come off, the negative is that you have seen interest rates move higher and that has impacted in some categories consumer sentiment. How is the demand looking today?
Anuj Poddar: I will start with a personal anecdote. We just declared our Q4FY23 results yesterday. And to be honest, it was a good quarter. We had growth, etc, and I got a few messages this morning congratulating me. I said, don’t go by the numbers because you don’t know how tough it is to get these numbers. By that what I mean is that we are getting the growth but it almost feels like you are getting it against a very strong headwind.
The demand is not there and then you are really having to work for it — whether it’s discounting, other measures, means etc. Secondly, I wanted to pick on something that Ravi mentioned and you mentioned statistically in terms of the per capita GDP — it’s almost like for four or six quarters that we had been seeing a non-correlation between the GDP and the actual demand.
About two quarters ago, we said no, something’s not right and let’s go and dig into that. Which is not to say the numbers are not right, but then we figured the per capita is probably the wrong metric, you have to look at the median GDP. And that will give you a very different picture. It is the top one percent that is really consuming. So the median is not looking so rosy and that’s where the real challenge lies. So can we get the median up rather than the average? And that’s when you really unlock this demographic dividend and everything else that we talk about.
Third, in terms of what you spoke about commodity inflation and interest rates, I think we have passed commodity inflation, that’s the good news. So I think costs are in control for us. I think the interest rate hikes have really impacted EMIs — which is the cost of committed liabilities for people and therefore the net disposable income has come down.
I would hope that we are at the peak of the interest rate hike cycle if not a reduction. So from here on, you know, I think some of these are sentiments —you give consumers or people one or two quarters of no price hikes, no inflation, no further interest rate hikes and they start spending. So it’s a game of consumer sentiment — I think no further hikes, everything status quo and in 3-4 months, you should be back with a good demand situation. And that’s my wish for FY24.
Q: Let’s talk about demand at this point in time. What are you seeing because we saw through the COVID period, a big focus on home renovation, on housing, and so on and so forth. What is the situation at this point in time?
Ambareesh Murty: I think there are headwinds when it comes to demand. However, you have to also break this up let’s say, by geography. So tier-II, III India, I actually think we are seeing it in our business continues to surge ahead. I think the deeper depressions are in the metros and a little bit more in the tier-I cities.
I think the fundamental thing is especially in our sector, which is the furniture and home goods sector, we are going to have a whole bunch of new people coming into the workforce. The fact that there’s nuclearisation is something that’s here to stay, which means more houses and therefore more furniture, more home goods, etc. those trends actually are intact.
What happened during COVID was another fillip to the industry and I think that’s sustained or that’s held up. Normally in a waking day, we would have spent three or four hours at home, during the COVID pandemic we started spending 14-18 hours at home. And that built a serious consciousness of what you have in your house. So if earlier, you would put up with that couch which squeaked a little. Now you would no longer do that. And a lot of that panned out through the course of the last two years.
So in the short term, we are seeing some headwinds, in the longer term I think the fundamentals behind why India is going to be a great consumer story for the next 5-10 years, I think none of that has changed and I think that’s going to continue.
Q: Again, address the here and now in terms of demand and demand visibility, but more importantly, the opportunity and the headroom for growth that everyone is excited about.
Geetika Mehta: So I think indeed there has been a bit of an economic bump in this road — the India shining road. We have seen consumers and this is all Nielsen data — downgrading to smaller pack sizes for example, or in pulse categories some of the sheen coming off them.
During COVID frankly, everybody had become home bakers and everybody was posting these lovely pictures which was great for a business like ours. And now with everybody getting back to work, where is the time to do baking and kind of prettying up your pictures before posting them. So I think there’s been that part.
However, the narrative doesn’t change, we strongly believe that this is a booming business. We see that in growth, while they may have come off a little bit from where they were, there are still very high double digit growth in all the categories that we play in.
So I think going forward, the optimism remains, I think it’s just a bit of a temporary bump and that’s how we are looking at it. But our overall kind of ambition around the India business continues unabated.
Q: What is the ambition for the India business? How would you quantify the ambition for the India business?
Geetika Mehta: We are a privately held company, I don’t think I can give you real numbers. I think for us, as Hershey India, a very high double digit growth is a minimum that we would expect for the business to do. Surprisingly, in India, we launched chocolates nationally in 2020 just before the COVID pandemic hit us. Already we have seen phenomenal growth over the last two or three years. So we are already number three in the category of premium chocolates and it is now internally our biggest category for us. So that’s again, something which remains our number one priority on how we grow.
Of course, the other parts of the business must grow as well, so our spreads, our syrups, our milkshakes, our brand SoFit is an area which I think as an emerging trend is here to stay. The consumers are getting more interested in products and foods which are really good for the body, not just the indulgence palette that most of the Hershey business is on and therefore that also is an area where, you know, our expectations of growth is very high. So yeah, that’s how I would quantify it.
Q: COVID was good for many of them, but not so much for the fashion business. But at this point in time, given the fact that there is clearly, what we’re hearing on the panel, some pullback in discretionary spending, are you feeling that at all today?
Vineet Gautam: We are seeing these headwinds ourselves. We run multiple brands around multiple categories and we can see this across the categories that there is headwinds. I think there are two major reasons in our category because we saw a lot of shift during pandemic to tier-II, tier-III, where people went back home. We were expecting a lot of growth coming from tier-II, tier-III, but I think once the third wave of the pandemic got over, a lot of people moved back to the metros.
So unlike what happened with Pepperfry, we are seeing the other side, we are seeing a slowdown in tier-II, tier-III and metros continue to grow. So there are challenges there, but I think the tier-II, tier-III or the Bharat is where the business is going to be.
We retail out of 130 cities in the country today and I think that is the way forward. We can operate from about 300 cities in the next 3 to 5 years and that’s what we are trying to do.
The good part is about 40 percent of our business comes from women’s wear and that’s a segment that is growing very rapidly. 40 percent of our workforce is also women. So I think we focus a lot on that, multiple brands in that category. And I think it’s one of the categories which is also under-penetrated from brand presence in this country.
There are few international brands but they’re not real Indian brands around there. So we continue to see very large growth. And I agree with Geetika Mehta that in the next five years, high double digit growth in India is not a problem but it comes at a cost because our business is investment business, we have to open retail, it’s not distribution business. So it requires continuous investment in terms of capital and also building the brand, building the cult behind it, different brands have their own strategy, but there is a very wide amount of consumer available in this country in many segments.
The good part that we are seeing is segmentation is becoming sharp. So people start to look at you from that perspective, so you can easily target them because of digital and now 5G is going to be the next game changer. I don’t know how many people are thinking about ONDC, but I think ONDC is something that we are looking at very, very closely. It will mature over time, but what UPI has done to payments, I think ONDC could do that for retail businesses. So I think that will bring a lot more consumers inclusive to brand like ours.
Q: You said there is head room for significantly higher growth but profitable growth or not is the question? I think everyone is very clear, there is complete consensus on the panel as far as growth is concerned. But profitable growth?
Satyen Momaya: I would actually echo what Ravi said. If you were to look at the fundamentals, they remain really strong. I represent apparel lifestyle business and if you were to look at three things — one is the fastest growing economy, second, the young population and I think the third one is in the apparel, we are seeing a huge shift happening from unorganised to organised. So I think the digital is helping spread that.
When we look at growth — with high growth comes volatility. And I think the benchmark thumb rule which we have been using is, as a company if you are able to grow 2x the market industry growth rate, and if you are able to grow 2.5x the GDP growth rate, you are a better performing company. So profitability is something that you really want to continue to invest in.
Apparel needs a lot of investment in actually growing the category — the organised category and hence if you are not really going to be profitable, you’re not going to reinvest back.
We are seeing a slight headwinds currently, maybe because of the inflationary pressure which we had on prices and hence there is some amount of discounting, it would be higher than last year. But we also have to remember that last year was one of our best years in some time frame. Hence on back of that, probably like for like growth could look a little muted. However we are very positive about profitable growth and we continue to look at seeing India as a market, which will be one of the fastest growing markets for Celio globally.
Q: I guess till about 12 months ago, nobody needed to worry so much about profitability because cheques were still being written out by somebody else. But in this environment, as we have now seen globally, interest rates move significantly higher and easy money no longer easy. What is that going to mean in terms of growth and the aspiration for growth from here on?
Manish Taneja: I am a minority here because I represent an online business. I think most of the people here represent more offline businesses. I think online businesses have immense operating leverage that we are now beginning to see. To give you a perspective, I think our business would have grown by like 200 percent over the last three years. And our people cost has remained more or less the same. We don’t need to employ more people and with advancement in machine learning, with advancement in AI, even very smart decisions for which you actually needed high paying people, today computer does a much better job.
You will be surprised to see how many ecommerce companies will break even very soon in India. I think a lot of world had written us off, that we had free cheques available and hence we were allowed to burn a lot of capital. But Purplle has always balanced it out but I am saying for many companies, which have achieved hyper scale, you will see them turn profitable very soon, if not in a few months, I would say in less than three or four quarters. So I think it’s the nature of the business. I think online businesses give you amazing operating leverage that I am assuming an offline business does not give you.
I think our business operates slightly opposite to how probably a Bestseller operates or a Celio operates. One, we are not a brand business, we are a marketplace business, so it doesn’t really hurt us if people down trade.
If they buy more times a year we are okay as long as they are on our platform. Two, I would say this quarter our growth rate is north of 50 percent over the same quarter last year with much better unit economics and almost close to profitability. So I think it’s a business model shift that one probably needs to make. I think different business models have different risks, but I would say if you are an online business, I think operating leverage is unbelievable.
Q: You have heard what everybody on the panel has had to say. And in many ways, I want to link this back to the PwC survey that was released in Davos and ask you this in the context of the strategic choices that each one of these businesses will need to make to ensure that they can actually ride out the storm and capitalise on the opportunity.
Sanjeev Krishan: In the deal street, when you talk about consumer businesses, we only talk about businesses which are pricey and pricier. There is no other term for consumer businesses and that stayed true for at least four business cycles that I have been in private equity for.
So you can well imagine that this sector is the darling in some sense to the point that you were mentioning earlier. Having said that, the survey actually showed and we spoke about it that 4 in 10 CEOs globally are talking about significant business disruption and saying that this business will not exist the way it currently exists.
Actually the consumer CEOs are a little bit high on that chart, they are saying that more of those — in the consumer, maybe that number is I think five or five point something on our scale. So that effectively means to the point that was just being made by Manish that I need to continue to reinvent myself. I mean we are dealing with a bunch of transitions at this point in time. We are dealing with a technology transition and the impact that ChatGPT and others might have. Does it make me more efficient or can it create certain challenges for me? Will some of these businesses not exist tomorrow, is a question.
At the same time, I think the challenge also is that we are also perforced to adopt sustainability. And again, that comes at a cost. That again is a significant transition which is happening on the sustainability side.
Then there is a significant transition that is happening on supply chains, supply chains are getting disrupted. Way I source, how I source it, where does the input come from? And can I have that source in a way that I can tell my customers on a regular basis what is it that my brand stands for? I think that is an issue as well.
Then finally, the whole workforce transition, which is of course very, very critical. We spoke about how we might have benefited from it from the past, but there is workforce transition as well.
Now these four transitions will have to be embraced by each of the consumer businesses as well. We could be in different segments of our business, but as we saw in financial services, for instance the big players got impacted and some of them have seen significant disruptions and now the disruptors are getting disrupted.
So I think that is something that will actually make us more agile and make sure that we are always on our feet.
The last thing that I will say is that, when we look at the consumer themes, the one big theme for us, when we talk about retail and consumer is that, are we going to be a national business? Are we going to be a local business? Because we have seen for far too long that local businesses survive very, very well. But when local businesses, local brands wish to become national, they hit a bottleneck and the amount of spend that it requires for a brand to become national from regional should I say is at times very, very hard and that’s a huge hump to cross.
Q: Talking about going from regional to national, what about international as well because everybody is now talking about the Make in India for the world opportunity as we talk about supply chain this disruption, etc. And how do you become part of the global value chain, is the question as well? And what’s the kind of distance that Indian brands will need to cover to make that journey? Let’s talk about some of the transitions that we were just addressing. For a brand like yours, for a company like yours, what is it going to mean in terms of R&D spends? What is it going to mean in terms of differentiation? I mean, how are you reinventing or reimagining the future at this point in time to capitalize on this?
Poddar: We are probably the oldest company on this panel; we are 85 years old. So it’s a deeply legacy company, and it is deeply in need of reinvention. And that’s the journey we’ve been on for the last three to four years. When I say reinvention, firstly we are trying to flip ourselves into becoming a far more consumer centric company to some of the points that Sanjeev made about — you will not survive the next decade if you are not just consumer centric but very agile. So one is just trying to change the pace of how quickly you capture consumer insights, and then translate that to products on the shelf. And to that, I think the inspiration comes from fashion companies, because fashion changes every season. And if they can do that, can we kind of make that happen.
So to your question on R&D, firstly, we just trying to make that far more consumer centric, be more agile, and thirdly, we have upped the invention in R&D. But when I say R&D, what we’re trying to focus on is meaningful innovation and not techy innovation that makes somebody feel very proud of himself, but that must sell in the marketplace. So it has to cater to, let’s say, a Indian housewife who wants to grind her masala and there’s a problem with the mixer blade, then that’s a problem we need to solve for, rather than very techie problem in the gadgets, etc. So R&D is going to be core to surviving, etc.
I also want to pick on the question of sustainability, our contribution to sustainability really revolves around energy efficiency. Most of our products involve consumption of electricity, and the more energy efficient we can make them, we’re kind of aligning with the national mission of reducing energy and power consumption, etc. We have just launched fans right now, which people don’t realize that they are the most energy efficient fans in the country. But I think as you start doing that, across all the other gadgets and appliances, hopefully we’ll touch all of these different factors that we spoke about.
Q: In the quest for sustainability, etc. who pays the price for that? I mean, are you expecting the consumer to pick up the tab for that? Or is it going to be something that the company is going to have to do at the back end? Do you make it the consumer’s problem? Or is it your problem?
Poddar: I think we can fool ourselves to think what people speak and what they say is what they pay for. Consumers want proposition, they want value, and particularly, Indian consumers are very price sensitive. And I think it’s our job, it’s not a criticism of them. It’s our job to make sustainability affordable and not unaffordable, especially if you want to cater to more than the top 1 percent. So if you want to make a meaningful mass difference, the masses cannot pay for it. And I think that’s our job of R&D when I say meaningful innovations. All the innovations that we’re doing comes with a price capping that is applicable to it.
Q: Fast fashion is one of the bigger sectors that that does need to do a lot more as far as sustainability is concerned. But again, who pays for it?
Gautam: I think businesses will have to find efficiencies to pay for it. It is not going to be anyone paying for it. As an investor, I don’t want to pay for it, as a consumer, I don’t want to pay for it. So I think it is the efficiency that has to be brought in. I think fast fashion has been spoken a lot more.
But I think it needs to be built into the system, it just cannot be saying, I will be sustainable by 2030. I think there is a lot more work, especially in the fashion business where it needs to start from a design process. We need to start it from the design, how sustainable garments can we make and then building the whole value chain, tracking that up and then living up to it.
And I think, especially from Bestseller perspective, we do it for ourselves, as something which means very important to our business and to our owners. So we don’t do it to market, we don’t use it as a marketing peg also, but sustainability is core to our business value. So hence, I think we will have to pay it for ourselves by building a sustainable business on this basis.
Q: The other aspect that I want to talk about is, we have all gone through this phase of are we now omnichannel, are we phygital? What should we realistically expect in the next few years?
Murty: Our thesis always has been that it’s the same customer. That customer could be on a laptop at some point in time or a mobile phone at some point in time or at a mall other point in time. And therefore, as a brand, or as a company, which needs to engage with the customer at all points in time, I don’t think we have a choice, you have to engage whichever way the customer wants to engage with you. So I think omnichannel is the default state for businesses today.
In our minds even if you look at how disruption pans out for businesses, let’s say five years back, or seven years back, furniture was a classic example of a local business. We used to have manufacturers which used to sell in a 200-kilometre radius around themselves. The fact that somebody like us built out a supply chain, which allowed for those manufacturers to sell, let’s say across India, created a massive disruption in that entire sector. It also enabled small businesses to start selling and scaling rapid.
Similarly, omnichannel — there was a period of disruption on the thinking of omnichannel. I think now, it’s just a thing of the past. Every brand is an omnichannel brand. Purplle is a tech company and we have tons of data. And when you have tons of data, all the challenges of not having third party cookies and stuff like that, which will emerge over the next two, three years, we can actually begin to solve today. Three years later, it will be disruption. But if you start solving it today, you don’t get disrupted. So the point I’m making is omnichannel used to be a classy, trendy word. I actually think it’s just the nature of business today, there is no option.
Taneja: Our omni-channelisation journey is only six months old. So very little data. But what we have seen is, there are some consumers who are very savvy online consumers, I would say 70-80 percent of their transactions are online and maybe 20-30 percent transactions are offline. And then there are obviously some consumers who are much more comfortable buying offline than they are buying online.
What we’ve seen in our stores, and we just have eight of them right now they’re only six months old, what we’ve seen is a lot of our churned customers in those zip codes that we opened our stores in, have actually returned back, they’ve shopped with our offline stores and then they’ve become active customers of Purplle, and they’ve also now started shopping online again. No amount of discounts or marketing could have gotten them back to Purplle. But I think them just experiencing us in our stores, got them back to transact with us in our stores, and then sequentially also coming back to the online store and transacting again.
So, I think it builds a lot of trust. I think there are a few categories that you just cannot buy online without trying it. In our case, it happens to be foundations, it happens to be a lot of face products, which people would prefer trying offline.
So I don’t disagree with Ambareesh at all, I think omnichannel is something we will have to embrace. And hence we have started efforts in that direction. I think Pepperfry is much ahead of us, they have 200 stores. But I think early data shows that we will continue to invest more in it.
Momaya: For us it is a little different story. We also trade through multi brand partners, we also trade to modern retail. We put a digital blueprint about five years back and we said how can we accelerate D2C? And that’s where D2C is direct to consumers offline and our own website. And that’s where we made huge progress on actually being omnichannel. But on the other side on the wholesale, it’s a little difficult to really call it, so it’s a multichannel approach there, rather than being an pure play, omnichannel play. But in our D2C we have made big progress.
So I think what’s really the advantage we have in India on the digital front, we really have cutting edge technology with some of the startup ecosystem at very reasonable prices. And I think what’s really helping right from forecasting demand to predicting demand to actually buying to allocation to interest to transfer, I think a lot of it is getting done through AI and so it’s up place where cutting edge technology is really helping solve consumer problems, and eventually helping consumers shop seamlessly in a D2C. And that’s take we have at Celio.
Q: Geetika are you a technology company, also a chocolate company or are you still a chocolate company?
Mehta: No, we are just the sweetest place on earth, as we call ourselves. We are an all and out chocolate company, but absolutely harnessing technology where we can, both inward facing in the sense of digital transformation, automation, data at our fingertips, just getting the right information to be able to make insight and moving it forward, but also to the consumer.
So how do we really engage with them in a meaningful manner through digital? How do we get personalisation done through them? We have recently done something called the Hershey campaign, it’s basically making the invisible visible — her and she — is invisible inside Hershey. Therefore, we really kind of celebrate women who are not talked about as much and talk about their achievements and make their achievements visible.
And in order to personalise it, it had a QR code and anybody could send it to who they would like to celebrate, so their near and dear ones, and get a personalised message going to them. So technology, but where it matters. I think technology is not the end in itself, it is a means to get to either better consumer experience or better insight and faster decision making at the back end.
Gautam: I was coming to a point on retail. I think if you want consumer stickiness, retail is very important. I think experience in India, especially of whatever I’ve seen whether it’s fashion food, or I’ve worked in telecom also, the retail front does matter to the consumer.
I think, especially in a country where there are no great parks or beaches, I think people end up in shopping malls on high streets. And hence, you will see much more stickiness, and even to retain consumers is far easier offline than online. Because online, it’s just a flip of a second and you move to another website or another commodity. So I think that’s what I wanted to mention, from a omni perspective, having retail will really help stickiness for you.
Q: Absolutely are right in pointing out it’s not just experiencing the brand, but it is an outing for a lot of people.
Gautam: Malls are entertainment centers, they don’t call themselves shopping malls anymore, they call themselves entertainment centers because you are going for food, you are going to the cinema, you’re going for the air conditioned environment, which in our country with the weather system, it really helps a lot of consumers. And I think that brings footfall and that brings business. And I think that’s where retail is becoming much more sustainable than it was a few years back for us.
Q: Let’s talk about how the Indian consumer is changing. We’ve talked about some of the structural changes that we’re seeing as far as the economy is concerned. But let’s talk about how the consumer and the consumer habits are changing, of course, much more now willing to experiment with online and so on and so forth. But for the longest time, what we’ve always heard about the Indian consumer is, value conscious price sensitive. How do you believe the consumer has changed? And what do you see happening on that front?
Kapoor: I think some things don’t change as well, right? I think the Indian consumer is super value conscious, that phenomenon is not going to shift. So I would say that part stays strong. However the ability of consumers to experiment is going up. Look at the way the plethora of D2C food brands, which have come into play. The experimentation quotient is going up. And so you see a bigger basket of brands coming and making room for themselves. So I would say the quotient of experimentation has gone up. I would say consumer expectation has also gone up. Because what we are talking to our clients is personalisation at scale. So really deploying technology and trying to see that is meant for me. And it will be more relevant for certain parts of the economy and less for others, but I would say that part has also kind of gone up.
And the last one point I would say is the consumer is also looking at experiences. We don’t have anybody representing the experience side of the economy, but it’s not just products and more, but also getting good experiences for the family. So that part also is becoming important. So whether it is going out into a mall and shopping, whether it’s a great online experience, which is frictionless or actually physically going and enjoying as the case may be, so some of these trends, I would say are becoming more strengthened over a period of time.
Taneja: 11 years ago when we started Purplle we used to sell different merchandise in Mumbai, Delhi versus smaller cities. I think a trend that we’ve been observing over the last three four years is the same stuff is selling in Bihar and the same stuff is selling in Delhi. The same lipstick shades are selling in Mumbai as they are selling anywhere else. I have a friend who runs a fashion company, he tells me the same baggy jeans that are selling in Delhi are also selling in Bihar.
I think 2017-2018 onwards ever since Jio took off and our data consumption took off, I think the aspirations to buy products in tier-III, tier-IV cities are very, very similar to aspirations in metros. The access is now there because of online and people can order it online and buy.
And I think that’s been the single biggest, I would say change that I’ve seen over the last 10-11 years where people are just buying exactly very, very similar products as they’re buying in metros or whether you’re in a very remote part of any other states in India.
Q: What hasn’t changed is that it continues to be a fairly diverse country. The experience of sales for a company in the south could be potentially very different from what a company experiences in the north, those regional differences, how large are those? Have you seen those gaps widen or shrink?
Poddar: My view is that we are an extremely diverse country for multiple reasons whether you’re talking about geographical access, which means climate, whether it’s affluence or different segments etc. My experience is – take a category like pressure cookers and I did not know this till I got into this company – that the same pressure cooker will not sell across the country.
All my growing up years in Mumbai I had seen pressure cookers with a lid that goes inside. If you go to the south of India the lid is always outside. I don’t think it has a fundamental difference on the cooking but the south Indian homes will have a lid on the outside, in the western homes they will have lid on the inside. So that changes the whole mould, the R&D, the supply chain etc.
Even the fan that will sell in south of India will not sell in north of India and vice-versa. So consumers have their strong preferences and behavioural tendencies and beyond the functional needs there are these diversities that exist.
The challenge for us and that we are trying to solve for – I look at McDonalds product and then I look at the local restaurant Shiv Sagar which has such a long menu, how will Shiv Sagar ever become McDonalds?
If I want to give everything to everybody, I will never build a company of scale. So we need to find a confluence between this need to personalise and yet operate at a scale at some kind of common homogenous platform or whatever we call it.
Momaya: So price value equation is what I would say is the right term. Probably if you’re able to offer a price value equation, consumer whether he’s in Punjab or whether he’s in Chennai, I think if you’re able to get product innovation, you’re able to get the global trends at the same time, consumer is actually really open to adapting.
We’ve seen a big change happening in the consumer behaviour. It’s not just loyalty. Consumers are actually willing to experiment, try out new brands till the time you’re actually able to offer them real genuine innovation, genuine value for money.
I think we always say India as a price sensitive market. I would partially agree. But I think the term would be India is a really price value equation market and till the time you’re able to offer that I think consumers really appreciate the effort gone into offering that.
Q: Everyone’s talking about disruption, disruption of the market, but also disruption of their own individual businesses. What do you see as being the big disruptors as we look ahead?
Krishan: So, to me, I think two things, one, because we are dealing with the consumer who’s always online, and we talk about digital interfaces, the fact that we have a much more informed consumer at this point in time, a consumer who’s also wanting to focus on what we call purpose, so again, that goes the whole focus on sustainability in whichever shape or form and whoever pays for it to the earlier conversation that we had, and I think also consumer who’s more globally aligned. He knows the global trends etc, we were talking about how people are embracing the same thing and Bihar and Delhi, likewise they want to embrace the same thing that’s happening in New York and so and so forth, etc.
So, we are talking about an aspirational consumer, a very well informed consumer, and there is so much data we are at the cutting edge of technology, India is at the cutting edge of technology. We get so much data and we have analysed so much data, I think this consumer is a very discerning consumer.
And of course, on top of it, whether we call it price conscious or value conscious consumer, it is something which has to be delivered at a particular margin, you can’t necessarily look at margin expansion. So you need to look at your supply chains and value chains, etc, to make sure that you are actually maintaining your margins. So, I think these are things that will continue to disrupt. I think one big thing which I also think is going to be a huge shift and it could be an enabler is, what’s happening on the policy side, and what’s happening on the regulatory side. So for instance, we’re talking about the foreign direct investment rules have been eased in India over the years, etc, so that’s one thing which has got many more things available to Indian consumers. Second thing is to the business per se, what does the whole FTA regime does. I mean, that’s again, going to be a huge enabler for businesses per se, because they are hopefully able to either source more or sell more to the point that you’re mentioning about geographic expansion, and that will also change the shape of the industry in times to come.
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