Damodar Mall, the well-known retail expert and now CEO at Reliance Value Retail, has finally launched his book, Supermarketwala- Secrets to winning consumer India.
1. The time spent in a store, and therefore the money, is highest when two women shop together, followed by a woman alone, then a woman and a man, and finally, a man alone!
2. A huge challenge to Kirana stores is coming from the most unexpected quarters, and for a reason that was supposed to be their strength. Young women, or the new daughters-in-law, to be precise, who don’t like the over familiarity of the Kirana store.
3. Uniforms mean different things to different people. Thus, while a younger generation might see in uniformed guards a symbol of order and attention, but an older generation might see it as a sign of not being trusted. Supermarkets need to take care of both these customer types.
4. People behave better in malls. The larger sizes, uniformed attendants, and polite service seem to have an affect that small shops cannot.
5. The rule of queues in India. Any place more than an elbow length will always be breached or filled in India. In any queue. Try it to prove it.
6. Social shopping is getting bigger.The new shopper relies heavily on what she sees other people trying, buying or even eying, to make her own purchase decisions.
7. Repeat brand purchases are no more a foregone conclusion. Supermarkets and their self- service mode means that people can try more brands. Not give the fixed list to the neighbourhood storewala. Brands need to work harder to retain these customers, or win a swayamvar each time a customer walks in!
8. Thanda matlab, bassi! Indians love their food fresh, and it would be a rare housewife who would cook food to last more than a day.
9. As refrigerator sizes increase, it is changing consumer habits too. The extra large freezer has led to larger purchases of a lot of produce, though noticeably, not vegetables, which have to be fresh! (refer point no. 8)
10. While the white collared professional prefers the look and feel of his peer group, for the businessman, lacking easy markers like designation, company and a corporate office, it is a far more challenging task to show he has ‘arrived’. Thus the push for more customised purchases.
11. Local QSR retailers of ‘Indian’ fast food have the global players to thank for raising the price points on meals. Without Mcdonald’s or a Pizza Hut, we would never have had people people willing to pay Rs 100 and more for Idli’s and Pao Bhaji.
12. Women shopkeepers will change the world. With customers taking care of their needs themselves in self service formats, retailing is no longer the exacting profession it was. Plus, with hypermarkets becoming a single stop shop for small retailers, women can step in now.
Damodar Mall's book Supermarketwala- Secrets to Winning Consumer India is a practitioners view of one of the fastest growing phenomenon in Urban India – Shopping.
The author heads Reliance Retail and has been with DMart & Big Bazaar in their formative years. The book has 30+ slim chapters peppered with stories and can be finished in a few hours.Given below are few of the interesting observations from the book summarised in my words
1) Women's Empowerment: Walk into any departmental store, most employees on the floor are women. It offers them a safe working place, fixed working hours, standard uniforms and clean washroom facilities. Young girls have taken up traditionally male dominated jobs like security guards, shop assistants and cashiers. They are trained to converse in English. Its said that you educate a women, you educate a generation. Modern retail should be credited for this silent revolution.
2) Crowd Puller: In the western world, peaceful and spacious retail layouts are the norm. In India such layouts are considered wasteful. The Indian mind is programmed for crowds in buses, trains, bazaars, weddings, schools & offices. Too much retail space can be counterproductive. On entering a large mall designed to prevent crowding, the shopper is likely to say - " Yeh Mall bada soona hai, looks like no one comes here"
3) Shopkeeper in Law: The local shopkeeper is an extended member of the customer’s family. He calls her Mummyji or Mausiji. His cache memory stores her households buying preferences. This familiarity has been the backbone of local Indian retail. So far so good. Now assume a new daughter- in- law enters the house. Will she feel comfortable ordering personal hygiene products from a shopkeeper she addresses as Panditji or Chacha?. How will she react when she asks for a new tea brand and the shopkeeper intrudes " Your Mother in Law has never changed her tea brand” ? This is where Supermarkets offer anonymity and luxury of discovering new products. Will changing demographics and family dynamics change the way women shop?
4) Gold Collared Men: Modern fashion retail pampers the corporate man but ignores a much larger market - the self employed, non corporate entrepreneurs. The office goer has to blend in with his colleagues and does not venture beyond the matrix of white/blue/solids/stripes. On the other end, the entrepreneur has to stand out and make his presence felt. His shirts have embroidery, loud colours and fancy collars. At present this need is being met by the small apparel shops and the dwindling tailor shops. Branded retail is yet to crack this opportunity.
5) The Only Pan Indian Cuisine: Which cuisine unites Kolkata, Delhi, Kochi, Ludhiana and Ahmedabad? Not North Indian or South Indian, its Indian Chinese Food. Fried Rice and Manchurian have successfully pole vaulted into the Indian kitchen via brands like Ching's Secret. Supermarket shelves invite the homemaker to experiment with food. She can whip up a tasty continental meal at half its restaurant price. Cuisines like Italian and Thai that were mainly for out of home dining have started knocking on kitchen doors. And many more are waiting to be discovered.
I have no interest in large-scale retail and no long-term plans to persuade the kirana store customer to convert to the shiny new mall I’m building. This is the purported purpose of this new book by Damodar Mall (has ever a man had a more occupational joke-appropriate surname?). I am not convinced that this is not something of a ruse – a ‘buy this toothpaste because dentists give it to their kids’ gambit. You think that if the books are meant for the almost-Biyanis and quasi-Ambanis then maybe I should get my hands on it too? Whatever. You’d have to be a highly incurious sort of human being to be not intrigued and entertained by some of the revelations of this breezy, cheerful book.
1. “If you leave a space measuring more than your forearm – from the tip of your finger to your elbow – between you and the person just ahead of you in a queue, in India, such a gap is not feasible to sustain. It shall get bridged or occupied within five minutes.”
This is one of the interesting results from a study done on Mall’s request across India from temples, colleges and train stations to malls, multiplexes and wedding parties. But Mall’s interpretation of these results is even more fun. He says Indians value what he calls the ‘elbow push factor’ in different ways from the Western shopper. Luxury stores, built with plenty of room so no one needs to jostle (based on the understanding of the Western shopper), are looked upon suspiciously by the Indian shopper as forlorn and empty, not as peaceful and serene. “People actually felt reassured by a certain polite level of elbow push, a certain amount of crowding as long as it does not degenerate into disorder and chaos.”
2. The existence of the female customer shaped the Indian fitness business way before Karisma Kapoor started exercising in tights.
Talwalkars (est. 1932) is convinced that their huge success – 175 branches in 65 cities – is entirely because way back in 1943, Vishnupant Talwalkar was the first Indian gym owner to welcome women, instantly positioning it as a ‘family’ space and not a rippling, bronzed, grunting male one, which is what the akhaaras were. In one of the book’s funniest ‘unself-conscious tycoon’ quotes, Prashant Talwalkar (current head of the empire and grandson of Vishnupant) says, “There’s nothing wrong with lady personal trainers in gyms wearing hot pants. Our male patrons may like it, too. But it does not pass the test of having a congenial, comfortable atmosphere for women patrons. So Talwalkar’s will not do it.”
3. The Indian customer is no longer impressed by readymade clothes in the way s/he once was.
Her traditional access to highly customized clothes (via tailoring) is something she still values. She is repulsed by the sight of the same clothes in a few dozen sizes in the way it is offered by modern retailers. So who gets it right? According to Mall, it’s the traditional retailers, including old-fashioned jewellers, whose shop assistants feed customer preferences back into production. These stores create endless minor variations so every customer feels like they’ve got something no one else has. These Indian stores and… Zara (surprise! Start at minute 1:04 of the video Shit Delhi Girls Say!). Zara with its fruit fly length design cycles works just fine for the Indian shopper frantic for something non-standard that will allow her to put off the search for That Magic Tailor.
4. Indians have been apparently buying millions of fridges and, this is important, have been buying bigger fridges.
But what we are doing with these fridges does not quite follow the Western trajectory. We are still terrified by leftovers. Leftovers are only okay if you can bung them into the transmogrification machine. To quote Mall, “Google search ‘recipes, leftover rice’. While half the world eats rice and therefore has ‘leftover rice’, the recipes to rework it and make it refreshingly new and hot are overwhelmingly Indian.
5. Also on the Indian fridge front, we are wildly suspicious of actual ready-to-eat foods.
Indian households are instead filling their fridge with what Mall calls work-in-progress foods – batters, pastes, mixes, packets of vegetables cut for Chinese stir-fry or sambhar. According to Mall’s research, the Indian middle-class household would rather get a cook (full-time or part-time) or even outsource special festival cooking to what he calls a “neighbourhood aunty” – informal catering operations run by women. As long as the illusion of making something from scratch and the illusion of customization exists, the Indian grocery shopper is willing to try anything from pesarattu batter to maple syrup
6. Young Indian women like to shop for groceries in malls and supermarkets because of the anonymity.
Mall points to an annoying and hilariously recognizable phenomenon. You love your neighbourhood store because it stocks the brands your household likes and remembers it. But what if you are a young woman who doesn’t want to know what the kirana store guy thinks of you for buying expensive fabric conditioner or a private stash of Lay’s chips. Mall calls it the Shopkeeper-in-law situation. “A significant clue lies in the manner in which the young bahu addresses the grocer. It is with the same respect that she would use with a senior member of the family. ‘Panditji, Guptaji, Anna, Gauru, or Bhaisaheb’ are the norm. Most of the time, the fan is directed on him and the customer has to sweat it out at the counter. She might be giving him her custom but he is the one patronizing her.” How glorious the long, empty, anonymous aisles of supermarkets and malls must seem in contrast where you can buy denim-coloured condoms. In bulk
7. Indians are obsessed with long, black hair on women.
You colour your hair to cover the greys or for the very occasional, very youthful lark. Really you just want a trim and say no in an embarrassed manner when the funky stylist suggests taking a few inches off. Mall says, “Paradoxically, the biggest offering in salons in India has to do with hair, even though that’s what Indians need the least… Even though the ratio of spend on skin versus hair is 60:40, with only 10 per cent of the revenue coming from styling. In salon imagery, of course, the opposite is true. All of us have seen gigantic posters of exquisitely styled hair in salons, most of these sponsored by L’Oreal, the industry leader by far.” Mall goes on to write about YLG, a young and extremely successful Bangalore-based chain of salons – 34 salons in 5 years. YLG says they did it by ignoring the MNC dogma and switching their focus to a very big, juicy range of skincare services
8. One of Mall’s most intriguing nuggets is about prasad. How did particular foods become inseparable from particular pujas?
“Every celebration is accompanied by food that was once upon a time considered exotic. In the days of cooking at home from scratch with local raw ingredients, fasting items like sabudana, rajgira (amaranth) atta, bhagar (wild rice), sweet potato and festival foods made with besan, maida, dates, sevaiyan, sherbet and exotic fruits, were actually processed in distant factories or imported from far-away places. Weren’t they the equivalent of what olives and tofu mean to the young women today, for our great grandmothers way back in that day or age?” asks Mall.
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