Moving on to the Mc and Pizza Generation

I was watching a small kid , not more than three year sitting on a typical stool in a McDonald's restrurant, waiting paitently for the Happy Meal being brought by father. The photo above was taken there which shows that the place is almost full, and the fact is that a large number of these customers are young kids who are coming more and more regularly to these joints . With almost 20 years after the first reformist budget we can see the impact of opening up of the economy, for many of these players have done the waiting period and will plan for rapid expansion in the next decade.

But apart from the growth that these Macs and Pizzas vendors can would look forward to , I was thinking about what would that small kid prefer to eat when she grows up? My guess is that the generation would grow up on Burgers and Pizzas and continue to patronize it heavily, which is a very happy situation for these companies, especially within home markets either saturating or becoming more and more health conscious...

Photo Blogging - Malls getting decked up for Republic day

Co-Creation in Indian FMCG Domain

50 lakh prize money and 1% on the turnover , is the new promo campaign for anyone who comes up with a new flavor for lays, this is in essence the idea of co-creation wherein you are involving the consumer ( one of the stake holders) of your product into it's development. This is actually an extension of Frito-lay's effort to increase the involvement of the consumers, earlier they had the 'fight for the flavor' campaign where they wanted people to rate flavors ......

Incidentally when I was looking for more info on the topic I came across their blog, http://fritolayindia.blogspot.com/, which shares the happenings in their office here in India. It was good to see the blog and the posts , for ex- it had a post where the MD clarifies against the rumor which was floating around on the web, that if you were to burn Kurkure it would turn into plastic and therefore is harmful for health....

Coming back to the main issue of co-creation, it has also been used by Maggi noodles where they are asking consumers to share their experiences with the brand thru the website http://meandmeri.in/, out of which some of them are later converted into ads. I think the idea here again is to bring the brand closer to the users and tap into the feelings about the brand maggi, and because you make the users partners in the process you increase the authenticity of the brand experience.

When the idea of co creation was introduced around a decade back,very few of us could see the relevance and the wider application of the idea, the examples here are from plain fmcg products, if one were to look into the Internet domain then the number of examples are numerous....

Visit to a Desi Retail Store - Sarvanna Stores

Though I have named it as a Desi Store, it is considered as a pioneer in retailing in the country. I had heard about it quite a long time back and wanted to visit it. Though I had been to Chennai during my sales days and had food at the Sarvanna Bhawan , but had never taken time out to visit Sarvanna Stores. The interest in the stores was further piqued by it's mention by Kishore Biyani in his book "It Happened in India" as being the role model for Big Bazaar. So this time when I was in Chennai's T Nagar market I made it a point to visit one of the stores, Sarvana Selvarathnam, which was store exclusively focused on Textiles.

It is a huge store spread over seven floors including the basement and had a mind boggling variety of stuff which was on display. The target was value-conscious consumer, infact the taxi driver who dropped us to the shop said he was planning to shop for towels to be put as seat covers on his car at the store....

The layout of the shop was very simple, so were the billing and price tags on the products , no sophisticated bar codes - the prices were hand written. I could see what inspired Biyani , the store was competing for share from the middle and lower middle income consumer, and the competition was just a few steps from the store in the form of vendors on the streets ...

Overall the visit to the T-Nagar market was a eye-opener, the mass of people moving in and out from the various traditional shops made us realize the vibrancy of traditional retail and their strong hold on traditional segments like Sarees and Jewellery. It was also the Christmas eve so the rush , but I was told that market was crowded on most of the days...

Plastic usage in Everyday life - Marketing Implications

I thought I should start the new year by writing on something which would become a prime concern for marketers in the years to come - 'environment consciousness' . World over there is an increased concern on the role corporates/marketers play in maintaining the environment and accepting responsibility towards their actions and its impact on the society at large.

Though there is a lot of talk and discussion happening on global warming and climate change, many a times we tend to see these issues happening at the Macro level, something about which we as individuals cannot do much about. I will share a recent experience which made me realize how we as consumers add to these problems and perhaps have to think a way out of these issues.

The example is from our recent trip to Andaman, where the islands have a policy of zero plastic usage, if you walk into a general store you will not get a plastic bag and rather shown the policy (though some of the shopkeepers will give you a plastic bag, but then insist not to tell where u got it from!!!). There are notices in all beaches on don't use plastic and so on, the photo above should give you an idea of how well it is being followed...

Being a nature lover we have been consciously avoiding leaving plastic around , but this time around we thought we will be more strict in our plastic usage and try and monitor it. So we started the exercise of keeping all the plastic we used in a day in our back-pack and disposing it back in the dust-bin when we would be back to the main island after our trip. And we were surprised and guilty about the amount of plastic two of us were consuming every single day. We use plastic in everything.... whether we eat a pack of biscuit , drink water, eat chocolates, consume soft drinks, you name a product and inevitably it is packed in plastic....We were made aware of how much dependant we had become on plastic in our everyday life.

And future marketers need to look at this issue very seriously, because we need to find ways to break our dependence on plastic as the main source of packaging and move towards a more environment friendly material...

I just thought I will share this as a food for thought to start the new year, will look forward to more comments from you...

Wishing all of you a very Happy new year...