In our introductory article in this series on cool-hunting we touched upon the new phenomena of Indian consumers ‘rejecting' brands that may have provided satisfactory experiences in the past to choose newer, more attractive options.
The striking thing is not that these ‘cool' consumers (people in the age-bracket of 14-34 years) are ‘rejecting' – it is the fact that they are doing so without any trace of guilt or emotion. Rejection has suddenly become cool!
Cool-hunting and analysing the mental make-up of the new Indian consumer got us to another emerging trend. We'd like to term it ‘contrasting' - a trend that we discovered when we were mapping the modern-day trend of eating out in urban India.
This trend will dismay the marketer who believes in segmenting consumers into ‘target groups' – for contrary to this practice of bracketing, we found that the cool-group is comfortable behaving and doing things that do not fit into stereo-typical descriptions.
The problems get more complex when you analyse their behaviour at either end of the spectrum in their consumption patterns. We sampled people in five cities of urban India to figure out as to when they eat out and where they eat out. The results drove us to believe in ‘contrasting'.
Of the total number of people mapped – more than half (54 per cent) eat out at least once or more than once a week. And of these regular eating-out types, for every three visits to a fine-dining place, there were five instances of sampling street-food in most cases.
An Effortless Change
The evidence of contrasting is evident in the cool brigade's eating-out patterns, but don't think this is limited to this category. We feel this is an insight that has far more implications. If we reject contrasting as a phenomenon limited only to eating out, it will be akin to Newton thinking that gravitational pull worked only on apples!
The ‘cool' set perhaps drifts from luxury goods to value-for-money products or services effortlessly depending on compulsive reasons. These compulsive reasons may vary from a prudent, affordability approach to the Maslowian need of esteem, acceptance or self-gratification.
We will catch more on ‘contrasting' in our future dispatches. We want to leave you with this thought – should a modern-day marketer think of generating compulsive reasons within the proposition to inspire a buy or should she/he wait for this set of drifting consumers to discover a few themselves? Keep in the coolhunt, folks!
(Giraj Sharma is an independent brand consultant who is a compulsive coolhunter.)