BOOK REVIEW. Nothing like the Indian market

‘Stop smoking. Get a job,’ says a small placard hanging in the tea shop I pass by every day, on the way home from office. Below the message is the contact number of an LIC agent. Apart from tea, the shop also sells cigarettes and biscuits.

I found the ‘ad’ ingenious. The placard was placed just above the rack of cigarettes. It rebuked smokers for endangering their health and for wasting time. It seemed to be telling the smokers, “If you don’t have anything better to do, go get a job.” And with the phone number, a job could be just a call away.

This was a much better way to attract the targeted audience than the usual practise of insurance agents — scribbling contact numbers on walls, or pasting posters all over a neighbourhood.

It was a coincidence that I was reading Dheeraj Sinha’s India Reloaded the same time I first noticed the placard. The senior Grey executive would have come across innumerable of these clever marketing tools across India.

In his marketing career, Sinha would have also studied how these placards jostle with big hoardings, print ads, television campaigns and now, YouTube videos, to get the customer’s eyeballs. It is just another dimension of doing business in a country with 1.2 billion population and where, as it is popularly said, in every 20 km dialect, clothes, food and culture changes. The Indian market is a marketing guy’s dream that can quickly turn into a nightmare.

And India Reloaded analyses why that happens. It ridicules companies that make ‘simplistic and widely-held assumptions’ about the Indian market. Not surprisingly, they often fail.

Like Tata Motors’ and Ratan Tata’s dream to give the middle-class family the safety of a car while travelling on roads. The Nano car looked like a sure-shot winner, given the average Indian family’s aspiration to own a car.

But as we know now, the small car failed miserably. “Nano isn’t a failure of product design or marketing strategy,” writes Sinha in the book. “The problem is with our vantage point — we look down on the lives of the aspiring class from our well-heeled and successful position,” he reasons. In other words, the middle-class does aspire for a car, but not for the ‘cheapest car in the world.’

Sinha’s plainspeak is an enduring feature of the book, which somewhat compensates for its lack of literary finesse. So even if one has by now read a hundred case studies on why the Nano has failed, Sinha’s bluntness rescues the prose.

But even that starts waning when the author adds his wisdom on yet another oft-debated issue — why India’s 300 million-middle-class market didn’t materialise.

Thankfully, the writer manages to keep the reader’s interest alive when his case studies are interspersed with personal experience and observations. He gives some interesting insights on how we Indians behave. One that I enjoyed reading and associated myself with was in the chapter titled “Why do Indians like standing in the longest queues?”

I recently hurt my back while stretching before my morning run. Neighbours suggested that I meet this famous orthopaedic, not very far from my home in Chennai. At the hospital, the doctor’s reputation was visible in a crowded waiting room outside his door. I had to wait for close to two hours for my turn. But I was out in five minutes. Worse, even after a week, my back didn’t feel much better.

I went for a second opinion, another orthopaedic that was less known and practised from a small clinic. I hardly had to wait for five minutes for my turn but got over 30 minutes with the doctor. His medication was better and I’m hopefully on my way to wearing those running shoes again. While I learnt a lesson in not following the crowd, Sinha manages to explain the behaviour through many examples, including that of the 1995- incident when Ganesha idols across the country started drinking milk.

As a parent, I’m troubled by our admen’s cliché-driven portrayal of youth that centres on sex. How can it be ok to hit on your girlfriend’s mother? Deodorants and undergarments can’t be just about sexuality. Sinha cites examples (though at times, one wishes he could have done with fewer), from Bollywood and television soaps, criticising the formula-driven content. Sadly, at present, the over-the-top marketing and making everything sexy and spicy seems to be working.

The reader would be advised to take a breather between chapters, each of which have never–ending case studies, and hop from one brand to the other. I did, and realised that Sinha has driven home the argument on cultural chasm in the country; where sexual liberation fights with moral policing. This is an additional challenge for companies when they market their products.

Another challenge is to back their products with service. Anyone who has shopped online would have had one bad experience. Consumer complaints against telecom companies are many. Where does the fault lie? Are the companies to be blamed, or is the government at fault for a poor infrastructure?

For someone new to the Indian market, the book gives a glimpse of the contradictions and diversities that beset it. And Sinha does well to peel off and bare some of the layers without resorting to, or tiring the readers with jargons. He doesn’t provide all the answers, but arms you with questions that might help find the solution.