(Contributed to the BusinessWorld cover story - "What 2 Expect in 2010", issue of January 4, 2010) Everything that can be said and assumed about the Indian market is true at some level of granularity. Very simply, in India there is a segment for every product, an opportunity for every service, be it ever so small. But when bubbles are bursting all over, as the Noughties Decade comes to a close, the puzzle that is Indian consumer market also warrants a fresh look. For most of the Noughties Decade India has seen Generation-C, the “Choice” generation, coming of age. They…
Following on our article ("Numbers and Stories", 23 November 2009), our friends at Retailwire.com thought it would be interesting to run a poll to ask the Retailwire community what they thought about retailers using research. The original discussion is here on Retailwire, but we've reproduced the comments and the poll results as they stand today (16 December 2009). As evident from the graph below, the short answer is "no, companies don't use research well"; only 15% of the respondents felt that companies are "good" in using research, at their best. Should we blame the companies or the researchers? The comments…
By Diwakar Kumar Imagesfood.com, December 2009 Parents continuously strive to do better for their children. They play an indelible role in shaping up the eating habits of their kids beginning at infancy. So when it comes the matter of feeding their toddlers, urban Indians (parents) typically are willing to go the extra mile in enhancing the nutrition quotient. Once within a supermarket, however, an ambiguity pops up – that of making a choice between a Private Label (PL) and a Brand Label. A PL product undoubtedly offers opportunities for savings as compared to manufacturers` labels, but what of product quality?…
By Aniruddha Basu and Nandita Bose REUTERS MUMBAI, 9 December 2009 * Cotton prices up 20 pct in six weeks * Rising input costs to bite into profits * Domestic players can raise prices, exporters constrained MUMBAI, Dec 9 - An unforeseen drop in global cotton output has seen prices flare, putting at risk the fragile recovery of India's textile industry that was battered by the global recession earlier in the year. The rising demand the industry was hoping to cash on, bolstered by 25.5 billion rupees in government subsidies to upgrade technology, has started to look less promising as…
Geopolitical friction has again sparked renewed concerns over inflation and rising input costs for FMCG companies as @itmeansjustice @whysnavi write. @devangshu commented.
