In early-June Big Bazaar (part of Future Group) was reported to have broken off its relationship with Cadbury’s. About 2-3 weeks later the two were reportedly back together. The alleged differences and the apparent solutions have been reported widely, as also the feeling that some issues remain unresolved.

If that reads like something you would find in a celebrity tabloid, you’re probably right. The relationship between brands and large retailers is truly one of the “love-hate” kind. And this case is no different from many other such relationships in various markets around the world. In fact, the Future Group itself is reported to have had similar run-ins with PepsiCo’s FritoLay and GlaxoSmithKline in the past.

I won’t dwell on the various allegations and clarifications about commercial structures and differential pricing in this particular case, since the view from outside isn’t really clear. But it is certainly worth noting that this case is not unique, and thinking about what the future (no pun intended) might hold for brands in markets such as India.

There is no doubt that brands love the scale that large retailers provide them, with the quick access to a large footprint in the market, and the high visibility. On the other hand, as a vendor, they hate the negotiating edge that this scale gives the large retailer. Brand generally rule fragmented retail environments such as India. Large retailers, on the other hand, squeeze out more margins in the form of bulk discounts, placement fees and the like. There’s more: special promotions, differential merchandising and delivery needs…the list of demands seems endless.

On the other side, retailers love brands for the footfall they bring. The brand typically creates a “need to buy” on the consumer’s part, and invests in creating a distinctive proposition which is valuable in a cluttered market. In many cases the brand would have also advertised where it is available. This is all good stuff for the retailer, who then essentially has to make sure that the brand is available and visible in-store to the customer to convert the walk-ins into sales. However, what retailers don’t like is the fact that brands will generally charge a premium of 10-50% over a comparable generic product. In some cases the premium may be so high that the brand product’s price itself is multiples of a generic product’s price.

The retailer-brand partnership is a very powerful one, even from early days. Many consumer brands and branded companies have scaled up significantly with the growth of their retail customers. The US market due to its sheer size and its evolution offers numerous examples including companies such as Levi Strauss, Hanes, Fruit of the Loom and Proctor & Gamble that grew on the back of discounters such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart as well as retailers such as JC Penney, Macy’s and Sears. Similar examples appear from other countries where the modernisation and consolidation of retail have happened over decades along with economic development.

An established brand provides the new retailer credibility, even as the retailer provides the brand new shelf-space. Or the other way around: even a new brand provides value to an established retailer by identifying the market need, developing the product, managing sourcing & production, and establishing the consumer’s interest in the product, while it is the established retailer who provides the much-needed credibility and presence to the new brand.

For most, this remained a happy relationship for a long time even as the retail environment grew and evolved. Retailers focussed on creating shelf-space and managing it, while the brands focussed on creating products and desirability.

However, economic shocks various times and the rise of low-cost imports raised questions in retailers’ minds about the value added by the brand compared to the margin they supposedly made on the higher prices. At the same time, better communication and travel infrastructure as well as falling costs made it easier for retailers to consider approaching factories directly.

Enter private label, the “other” in the love-hate triangle.

Over the last couple of decades, department stores, hypermarkets, grocery stores and even discounters have worked seriously on private label.  The opening premise was that you could entice the customer with a lower price (sharing some of the margin earned by direct sourcing), and as long as you gave a comparable product the consumer was happy. Many Indian retailers followed a similar route when they began exploring private label.

The strategy has had a varied degree of success, much of it to do with how the private label has been handled (indifferently in most cases). Recognising this flaw, many retailers around the world have attempted to improve their handling of their private label product development and also presenting it also in a manner (including advertising) similar to a national or an international brand. Some of these retailers’ own labels are now serious brands in their own right even though they are restricted to only one retail chain.

The difference between a “label” and a “brand” is the inherent promise that a brand has built into the name, the repeated experience that the customer has had with the brand that reinforces this promise, and the relationship that develops between the consumer and the brand. All of this requires structuring, nurturing and careful management, and it costs time, effort and money. When the economy and individual incomes are growing, consumers are willing to shell out a little extra for a brand and all that it stands for.

However, brands get into trouble if income and spending perceptions turn downwards, and comparable products are available. The 10+ per cent premium between branded and generic begins to look like an important saving to the customer.  Or conversely, due to the growing market more suppliers for the same product appear that the retailer can use as a foil to the branded market leader. With falling import barriers, more diverse contract manufacturing becomes available for sourcing private label merchandise. The scenario becomes particularly grim if the relationship between the brand and the consumer is not old enough to have become lasting – in this case, replacement of the brand with an alternative or a retailer’s own label is truly feasible.

The Indian market, at this time, shows all of the above ingredients. Inflation is making consumers reconsider how and where they spend their money.  The growth of the market over the last few years has attracted several companies with alternative products and brands e.g. ITC as a challenger to biscuit-cookie major Britannia as well as to Pepsi’s potato chip brand Lays. Retailers such as the Future Group, Shopper’s Stop and Reliance have actively incorporated imports into their sourcing strategy. In many cases, the brands that most want to be on the modern retailer’s shelves are new to the market, and don’t yet have a strong imprint on the consumer’s mind.

However, at the same time, retailers themselves are still developing the systems and disciplines to manage their relatively new businesses. They are more than fully occupied with rising real estate costs, and managing the front end. If a brand can handle the product and supply side for a reasonable margin, they are more than happy to ride with the brand.

There is place for the branded suppliers in the market, and for them even to lead the market. Even as retailers grow, branded suppliers won’t lie down or die quietly. Many of them (such as Hindustan Unilever) are also actively engaging with smaller retailers, to help them improve their business processes and competitiveness. On the other hand, they are also reconciled to the inevitable growth of modern retailers, and are developing “key account management” functions, parallel distribution processes etc. to cater to the large retailers differently from the rest of the market.

So will brands survive, or will it be the retailer with the muscle of the storefront relegate them to a small portion of the market?

As long as the competitive pressures and economic cycles remain, the relationship between retailers and their branded suppliers will inherently be a tug-of-war for margin.

In either case, whether individual brands or retailers win or lose in the short term, the consumer will hopefully be a beneficiary in terms of better product, more variety and some sanity in terms of prices.

Picture an upper-middle class consumer out shopping groceries in a large, air-conditioned hypermarket after catching the new movie at the mall.

Global best-practice is the standard here. The aisles are wide enough to allow two shopping-carts to pass each other comfortably, and are organized according to product categories. The shelves are neatly ticketed, and the products equipped with bar-codes to allow for quick checkout. The emphasis is clearly on convenience. But (surprise!) the store has apparently underestimated the demand for the conveniently pre-cut and packaged vegetables. The loose vegetables are going untouched, while the pre-cut packs are almost sold out. Looks like another win for modern retailers.

This scenario would seem plausible to most people who have observed or been part of the growth of modern retailing in a market like India.

The “organized retail boom” and “growing consuming class” are consuming miles of newsprint and eons of airtime, while the malls are the gleaming new temples at which every devotee of retail must pay respect. This is the picture of modernization or organization of the Indian retail sector that comes to the mind of most people.

On the other hand, the picture that comes to mind when one thinks about the traditional sabziwala (greengrocer) is a total contrast. A messy side-street, with the push-carts overflowing with an indifferent mix of vegetables, other than the occasional yellow bell pepper or some other such “exotic” produce. Or the typical kirana shop owner scrawling an illegible list of items and figures on a scrap of paper and handing it over as the “bill” for the groceries one has just bought. Surely, a business model that is not going anywhere fast.

So, to most people, the line between modern or “organized” retail and traditional or “unorganized” retail is quite clear, and the differences quite stark. “Organized retail” usually means large, “corporate” stores that personify the so-called “retail revolution” which apparently is about 3-5 years old, while traditional retail business usually means “unorganized” and “belonging to the past” (or at least, soon to belong to the past).

However, a revolution is when the majority starts getting impacted. When only a few create a change that mainly benefits them, it is a coup.

To anyone who has been involved in the retail sector for longer, in fact, there has been a far more interesting, widespread and ongoing change in the retail business over the past couple of decades, and possibly further back. This is not restricted to a few corporate groups. It is not even restricted to the front-end (store-end) of the business.

The change is created by the feedback loop between customer expectation and the minimum acceptable standard of service which is constantly being moved up. Of course, the newly-minted corporate retailers have a role to play in this. But, more than that, it involves many small changes accumulating organically over a period of time involving individual kirana owners, farmers, wholesale traders, market associations, the FMCG companies and even the migrant villager who sets up a hand-cart that may be stocked daily with rolling credit from the money-lender.

And that is my point. The modernization of retail is an ongoing process, and it is sustainable because it is widespread.

In recent Indian retail history, as customers we may identify a point where we saw the local shop shift from stocks in a dingy back-room to being displayed openly, setting the example for other shops in the market.

But the changes needed were not just at the retailer’s end – they also required the wholesale vendor’s approach as well as the FMCG principal’s approach to begin changing.

Certainly a shift occurred in service standards, when vegetable vendors started taking home-delivery orders on mobile phones – impossible without the wider telecom price-quality revolution. And when credit card swipe machines started appearing in the kirana, something that could have only happened with the support of the banks and their intermediaries.

And the pre-cut packaged vegetables whose demand the hypermarket had underestimated? Well, the sabziwala has that covered as well – beginning with the packs of cleaned baby-corn, this list has now expanded to include pre-shelled green chick-pea (chholiya), cut jackfruit and chopped sarson saag – vegetables that can be quite inconvenient to clean at home when time is scarce.

The impact of this modernization was brought home to me, when I observed a customer reprimanding the local sabziwala for not keeping adequate stock of shelled peas. The interesting aspect was that this was not one-half of an upwardly-mobile DINK couple. The customer here was a domestic helper, whose complaint was that he had many other jobs to get done around the house, and shelling peas was something that was too time-consuming and best “outsourced”!

So, to all those who have the question, “what is the key to succeeding in the Indian retail market”: the key may lie somewhere entirely different from where you have been looking, or the customer-profile that you have been building.

We are surely underestimating the business potential amongst India’s middle and not-so-middle classes – as we would discover if only we were to re-state business objectives and tweak strategy a little bit, and look at the market without high income-tinted glasses.

Among the frenetic activity of large stores opening and the expressed visions of organized retail taking over the market in the past couple of years, the competition is becoming more intense with each passing month. What would set the winner apart is not just the customer experience and satisfaction but also customer loyalty – where, for instance, an “unorganized” kirana store can still beat a much-larger organized retail business due to the intimate understanding of their customer base and micromanagement of the store.

What it would take for the organized retailers to replicate that experience is the people who create a culture of caring. This may sound “soppy”, but only true concern for the customer produces fabulous service from a salesperson. And if the salesperson has true concern, then he / she is probably showing the same concern to others (including colleagues and others in his / her life), and this itself can’t exist in isolation.

Many organised retailers have already made huge investments to put the technology and systems in place in the store. The missing link, however, is bridging them and customer with care and understanding, which is an absolute essential for the front end of any retail business. When time and competition is getting tougher by the day, creating a culture of caring makes great business sense for an organized retailer.

An article by Shailesh Dobhal and Bhanu Pande in The Economic Times today refers to a growing inequality of income in India. (“India Rising, Bharat awaits for the trickle to turn flood”)

The change for all of urban India is reported to be 15%, which is quite visible, especially in the larger cities where the change is possibly greater. What is worrying is that even in rural India the change is 13%.

And these figures are for 2004-05, from a report authored by NCAER’s Dr. Rajesh Shukla. My guess is that the difference would be even higher now, 3 years later.

Obviously at a personal level this should concern all. Each person is part of the ecosystem – there is only so long one can hide in ivory towers behind tall walls and locked gates. We are most secure and content when our neighbour is secure and content. Stark disparities that grow even more stark are not a way to develop security.

However, one might ask, why should business managers in consumer goods and retail sectors concern themselves with this phenomenon from a business perspective?

The answer should be self-evident – as shared in a presentation at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) National Retail Summit in 2006 – a retailer can grow its market by encouraging the development of smaller enterprises, especially those in lower income areas. As these enterprises grow, so does prosperity and available income.

“Grow your wealth by growing someone else’s.” That may seem like an odd notion. But think – is it so odd?

In May 2007 Arun Maira, Chairman of the Boston Consulting Group’s business in India, presented scenarios that were developed in an exercise a few years ago, about the possible developmental trajectories of India. These include:

• “Atakta Bharat (India Stuck)” described as ‘Buffalos Wallowing’,

• “Bollyworld” (the crazy mix of glamour and tragedy) described in two parts as ‘Peacocks Strutting, Birds Scrambling’ and ‘Tigers Growling, Wolves Prowling’ and

• “Pahale India” (India First), subtitled Fireflies Arising.

Here’s his very thought-provoking article (India: Many Million Fireflies Now) that is well worth a read.

Even in these enlightened marketing times, many people believe that the brand is the name. They believe that once you advertise a name widely and loudly enough, a brand can be created. Nothing could be further from the truth.

High-decibel advertising only informs customers of the name, it cannot create a brand.

If we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes, a brand is an image, comprising of a bundle of promises on the company’s part and expectations on the customer’s part, which have been met. When promises are delivered, when expectations are met, the brand develops an attribute that it is defined by.

The promise may be of edgy design (think Apple), and the customer expects that – when the brand delivers on the promise and meets the expectation the brand image gets re-affirmed and strengthened.

However, these attributes are not always necessarily all “positive” in the traditional sense. For instance, a company’s promise may be to be low-cost and low-service (think Ikea, or “low-cost airlines”), and the customer may expect that and be happy with that when the company delivers on that promise.

The promise may be products with a conscience (think The Body Shop), which may strike a chord with the consumer.What that brand actually stands for can only be created experientially.

Creating this image, creation of the brand, is a complex and step-by-step process that takes place over time and over many transactions. Repetition of the same kind of experience strengthens the brand.

The brand touches everything that defines the customer’s experience – the product design and packaging, the retail store it is sold in, the service it is sold with, the after-sales interaction – all have a role to play in the creation of the brand.

For instance, to some it may sound silly that market research or how supply chain practices can help define a brand, but that is exactly how the state of affairs is for Zara. Changeovers and new fashions being quickly available are what that brand is about, and it would be impossible for Zara to deliver on that promise without leading edge supply chains, or a wide variety of trend research.

Similarly, it may sound clichéd that your salesperson defines the brand to the consumer, but even with the best products, extensive advertising, and swanky stores, for service-oriented retailers everything would fall apart if the salesperson is not up to the mark. This is indeed a sad reality faced by so many of the so-called premium and luxury brands.

Of course, brand images can be changed or updated, but the new image also needs to be reinforced through repeated action, a process just like the first time the brand was created.

(Extracted from the article “Brand Immortality and Reincarnation“)