Vivek Kaul
In a rather poignant scene in Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, the character played by Farhan Akhtar, is sitting face to face with his biological father, played by Naseeruddin Shah (in a brilliant cameo). As the story goes, Shah had abandoned Akhtar’s mother (played by Deepti Naval) after getting her pregnant and moved onto becoming a famous painter in Europe.
Akhtar finally calls up Shah, when on a holiday in Spain he and his two friends get involved in a drunken brawl and land up in jail. Shah comes and bails them out. After this, Akhtar asks Shah for the true reason behind abandoning his mother. To which Shah replies “Sach hota kya hai. . . sach ka har ek ka apna apna version hota hai!” (What is truth? Everybody has their own version of it)
This line written by Farhan Akhtar is at the heart of the current debate happening, after the decision made by the Congress led UPA government to allow foreign direct investment in multi-brand foreign retailing.
Those in favour of the decision have their own version of truth. And those against it have another version. Those in favour of the decision believe that allowing foreign investment will create jobs, build supply chains and overall help economic growth. Those against it firmly believe that it will destroy the neighbourhood kirana shop, as you, I and everybody else, hop onto Wal-Mart to buy stuff. I have my own version of truth which is somewhere between the two extremes.
The kirana store will survive: A lot of hue and cry has been made on this. Nitish Kumar the Chief Minister of Bihar believes that the aam aadmi will suffer because of FDI in retail and hence he won’t allow it in Bihar. The fact of the matter is that it is not easy to compete with the neigbourhood kirana store. My kirana guy even goes to the extent of delivering things that he does not sell, like eggs and medicines, to ensure that I keep giving him business. As Rajiv Lal a professor at the Harvard Business School told me in an interview I did for Daily News and Analysis (DNA) “Kirana stores have a lot of benefits that established retailers don’t have. First of all location. What rents do they pay versus what established companies have to pay? Employees, same story. On the consumer side they can deliver services, in terms of somebody calls them and asks can you deliver six eggs? The guy runs and delivers six eggs. That’s not something that the big established firms can provide.” (You can read the complete interview here)
No homogeneity across India: An important factor for big retail to be successful is the homogeneity of the population in consumption behaviour. This gives them economies of scale. As marketing guru V Kumar told me in a recent interview I did for DNA “Does the country as a whole consume common things or there are regional biases? In a country like Brazil people eat similar foods that every retailer can sell.” In India clearly things are different. “In India between South, East, West and the North, there is so much heterogeneity that you need localized catering and marketing .So consumption behaviour varies therefore unless you are willing to carry heterogeneous products in each of the locations it is tough,” said Kumar (You can read the complete interview here). This is a challenge that foreign retailers will have to deal with.
The real estate conundrum: A typical Wal-Mart in the United States is situated outside the city, where rents are low. But such a strategy may not work in India. “It’s not easy to open a 150,000 square feet store in India. That kind of space is not available. They can’t open these stores 50 miles away from where the population lives. People in India don’t have the conveyance to go and buy bulk goods, bring it and store it. They don’t have the conveyance and they don’t have the big houses. So it doesn’t work,” explained Lal. This is something that Kumar agreed with. “Even if Wal-Mart is there in every place, the way they are located is typically outside the city limits. So only people with time, motivation and a vehicle, will be able to go and buy things. And the combination of these three things is very rare.” The kirana stores also provide goods on interest free credit to their customers something that no big retailer can afford to do.
The fear of Wal-Mart and others of its ilk is overdone: It is widely believed that wherever Wal-Mart goes it destroys the local business. As Anthony Bianco writes in The Bully of Bentonville – How the High Cost of Wal-Mart’s Everyday Low Prices is Hurting America “It (Wal-Mart) grows by wrestling businesses away from other retailers large and small. In hundreds of towns and cities, Wal-Mart’s entry put ailing …shopping districts into intensive care and then ripped out the life-support-system.”
But that is truer for markets like Canada, Mexico and United Kingdom, which are culturally and geographically closer to the United States. The Wal-Mart formula doesn’t always work everywhere. Pankaj Ghemawat, who has the distinction of being appointed the youngest full professor at the Harvard Business School, writes about this in his book Redefining Global Strategy, “When CEO Lee Scott (who was the CEO of Wal-Mart from 2000 to 2009) was asked a few years ago about why he thought Wal-Mart could expand successfully overseas, his response was that naysayers had also questioned the company’s ability to move successfully from its home state of Arkansas to Alabama…such trivialisation of international differences greases the rails for competing exactly the same way overseas at home. This has turned out to be a recipe for losing money in markets very different from the United States: as the former head of the company’s German operations, now shut down, plaintively observed, “We didn’t realise that pillowcases are a different size in Germany.””
What is the experience from other emerging markets? Big retail has got some traction in countries like China and Brazil. As Kumar put it “If you look at evidence from China organized retailing has got more traction. That’s because they did not have many mom and pop stores to begin with. They were cultivating their own things which was locally community based. But with more cities coming up and migration of people from rural areas to cities, gives more scope for organised retailing in China. Also space is not an issue in China. In India space is a constraint. Look at China and India. China is much bigger than India but the population is pretty much similar. Look at Brazil, it is as much bigger than India but the population is maybe one sixth that of India. So they also have space.” Whereas space remains a key constraint for big retail stores like Wal-Mart, Tesco and Carrefour in India.
Also in almost all emerging markets a local company is number one. As Lal told me “There is not a single emerging market that I know where a foreign entrant is the number one retailer. In Brazil it is Pão de Açúcar, in China you have the local Beijing Bailian. In most markets even when there are foreign entrants the dominant retailer in the organised sector is still the local retailer.”
And there are several reasons for the same. The local retailers are very price competitive. “If Wal-Mart is operating in Brazil there is nothing that Wal-Mart can do in Brazil that the local Brazilian guy cannot do. If you want to procure supplies from China, you can procure supplies from China as much as Wal-Mart can procure supplies. On top of that they have local merchants that they know they can source from and Wal-Mart may not,” said Lal.
Will foreign players be able to crack the market, when most of the Indian retailers are bleeding? The biggest Indian business groups have tried to crack organized retailing over the last decade. The Tatas, the Birlas, the Ambanis, all have a significant presence in the sector. But despite that organized retailing remains a small part of the overall retail business. As Sreenivasan Jain writes in the DNA: “For starters, India has had big or organised retail for about 15 years now, not a small stretch of time. Some of the biggest Indian corporates are in this space, like Reliance, the Birlas, Godrej, RPG (Sanjeev Goenka Group) and Kishore Biyani’s Future Group. Despite this, organised retail is only 5% of the Indian retail market. The remaining 95% is still unorganised.” (You can read the complete article here).
And all these big players are losing money hand over fist. “Last year, Reliance Fresh posted a loss of Rs 247 crore, Bharti posted a loss of Rs 266 crore, and Aditya Birla group, which runs the chain of More supermarkets, posted a loss of Rs 423 crore. Some retail chains have actually shut down, like Subhiksha which at one time had almost 1,500 outlets,” writes Jain.
It is in the interest of these firms that foreign investment is allowed in the sector, so that they can sell a part of the equity to foreign firms. Those in favour are of the opinion that these firms do not have the necessary expertise which the foreigners will bring in. This argument does not really work. Bharti Enterprises which runs the Easy Day stores has a back-end and cash-and-carry partnership with Wal-Mart. Star Bazaar, run by the Tata group is offered back end support by Tesco. So the big retail giants are in a way already operating in India.
Another point put forward by those in favour of foreign investment in retail is that it will help build reliable supply chains across the country. Theoretically yes, but the trouble is supply chains cannot be built if it’s left to the states to decide whether they allow foreign retail or not. Supply chains need to be seamless, they cannot be built if one state allows foreign retail and the neighbouring state does not. Also, we must remember that despite the presence of these heavy weights in the retail sector the kirana shops still continue to function as they had before.
So what is the future going to be like? It is difficult to predict what the future of the likes of Wal-Mart, Tesco and Carrefour in India is going to be. But one thing is for sure. They won’t find it easy. As far as Wal-Mart goes Kumar had this to say “There will be a market if they are content at not being the largest retailer. If they say in India I am one among many, they will have a presence. Maybe at some point in the future, things might change, like Wal-Mart buying other retailers and that’s the way they can expand. Their specialty is supply chain and turning the inventory over multiple times than other retailers. They cannot turn it over multiples times here. Each time if they make a 1% margin they get a higher margin due to turning the inventory over multiple times. Here I don’t see them turning it over as many times as in other markets. It’s very difficult to do that.”
Kumar also predicts that over a period of time the likes of Wal-Mart will be forced to buy the smaller kiranas in order to expand. “My prediction is this that mom and pop stores or kiranas as we call them will become more and more sophisticated. Today the store owners know people by their names, as the number will grow they will have to start building a database, but they don’t have the capabilities. So organised retailing will start buying mom and pop stores individually. And then they will put all of them under one banner. It will be like how Tesco is operating in the U.K with different store formats. You have Tesco supermarket, convenience store, street corner store, express etc. So that is the way in India you will see this evolving because otherwise there is no growth for them,” said Kumar.
So my version of truth is somewhere in between those who support foreign investment in mutli brand retailing as it’s called, and those who don’t. Big retail will not be the panacea it’s being made out to be. Neither will it destroy the smaller shops as is being claimed. It will have to create its own space. And that will only happen over a period of time.
This article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 18, 2012. http://www.firstpost.com/business/kirana-vs-wal-mart-busting-the-big-myths-of-big-retail-459490.html#disqus_thread
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and he can be reached at [email protected])
Tesco
'Tesco UK model shows organised retail will buy out kirana stores in India'
Few have approached marketing as a science like V Kumar. “My significant contribution to marketing is bringing science into it. Bridging science and practice,” says the IIT Madras alumnus, who has been greatly inspired by Philip Kotler. VK, as he is better known, is the Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair Professor of Marketing, and executive director, Centre for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, in the US. He was recently ranked amongst the top five marketing scholars worldwide, based on his research productivity. He is also the recipient of eight lifetime achievement awards (in various areas of marketing), which is a record and a consultant to some of the biggest companies in the world. In this interview, he speaks to Vivek Kaul.
Excerpts:
One of your core areas of work has been customer loyalty. Can you talk about that?
Fourteen-fifteen years ago the universal metric was that if somebody is loyal they are the most valuable customers. We questioned that linkage. Why is loyalty equal to profitability? Maybe in contractual relationships it is so. But most of the transactions between a firm and a customer are non-contractual .I am free to go and buy a shirt anywhere, a computer anywhere, a phone anywhere. Very few things are contractual. Your monthly subscription to your wireless plan is contractual. Maybe your internet connection at home and utilities, like electricity are. Given that we started to empirically test the relationship between loyalty and profitability and found it to be a very weak relationship. We went to the companies and said that if you want to engage customers then don’t use loyalty as a metric.
How was customer loyalty defined?
Loyalty was defined as how long a customer has been shopping with a company. How much money out of the total wallet size they have been spending with the company. How frequently they are coming and buying from the company. But there was nothing about profitability or the fact whether the company is making money out of the relationship. Banks were the first ones to start looking at how much profit a customer was bringing in and that too they were looking backwards i.e. how much profit the customers gave in the past and not how much profit they were likely to give in the future.
And you challenged that notion?
Yes. This prompted us to come up with a metric to value the customer. How much profit a customer is likely to give in the future? And we went to companies, got their transaction database of what customers are buying, how much the companies is spending on them in direct marketing costs, and accounting for all this we calculated the gross margin for each product sold. With these three pieces of data we were able to put together a customer life time value(CLV) metric. We did this in 2003-2004 and one of the first companies to implement this was IBM. In a pilot study we tested the customer life time value model and they made $20million instantly. Then that became the mantra for them into becoming a customer centric organisation and allocating resources to those customers where the most bang for the buck is. In India we worked with ICICI Bank . We worked with the Wells Fargo bank in the United States. We worked with the HSBC bank in Middle East. In telecom we worked with AT&T for six years. Then in the retail environment we worked with the Polo Ralph Lauren, Gallery Furniture, etc.
So the focus was on profitable customers and not necessarily the loyal ones…
Yes. In 2007 what happens is that suddenly there is a headline that the telecom company Sprint fires 1000 customers because they were unprofitable. So was it the right thing to do? The media came to us and said, you said profitability is the metric to chase and they are doing that and they are firing unprofitable customers. I said, if they are unprofitable what can you really do? It’s better to fire them, so that they will go to competition and make them unprofitable. It’s good for the company. But what if these customers spread bad word of mouth about the company, I was then asked? Who will listen to them, I replied. Because they are bad customers and hence they were fired. So if bad customers go and say they were fired, the response they will get is that of course something must have gone wrong in the relationship.
How did the company handle the situation?
Sprint also wrote about saying that these customers were calling the call centre eight times a month. At the rate of three minutes each time, it amounted to 24 minutes. Each cost call Sprint three dollars a minute. So the total cost was 72 dollars. And Sprint was making 15 dollars on them .So net net Sprint was losing 57 dollars a month on them. Over a year the company was losing over 600 dollars on a single customer. Sprint communicated to the customer base and told them that if they had not fired these customers, then the rest of the customers would have had to subsidize them..
Could you give us other examples of companies firing people?
After Sprint fired 1000 customers then the internet service providers Comcast and Verizon and all started putting a hold on the bandwidth. If people were hogging internet usage by constantly downloading movies and so on, then they said I am not going to service you or I am going to slowdown your speed. Proactively they tried to ensure that they did not lose money on somebody. They also fired a few consumers..
Some of your more recent work has been in the area of trying to figure out who is influential in the social media and using that insight in marketing. Could you take us through that?
This is the new wave. In 2008 me and my team developed this model. We basically wrote a software that could track everybody’s twitter and facebook conversation. Therefore when you put something on Facebook and others like it, then my software will see it. My software will also capture the tweets. You can ask if all this is legal? They had an open gate system at that point of time. Anybody could monitor anybody. Now they are putting plugs.
So how did the software work?
My software could crawl and track who is on Facebook and Twitter, what they are saying, who is tweeting to whom etc. Not only that, if I tweet something, you forward it to somebody else, they forward it to somebody else and they again forward it to somebody else, we could find out how far your tweet spreads. How far your Facebook like spreads? So when I tweet to you it spreads to 10,000 people. But if I tweet to someone else it only spreads to 200 people. So I then try and I figure out, why in a two week period your tweet spreads to 10,000 and the other person’s goes to only 200 people. And I find that you have more followers on Facebook and Twitter. And you are pretty active in the social media world and you are talking about multiple subjects or even a single subject but more of it. And whenever you say something to somebody they also reciprocate to you. We come up with eight measures like that. With the help of this we can pretty much say something like that if I use you as a seed to plant a message then it will reach 8500 people. That is what we have done.
Could you take us through a real life example on the above subject?
An ice cream retailer from Mumbai approached us and asked us to help them to promote this ice-cream. Our target group is college students and young adults, they said. They are the ones who are going to spread the word. They are active in the social media. So we want to use social media. We have a very limited budget.
So what did you do?
We created a stickiness index. Of all the conversations happening we tried to figure out who are the people who have a high degree of category relevance. So in this case who is talking about ice cream related products on Facebook or Twitter. People could be talking about milkshakes, or gelato. It could be just ice and of course ice cream. We applied the stickiness index on the influencers i.e. if there are 10,000people with a high customer influence effect meaning those who can spread the message the farthest, applying the stickiness index, we narrowed down the number to 300. So we take this 300 and bring them to the ice cream parlour and got them to taste the ice-cream. We also asked them to create their own ice cream and give a name to it.
And what happened after that?
After this we asked these guys to spread the word about the ice-cream. So in next step they put it up on Facebook. Tweeted about it. Other people who saw this on Twitter could take the hashtag associated with the tweet to the ice cream parlour and could buy the specific ice-cream created by the person tweeting. The parlour boy registered the hashtag. At the end of each day our computer read from each ice cream parlour of this chain and related it to the person who sent the message on Twitter. So what is in it for the person sending the message? Each week we had a competition where the winner got a t-shirt, tote bag, etc.
Which chain was this?
This was the Hokey Pokey ice cream chain.
So there are varying things that companies get their customers to do for them…
Yes. If I am the customer and you are the firm, then I can buy from you. If not buy, I can refer customers to you through incentives. If not, then I can write about you on my social media. If not, I can give you ideas to improve your service quality. Introduce this product. Add this feature to your product. When I give ideas to you, you take that idea commercialise it and then whatever profits you make you give a share of profits to me.
Can you give some examples on that?
Many women when they are getting married in the United States hunt for the right bridal wear and often they don’t find the one they like. So they create their own design and send it to the bridal wear company which can post it on its website and say here is a design which one of our prospective customers created. How many others like this? If 200 others like it and are ready to buy it then the company can produce 200 dresses of that design at the stated price and share profits with the person who came up with the design. Another good example is IBM. They put up the Linux operating system as an open source software. So you and I can create an application for IBM that runs on Linux code, give it to IBM, they will market it and share the profits.
Any other examples?
A fast food chain got into trouble when on a YouTube video somebody caught two of its employees picking their nose and then putting their fingers into one of their products. This was a challenging situation. The company decided to have a competition and let the customers design the ingredients. They had a competition. And two people won. The product the winners had designed entered the menu of the fast food chain and the profit was shared.
Can organised retailing compete with mom and pop stores in India?
Organised retailing at best in India could be at 9%. My prediction is this that mom and pop stores or kiranas as we call them will become more and more sophisticated. Today the store owners know people by their names, as the number will grow they will have to start building a database, but they don’t have the capabilities. So organised retailing will start buying mom and pop stores individually. And then they will put all of them under one banner. It will be like how Tesco is operating in the U.K with different store formats.. You have Tesco supermarket, convenience store, street corner store, express etc. So that is the way in India you will be see this evolving because otherwise there is no growth for them.
What is the evidence from other emerging markets?
If you look at evidence from China organized retailing has got more traction. That’s because they did not have many mom and pop stores to begin with. They were cultivating their own things which was locally community based. But with more cities coming up and migration of people from rural areas to cities, gives more scope for organised retailing in China. Also space is not an issue in China. In India space is a constraint. Look at China and India. China is much bigger than India but the population is pretty much similar. Look at Brazil, it is as much bigger than India but the population is maybe one sixth that of India. So they also have space.
Any other factors at work?
There is another major factor on which it depends whether they will survive or not, it is the homogeneity of the population in consumption behaviour. Does the country as a whole consume common things or there are regional biases? In a country like Brazil people eat similar foods that every retailer can sell. In India between South, East, West and the North, there is so much heterogeneity that you need localized catering and marketing .So consumption behaviour varies therefore unless you are willing to carry heterogeneous products in each of the locations it is tough. But the organised retailers have a choice now. Do they invest capital and build their own infrastructure or should they buy out these kiranas and build them up? And clearly I see the latter as a more viable strategy than putting up their own real estate.
Should we allow the likes of Wal-Mart into India?
Wal-Mart is a value conscious store. Even if Wal-Mart is there in every place, the way they are located is typically outside the city limits. So only people with time, motivation and a vehicle, will be able to go and buy things. And the combination of these three things is very rare. Therefore their ability to grow organically in a country like India by systematically expanding the number of outlets is going to be difficult. There will be a market if they are content at not being the largest retailer. If they say in India I am one among many, they will have a presence. Maybe at some point in the future, things might change, like Wal-Mart buying other retailers and that’s the way they can expand. Their specialty is supply chain and turning the inventory over multiple times than other retailers. They cannot turn it over multiples times here. Each time if they make a 1% margin they get a higher margin due to turning the inventory over multiple times. Here I don’t see them turning it over as many times as in other markets. It’s very difficult to do that.
(The article originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on September 10,2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_tesco-uk-model-shows-organised-retail-will-buy-out-kirana-stores-in-india_1738905)
(Interviewer Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]