The Hindu Business Line : Tryst with market force

The booming consumerism in today’s India bears little resemblance to the early years of Independence when there were few shops and fewer things to buy.

Every gimmick and trick in the marketing book were tried out to stimulate a small, slow growing market.

(Hindu Photo Archives)

Shopping Raj: A file picture of the Spencer’s building in Madras (now Chennai) dating from pre-Independent India

S. Ramachander

Those active high-street shoppers who were up and about during India’s tryst with destiny 60 years ago, should now be past 80. Statistically, they should be rare birds, since in 1947 the average Indian’s life expectancy at birth was only 27 years — at least according to the demographers, if not the Lord above. Those octogenarians would easily recall the stark contrast between the marketplace as it was then and today.

To be sure there were fewer shops then, and far fewer things to buy. To begin with, everything was imported from the Commonwealth countries. Strangely enough, from the mid-1950s nearly all of it disappeared from the shelves for a whole generation, as India faced the consequences of deficit financing, rising debt, and socialism, all of which led to a punitive duty regime and prohibition of nearly all imports. It is also rather trite to say that many things that have become everyday products now would have been undreamt of then. From the iPod, the mobile phone and the laptop to the fax machine, ball point pen and even the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag... none of these had yet seen the light of day.

Consumerism, which was born in America in the years following World War II, appeared here too with India’s birth as a nation. Here one grew up with the corner store stocking old and trusted household names from the Colonial era: Ovaltine, Milo and Horlicks for children’s drinks; Huntley and Palmers biscuits, and Rowntrees Cocoa, besides such staples for the school as the Oxford instrument box, Venus pencils and the coveted Swan, Waterman or Parker fountain pens. The Indian baby-boomer generation, now greying at the temple, would recall a time when the retail shelves were sparsely stocked and many an essential commodity was perennially out of stock. In the early days, even food grains had to be rationed.

Plenty of ‘shortages’

I recall a day, during my early work as a field sales executive, hearing in a grocery store a hushed query in code from a customer wanting to know whether his supply of a secret brand had indeed arrived. The shop owner signalled to the friendly customer to come back later — yes indeed, bottles of the elixir, at Rs 5.55 (at the Government controlled rate) were available — but strictly on a rationing system. The product turned out to be Horlicks, universally acknowledged as a beverage for convalescents and children, prescribed by doctors, particularly in the south and east of the country. ‘Shortage item’ was a sure signal of potential profit for the retailer. When prices of ordinary commodities increased suddenly — the move often long overdue, and fought and won by the manufacturers from the government regulator — the small-scale entrepreneur made windfalls. That was what made retailing so attractive for the small business, usually run buy a family — a typical mom and pop store.

The clientele was necessarily from the neighbourhood because, to begin with, the towns were relatively small, the distances not too great and commuting merely to shop was neither a practice nor indeed worthwhile. What would you shop for anyway?

If you were well-heeled and widely travelled (which usually meant somewhat westernised) then you could afford to shop in the big stores of Connaught Place, Khan Market, Warden Road, Chowringhee, South Parade or Mount Road. A certain class of customers still bought the latest imported and increasingly rare delicacies such as ham, bacon, gin and scotch whiskey, as well as less-known acquired tastes such as artichoke, Brussels sprouts and celery. Large chain stores were rare but had resounding names and stood for unimpeachable quality: Spencer’s for all sorts of high-class household needs; AH Wheeler’s and Higginbothams for bookstalls at railway stations everywhere; Whiteway and Laidlaw, and the Army and Navy Stores for fancy provisions for the sahib — both the leftover white variety and their brown successors. Eating out was not yet a habit of the average middle-class, other than at the dosa places or on the beach. As for business visitors, the only place one cou ld take them for a good meal, with or without a glass of beer, was Kwality’s, Gaylord’s or one of the downtown restaurants run invariably by the enthusiastic and indefatigable first-generation post-Partition Punjabi.

The early marketers

A business in household products meant dealing with the several hundred thousands of shops around the country. These were painstakingly tracked down, surveyed and serviced by the pioneering distribution companies of India — Burmah Shell, Wimco, Union Carbide, ITC, Brooke Bond, Lipton, Tata Oil Mills and Lever Brothers. Thus was nurtured an infant consumer economy; and the leaders as well as the systems practised by them became the models for all other companies that came up later.

As you can see, the list comprises makers of goods that are absolutely essential even for working-class families: tea, kerosene, torchlight batteries, cigarettes, match boxes, soap and so on. If the consumer had a tough time (and no choice) because of the inevitable deterioration in the quality, range, and variety of products on offer — and even the integrity of the shopkeepers and manufacturers, the sales and marketing people had a difficult time of it too. They had to find innovative means of creating demand in a huge country with widely dispersed and meagre consuming power, and very little standardisation possible in tastes or habits.

Prakash Tandon, the first Indian chairman of Levers, tells of Duncan, his senior colleague and a British expatriate, standing on the roadside outside a cinema in South Bombay with a demonstration team in tow and, like a village vendor, calling passers-by to smell and feel the wonders of the new substitute for ghee called vanaspati. Fresh snacks were made and passed around. Drops of vanaspati were smeared on the back of the wrist in the traditional way one did wit h ghee to check its aroma and authenticity.

Establishing a market for another such novelty, the powder detergent, took as long; people came to your house and offered to wash your dirty linen to persuade you about the merits of the bucket wash. These brands could never have been created with just advertising and distribution. However, the most basic ingredient was always ensuring sheer availability, the first goal of any marketing system. A network of wholesalers and retailers was fed through stock points and the entire flow managed at very low cost towards this paramount objective: no stock-outs. No customer should go back empty-handed for want of merchandise on the shelf.

Wooing a slow market

Inevitably, the first breakthroughs in every gimmick and trick in the marketing book were tried out in the first two decades of Independence, to stimulate a small, slow-growing market. Free samples, demonstrations, gifts and display contests were in plenty. Most ubiquitous of all was the huge wall poster in the local language, supplemented by the more durable, if less sophisticated, wall painting. These were found, as you toured the countryside, everywhere from the town bus terminus to the side of a pump house in the middle of the paddy field.

The most powerful invention for direct communication was the work done in the bazaars and shandies (still being carried on by the successors to the early marketers) through cinema vans, which sold during the day and showed movies o ff a small projector from the back of the van at night. There was always enough space, barring rainy days, in the villages for this free, open-air entertainment. Still, distribution without the support of a widespread access to the banking system was quite unusual. In the pre-war years, when almost everything was imported, local wholesalers of the port towns formed the backbone of the system. They would in turn pass on the goods to the hinterland, with collection by a hundi or, as in the angadia method employed by Gujarat traders, on trust and faith. In the case of consumer products, company salesmen would send the goods by rail to the upcountry town and, on reaching the destination, they would clear the wooden cra tes from the yard and distribute the goods from shop to shop, off the back of a hand-drawn cart.

There is an interesting story of a salesman who, having to introduce a new brand of soap (in Trichy, so it is said), found the going tough because the sceptical dealers resisted his offering. He decided to go through the main bazaar road every so often all day, with just one wood box containing soaps on the cart. Soon every dealer was intrigued and wanted to know who that case was destined for. On each occasion the salesman said it had been pre-booked and allotted to a dealer on the other side of town. By the afternoon he had enough eager dealers insisting that he unload some of this coveted stuff into their shops; needless to say, his single case was disposed of in no time! Such was the local inventiveness that went into the market entry of many brands that subsequently became successful in the country.

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Tryst with market force