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Consumers are rather pleased with the phenomenal growth in the consumer goods market, especially in processed foods. But they should be more than a little frightened, because there is little evidence of the standardisation that protects the consumer in the mass market. Two developments last week exposed the immaturity of our markets. The Supreme Court ruled that imported goods will have to carry local price tags and the Ministry of Health and Family We-lfare has required perishables to be marked with a best-before date. It is amazing that the market has been permitted to operate without such basic consumer safeguards for so long. The case on imported goods related to Kodak film, whose price varies freely from territory to territory and fluctuates according to market forces. Hardly the characteristics of a standardised mass product. Char-acteristics, rather, of onions and potatoes.
The order on food products is even more sobering. So many years after the food processing industry was fast-tracked, consumersdo not have any indication, other than the date of manufacture, about the usability or safety of a product. The initial response of the industry to the move that it would lead to shelf-stock being "wasted" shows just how out of touch it is. The world over, best-before dates are used as occasions for discounts. Products past the date are simply offered at a lower price. Nothing is "wasted". The best-before tag actually works in the interest of the food industry, building consumer confidence. The ot-her argument, oddly socialistic though proceeding from capitalistic mouths, is that small units which cannot afford the infrastructure for labelling will be wiped out. It is completely anachronistic. The food industry now runs off production lines. There are ancillaries and outsourcing is a common practice. The move will actually allow small units to specialise in packaging, leaving production to larger entities. The general point to be made is that India can no longer depend on traditional production techniquesin what promises to be a huge, capital-intensive and high-profit industry. Besid-es, it must develop a new marketing vision focused on consumer needs.
In the near future, the urban Indian market will move in a direction that has become familiar in the West. The corner provision store will lose out to the supermarket chain, which can leverage a more widespread sourcing network and better access to capital to give consumers a better deal. The supermarket war that broke out in the UK earlier this year showed the shape of things to come. When price competition became difficult to sustain, the chains even moved into non-traditional areas. One offered free Internet access, a product completely remote from the goods on its shelves. The players in the Indian consumer market will have to prepare for a rather sophisticated future. The first step in that direction would be to build consumer confidence in their products with reliable standardisation.
Consumers will have to be told that any branded product shall be nodifferent from any other, retail at a price that is not rigged, and be safely usable.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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