Indian Retailing – Some new growth sectors

A few years ago, I read a report by a consultancy firm about sectors in India that are amenable to organized retailing.

I think there were some ‘Ready to Go’ sectors like Grocery and Men’s Apparel; Some ‘Shape and Adapt’ sectors like women’s apparel, books etc, and then some ‘Wait and Watch’ sectors. Pharmacies were in the wait and watch category.
But I think, if one were to look at the retail scene in India today, two (for me) surprising sectors that are showing great activity on the organized retailing front are: Pharmacies and …Flowers!

Pharmacies actually started getting organized a while ago – the RPG owned ‘Health and Glow’ were amongst the first – Primarily into personal care and beauty, most outlets had a small pharmacy section with the traditional white coated assistant.
Now, I see many of these organized pharmacy chains – in Bangalore, Trust, the Apollo Pharmacy (which has the benefit of having a large name attached to it), and Lifeken are a few names. These outlets offer the usual ‘organized retail’ advantage of a common ambience, a pleasant shopping experience, sometimes qualified (atleast apparently so) personnel dispensing drugs as well as advice. I also, much to my surprise, saw some interesting ‘marketing’ related activities – my corner Lifeken has nice printed bags and banners. I do think the big disadvantage they have is location – there just aren’t enough of these around – so, sustainability of the concept may be an issue. However, a larger worry to me is – what is their value proposition? The big one that I can see is 24*7 service – this is huge, it differentiates, and may even negate to a certain extent the location disadvantage, especially at night. However, what is it in their operations that is making the better ambience/ more qualified people/ 24*7 operations viable financially? (Is there a supply chain play here? I am assuming not – unlike fresh grocery, where disintermediation has given rise to huge savings in the supply chain, most medicines get manufactured by large organized pharma companies). Maybe its in the product mix – ie, keep a larger supply of the unorganized sector products – cotton wool/ bandages etc…not sure, though

Similarly, Flowers is an area that I am suddenly seeing some organized activity around – there are many of these outlets called – “Tilia” (for a meaning of the word, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilia) These are slowly replacing those corner flower shops that we saw at virtually every corner. Again, as value proposition, not sure what they offer – I suspect better service/ fresher flowers/ fancier designs…infact, when it comes to flowers, I personally would much rather take the “flower girls” a la Eliza Doolittle any day over the (to me) artificial chains – but I am sure, given the fact that this was a white space, atleast the prime movers here will do well.

Blog Analysis: A dynamic, exciting field

The world is abuzz with the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and there is a lot of effort at corporate and agency levels going into thought leadership around using the blogosphere and other new media in various ways.

EmPower Research, for the past few years, has been tracking and analyzing this space. EmPower uses several metrics and indicators to demystify the blogosphere for its clients.

We use many search engines, some proprietary software and finally what we like to call a “software aided human process” to gather all content and some preliminary metrics.

A tangential thought that struck me as I was reading a blog post the other day was to see how popular the various hosting platforms were. Sheer serendipity – I basically checked in 4 search engines for 3 diverse categories. Google blogs and Blogpulse showed me easily the urls of the blogs – so I could carry out an analysis, but technorati and ice rocket did not, though they had trend graphs that I could compare.

The categories/ search words I used were: “Telecom Services”, “Beer”, and “Nursery Education” (examples from three currently ongoing projects that we are working on). The results were interesting to me








A few points that leapt to the eye were:
• Google blogs does not seem to cover myspace blogs
• Strangely, Google blog search does not necessarily favor blogs written on blogspot (blogger) – this could be a) because blogspot is universally acknowledged as popular, and so finds fairly high salience across search engines, or, b) because google is in any case not into self promotion of their own properties
• Google blogs has a much higher ratio of individual/ other blogs
• Blogpulse, on the other hand, has a more diverse ‘key’ platform source





The results, ofcourse, differed by category a bit:
• For Google Blogs, Nursery Education had the most international (read primarily EMEA, infact, mainly the U.K.) blogs – I guess mainly because of the key word used
• Also, for both the platforms, blogspot usage rose from telecom to beer to nursery education – not quite sure why/ what it signifies, though.
• Not surprisingly, very much in keeping with the user profile, Beer scored high for Myspace users – it’s a matching demographic, one would think!

Incidentally, both Technorati and Ice Rocket do give you hits by day – again, interestingly enough, both had different figures, though the trends matched more or less.

Blog posts mentioning telecom services per day for the past 30 days.





Blog posts mentioning beer per day for the past 30 days.





Blog posts mentioning nursery education per day for the past 30 days.