Silk and silk sarees have always played a central role in the lives of Indian women. No wedding, festival, or auspicious occasion is complete without silk sarees. Over time large retail chains started to own the narrative on silk, especially in the South. A few of these retail chains succeeded in cornering a large share of the market. They became destination stores. In fact, they came to be so...
A case for product differentiation There is something strange about the Indian jewelry market. It is large, yes, but unlike most other markets it does not have a dominant player. There is no Maruti or Jio as far as the jewelry market goes. The reason becomes apparent when you dig a little deeper. This market is not a composite whole. It is a sum of a lot of markets. The brand that dominates in...
The world will breathe a collective sigh of relief as the hands of the clock inch towards each other for one last time this year. It has been a terrible year. Enough has been said and written and experienced about the terribleness of 2020. But like every terrible, devastating, and mind-numbing experience it has left us some hard lessons to ponder over and learn from. Here are a few of these...
Rural consumption boom
Alexander had Bucephalus, help him conquer. Where is your brand's?
Or how the coronavirus will change the communication business After having looked hopefully and then a bit fearfully at the future we now turn our attention to the present and to the business of our business. The world of brands and branding. The nature of the question we ask however remains the same. What will this virus do to the world of brands and branding? There is an obvious catch in the...
This is our second piece on the impact that coronavirus could have on all of us. We started debating on this on the 14th of April, about an hour or so after the PM’s address to the nation. Lockdown 1.0 was coming to an end; Lockdown 2.0 was about to begin. We soon realized that putting down a pessimistic point of view is much harder than imagining the positive side to all of this. What can...
Everything was planned. Thoroughly planned. We stuck with the name that we chose over a year ago – The Strategy School. We imagined ourselves collaborating with our clients and uncovering new insights that would then help them realize their business goals. We spent a lot of time reworking our logo, we spend time segmenting our market, creating our products, we went through about five painful...