Selling Conscience

HAVE Indian companies failed to improve the quality of life of the masses? Does target marketing ignore the large-volume, low-margin products for the public? Does consumerism allow marketers to make whopping profits at the cost of consumers? Are our corporates merely duping consumers with misleading spiel?

"Yes," said business school students from around the country. They had gathered recently at the Jamshedpur-based Xavier Labour Relations Institute, XLRI, the country's oldest B-school, for a wisdomfest with a twist. The theme: marketing for the masses. B-schoolers—usually at home with marketing, finance, production and people management—found themselves grappling with issues like marketing's fillip to social infrastructure, marketing to improve the quality of life and the importance of a powerful consumer movement to thwart predatory corporates. "Marketing for the masses," says Sharad Sarin, who teaches marketing at XLRI and is the brain behind the meet, "is really about the vast majority of poor, commercially unattractive people whose concerns we seldom notice."

 So who really are the masses? According to A. Rajasekaran and Amaresh Mohan of the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, they are the 80 per cent of Indians who live in the villages but share just 29 per cent of the national wealth and income. Or, according to XLRI's Gaurav Narasimhan and Prashant Vadhyar, 83 per cent of the households who earn less than Rs 40,000 per annum—nearly 75 per cent of whom are in rural India.

But marketers, say IRMA's Rajasekaran and Mohan—who walked away with the first prize with a presentation on marketing as an instrument of development—keep targeting the "creamy layer". That is, the 1 per cent very rich, or the 10 per cent that make up the middle class. The upshot: marketing doesn't help improve the lot of the masses. On the other hand, say Narasimhan and Vadhyar, whose presentation on consumerism and its trickle-down effect bagged them the second prize, the low-income consumer is often shortchanged by marketers taking advantage of his lack of education and awareness.

The judges were agreed on the need to change perceptions. "Marketing has been about selling in any way possible," says Bindeshwari Pathak, who heads Sulabh International, the largest pan-Indian social service outfit promoting human rights and environmental sanitation. "The students should think in terms of a whole new approach to marketing, based not on the imperative to sell but on the need to induce an attitudinal shift in the consumer. This is selling to his soul." J.P. Singh, a professor of international management and organisational behaviour at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), wonders if present-day marketing really gives consumers a freedom of choice. "Marketing actually limits your choice," he says, "because the marketers don't give you the full and truthful information about their products."

Students flocking to B-schools to join the hottest employability-linked post-graduation courses may find Pathak's ideas outlandish. But XLRI's Sarin recalls taking students to tribal villages near Ranchi in Bihar and Midnapore in West Bengal to study the economy and local banking systems in the mid-'70s. As B-school courses get more and more cramped, there is little time left to make these study tours a regular practice. But some students feel the beginnings of a small shift in attitudes. One XLRI student talks about how a few students in his first year batch are keen on summer training with NGOs in the field to get to know the other India. Some 20 of the 35 students majoring in marketing this year from the institute have also taken up rural marketing as an elective subject. "There is a growing interest in these issues," says Sameer Sinha, a second year marketing student at XLRI.

But there's still a long way to go. Essentially, the B-school degree is a hot ticket to the most lucrative jobs in town, and this will not change in the near future. "It's true that B-schools have failed to throw up leaders to bring about social change," says Sarin. IIM-A's Singh is more trenchant. "B-school students essentially end up as half-baked products who stay in protective transnational and large corporation environments," he says. "Take away the protection and half of them will flounder." Singh says every B-school should introduce a course on consumer perspectives to marketing. "There's not enough sensitisation of B-school students and the courses are to blame in part," he adds. Till then, the hapless consumer will never really be the king.