Consumers' Paradise: Try snatching those bags away and you'll know

72 brands of toilet soaps. 12 brands of cars, not counting sub-brands and models. Over hundred satellite channels. Just what's your pick today?

Fathom this. Three decades ago, the Indian housewife had 11 brands of soap to pick from, fixed grammage per bar. She now has 72 brands, in assorted forms. The Indian officegoer had two brands of cars, three boxes each-bonnet, cabin and boot. He now has 12 brands, not counting the sub-brand models.

No, not to imply that the Liberalisation project was kick-started 30 years ago; the Great Indian Brand Burst occurred between the palindromic years of 1991 and 2002. Nor to imply that counting bars and boxes is an appropriate way to measure freedom.

The issue is not the awesome variety of five-star hotels, four-season resorts, three-box cars, two-piece suits or even one-piece SIM cards for dropless global communication. All these things make the consumer happy, and opposing them would be an exercise in masochism. The issue is what all this choice means to that elusive measure that marketers often call the 'quality of life'.

Choice As Human Right

For ages, the Indian consumer could buy any car he liked as long as it was white-and having it painted was the shockwave-causing equivalent of appearing in public wearing, say, a Lycra dhoti with loud checks. Those were the days that cars were run till they rusted aground.

Today, people buy things they want, not what they're forced to. An 800 gets replaced by a Santro not because it's too creaky to run, but because the latter has entered the customer's dreamspace. "With choice," says Radhika Roy, National Qualitative Head, NFO MBL India, "the cycle of repurchase, upgrading if you will, has become shorter, thus liberating the consumer."

THE VALUE REVOLUTION The biggest cause for celebration is the expanding basket of products that price-based competition has put within the reach of millions

What's more, a white car these days almost qualifies as a sort of statement-an attempt to stand out. Colour options? You name it. A car these days would have to be plastered with scandalous graffiti to raise eyebrows on the streets. Cars are no longer just boxes on wheels ferrying people about, nor even mobility assurers. They are turning into a way to express one's individualism. That's what a bustling market can do. A market bustling with four-wheeled sirens vying for your attention.

Feels good, doesn't it? Choice, in itself, is liberation. "Ultimately," says Srinivasan Raman, Head, Quest, ac Nielsen ORG-MARG, "exercising choice is empowerment."

The irony has been that a country enlightened enough to adopt universal adult franchise as a matter of principle, took so long to apply the same logic to consumption. Self-denial was virtuous, as grandpa told us, but then it should have been self-denial as chosen, not as compulsion.

It's a fine but crucial difference. Even the ascetic who stays off all the wonders of a multiple choice lifestyle ought to feel ennobled only if these soul-threatening wonders are actually accessible. That's when that choice assumes validity-as a willful decision taken after having examined all the other options.

"The consumer's assessment of product performance, durability and affordability have changed because of choice," says B. Narayanaswamy, Executive Director, Indica Research. For once, consumer 'demand' actually means demand.

THE SMORGASBORD OF CHOICE There are over 100 cable and satellite channels and 22 terrestrial television channels available currently in India, with something aimed at everybody

Check out supermarket shelves. According to K. Radhakrishnan, Vice President (Merchandising), FoodWorld Supermarkets, "We have expanded our small imports counter to a full-fledged imports department."

But do customers really bother to examine their options? Often, yes. "There are very few categories in which the consumer is unwilling to experiment," observes Roy. Even otherwise, people must have these options. Because demand works best as an invisible force, a force with its own dynamics. Of some 25 articles on a supermarket shelf, most customers may want to spend their lifetimes with just one OL' familiar. There may be terrific 'value for money' in that purchase. But the very availability of the other 24 options is also 'value' in a roundabout sort of way. They, as competitors, set comparative benchmarks of value for the OL' familiar-and thus act to regulate its performance.

So consumers may not behave like cola endorsers, asking for 'more'. But if that 'more' suddenly becomes 'less', they will notice-without doing the sums. They will not analyse the difference, they will feel it. More than a decade since 1991, having experienced competition, the Indian consumer will not settle for any less choice-and that, perhaps, is the biggest vindication of a liberalised market environment.

Zip Zap Zoom

If you really want to try a tricky experiment, take TV. The choice in this arena has been explosive since satellite dishes brought live CNN images of 1991's Gulf War straight into Indian living rooms.

A VERITABLE KALEIDOSCOPE The variety of three-box cars, two-piece suits, and one-piece SIM cards and just about anything else has ensured that there will never be a dull moment in the consumer's life

In the years since that invasion, the 'remote' has become a mission critical device in some 45 million homes- hardly a wonder, given the virtual smorgasbord of choice in software programming. There are over 100 C&S channels and 22 terrestrial TV channels available currently in India, with something aimed at everybody-whatever the demographics, whatever the psychographics. That this is the world's most kaleidoscopic market is no exaggeration. A googa-geegee show for a two-year-old? It's there. Reports from Liberia? It's there. Daily enactment of ma-in-law management? There too. Wailing electric guitars with spaced out lyrics? Got it. Something for someone seeking enlightenment? Yes. For someone madly in love? Sure.

Now try narrowing this choice. Nobody can possibly watch more than 75 per cent of those channels for more than a second's worth of surf-through pixels. But try asking a dozen office colleagues to submit signed-in-triplicate lists of which channels they want to declare as 'wanted' and which they'd forgo-and watch the mayhem. That's the funny thing about choice. It's hard to put down. Having 100 channels, three-fourths of them unwatched, is value in itself. It gives us the freedom to zap channel-to-channel, and even a second's peek at a neighbour's choice-which we halo'd souls are too virtuous to watch-has its own gratification.

What the television remote is at home, the cellular phone has become outside-something to keep clutched. Till the consumer didn't have this little contraption, the old coiled telephone did just fine. But now that she has it, try prying it away from her. Feel like a stroll to the corner cafe to finish that book? Feel free. You wouldn't have gone missing. Just had this bizarre thought you want to share with someone? The keypad's all yours. Want to switch to 'vibe' instead of 'ring' mode? Just a flick away. The Indian mobile base is already 15-million strong, two-thirds of whom have opted for the pre-paid card option-an idea thrown up by the private sector rivalry for numbers. That's something to think about.

Access, Access, Access

At the end, the biggest cause for celebration is the expanding basket of products that price competition has put within the reach of millions. Low-cost shampoo sachets of have empowered village women to use glamour as a weapon in the marriage arena. Small-pack biscuits have given village-to-village trudgers a portable energy booster.

There are no bar codes in this part of India, and the demand signals often gets muffled along the way. But there are a lot of things the Indian villager would want to do if he could: Just because.

-additional reporting by Nitya Varadarajan