How should you react to the pathetic performance of India's most famous marketer of consumer softs, these past few years, amidst the chirpiness of an otherwise growing market? Or to the bucketloads of sweat produced by marketers, advertising agencies, market researchers, brand consultants and all the rest, as they struggle with the challenge of finding new methods to understand people and persuade them to buy their wares?

By uncorking the bubby-that's how!

Don't get us wrong. We have nothing against marketers of any size, big or small. But the fact that the Indian consumer, circa 2005, is a creature far from the traditionally pictured stereotype of yore is worth a celebration. It is obvious that the consumer is better off than ever before; just look at the sales figures of cars, holidays, loans, and what have you. Prosperity brings spending. So that's really no big deal.

What's important, something often missed in the cacophony of daily business life, is the actual coming of an Indian consumer who is much more than a consumption node, grateful and content. She is now a consumer who is morphing slowly but surely into a market maker, demanding and powerful.

It should be no surprise, really, coming as it does more than a decade after the advent of satellite television, which now reaches more than half of the 80 million-odd television homes in India, and the loosening of the regulatory system that kept free-market forces so tightly leashed for so many decades. Oh yes, it has been an eventful period, and to think of the Indian consumer as the same being would be rather silly, to say the least.

So who is this new Indian consumer?

She is elusive, for sure. She is not just hard to get, as any harried media planner will tell you, or hard to please, as any of those creative types will tell you. She is all that and much, much more. Above all, however, she is a keen participant in the making of the market as we will get to know it (hopefully).

In other words, the Indian consumer is no longer passive. She knows what this whole marketing game is about, is quite willing to play along, but is very clear that it must be on her terms. She is no longer willing to just lap up what is offered to her, but is itching to be an active agent in the creation process. On this, she is more than willing to be assertive. She is prepared to sprout wings, take to the skies, and skywrite the message loud and clear-if that's what it takes (in a manner of speaking, of course).

Marketers are taking note. They had better. It's much better to hear it straight from the consumer than have it stare at them from dismal sales numbers.

The immediate effect of all this, it appears, has been a huge shift from regular mass-media ad messaging to what goes by the term 'below the line' marketing. Response-led initiatives, direct-feel promotions, interactive marketing, consumer touch-points and all kinds of new '360-degree' consumer involvement tools are currently in use to try and get somewhere with this newly empowered consumer. This, even as market researchers are being pressured to get really, really up close and personal with the consumer. Get right into the inner depths of her heart and mind, researchers are told. And into the inner depths of her heart and mind, researchers like to think they've reached.

Still, no matter how hard marketers try, the consumer still remains an enigma of sorts. This is so at almost every spending level, be it a one-rupee biscuit pack being bought at a corner shop in some dusty hamlet, or an S-class Mercedes being picked up at one of the country's snazziest showrooms. Or even-the reference cannot be resisted-a bar of soap promising the radiance of film stars.

But the question nobody wants to ask is this: is slipping ever larger chunks of the budget 'below the line' really the answer? If the Indian consumer has lost the diffidence she once had, why have so many marketers receded behind a protective membrane of shyness? This is an equalisation, not a role reversal.

"Customers buy for their reasons," the legendary adman Orvel Ray Wilson once said, "not ours." The only way to make that 'connect' is for marketers to exorcise their fears and get a little more explicit.