Moving Retail's Marriage from Convenience to Relevance

As Indian consumers become more educated about products available to them, and become more demanding in how they receive these products, marketeers are waking up a stark new reality. Scarcity of choice has changed to abundance, customer has transformed from beggar to king, and a once remote phenomena called "competition" has now arrived in this previously oligarchic market. And this trend will only increase as retail invests expertise, modernizes and consolidates.

Enter the relevance of Customer Loyalty as a tool for driving retention and positive brand experience. Let us explore this a bit further.

Hydroponics, the urban face of Agriculture 2.0

Hunger and water scarcity are but two sides of the same coin, both in urban India as well as in farming communities depleting their reserves of arable land. We desperately need for traditional practices of soil-based agriculture to be complemented by more productive and ecologically-sustainable forms of modern agriculture. These modern practices need to be cognizant of our modern day challenges of de-forestation, overly complex distribution of perishables, overuse of water for irrigation, excessive use of transportation fuels, and the rising menace of food price inflation.

Making Innovation Contagious

Utopia in the developmental world can be visualized as the existence of a vast array of 'copy, tailor and paste' programs, where sustainable social innovations are being massively replicated across low-income communities, and the capital markets are seeing enough opportunity to trade in the sector. What would drive this ability to scale though would be an abundance of openly-available success stories and lessons learned. And what would allow for such successes in the first place would be a relentless focus on collaboration, as opposed to competition, by social entrepreneurs and their sponsors. Collaboration in specifics is the essence of what will scale social impact, and set it apart from the purely commercial world that is obsessed with capturing value primarily for shareholders.

Our Invisible Green Collars

Imagine our beloved city of Mumbai if our hundred thousand 'ragpickers' suddenly vanished! Our neighborhoods would be awash in waste, well in excess of what the municipal authorities can manage. Our massive recycling industries, such as in Dharavi, would lose a chunk of their raw materials. Our city's harmful greenhouse gas emissions would continue to balloon. Our products made from recycled products would become more expensive. And most unfortunate of all, our poorest and most vulnerable members of urban India would lose their one and only opportunity to earn a meager 100 rupees a day.

IRIS to the (Triple Bottom Line) rescue

Between 2004, when I initially grew interested (through Net Impact, CA) in impact investment and the blended-value/SROI models developed by the likes of Jed Emerson and Sara Olsen, and today, there have been several attempts to mainstream the connect between social entrepreneurs and their financial sponsors. Enabling philanthropists and capital markets to engage social innovators on a healthier footing, and build overall capacity in this sector, has been a challenge. I am therefore encouraged now to find that a number of SVCs/social impact investors have built tools to support their due diligence activities, measure and benchmark their investees, and report against a standard of social and environmental indicators. It would seem like the notion of the 'triple bottom line' is now here to stay and a recognized 'must' in order to scale the impact investment sector.

Godliness revisited

Whether ‘believers’ or not, the idea of God is pervasive in our over-complicated little lives. God is either our friend or foe, based on the circumstance dealt. An unfortunate but true universality. As much as we love and exalt God when times are good, if someone dear to us is at death's door, we will choose to beg God for a recovery, often as a quid pro quo for confessing our sins.

Increasing government accountability i.e. stemming corruption

My friend Prathima Manohar of The Urban Vision recently asked how we may improve government transparency and accountability in India. Here are my thoughts to that end. And raising the ugly head of corruption in this discussion is all too inevitable.

Why do you really need a 'consultant' working for you?

Why do companies really need all these highly paid external consultants working for them? You may wonder. If you posed the same question to the management of these companies, they usually say "Oh, to help us think outside the box," or "to temporarily plug a skills gap," or "to help us solve a specific problem using industry best practices," or maybe plain and simple "to help us sort out this mess that we've created."

Is climate-change a red herring? You be the judge

Recent frenzies in the climate debate have in my opinion made a mockery out of what should be one legitimate piece of a much broader initiative. One can argue that recent climate summits are in fact distracting our leaders from other more pressing missions. Do we really believe that a significant portion of our natural disasters are caused by "climate change?" Isn't it convenient to just blame polluters and consumers without looking at the larger framework within which they try to co-exist? The armchair pundits will of course say "of course we know it’s not just about the climate, it’s more about finding an emotionally legitimate ploy to rally people towards new sustainable solutions for energy and development." Sorry, that argument’s not going to fly any longer with your electorates or shareholders. There are larger burning issues, no pun intended. The fulcrum policy shifts what will truly enable man-induced climate change and other issues to be alleviated will need to center around mitigating special interest’s clout over policy-making. Once this core issue is tackled in the larger economies, while allowing for grassroots entrepreneurial innovation, many would argue that energy could in fact become a very cheap and abundant commodity, and in many cases not requiring the grid.