#RandomReviews — Why Big Bazaar stores look so Bizarre and why don't they fix it?
I was one of those lucky ones who got a campus recruitment and placed directly in a EU countries as the first job. Retail market place that i tasted first were ‘Debenhams’ and ‘Carrefour’. After 7 years of overseas stay i have returned back to Pune, India in 2007. Monthly grocery needs for us was initially fulfilled by a Big Bazaar outlet in Fatima Nagar Junction near Hadapsar. From beginning i wondered why Big Bazaar is such a chaotic place? Having experienced the EU style of shopping, i had a real welcome to India feeling during those days. Later we moved on to other outlets. There used to be one Big Bazaar outlet in Kalyani Nagar; We found that one is better outlet, specially there imported items available in that store. Ever since i was wondering why it is Bizarre, Why don’t they plan it better? Why don’t they improve at all.Why don’t they have god-down in basement and don't fill in all the the stuff on the floor. Why don’t they improve at all?. Why don’t they give better training to their staff? more importantly why don’t they fix it? Having looked at how a Carrefour managed their operations, It does not seems to be so difficult. I never really got any answer on this topic
Recently i came across this book by Kishore Biyani the CEO himself about his entrepreneurial stint with Big Bazaar and future group as a whole. This post mainly describes highlights of the book by Kishore and Dipayan Baishya ( another business writer). Though the book was published in 2007, I saw it now- mostly i have ignored this question long back. MORE mega store opposite to my flat in Bangalore reminds of those Big Bizarre experience many a times.
The book start with famous quote from people president APJ Abdul Kalam — ‘We are a nation of billion people, thinks like a nation of million people’. Essentially what the author starts to say is, what we dream of is what we become. Half part of the book is talks about how he went ahead and built Pantaloons, to Big Bazaar, to Food Bazaar, to e-Zone, to Central and the struggles he faced building those and the second half talking about how he went ahead to make conglomerate out of these companies — now called ‘Future Group’. This blog-post i am penning it as first the answer of the question in ‘title of the post’, respecting the reader who clicked to understand the answer and then the other part is mainly about learning from the book — which majority for management students and new era entrepreneurs .
PART 1: Why Big Bazaar is Bizarre ?
None understood Indian consumers, that what Kishore Biyani did. All others opening retail shops in India is just copying what he did. He categorizes India consumers in 2 divisions. India-1 is upper class and upper middle class having decent disposable income to spent on retail outlets. The senior managers, office goers, babus and of course plus the elite class. Whereas India-2, relatively the low income group majority is the service providers for India-1. They are mainly the drivers, house maids, nannies, house keeping staff, peons, security guards etc. The curious case is the India-1 one always need their service and never pay them what they deserve. If you are in India-1 category, imagine how many times you have got salary increment in past few years and how many time you have increased the same for your support staff. India-2 has a perception that the big malls (the one that are very sophisticated one .. the likes of Shopper stop, Lifestyle or UB city) are expensive. India-2 always looks for value for every rupee spent. India-2 travels in two wheeler and public transport. India-2 constitute more than 50% of Indian consumer market. In year 2000s India-2 shops from Kirana stores or market places. Kishore Biyani could understood this phenomenon very early stage where he realized that if has to be successful in retail business, he need to target India-2. But if he follow the wall-mart of debenhams model, its not going to work here, as India-2 will not even come closer. For India-2 clean and shiny environment of modern retail stores creates a perception that, such stores are too expensive and exclusive. Kishore’s intention was to give a Bazaar like feeling to India-2, but still much comfortable compare to traditional bazaar. When India-2 goes to market, she gets everything in same market. She always bargains to get the best price, She always check for best quality. She touches, feels, even tastes before she buys staples. So he started Big Bazaar in 2000 concentrating more on the Bazaar aspect than the Big part. Floor plans were designed to shabby, congested. It is a well planned chaos that he offers in Big Bazaar stores. The loose staples and U shaped Sabji Mandi is part of the plan. Some Big Bazaar outlets in rural villages even offer edible oil in loose and live chakki. As one of there senior employees called out, “If we would have allowed him, Kishore would have brought a cow as well to the store to give fresh milk”.He thought of hiring the best talent to guide India-2 within their stores, later changed the plan to hire people from India-2 community so that they connect well. So answer to the title of this post is Bizarre that you see in Big Bazaar stores are designed to create such chaos — because he knew early on that if you give a UB City like experience and sell the same things, India-2 will not even come to that place — because of expensive notion.
More exciting lessons and interesting tactics on retail business — read through part 2 — please don't forget to share the story if you returning from here.
PART 2: Other key points from KB’s autobiographical book ? (chapter wise)
1. Made in India
The chapter starts with ‘Sabse Sastha Din’ marketing campaign, they have put on a republic day back in early 2000s and the chaos, traffic and law and order situations it created in various locations. From this experiences one of the import factor to learn for Kishore is ‘ what drives purchases?’. He says 4 reasons, Greed drives customers to buy more than they need. More options forces customers to buy more even for gifting purpose if not for their personal use. Fear — of increase in price in future also drive higher purchases; Lastly envy sets in when one sees others buying and making best out of the deal.
India is land of festivals. Celebration creates consumption of goods in India. On any given week, somewhere, our countrymen are celebrating a festival about which most of us may not have a single clue. We always concentrated on capitalizing the festivities of the land.
Kishore believes business is simple; Most people try to make it complex because they are trained to think that way. In fact many try justifying their jobs by making things complex.
Most of our business ideas comes from store managers on the floor. We train them to observe customer behaviors and as Leader my job was to transform them into actionable tasks.
Retail is like cycling up hill; you can never stop peddling. Kishore feels happy that Big Bazaar opened before he visited Wall-Mart. If you copy from America it does not work here — foreign retailers, in-spite of their deep pockets and years of experience could not make much head way here in this subcontinent.
2. Build from Scratch
He starts this chapter with his school and college days where in entrepreneur in him start showing symptoms of building a business. He just did not want to run the family business as it is. Being from a Baniya family, his father and uncle and cousins continue to preserve their family business generation by generation. Just preserving family business for him is monotonous and status quo.
Our culture in generally is against entrepreneurship. Parents discourage children from taking larger risks or getting into uncertain territories. Kishore cannot stand status quo. He just want to think expansively and grow.
He believed in a flat org structure with 3 layers. Information gathering layer, knowledge creation layer and strategy layer. In a multi layer organization, by the time data reaches the top, its either been miss-interpreted or has become irrelevant. Most of these organization we make grant presentations and have long meetings to share data. Often outcome of these meetings are to decide when to meet next.
3. Defying the Odds
His journey started with brand WBB through which the power of branding was learned. Inspired from an Italian fashion, he started withe trouser brand ‘Manz wear’ which later renamed as ‘Pantaloons Fashion’. In the quest of scaling it to a national level; He set up and franchise network across the country to sell their trousers. Kishore was always clear on his vision, articulated it well that each employee believes in it, passionately owned it, and relentlessly drive it to execute it.
Shorter mind-to-market — The time between recognizing a fashion trend and putting them on the store shelves has to be as less as possible.
He never allowed financial constraints as to affect his vision and ambition. ‘Making finance and funding’ as the starting point of business is like nipping the bud itself. This is an important lesson for any modern day entrepreneur. When he fell short of capital, the company went public on Rs.10/- IPO; But never shown fudged data to attract investors. Unlike traditional reporting, they produced monthly reports to Dalal Street. They took every investor not only visit their store, but also to the rural Indian markets, the chawls, the slums.
After that they went ahead for Bank loans, and never default even a single re-payment.
4. For GOD, Country and Big Bazaar
Customer is the queen; Listen to them. Big or small, she is always right. You don't hire foreign consultant, as they will never understand this country. Kishore do not know how to wear a tie. Let the world laugh at me, but i will not pretend to somebody that i am not.
White-Shirt Saga — In India everybody has a white shirt. They purchased 1 lack white shirts and stocked in Mumbai store. They put a price tag of Rs.149 Surprisingly it was not getting sold. Later realized that, his target customers which are mainly India-2, do travel in local trains. White shirt is a high maintenance item in there.India-2 buys white shirt for occasions in that case they buy a Rs.500/- shirt from elsewhere. India-2 believes that expensive ones are good quality.
Sam-Walton’s book — It talks about 2 styles of retails — operations driven — which thrives to reduce cost by improving operational efficiency; Big Bazaar focused on he later — which is merchandise drive. When you go merchandise drive, you do not have any maximum limit for improvement.
Central Stores — Unlike traditional modern mall set ups where brands will occupies store spaces and pay a rent whereas Kishore tried a different method. These day many mall copies this style. Central’s way is — do NOT charge rent, take commission of sale done. This way he will know which brands to keep and which ones to remove.
5. Bollywood Calling
Another thing that Kishore was very fond of was Bollywood apart from cricket.His idea was to make a film to promote ‘Pantaloons’ brand. It should be a regular love story that happens around the store. Though so many people surrounding him including family members rejected the idea; He went ahead and produced to two movies — ‘Na Tum Janno na Hum’ and ‘Chura Liya hai thume’. Both the movies flopped in the box office. Prior to working on the movies, he had believed that he knew every about the customers. He was proved wrong, He soon realized that ‘customers’ — ‘Na Tum Janno na Hum’. Good part of movie making is that you will know about success or failure within hours movie release on that specific Friday.
6. Business at speed of thought
Unless the leader understand the human dynamics, he cannot ever get the best out his colleagues. An organization must give an environment for employees to feel happy and motivated. Though in the first interactions with Kishore, it looks like an one-man-show; a bania or lala company, the more you know about KB, you will remove he perceptions faster. When comes to recognition, KB ensure to recognize the employee socially — Means if they give a gift, it will be family gift that he will give, so that employee’s family members feel proud about it. KB has gone to the extend of painting houses of all the employees of Big Bazaar on the occasion of Diwali. Gurukul is a residential training program that each employee undergo to get the pulse of the organization irrespective of the sale man or a senior manger joins the company. Apart from that there are various company sponsored professional education that employee can take up.
In partner relations, KB ensured relationship is more important than the transaction, if he believes that a relationship is not getting built after multiple sittings he just walks away. He is not of bargaining type. Even if he scarifies a rupee or two for building a relationship, he will go for it. Most of the real-estate deals with developers happened in that fashion for Big Bazaar and Pantaloons. He compares partner relationships are exactly like arranged marriages in the India. Love starts post-marriage.
7. The Pantaloons way
we like being simple
speed is essence of everything we do
we like to learn while we execute
we like thrift
we believe that customer are always right
we like to think in terms of majority
we take pride of our core value — Indian-ness
we believe in ourselves
we do not blame others or external factors
we like to think positively in every situation
we like building and nurturing relationships
we love to rewrite rules, even as we retain our values
8. Business of Life
KB believes in collective individualism; As many of his cousin’s are share holders of the company, they have created a trust made the owner of the company. He believes that, they are happy as family as he maintained his original middle class upbringing as it is. Respect, Humility and simplicity. Managing the family is no less important than managing the business.He believes that people who do not blame others are the happiest. The illiterates of 21st century are not the ones who cannot read and write. Those are the ones, who cannot learn, un-learn and re-learn. It is for Individuals to decide on there own success and failure scales.
9. Who says elephants cant dance?
An organisation needs a Creator, preserver and destroyer to keep pace with the changing reality. And Biyani considered himself a creator and a destroyer. This is clearly stated where every three years they have destroyed their existing organizational design. The whole journey which started as a garment manufacturer has now built multiple retail chain.
That was very long folks !!!!
Thanks and Best Regards — Anu Sadasivan
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#RandomReviews is a hashtag that I started pursuing — voicing out my personal opinion about my experience with anything; It could be a book I read, a movie I watched or a car I had test-driven. This is has no intention to promote/demote the work/product, its just a personal view.
