What HR can learn from the humble Bhatukali play

I’m a market research professional. Small wonder then, that my default attitude is that I always have my ear to the ground & my finger on the pulse of the audience. During this Lockdown, I found that while most Human Resources (HR) firms were busy grappling with issues such as boosting motivation during Work From Home (WFH), setting work/life boundaries, engaging WFH teams, managing performance under pressure & succession planning, it was amusing to hear the workforce buzzing with a different kind of grouse:

“ये HR लोग अपने LinkedIn bio me “Passionate about Hiring” लिखते हैंI ये कैसा passion है भाई? Candidates के e-mail का reply देने में तो नानी मरती है तुम्हारी” Translated this means HR needs to be more responsive to placements & job searches at the present moment.

In my opinion, what HR needs to do in India today is to discover newer perspectives to manage WFH challenges, understand how to set boundaries & expectations and implement Emotionally Intelligent communication techniques in their operations.

Doing this comes naturally to more than half the HR professionals in India. Why? 1 – Because they are women. And 2 – Because of how little girls in India are socialized.

During the endless months of Lockdown this year, many Indians experimented with food preparation at home. Social media was abuzz with creative ways to prepare the humble roti or thayir sadam. Preen pics of sleek looking kitchens with funky, new age pots & pans got more hearts than pics of babies & epic fails! Much noise was made about cooking techniques, cuisine, presentation. Over-rated chefs held sway. Folks like Gordon Ramsay who taught us to prepare left-overs from left-overs that tasted horrible (no wonder he doesn’t dare open a restaurant anywhere in India!) or Nigella Lawson, who I kid you not, taught us to prepare milk & buttered toast for breakfast (no wonder the lady is forced to make up for this level of skill in other ways). All this reminded me of how, in Corporate India, we look to the West for management tools & trends that are counter-intuitive for Indian conditions.  

We come from a land where culinary traditions stretch to the beginning of time. Our grandmothers & those before them served hearty, hot & usually tasty home-cooked meals at large family sit-downs at least twice a day! While today’s middle-class household has up to 50 types of utensils, a few hundred years ago, the average Indian middle-class household had around 200 types of kitchen articles! How did our foremothers get so skilled at running such a kitchen (forget the rest of the house & domestic affairs)?

By playing Bhatukali!

Growing up, most girls love playing ‘house-house’. In my state of Maharashtra, girls have been playing a desi version of this called Bhatukali for over 500 years now. The players in Bhatukali are all mainly girls from the neighborhood. However, young brothers who promise to behave well, may be included to function as men in the household. Leaves, flowers, pebbles, sand & marbles are used as ingredients for the meal. Sometimes mothers give the girls jaggery, puffed rice, peanuts and other dry fruits to play with, which are pretend-cooked & eaten in raw form.

A short Bhatukali session takes two to three hours. An elaborate Bhatukali can start early in the morning & runs all day long into which the girls replicate all the home management rituals and traditions they grow up with. Bhatukali players take on the different roles in the family and enact their roles with the appropriate attire & with meticulous precision. Through different roles girls simulate the routine within the household, demo grown-up behaviour & also trouble-shoot some of the crises that occur in homes like say, the unexpected arrival of a ‘vegan’ guest for a traditional, festival lunch.

Through this imaginative and meaningful play many Indian women over the years have learnt to have fun, to socialize, to think, to solve problems and to work cohesively in group settings. This play connected us with our imagination, with the environment & with people around us. We learnt to be socially, emotionally & environmentally responsible. We learnt to solve problems, manage money & work with different personality types towards a common goal. This play enhanced our social skills like language use, non-verbal communication & communal interaction. This is also why HR comes so naturally to so many of us Indian women.

So, the next time you see little girls throwing a ‘Barbie Party’ gift them a Bhatukali set. You will not only be promoting Indian toys & desi traditions but you will also be imparting little girls with the life skills they won’t learn in a hobby class or in the best B-Schools. And if you are invited to play, join in. As a woman, you will learn something new about managing social relations and also get a brilliant opportunity to impart life skills & job skills to eager little girls. As a man, this is your ‘made it in life’ moment. You are seen a ‘good boy’ and it’s the best feeling in the world to have your little girl not only look up to you, but also publicly exhibit that pride.

Image Courtesy: Google Images

Horror Year 2020

Things are really looking up business-wise for us in भारत that is India. With the Wholesale Price Index at around 1.5 & Consumer Price Index at 7.5 for October 2020 YoY, no one can confidently say that India is in “high inflation” territory. For Indian manufacturing too, all ducks are in a row. Currency, corporate taxes, labour reform, tariffs, subsidies, geopolitical tailwinds, low base, potential of the domestic market & equity markets functioning well. Make In India’s, Atmanirbhar Bharat’s time has most certainly arrived.

But you forget that we live in Horror Year 2020, written by Stephen King directed by Quentin Tarantino! Delhi is reeling under another outbreak of COVID-19 & its usual abnormally high levels of November air pollution. In Maharashtra, we are hurting from high electricity tariffs & zero governance as we brace for another tryst with the Coronavirus. The situation in the rest of India is only just marginally better.

Business owners and honchos of India Inc alike have just about had enough of 2020! In fact, the dumbest thing we all purchased this year was a planner. I’m not buying a 2021 planner until I see a trailer. Speaking of which, I’m really curious. Does anyone happen to know when we find out which Hunger Games district we are in? Because I’ve quit thinking. Just as I was thinking I wouldn’t mind cooler weather to kick in, weather in Pune this week has started headbanging to GNR. We’ve had November Rain for 3 straight days in a row. It’s gotten so bad now that every time someone feels a tickle in their throat, the rest of us jump in to ask, “Is that ‘rona you got?”

On the positive side, this year has given all of us a deep appreciation of Renaissance Art. For the first time in history, many of us saved the human race by lying in front of the TV/Laptop/Mobile screens, doing nothing!  So we understand why most Renaissance paintings are of scantily or poorly clad chubby people lying around, doing nothing.

Sitting for a recruitment interview this morning, I watched with some amusement as the Team Leader asked the rookie, “So, where do you see yourself three years from now?” I’d asked him the same question in 2017. In retrospect, not a single person in my company from that batch of recruits got the answer right to this question. In fact, when HR interviews in 2030 & asks a candidate, “There is a gap in your resume…what were you doing in 2020?”, the most likely answer they’ll hear is, “I was washing my hands”. Never in my whole life could I imagine that hands would consume more alcohol than mouths have done this year!

Walking out into a crowd of applicants in the foyer, I heard what I never would have heard otherwise. A young lass got asked, “Hey, if COVID-19 doesn’t take you out, can I?” We live in times of social distancing pick-up lines in India these days.

Anyone else concerned about the 2020 season finale? It’s like we all complained about what a ‘meh’ year 2019 was, so 2020 went like, “Here…hold my Coronavirus” and then sent all of us to our rooms to think about what we’d done. You might as well go ahead and pronounce the ‘p’ in ‘psychosis’. Nothing matters anymore!

Image Courtesy: Google Images

Why Lean Market Research is your safest option to grow sales in the bazaars of India

From large corporations to owners of small & medium businesses, it’s the same story across India. Diwali this year isn’t as bright as it used to be. The markets are just as brightly lit as the year before, the offers on sale are just as attractive as they used to be, yet consumers aren’t taking the bait. They just aren’t biting! This is proving to be a cause of much heartburn and stress for the business community. Last year, during Diwali season alone, Indians spent close to Rs.300 billion in purchases. Earning roughly 4 billion dollars in just one fortnight is not something you can see waning off without feeling acute distress!

Indian markets in present times, appear like the proverbial ‘Flux Vortex’ we saw in the 2009 James Cameron sci-fi fantasy adventure ‘Avatar’. In fact, if you superimpose India Inc. on a single scene in the Avatar movie, Trudy Chacon, the SecOps pilot would be Head of Marketing, Dr. Grace Augustine would be CEO, Norm Spellman would be front line Sales Staff, VFR would be Market Research and Hallelujah Mountains would be Consumer India! The script would play out like this:

[Trudy is flying them towards Hallelujah Mountains]

Dr. Grace Augustine: We’re getting close.

Trudy Chacon: Yeah, look at my instruments.

[the instrumentation is going haywire whilst they fly through clouds]

Dr. Grace Augustine: Yep. We’re in the Flux Vortex.

Trudy Chacon: We’re VFR from here on.

Norm Spellman: What’s VFR?

Trudy Chacon: It means you got to see where you’re going.

Norm Spellman: You can’t see anything!

Trudy Chacon: [laughing] Exactly. Ain’t that a bitch?

Given off-the-charts levels of market risk & sluggish sales in Diwali season this year, as a business owner, what can you do to quickly increase your sales in a ‘cheap & best’ way? The answer: Commission Lean Market Research, a revolutionary new way of doing market research in times of COVID-19.

With established brands in भारत that is India like Parle-G, Bajaj, Titan & Amitabh Bachchan feeling the heat in the unforgiving Indian marketplace, no business owner today can afford to be critical of market research which, to put it simply, is any set of techniques used to gather information and better understand a company’s target market. Businesses use this information to design better products, improve user experience, and craft a marketing message that attracts quality leads and improves conversion rates.

During the Lockdown when businesses were struggling to stay afloat & during Unlock season when companies actually went under, my market research agency, Cobblestones Consulting, was not only able to weather the storm, but today we are actually clocking more sales than we did at the same time last year. As a business owner, how did I lead my team to achieve this feat?

Like millions of business owners/CEO’s/CMO’s across भारत that is India, I too was feeling lost, unsure & held back by market conditions. The best way I found to break this this inertia was to look around for information. Lean Market Research gave me an accurate answer, on a budget outlay I could easily afford. 

At Cobblestones Consulting, our model of Lean Market Research is a model for continuous improvement that relies on quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new features. Take for example, the pan-India market research project for an Eye Wear client that we’ve just wrapped up. Before his Eye Wear business took off, this entrepreneur had launched two startups, but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded. With the Eye Wear business, they did things differently. Long story short, they commissioned Cobblestones Consulting to conduct market research in the early stages to figure out what their consumers really wanted, and they made (and continue to make) constant improvements based on regular market research. Today the company looks poised to give established brands a run for their money as positive word-of-mouth & a strong digital buzz have set the cash registers ringing.  

Commissioning a Lean Market Research project to Cobblestones Consulting can help you become more…

1. Efficient: it gets you closer to your customers, faster.
2. Cost-effective: no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.
3. Competitive: quick, powerful insights can place your products/services on the cutting edge.

Like in the case of the Avatar movie, the plot in Indian markets today can also be described in just three words: Technology II Innovation II Ideas. Market research is the only reliable way you have to understand your users. Sure, you might have a general idea of who they are and what they need, but you have to dig deep if you want to win their business. Winning their loyalty? With the current mood of Indian consumers, that is a long shot these days! At Cobblestones Consulting, the way we do market research is neither expensive nor time-consuming. Our Lean Market Research inputs helps us give clients quick answers that help them stay ahead of the competition.

Here’s are 4 key reasons why Lean Market Research will be critical for your business survival, especially between the years 2021 to 2025 when sudden market disruptions, consumer upheaval & changes in business structures across markets in भारत that is India will become the norm as Consumer India matures & the economy struggles to reach a state of equilibrium.

1. Obsessing over your users is the only way to win. If you don’t care deeply about improving user experience, you’ll lose potential customers to someone who does. Whoever gets closer to the customer wins.
2. Analytics give you the ’what,’ but research gives the ‘why.’ Big data, user analytics, and dashboards can tell you what people do at scale, but only research can tell you what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. For example, analytics can tell you that customers leave when they reach your pricing page, but only research can explain why.
3. Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices. Have you ever watched your colleagues rally behind a terrible decision? Bad ideas are often the result of guesswork, emotional reasoning, death by best practices, and defaulting to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO). By listening to your users and focusing on their customer experience, you’re less likely to get pulled in the wrong direction.
4. Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum. Your team might be amazing, but you and your colleagues simply can’t experience your product the way your customers do. Customers might use your product in a way that surprises you, and features that seem obvious to you might confuse them. Over planning and refusing to test your assumptions is a waste of time, money, and effort because you will likely need to make changes once your untested plan gets put into practice.

In India, in the 1990’s we moved on from the Industrial Age propelled by the government’s LPG push & entered the Computer Age (1990-2010). With the advent of the Digital Age in India (circa 2011), Indians no longer live & operate in an Analog world. COVID-19 has shoved all of us Indians into the digital world fully. Today, we are all connected in a tangible way.

As an entrepreneur, this can leave you feeling like you have one foot on the dock & the other in the boat that is setting sail. As a market research professional with close to 25 years of Indian market experience under her belt, I can tell you that you have no choice but to get onto this great adventure. Your best option is to flow with the market currents. Be less constrained. Get on the technology train. Update your skills. This Diwali season, I find that many businesses have suddenly disappeared, either because they are not visible or because they are no longer required.

Based on my close, on-ground interaction with consumers over the past three months, here are a couple of hacks that you can use as a business owner:

HACK-1: There is not anyone out there who does not feel they need to take control of their business profits and put things back on track. But words such as control & victory will not earn you much consumer goodwill. Not market dominance, but customer inclusion, collaboration & co-operation is the best way forward for you in Indian markets. 

HACK-2: For Indian consumers these days, it’s not just about economics. Aesthetics are equally important in product design. Think in terms of beautiful, not just useful. If you are a service provider, don’t focus solely on utilitarian aspects in your delivery. Let cohesion be just as important. Embrace, do not conquer. Balance being gentle, kind, nurturing with a fiery, independent & strong brand persona. Remember, in these present times consumer transactions are either smooth or full of friction.

HACK-3: Consumer free will is an on-ground market reality you have to accept. As this next phase of your business journey is underway, what parts of your business story are you holding on to in light of this fact? So much has happened over the last two to six months that the landscape of your path has changed drastically. With each passing day you will be moving forward, slowly at first, but the pace will gradually escalate. It is not in your best interest to maintain the same stance as you had six months ago. While ‘The Lockdown’ & three ‘Unlock’s’ have spun you around a few times, they have not stripped you of every part of your business existence. Using Lean Market Research, you can decide where you go from here, and things you need to retain in your business story in order to ensure your security. A conservative approach is still the best to take, allowing the consumer mood in the coming months to smooth out in your favour.

HACK-4: On a personal level, you can do as I did. I created and conducted a Timeline Exercise for my business journey. Whatever you’ve been dealing with in terms of your business story, look at your timeline for answers to what is holding you back. Like me, you’ll find that over this past decade & more, you handled some things really well. Others you put on the back burner, to be reviewed later. It is a fascinating exercise. In my business story, I found major turning points occurred in the years 2009, 2012, 2014, 2017 (when Cobblestones Consulting went international in our operations & which bought home to me a full awareness of my professional capabilities) & of course the unforgettable Year-2020.

In the recent past, Cobblestones Consulting has helped many clients execute Lean Market Research in domains as diverse as Product & Offer Development, Brand & Communications, Service & User Experience, Business & Stakeholders, Consulting Services, Education, Healthcare, Consumer Goods & Retail, Social & Government & Technology.

If you are looking to conduct conduct quick, effective market research & wish to hire a market research agency that fits your budget, reach out to us at cobblestonesconsulting@gmail.com. Our Lean Market Research is easier than you might think. Both on your pocket & in terms of your time. And it can be done at any stage in a service/product’s life-cycle!

Image Courtesy: Google Images