Media365
There was a time when growing up in Mumbai or Delhi gave one a cultural head start. The newest fashion, music, Hollywood movie releases, magazines, restaurants, and brands usually reached the big city first.
You could see this even within the same family. The cousin from the big city dressed differently, spoke differently, and seemed more exposed to global culture. He or she was the cool person at the family wedding or during the long summer vacation at grandmom’s place.
This was the “cultural gap” between the big city and the vast number of smaller cities and towns across India. This gap seemed to be an established, unchanging reality of the country – you would always know who came from the big city and who made their way up from the small town.
But in the last two decades, a combination of the internet, social media and e-commerce has been changing this significantly and at a rapid pace. Today, that gap has certainly not disappeared. It has, however, narrowed dramatically.
A lot of what we called big-city cosmopolitanism was, in reality, an access advantage. The big city folk had access to culture and the cool stuff much earlier than the rest of the country.
Ideas, trends and products reached Mumbai much earlier than Indore. Fashion travelled to Delhi first before it went to Kanpur. A new restaurant format first found its roots in Bangalore many years before something similar opened in a smaller city.
The internet and social media have compressed this time scale.
Trends once moved slowly. The internet compressed this chain. The latest fashion trend from a K-drama can start in Seoul and reach someone in Salem at the same time as someone in Mumbai.
Social media made exposure more equal. This goes beyond watching the latest reel. The internet and social media have given people everywhere access to specific subcultures and trends. What you follow or aspire to is no longer tied to geography; it now depends on your interests and willingness to explore and experiment. Cheap data from when Jio started off played a not insignificant helping hand.
This has created a new kind of monoculture – a monoculture not determined by TV shows or movies, but by social media and specifically trends on social media.
E-commerce and marketplaces completed the job.
Seeing a trend is one thing. Being able to buy the latest fashion from that trend is a completely different thing. Instagram made access equal for everyone. E-commerce made distribution equal for everyone.
In the pre-internet era, a customer would have to either visit the big city for the latest Walkman or baggy denims or ask someone to bring it for him or her. To a large extent, physical retail store locations determined consumer behaviour. And these physical retail stores tended to be, and still tend to be, in the big city.
E-commerce completely changed this. The product is available anywhere across the country. A customer in any of the 19,000-plus PIN codes in India can access the same product as the most sought-after PIN code in Mumbai. Some estimates suggest that 60 per cent of all e-commerce purchases happen in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India.
The way trends move is different.
Trends now move very quickly from Instagram to Content Creators to a Marketplace or a Shopify Website. The customer purchases using UPI or COD, and third-party logistics providers deliver the product to their doorstep. The city in which you live matters very little.
Everyone in India with a smartphone is up to date on the same trends, brands, and products. The differences may be price sensitivity, language or purchase frequency, not cultural awareness or a different idea of what is trending.
The aspiration gap between metros and smaller cities is narrowing much faster than the income gap. That, according to me, is one of the most important consumer shifts happening in India.
It’s far from over, and in fact this has just begun. India is a vast country with many layers and slices of customers – and the old way of looking at customers as coming from Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3 cities is not the only way to do it.
This is changing how brands should think about their customer. The Tier 2 or Tier 3 customer is not a delayed version of the Tier 1 customer.
The writer is the Founder – The Brand Ignition Co
