Fly on the wall

Bangalore saw a downpour of Indian retail CEOs at The Shop last week. I’ll be posting several interesting stories & anecdotes heard during presentations and informal conversations at the conference, over the next couple of days.

To start with, the big one, the Big Bazaar story. This was during a presentation on Day 1 by Rajan Malhotra, CEO of Big Bazaar.

He talked about how Big Bazaar was conceptualized several years ago (around 2000?) — Kishore Biyani and his team were inspired by the Hotel Saravana Bhavan, one of Chennai’s oldest & most popular legacies. Some of the key learnings from Saravana Bhavan (this is not verbatim; this includes my commentary):

1. Hotel Saravana Bhavan, over several decades of growth, has been popular across several categories of consumers. You’ll find the autorickshaw drivers as well as the CEOs having lunch there. (South India’s answer to fast food, except it’s not junk food). The Big Bazaar team was inspired by the restaurant’s ability to cater to a wide range of audience, day-in & day-out. This concept was extended to the Big Bazaar, where you’ll see a real wide variety of consumers shopping there. Of course, the majority includes folks who wouldn’t be comfortable going to other “glossy” looking malls (like the Bangalore Central, Forum Mall, etc.)
2. Based on what they observed at the Saravana Bhavan, the Big Bazaar team noticed the cramped spaces in the restaurant, in the aisles, between tables, at the cash counters, etc. Somewhere there was born, a germ of an idea, to have the Big Bazaar retail space designed in such a way that Indian consumers would get a sense of the crowdedness (which they’ve always loved while shopping at the traditional markets) while shopping in the mall. Consumers, apparently, are loving it.
3. Saravana Bhavan has grown exponentially over the years, opening branches all over India as well as overseas, including in major American cities that host a large community of south indians, like Sunnyvale, New York and New Jersey. But, their quality of food has been amazingly consistent across all the restaurants (I can vouch for that myself!). The Big Bazaar team learned their lessons in scalability here…how to expand your stores without losing out on the quality and consistency across the stores.
4. Also, the store managers in each of the Saravana Bhavan restaurants are considered to be really on top of what’s going on in each store. This gives a good balance between the macro and micro view while managing the same brand of stores across several locations.

Other interesting revelations about Big Bazaar (some of this stuff is mentioned in the “It Happened in India” book by Kishore Biyani):

1. The company sees differences in buying patterns across stores in the same city…for e.g. the same item that sells like hot cakes in one store in Bangalore, is still collecting dust in the Big Bazaar store across at the other end of the city.
2. Indian consumers are loving the mega discount days that Big Bazaar has now become (in)famous for. During one such discount day in one of the cities, Rajan Malhotra (CEO, Big Bazaar) saw a queue that was couple of miles long outside the store, waiting to get in. Among those standing in the queue, was an elderly gentleman and his family. Rajan walks up to the gentleman, and requests him to go and come back in few hours after the crowd has reduced so that he can avoid standing the queue for hours. The response he got — “Arrey! Humko to bahut achcha lag raha hai; yeh to mele jaisa lag raha hai!”…in other words, “We’re loving it here, it feels like we’re at a mela!”
   So, folks actually don’t mind standing in queues for several hours just to be part of the experience, not just because they’re getting stuff at (supposedly) discounted prices!

More trivia and anecdotes about Cafe Coffee Day, Barista, and other Indian retail success stories soon…stay tuned!