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January, 2004 |
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Cover Story |
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Profiling NEPALI CONSUMER When
Great Poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota posed the question "Is Nepal
Small?" in one of his famous essays the population of the country
was not even 8 million. Now it has swelled to 24 million, which
qualifies Nepal to be called a medium sized country, if not big, in
demographic terms. More importantly, almost 40% of the population (about
9 million) is aged 15 years and less, according to the population census
of 2001. Therefore, the business community's frequent complain that the
domestic market in Nepal is very small cannot be accepted on its face
value.
But
the diversity of this market seems to be proving very challenging to the
marketers. And this diversity is at multiple levels: religious, ethnic
and caste differences, religious diversities, rural-urban divide,
different sources of income (including domestic/foreign) and education
level. This indicates that though there can be some common
generalisations about the features of the Nepali consumers, the
exceptions are also equally important, if not more. High
trial rate One
most common generalisation about Nepali consumer is that he or she is
very eager to try new products. This is especially the case in FMCG, but
the generalization can also be extended to some other non-FMCG products,
say market observers. This indicates low brand loyalty. So launching a
product is not a problem: you may have very good sales immediately after
the launch of your product so that you have to have very good quantity
ready to serve the initial inquisitiveness of the Nepali consumer. But
soon after the launching phase is over, the sales are most likely to
nosedive unless you come out with something innovative in the product or
in the sales strategy which means, the innovation should be supported by
enough publicity and promotional campaigns. This
also implies that the existing players should have the patience to wait
for the tide of the new entrant to ebb. And if you are one of the
existing competitors and your rival launches a new product, then it
would be a good idea for you to launch a new variant of your product.
This largely explains why there are new product launches almost every
month, or even every week, even in the same categories of the products
such as instant noodles, biscuits and liquors.
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