The heterogeneity that characterizes the modern Indian consumer has created a maze that marketers would like to unravel in order to target their products and services precisely. In this fortnightly series, Indicus Analytics presents the various facets of urban consumers, across geographies and socioeconomic groups
The youngest and smallest sub-segment of urban SEC (socio-economic classification) D is made up of households whose chief wage earners are single or married but without children, and who may be a skilled worker with primary school education or an unskilled worker who may have gone to college.
A majority of these chief wage earners are less than 25 years of age and in two- thirds of the households, they live alone. There is a mix of educational qualifications within this group, and some have gone to college, but less than half of them have completed high school and more than a third have completed middle school. With low education and experience, employment clearly is taken up wherever it is offered.Manufacturing, trade, hotels and trans- port, storage and communication are the four leading sectors of employment. How- ever, different cities have different prominent sectors of employment. For instance, Faridabad, Ludhiana, Surat, Amritsar and Thane have the highest shares employed in manufacturing. In Sonepat, south Goa, Nadia and Hugli, it is trade that is the dominant sector. Yet in most cases the chief wage earners fall in the contractual category; just a little over one-third have regular salaried jobs and fewer than one- fourth are self-employed, running their own businesses.
