Young and Upwardly Mobile
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 present the various facets of urban consumers, across geographies and socio-economic groups
The young household in the urban SEC B segment total a little less than one million, and most of these are small in size. In this segment, the chief wage earner is predominantly less than 34 years of age, and could be either single or married without children. The defining characteristic for the life stage of the chief wage earner in this segment is that children are yet to appear on the scene. In fact, though a little over half of the chief wage earners here are married, nearly 40% of the households comprise of just the chief wage earner living alone. This is, therefore, a segment of young earners, in the early years of their career. As chief wage earners in SEC B, they are either businessmen who have school education or skilled workers with a college degree. Though their qualifications span a diverse range, there is an equal number of graduates and those who have just completed school, each set making up close to 30% of these households.
Wholesale and retail trade has the highest share of employment in this segment, followed by manufacturing, public administration, and construction and real estate.
Interestingly, there is an equal split between those with regular salaried jobs and those who are self-employed, indicating that for those with skills, urban
Yet, if we look at different cities, we see varied proportions for this division in cities such as Bhopal, Puducherry, Chandigarh, Chennai, Patna and Delhi, regular salaried jobs have a higher share in this segment, while cities with a higher share of those who are self-employed are smaller towns such as Udaipur, Belgaum, Bareilly and Bhavnagar, where smaller manufacturing units or trade and transport are lucrative avenues for businesses.
Around 83% of these households earn less than `3 lakh per annum, being small households, and in three-quarters there is just one earning member, that too at the beginning of his earning graph. More than 40% of the chief wage earners are still to get married, working on getting onto a more settled earning path before tying the knot.
Since there are very few joint families in this segment, there is a higher priority for career at this stage in life. Consequently, there are very few households with children (children here would belong to relatives and not to the chief wage earner) and very few with senior citizens (in most joint families in urban India, the chief wage earner would be in his middle or mature years, which would not form a part of this segment)--house- hold consumption in this segment would be geared to the needs of the upwardly mo- bile young. This segment spends much more time per day on the Internet or watching TV than reading newspapers; the radio comes a distant fourth. When it comes to asset ownership, these households are just on the first rung of purchases, most still stay in rented houses; more households own scooters than cars; more own smaller cars than larger cars; and so on. However, it is quite clear that as earnings increase and the households mature, durables will be picked up as quickly as possible.
The households in this segment are in highest numbers in metros, of course. In addition, cities such as Ahmedabad, Coimabatore, Surat Lucknow Nagpur Kanpur Rajkot Delhi