Stop Reading Nielsen Surveys; Act on Real-Time Insights

India is an incredible confluence of cultures and cuisines. With it comes the challenge of selling and making products available that appeal to the disparate interests of these consumers. Consumer businesses focus on making products and distributing it to the urban masses to drive consumption at scale. Why? 

We analyzed sales in 77 cities including metros, mini-metros, state capitals and other key populous cities. These 77 cities consist of approximately 13% of India’s population. 

In Mar-20,

So, it did make sense to focus on these, right? 

Wait a minute, then came COVID-19, with lockdown and unlocks, here’s what happened

In June-20

So what just happened? 

We decided to dive deeper into the urban cities of India to understand better what happened. To identify regions where there’s the biggest problem in terms of sales. 

1. The Big Boys: (5Mn+ population cities) 

Consumption does seem to be bottoming out. However, it still does seem to be well in excess of the population it’s serving. So for now, we’ll consider it to be a good place to distribute. As cities unlock, we will possibly see this Multiple of Sales Vs Population go up further.

2. The up & comers

Consumption is the lowest here. These 30 cities need action, quickly! Currently, it doesn’t seem to give any benefit to consumption despite having population scale & urbanization.

3. The baby cities

While consumption dropped, sales of consumer goods are still 1.7x that of the population on June-20. In July, we do think this number will go up further. 

Methodology: 

The top77 cities were further broken down as