Dharmendra Kumar, director, FDI Watch in Retail.

1. Form cooperatives: The small and independent retailers can easily outnumber the countable companies in the business. They should club together and form cooperatives; together they can become one company, through which they can form a model that can compete.

2. Stay united: Scattered we fall; so we must stay united and plan together to fight competition.

IRIS idea: Challenge the fear
Images Retail Intelligence Service (IRIS) conducted an exhaustive research to understand the impact of modern retailing on traditional retailers and consumers. A primary conclusion of the research was that ‘challenging the fear’ is the need of the hour. The key highlights of the research include:

1. There is clearly a mixed feeling amongst traditional outlets in this new environment of development of modern outlets. Interestingly, the apprehension levels are high in Kolkata and very low in Bengaluru, with Mumbai and NCR somewhere in-between.

2. Also, the apprehensions are more amongst the smaller outlets and in outlets in residential areas; signifying that the larger traditional outlets in commercial areas have adapted a lot more to the advent of modern retail.

The possible directions the study leaves one with are:

1.Like our ‘father of the nation’ Mahatma Gandhi said, “customer is the most important…” If we are to keep the interests of customers paramount, then the task is to help the ‘small’ traditional retailers on various retail mix aspects such as supply chain, store design, marketing and merchandise assortments.

2. There is possibly a need for modern retailers to use and look at ‘promotions’ much more strategically, which would go a long way in easing whatever apprehensions exist

3. The growth in consumption is encouraging for both modern and traditional retailers, and, thus, we need to be poised with better-planned merchandise assortments.