In an interview on the side lines of his talk at “Bridge Briefings”, a forum for dialogue between experts, industry and academia, thought leader and Charles H. Kellstadt professor of marketing at Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Dr. Jagdish Sheth spoke on Consumers and Consumption in the Digital Age at the BRIDGE School of Management, Gurgaon, India.
Live Mint published excerpts on Dr. Sheth’s views on the changing consumer, pressure points for retail, and the art of political marketing.
On the broad shifts in the buying behavior of consumers over the years:
- Dr. Sheth said that consumption trends were moving from unbranded to branded products and hence becoming more individualistic since brand loyalties of different members of a family were different. He also observed that people in India had begun to live more and more like “room-mates in a family” where individualistic behavior was more the norm than doing the same things together as a family. This, he said, is a major change in Indian society.
- He noted that the generation gap in India was now less than 8 years. “The older sister cannot relate to the younger sister in lifestyle and in values. The gap was very striking to me. It used to be about 20-25 years because we were living in a family. To me this whole notion of generation gap and the discontinuity from the previous generation is a massive change in India. The reality is that this is permanent,” he said.
- Another interesting phenomenon he saw in India was that daily chores had become a hobby which led to a business. This paradigm shift allowed new opportunities in cooking and gardening for entrepreneurs. “I see that as a major change,” Sheth remarked.
These changes affected not only consumption but also the structure of the family. “I thought the change will be only among the educated, metro people. I see the change in second-tier and third-tier cities. Most of the young people are not interested in living with their parents. They pride their own personal freedom and independence more than family obligations or family bondage. It’s early stage, but over the next 10-15 years eventually you’ll have a shift from kinship to a friendship way of relationships,” Sheth predicted.
On change in how advertising impacts consumers:
- “Advertisements have to be more and more on the user side and not on the buyer side. In marketing, we always promoted advertisements to the person who bought the product. Now, it’s about the users,” Sheth said. So if a product is targeted for children the advertisement should appeal to the child directly and not its parents.
- The second shift in advertising is in media, Sheth continued. “While print in India will continue to stay strong because of vernacular languages, English media may become more digitized. Ultimately, Internet will take over as the primary medium.” The Internet not only has a wide reach, but it is a very rich medium where print, voice and video converge.
On the customer becoming homogeneous across markets:
- In an increasingly digital world, the consumer is becoming homogeneous and heterogeneous, declared Sheth. The homogeneity is in terms of reaching them via social media. However, there’s a huge diversity in personalization of communication. “The key point is that I can now make communication so personalized to you because I know what you did yesterday and what you did an hour ago. So there is huge personalization on the one hand and commonality on the other,” he said.
On retail facing pressure points, and whether e-commerce was one of them:
- Dr. Sheth said that e-commerce was definitely a pressure point in India due to the increasing affordability of smartphones. “My own view is that the person who will win the e-commerce game is the one who reaches the tier-II, tier-III and tier-IV towns. In a recent interview, the Amazon CEO said that 25% of all the people who bought things actually came from tier-IV cities. This means the divide between the small towns and big towns will go away, [to] which a bricks-and-mortar retailer cannot deliver. It is too expensive,” he noted.
- However, he did not think that large retail organizations would be affected by e-commerce very adversely. “The neighborhood mom-and-pop guys who had multi-generational loyalty” will be the ones that will get phased out because young people don’t want to shop at the neighborhood store.
On how marketers should react to new payment systems like mobile wallets:
- Dr. Sheth felt that mobile wallet payments systems will be much stronger in emerging economies because there were not as many credit cards available as in the west. And since these economies bypassed the personal computer evolution because of smartphones, they would bypass the bank credit/debit card evolution via the new payment systems. “Banks will jump in eventually with their own mobile wallets,” he said.
- The key advantage of this payment system was that it transcended national boundaries. Cards issued by banks in India did not have global mobility of payment. But mobile wallets are rising above these problems. “This is what we call the ‘Uberization’ of everything in life. Uber transcended all those issues. Wherever in the world there is Uber, I can take a cab and make a payment through a master account. I don’t haggle with the currency or the driver. Once it becomes so convenient, it becomes a necessity,” observed Dr. Sheth.
On the difference between political marketing and marketing of consumer products:
- It is much more difficult to market to a product brand because is it an inert brand. Political marketing on the other hand is when an individual is marketed and hence becomes a live brand which reacts to encounters and interactions and therefore it is more fluid. It is much more difficult to manage what you call a personality brand.
“The other problem with personality brands is what you do in your other lives equally become relevant data points. Your private behavior and your public persona…no way you can keep the walls apart. But the advantage on the other hand is as a brand I can personalize it much faster—in real time almost. For instance, with a different crowd I can create multiple avatars of me. With a product, it is harder to do,” explained Dr. Sheth.
Last updated: December 26th, 2025
