Organizing the Unorganized Lifestyle Retailers in India: An Integrated Framework

Abstract

India is one of the largest countries with consumers belonging to widest range of Religions, Regions, Languages, Sub-Cultures, Ethnicities, and Economic backgrounds which makes it difficult for just few organized lifestyle retailers to service divergent needs of such consumers. This makes it furthermore beneficial for unorganized lifestyle retailers spread across India in humongous numbers which are predominantly owned and operated by the store owner and their family members to take such divergent consumer needs to their advantage as far as their survival is concerned. Unless they attempt to adopt certain modifications and changes to their existing retailing model and store image this benefit will no longer be available to them in the long run. Organized lifestyle retailing in India is steadily growing its penetration into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and this is putting unorganized lifestyle retailers in these cities in quandary. In this study, we have analysed twelve months actual data across, a) unit economics; b) returns on investment; c) 94 business deployment factors; d) 192 critical effective factors; and, e) qualitative factors of few select organized and unorganized lifestyle retailers in India thereby drawing inferences / insights to design and propose an integrated framework which is, a) simple to understand; b) easy to execute; and most importantly c) demanding minimal additional capital investment and would possibly help unorganized lifestyle retailers in India to get organized.