The latest AC Nielsen Asia-Pacific Consumer Confidence Study suggests that consumers in the region are so confident about the future of their economies that they are headed for a spending spree.
India is very much at the forefront of that trend.
Ninety per cent of the 539 Indian consumers polled in this bi-annual study of 7,230 consumers said they would spend their disposable incomes on non-essentials.
Overall, Indian consumers display a proclivity to spend that is greater than the regional average.
All this should be terrific news to consumer goods manufacturers who have been struggling to push their products off the shop shelves over the past three years.
But before they pull out the champagne, it may be worth their while to pause and consider one point: the emergence of the new Indian consumer.
There is no doubt that the Indian consumer who will spend in the future will be far different from the consumer of even a few years ago in several important respects.
And he has changed beyond recognition as a result of the process of evolution wrought by global competition, proliferation of choice, growing disposable incomes in the hands of younger working people and easy finance schemes.
What did his predecessor want? Let's look at consumer durables, where the most dramatic changes have been wrought. Supposing he was buying a TV set. What would he have looked for in the early nineties?
One, availability; two, price; and, three, picture quality. By the mid-nineties, the efficacy of an exchange scheme and the number of channels a company offered might have tilted the balance of a purchasing decision.
Today, all these are considered par for the course. TV purchases are increasingly being bought on the basis of their sophistication and chutzpah -- it is no coincidence that one of the fastest growing segments of the market is high-end flat TVs.
Admittedly, flat TVs still constitute a minuscule part of the market, but the fact that this segment is growing at all says something about the new consumer -- 10 years ago, there wasn't even a market for them.
Price? With banks sweating to grow their retail portfolios, low-interest finance schemes are two-a-penny, so price is increasingly becoming a smaller factor in a purchase decision in a whole range of consumer durables.
Air-conditioners are another case in point. In the early nineties, thanks to skewed excise laws, air-conditioner manufacturers focused on institutional sales, leaving the dodgy unorganised sector, with its dirt-cheap and poor quality offerings, to service households.
By the late nineties, with the excise anomalies ironed out, air-conditioner brands emerged -- notably from the Korean chaebols -- and sales to households boomed. The air-conditioner as we knew it changed forever.
In place of the clunky box that simply cooled the room came sleek plastic shapes offering such features as a dust-free environment, split-room cooling and so on and so forth.
Today, an efficient compressor is taken for granted; it's the looks and features that count. Again, it's a market that is unrecognisable from less than a decade ago.
This is true of market segment after market segment. The short point is that, overall, competition and structural changes within the economy have raised the bar in terms of what consumers have come to expect.
Automobiles are a case in point. Where sheer availability was a variable before, today that's not even a factor given the 13 companies and 40-odd models that compete in the 700,000-strong market.
Indeed, even good after-sales service and high reliability, both features that played a part in influencing buying decisions in the mid-nineties, are taken for granted.
Clearly, tomorrow's consumer is going to be tougher to sell to than yesterday's. The more confident consumer of the AC Nielsen study is also likely to be more sophisticated and demanding.
How well companies can understand his and her new needs, hopes and aspirations will mark the difference between survival and success.
Powered by 
More from rediff