Samsung leads India’s most consumer-focused brands’ list; three Tata Brands among top 20

The second edition of ‘India’s Most Consumer-Focused Brands 2019’ (CFB), released by TRA is a study measuring the brands’ increase in buying propensity, the keenness-to-buy among Indian consumers. This year’s report lists 500 brands based on the buying propensity comparison of two successive years’ data.

N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research, said, “TRA’s most consumer-focused brands 2019 report in its second edition exhibits a substantial shift. The biggest find is that of the seven new brands that made it to the list as compared to last year, all have made it into the top 20.”

For example, three Tata brands, Tata Motors (second), Tata Salt (15th) and Tata Tea (20th), which were not a part of the list last year, made it to the top 20. Other new entrants to the top 20 list include Bajaj Pulsar (ninth), Reliance Jio (18th) and Sony (19th).

A few brands made significant strides over the last year to make it to the top 20. These include LIC (ranked sixth, with a jump of 82 ranks), State Bank of India (ranked 12th with a climb of 74 ranks) and Lakme (ranked 17th with a jump of 92 ranks).

“Of the 11,000 brands studied, only 541 brands showed an increase in buying propensity over last year, with 95% brands registering a fall in buying propensity in the same period,” Chandramouli added.

He added that TRA’s Buying Propensity Matrix is a scientific brand measurement model that gets to the root of consumer buying behaviour to understand and measure the customer’s buying keenness. It attempts to understand this through the overt, covert and contextual buying drivers of consumer influences.

“By increasing buying propensity, a brand creates a natural pull for the consumer towards the brand measured as a consumer’s trust (the transactional drives to buy) and attractiveness (the psycho-socio-cultural desire drives to buy). These two combine to make the fundamental substrate on which all buying decisions are made”, Chandramouli said.

Among India’s 500 most consumer-focused brands, 37 super-categories and 236 categories were listed. The categories with the maximum brands were F&B, FMCG and automobile contributing to 28% of the total brands in the listings.

Some of the important category leaders in consumer-focused brands are Panasonic (57th) in consumer electronics; Liberty (64th) in footwear; Kenstar (163th) in durables, L’Oreal (66th) in FMCG; Sun Pharma (76th) in pharmaceuticals;  Tata Sky (72th) in DTH;  DMart (111th) in retail, Fastrack (31th) in branded fashion, JW Mariott (155th) in premium hotels, Google (16th) in internet search, and Kit Kat (135th) in food & beverage.