Television Homeshopping & the consumer: Where's the rule book?

The Economist magazine’s occasional publication, strategy+business, Issue 61 (Winter 2010) carries an article entitled “The Good, the Bad and the Trustworthy”, that quotes the 2010 “Trust Barometer” survey by the PR firm Edelman. This study found that people believe that trust, transparency, and honest business practices influence corporate reputation more than the quality of products and services or financial performance.

Consumers, investors, regulators and the broad civil society have witnessed an ugly efflorescence of individual and corporate mendacity over the last few years leading to broad swathes of the corporate sector hemorrhaging credibility and trustworthiness. Sustained remedies only lie in earning trust by enhanced transparency and integrity in business practices. With this backdrop, let us turn our attention to the Indian consumer’s opportunities for shopping on TV.

 

Over the last decade or so, Indian consumers have been deluged by the mushroom growth of innumerable, so called ‘Teleshopping’ businesses. Products offered on these virtual store-fronts have little in common with what you would expect to find on the high street. Some actual product related quotes follow:

“Nazar Suraksha Kawach is blessed with so much extraordinary energy and power that it can guard and protects your family against the strongest super-natural forces negative powers and evil looks”.

“Blood Circular Massager vibrates the entire body of the user. The blood circular massager is a circulatory massager device which sends sinusoidal in the body”.

“Height Increaser: Your growth potential reduces especially after puberty because your pituitary gland becomes inactive. With Height Increaser you can reactivate your pituitary gland”.”

The single theme that runs through all these products and claims is this. The consumer is plagued by a set of adverse circumstances that have proven insurmountable. The vendor offers a magical remedy that will make these adverse circumstances disappear. We have a term for such behaviour: Predatory Marketing. The vendor is nothing less than a ruthless predator and unencumbered by ethics and accountability.

Years of being subject to such barefaced dishonesty in business practices has left the Indian consumer incredibly wary of shopping on television.

As new businesses from the organized sector begin to enter the Television Homeshopping market, they must begin a process of mending this yawning trust deficit.

We will briefly turn attention to mainstream television to understand the sea changes.

After years of being reviled as sensationalist, and inaccurate, news broadcasters got together under the aegis of the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA) to develop a roadmap for fixing their problem. Their comprehensive approach to restore viewer trust incorporates:

lDefining a Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards for the genre

lEstablishing a Self-Regulatory body, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority helmed by a former Chief Justice of India, Justice (Retd.) J. S. Verma and

lCommencing an active communication program to promote the self-regulatory body.

A similar process is now afoot across the Indian entertainment television industry and all signs point at a successful denouement in the near future These watershed moments point to the need to bring accountability to the Homeshopping genre.

Teleshopping in India today is an Augean Stable. It needs a torrent of transparency and honest business practices in the form of competent and self-regulation to clean the years of accumulated filth and give the Indian Consumer what she fully deserves: a transparent and trustworthy television homeshopping sector.

(The author is CEO, STAR CJ Network India)