Retail and Consumer

Seismic changes and shifting consumer behavior have redefined the Indian retail and consumer (R&C) sector in the past few years. The sector is estimated to exceed USD 2 trillion in the next decade growing at a long term CAGR of 1.5X to 2X of real GDP growth. To give consumers what they want while delivering tangible business outcomes, including volumetric growths, operational excellence, cost efficiencies, accelerated innovations, a constant vigil on ‘as - is’ operating models and pivot as needed will be the task of CXOs in the retail and consumer industry.

Retail and Consumer - Overview

The sector is at the forefront of the route to market (RTM) model innovation with omnichannel retail (i.e. ensuring physical and digital channels operate seamlessly), direct to consumer (D2C), business to business, (eB2B), direct to retail (D2R), Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and traditional direct and indirect distribution models (distributor-led) vying for relevance basis market archetypes and the strategic need for the brand in play. The sector continues to undergo critical shifts with extensive use of data and analytics in decision making, adoption of cutting-edge technology platforms across the value chain from procurement, end-to-end supply planning, in RTM and also in areas of trade spends and loyalty management. The winners, over the past few years, have brought forth the importance of operational agility, digital preparedness, C-suite resilience and talent management to the forefront.

While unorganised retail accounts for about 70-75% of the total size of the R&C sector, digital retail growths are projected at 4X-5X multiples of the growth in the personal consumption expenditure of the Indian consumer over the next five years. This growth in digital commerce is increasingly driven by consumers in Tier 2 and 3 and below urban markets. The next wave of growth will thus be increasingly driven by over 2/3rds of Indians living in rural markets with innovation needed across the entire value chain from customized product market fits to novel sales channels and denser supply networks. These growth paradigms will need to be sustainable too to ensure robustness in the growth paths chosen by R&C players.

As one of the leading retail and consumer packaged goods consulting firms in India, PwC provides a one-stop-shop to build answers for all parts of this ecosystem and can help refine your retail and consumer goods industry strategy, operating models and also work with your teams to deliver measurable goals. Our capabilities have been built around four key sectoral themes:

Changing consumer behavior

Data-driven marketing and commerce transformation

Supply chain resilience to enable recovery and growth

Future of work

Changing consumer behavior

We are helping our clients navigate these scenarios by providing insights against several topics:

  • Category dynamics: How will underlying consumer sentiment and income dynamics change the underlying consumption of goods and channel preferences in each category? Which of these changes to the demand pattern will persist in the long term?
  • Product strategy and innovation: How should the product assortment and innovation portfolio be repositioned in response to changing consumer needs and preferences? Where can I simplify my portfolio, and where do I invest to capture new demand?
  • Revenue growth management: How should revenue management strategies (e.g., marketing, pricing, promotion) be adjusted to align with new consumer needs and preferences and maximise return on investment?
  • Supply chain and financial planning: How can I get a better short and longer term demand signal to drive supply chain (e.g., production, inventory, distribution) and financial planning? How can I make margin-optimised decisions under increased uncertainty? How can tax optimise the business priorities?
  • Sales acceleration: How should brands prioritise white spaces across channels and geography? How should offline and online sales channels be leveraged synergistically to drive the market share agenda? What can be the right sized deployment of infrastructure – manpower, channel partner network to drive the direct coverage agenda in the dominant fragmented trade? How do we drive the right balance between growth and cost of sales?

Data-driven marketing and commerce transformation

We are helping our clients navigate these scenarios by providing insights against several topics:

  • Data-driven marketing transformation: Defining the strategies to win consumer trust in a digital era and designing the capabilities and operating model to become an effective data-driven and agile enterprise.
  • Digital commerce: Building channel strategies, execution capabilities and underlying technology throughout the entire consumer journey and across B2B, B2B2C and D2C, owned and 3rd party digital commerce
  • Media intelligence: Bringing greater effectiveness and efficiency to campaign, media, and programmatic operations through optimising spend, targeting and measurement
  • Personalisation and loyalty: Enabling growth and loyalty by understanding consumers and designing impactful, personalised experiences that can be activated at scale
  • MarTech and data: Enabling clients to bring marketing and commerce to life by designing and deploying scalable technology and data solutions, incl. CDP
  • Consumer analytics and marketing 360: Helping clients optimise full commercial ROI and make data-driven decisions through deploying advanced analytics / GenAI platforms
  • Marketing spend monitoring and compliance: Delivering value, transparency, and assurance to optimise advertising/media spend and related agency relationships.

Supply chain resilience to enable recovery and growth

We are helping our clients navigate these scenarios by recommending action against several topics:

  • Fulfillment experience: Building capabilities to deliver on customer expectations. Evolving into a growth engine that drives the customer experience.
  • Connected demand and resource planning: Elevating the demand planning function to be an orchestrator of enterprise-wide resources.
  • Visibility as a strategy: Increasing visibility to understand the suppliers’ overall resilience, financial stability, risk profile, and their ability to deliver. Utilise this information to take appropriate corrective actions to mitigate, where needed.
  • Re-imagining the supply chain network: Refreshing and modernising the supply chain network design to accelerate growth, retain profitability and create tax efficiencies in the changing business operating model.

Future of work

We are helping our clients define the path forward in these areas:

  • Doubling down on automation and accelerating the digital journey, allowing organisations to maximise efficiencies while fostering flexibility and teaming
  • Future-proofing skills, while focusing on new critical behaviors that surfaced through crisis which fosters employee trust and confidence to perform in the new tomorrow
  • Embracing new ways of working, by creating a data-driven, human-centered remote workforce strategy to help accelerate change in ways of working, culture, productivity, tax, legal and real estate considerations as clients drives their workforce transformation.
  • Workforce transformation: Modernising the HR function - simplify and standardise operating model, processes and deploy digital solutions, support changing workplace dynamics and priorities, drive cost efficiencies and help enhance employee experience
  • Remaining operationally agile by pursuing cost effective ways to deliver value (i.e., transition to the cloud, leveraging Global Capability Centers (GCCs) to foster agile and open innovation, reduce physical footprint and fulfill customer needs more quickly)
  • Diversity and inclusion: Support clients in fully realising the business impact of a diverse inclusive and engaged workforce, help drive measurable impact through D&I analytics.

Changing consumer behavior

We are helping our clients navigate these scenarios by providing insights against several topics:

Category dynamics

How will underlying consumer sentiment and income dynamics change the underlying consumption of goods and channel preferences in each category? Which of these changes to the demand pattern will persist in the long term?

Product strategy and innovation

How should the product assortment and innovation portfolio be repositioned in response to changing consumer needs and preferences? Where can I simplify my portfolio, and where do I invest to capture new demand?

Revenue growth management

How should revenue management strategies (e.g., marketing, pricing, promotion) be adjusted to align with new consumer needs and preferences and maximise return on investment?

Supply chain and financial planning

How can I get a better short and longer term demand signal to drive supply chain (e.g., production, inventory, distribution) and financial planning? How can I make margin-optimised decisions under increased uncertainty? How can tax optimise the business priorities?

Sales acceleration

How should brands prioritise white spaces across channels and geography? How should offline and online sales channels be leveraged synergistically to drive the market share agenda? What can be the right sized deployment of infrastructure – manpower, channel partner network to drive the direct coverage agenda in the dominant fragmented trade? How do we drive the right balance between growth and cost of sales?


Data-driven marketing and commerce transformation

Apparel, footwear and accessories

Apparel, footwear and accessories

Consumer packaged goods

Consumer packaged goods

Food, beverage and alcohol

Food, beverage and alcohol

Grocery agribusiness

Grocery/agribusiness

Household and personal items

Household and personal items

Hotels and catering

Hotels and catering

Luxury goods

Luxury goods

Recreation and leisure

Recreation and leisure

Supermarkets, drug stores and dollar stores

Supermarkets, drug stores and dollar stores

PwC is assisting clients build consumer-centric marketing and digital commerce capabilities

  • Data-driven marketing transformation: Defining the strategies to win consumer trust in a digital era and designing the capabilities and operating model to become an effective data-driven and agile enterprise.
  • Digital commerce: Building channel strategies, execution capabilities and underlying technology throughout the entire consumer journey and across B2B, B2B2C and D2C, owned and 3rd party digital commerce
  • Media intelligence: Bringing greater effectiveness and efficiency to campaign, media, and programmatic operations through optimising spend, targeting and measurement
  • Personalisation and loyalty: Enabling growth and loyalty by understanding consumers and designing impactful, personalised experiences that can be activated at scale
  • MarTech and data: Enabling clients to bring marketing and commerce to life by designing and deploying scalable technology and data solutions, incl. CDP
  • Consumer analytics and marketing 360: Helping clients optimise full commercial ROI and make data-driven decisions through deploying advanced analytics / GenAI platforms
  • Marketing spend monitoring and compliance: Delivering value, transparency, and assurance to optimise advertising/media spend and related agency relationships.
  • Supply chain resilience to enable recovery and growth

We are helping our clients navigate these scenarios by recommending action against several topics:

  • Fulfillment experience: Building capabilities to deliver on customer expectations. Evolving into a growth engine that drives the customer experience.
  • Connected demand and resource planning: Elevating the demand planning function to be an orchestrator of enterprise-wide resources.
  • Visibility as a strategy: Increasing visibility to understand the suppliers’ overall resilience, financial stability, risk profile, and their ability to deliver. Utilise this information to take appropriate corrective actions to mitigate, where needed.
  • Re-imagining the supply chain network: Refreshing and modernising the supply chain network design to accelerate growth, retain profitability and create tax efficiencies in the changing business operating model.
  • Future of work

We are helping our clients define the path forward in these areas:

Doubling down on automation and accelerating the digital journey, allowing organisations to maximise efficiencies while fostering flexibility and teaming

Future-proofing skills, while focusing on new critical behaviors that surfaced through crisis which fosters employee trust and confidence to perform in the new tomorrow

Embracing new ways of working by creating a data-driven, human-centered remote workforce strategy to help accelerate change in ways of working, culture, productivity, tax, legal and real estate considerations as clients drives their workforce transformation.

Workforce transformation: Modernising the HR function - simplify and standardise operating model, processes and deploy digital solutions, support changing workplace dynamics and priorities, drive cost efficiencies and help enhance employee experience

Remaining operationally agile by pursuing cost effective ways to deliver value (i.e., transition to the cloud, leveraging Global Capability Centers (GCCs) to foster agile and open innovation, reduce physical footprint and fulfill customer needs more quickly)

Diversity and inclusion: Support clients in fully realising the business impact of a diverse inclusive and engaged workforce, help drive measurable impact through D&I analytics.

Led by Ravi Kapoor, our Retail and Consumer team, which includes subject matter experts from within the PwC Global Network, offers nuanced consumer insights coupled with end-to-end holistic solutions to help you navigate the path to success. An ingrained implementation ethos and exceptional client service attitude have resulted in deliveries surpassing expectations, and as per committed timelines.

competencies v1

We provide services to these retail and consumer goods segments:

  • Apparel, footwear, and accessories
  • Textiles
  • Big box retailers
  • Consumer packaged goods
  • Packaged food, beverage & alcohol
  • Grocery/agribusiness
  • Household care and personal items
  • Hotels and catering
  • Luxury goods
  • White Goods
  • Logistics, warehouses & freight
  • Restaurants
  • Supermarkets, convenience stores, chemists
  • D2C, online marketplaces, brand.com

Leader profile

ravi kapoor v1

The first eight years of Ravi’s career were with brands like Colgate Palmolive, ICICI Bank and PepsiCo across a range of sales and marketing responsibilities followed by an over 14-year stint at a major consulting firm. In his last role, he was heading the firm's consulting services for the R&C sector in MENA. Ravi has anchored several, multi-year transformation programmes creating impact across R&C value chains with special impetus on client’s supply chain and route to market capabilities. Ravi has worked with several clients including Indian Promoter driven or Indian MNCs and Global MNCs, spread across almost all R&C sub sectors such as packaged branded food, personal and home care, brown goods, grocery, soft lines and hardline retailers.

Ravi Kapoor
Partner, Retail and Consumer, PwC India
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