Trendiya

Festivals bring joy and happiness. This year multi national companies are expecting happiness by expecting good sale and hoping to recover from last year’s meltdown. And the consumers are in joyful mood to celebrate Diwali by bringing goodies with some freebies or discount on the name of “special festival discount”.

The consumer durables are a Rs30,000 crore industry. and to cover last year’s loss they are offering big blast offer on products and in return they are expecting double growth too.

Like if you buy 8K or above Samsung digital camera, you will get 4K worth Reebok sunglass apart from 4GB memory card + pouch which is coming with almost all digi-cams. Canon made a deal with Philips by giving digital frame free with digital camera.

Whirlpool, the American appliances company is giving Reebok goodies apart from Microwave etc. And if one is looking for buying most desired huge wall mounted big screen TV, Sony Bravia came up with Home theatre with discounted prices. Or one can choose to buy Samsung new LED television and get another TV free.

You pick up any newspaper – it’s filled with lots of advertisement from Jewelry to home décor to what to gift this Diwali and tagged discounts offers. Want to go for great vacation at cheap deal or buy a real estate or drive home a new car at special price? – rush to the internet sites and there are plenty of sites offering the same. Even there are surprise discounts for hair cut to other beauty stuff. You name it and there are some discounts for you.

That’s why retail stores like Croma (electronics Chain by TATA) MD & CEO, Ajit Joshi is expecting 30-40% growth in footfalls as compared to last Diwali. So is L.G. director Marketing V. Ramachandran is confident about more accelerating growth something like 35-40%.

But if we go as per the CNBC – TV18 analytics, consumer confidence index is dropped by 1% means consumers are more interested in saving their hard earned money for any hard time. Studies also say that the bounce in economy is fuelled by government stimulus packages rather than consumer spending.

I will definitely do my bit by shopping this Diwali, let’s see if that changes consumer confidence index!