Y.S. Rana , CHANDIGARH : Growing consumer confidence drives Diwali spending in India says a survey done by Artha Yantra, country’s largest online personal finance Advisor with over 60,000 registered users. The survey was done on more than 1200 working professionals on their spending patterns for this Diwali.
It states the scale of the celebration is directly co-related to the sentiment of the consumers. According to 2014 annual Diwali consumer spending survey overall consumer confidence has increased from last year. This is reflected in the increase in spending across all age brackets and income levels.
In 2014, 73per cent of the working professionals surveyed would be spending between Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000 during this year Diwali. This is a marked increase from 2013, when most professionals were spending lesser amount between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000. Within the age groups of 35 to 45 the spending intent has increased the most to between Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000.
The survey shows that, consumers are more inclined to buy “Gifts for the friends and families”. There is perceptible increase in consumer inclination towards giving gifts. This has displaced the last year’s topper “Clothes and Fireworks “to the second position. The shifts of preferences are considerable in the last one year, and can be attributed to large changes in the consumer sentiment. For example, intent to buy gifts for friends and families in the less than 5 lakh income group has increase from 8 per cent in 2013 to 44 per cent in 2014, indicating tectonic changes in preferences. While buying “Clothes and Fireworks” has seen a reduction in the number of consumers opting for it.
Festival sentiment is driving buying pattern this year. The overall festival sentiment has increased for over 57 per cent of the respondents this is a 9 per cent increase from previous year 48 per cent. This also proves that, the Diwali advertising campaigns that are being run by retailers both online and offline are only successfully in weaning consumers away from existing players. The presence of e-commerce portals has not impacted the buying decisions significantly; it has only changed the channel from which goods are bought.
Despite the push to make consumers use credit to buy this Diwali, over 65.7per cent of the consumers preferred to buy this Diwali from their existing savings and bonus money. Commenting on the survey results, Nitin Vyakaranam, CEO of ArthaYantra says “There are clear signs on improvement in economic sentiment in the last 12 months, the results of the survey prove that the sentiment improvement is translating to more spending by the consumer.”
The positive shift in the consumer sentiment has clearly made its way into their spending habits. The Indian consumer will spend more during 2014 Diwali than in 2013.
The items that rank high when it comes to spending this Diwali are– Gifts for Friends and Family; Clothes and Fireworks;Gold; Electronics;Vehicle.