Tag: government

Arranged Scissors 5 – Finding the Right Exchange

If you look at my IIMB grade card, one subject stands out. It is one of the two Cs that I have on the card, and the other was in a “dead rubber” (5th/6th term where grades didn’t matter for placements). This C was in introductory marketing management. Where the major compoenent was a group project called the application exercise (ap-ex). I frequently crib that I did badly in that project because four out of six people in my group did no work, or even negative work (and this is true). Digging deeper, however, I think the more fundamental issue was that the two of us who worked didn’t really know what we were doing. We failed to understand the concept of STP till a few years after the project was over.

STP is one of the most fundamental concepts in marketing. It stands for Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. I quickly appreciated Positioning, but took a long time in trying to figure out the difference between segmentation and targeting. In my defence, they are highly inter-related concepts, and unless you look at it from the point of view of social sciences (where each unique point fetches you one mark in the board exam) it is not intuitive that they are separate concepts.

So you segment the “population” based on various axes. Taking these axes in conjunction, you end up “segmenting” the population into a large number of hypercubes. Then you do the “targeting”. Find the set of hypercubes that you want to sell your product to (in the context this post is about, sell yourself to). And so once you have found your “target segment” or set of “target segments” you “position yourself” and go out to sell. And then you need to figure out the “4 Ps” of marketing. Product (fixed here – it’s you). Price (irrelevant if you don’t plan to take dowry). Forgot one P. The other is Place (where you will sell).

The arranged marriage market can be broadly be divided into two – OTC and exchanges. OTC (over the counter) is the case where you have a mutual acquaintance setting you up with a counterparty. The only difference here between arranged and normal scissors is that in the arranged case, it is your parents who are set up with the counterparty’s parents rather you getting set up directly. Since it is a mutual acquaintance doing the setting up, the counterparty is at max two degrees away, and this makes the due diligence process a lot easier. Also, you have one interested third party who will keep nudging you and pushing hte process back and forth and generally catalyzing it. So people in general prefer it. Historically, there were no formal exchanges (apart from say a few “well known village elders”). Most transactions were OTC.

One problem in financial OTC markets is counterparty risk (which is what has prompted the US government to prop up AIG) but this is not a unique problem with OTC arranged marriage market – counterparty risk will always be there irrespective of the method in which the relationship was formed. Apart from providing counterparty protection, one important role that financial exchanges play is to improve liquidity in the market. The number of transactions that happen in the exchange ensure that the market is efficient and prices are fair. Liquidity is an important asset in the arranged marriage exchanges also.

The problem that I’m trying to describe in this post is about segmenting the exchanges based on their most popular commodity types. I don’t have reall live examples of this, but then for each product you will want to go to a different exchange. For example (this example may not be factually correct) both the Chicago Board of Trade (CBoT) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) trade in both corn futures and cattle futures. However, the volume of corn futures that are traded on CBoT is significantly larger than the volume of corn futures traded on the CME. And the volume of cattle futures traded on the CME might be siginicantly larger than the corresponding volume in CBoT.

So if you want to buy cattle futures, you are better off going to the CME rather than the CBoT since the former has significantly greater liquidity in this product, and thus you are assured of getting a “fairer” price. Similarly, to buy corn you should rather go to CBoT than CME. I suppose you get the drift. Now, the same is true with the arranged marriage market also. If you want to get listed on an exchange, you will need to make sure that you get listed on the right exchange – the exchange where you are most likely to find people belonging to your target segment.

To take an example, if you think you want a Tamil-speaking spouse, you are significantly better off listing on tamilmatrimony.com rather than listing on telugumatrimony.com, right? Of course this is just a simplistic example which I have presented because the segmentation and difference in markets is clear. Things in the real world are not so easy.

There are various kinds of marriage exchanges around. In fact, this has been a flourishing profession for a large number of years, and even the recent boom in louvvu marriages has done nothing to stem the flow of this market. You will have every swamiji in every mutt who will want to perform social service by opening a marriage exchange. Then, you have a few offline for-profit exchanges. Some of them work on a per-deal basis. Others charge you for listing, since it is tough for them to track the relationships that they’ve managed to create. Then, this is one business which has clearly survived the dotcom bust of 2001-02. The fact that this business is flourishing can be seen on the left sidebar of this page where I suppose a large number of them will be advertising. In fact, I encourage you to click through them since that will result in precious adsense revenue for me.

There is nothing wrong in carpet bombing, but that comes at a price. Notwithstanding the listing fees (which are usually nominal), you will have to deal with a significantly large number of “obviously misfit” CVs and bump them off. Especially if you live far away from the exchanges and have someone else broking for you, you don’t want to burden them too much, right? So the problem is in doing your segmentation and targeting. And then researching the exchanges to find which exchange has most liquidity for products belonging to both your segment as well as your target segment. And get listed on them ratehr than wasting precious time, energy and money listing on exchanges that are unlikely to be useful.

Since I began this (extremely long) post with marketing fundaes, I should complete it with some more (which is irrelevant to the rest of this post). A standard process for advertising is AIDA (Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action). Typically for a relationship to “happen”, you need a minimum of D from at least one of the parties, and a minimum of I from the other party. The normal arranged marriage process, however, assumes that an I-I is a sufficient condition for a sufficient lifelong relationship, and don’t give enough time and space for people to check if D is there. Hence the disasters. Hence the tilt towards the CMPs.

Arranged Scissors 1 – The Common Minimum Programme

Arranged Scissors 2

Arranged Scissors 3 – Due Diligence

Arranged Scissors 4 – Dear Cesare

Community and age of marriage

I’ll be 26 within two weeks time. In fact, if you go by the Hindu calendar (which sacrifices short-term accuracy for long-term precision) I’m already 26. One question people constantly ask me when I bump into them is about when I plan to get married. Most of my friends also belong to the same approximate age group. When we meet up, discussion frequently veers towards “market entry”. About the arranged marriage market.

One common thread of discussion is “you belong to XXX community. you should’ve already fathered two kids by this age” or “you belong to YYY community. it’s ok even if you don’t get married for another six years”. Which makes me wonder why people from different castes and communities get married at different ages.

The Hindu scriptures divide a man’s life into four stages. At the end of the first quarter, which is brahmacharya, the boy is supposed to get married, and become a gRhasta. This division of life into four quarters in the Hindu scriptures is a clear indication that our ancestors knew about the Quarter Life Crisis so long ago. And they has prescribed a simple antidote to it – marriage. Yes, I admit that different people would feel the QLC at slightly different ages, leading to a small variation in marriage age. However, there seems to be no reason as to why this should depend upon one’s caste.

For one to get married, one needs to earn enough in order to support a partner and still lead a fairly comfortable life. Typically, you won’t want a quality of life that is much inferior to what you were leading at your parents’ place, before you moved out. When you are still a bachelor, you might be willing to accept a lower quality of life in order to maybe further your career. However, by the time you get married, you want to be closer to the quality you were used to in childhood.

We need to remember that the caste system was initially intended to divide people based on their occupation. Thus, it is fair to assume that even fifty to seventy years back, when most people more or less “lived within their caste”, people from similar castes were likely to take up similar kind of careers. Some would choose to join the family business, others would go out to set up their own business, a few others would join the government, and some others would join the army, and so on.

You need to notice that each kind of occupation promises its own kind of cash flows, and so in each of these types of professions, you take a varying amount of time in order to reach the standard of living of your parents.

If you observe, in most parts of India, the people who get married the youngest are typically people who belong to Lala communities. Once you choose to become a Lala, you forego an income, and live on pocket money. And it’s your family which decides how much pocket money you get, and typically your father and uncles and so on won’t want you to live an inferior life to theirs. And so your standard of living is always equal to that of your parents’. And you get married quickly.

Then you have people who work for a salary. If you look back, back in the 50’s and 60’s, the only employer (there wasn’t much of a choice in this) was the government. And irrespective of what degrees you had, or what colleges you went to, you were subject to a pay scale based on number of years in the job. And your salary would typically start off obscenely low. And it would take ages for you to reach the standard of living of your parents.

So that explains it. I know I haven’t taken any data points in between, but I suppose it shouldn’t be too tough. Lalas always live at the same standard as their families, and are thus eligible to marry the earliest. People working for salaries had no choice. They had to wait till the sarkar paid them enough to reach the same standard of living as their parents. And they married really late.

It is all because of Nehruvian socialism, I tell you. In case India was more capitalist back then, more people would’ve gotten rich enough to marry sooner. And this caste-based distinction in age of marriage wouldn’t have existed.

So the next time someone brings up some caste or community related stuff when encouraging or discouraging you to get married, tell them that it is all Nehru’s fault. Talk to them about our great scriptures, and their recognition of the Quarter Life Crisis. Argue from the point of view of your own QLC so as to conveniently hasten or postpone marriage. I’m sure that the scriptures, properly invoked, won’t fail you.