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Axis My India, a consumer data intelligence company, published the India Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI), a detailed trend analysis that will track real-time shifts in consumer sentiment nationally.

A monthly index, the CSI will focus on providing intelligence and insights from the length and breadth of the nation, analysing several subtleties and nuances that influence perceptions and compile them into a consolidated scoring system based index. The consumer sentiment scores will be based on a moving average of adult residents across all states and Union Territories in India.

The sentiment analysis will delve into 5 relevant sub-indices Overall household spending, spending on essential and non-essential items, spending on healthcare, media consumption habits & mobility trends.

The CSI follows the methodology of a national representative random probability sample as used in the standardised CATI (Computer-aided telephonic interview) methodology, covering all geographic and demographic segments across all states and Union Territories in India.

Commenting on the launch of the report, Pradeep Gupta, CMD, Axis My India, said,The India Consumer Sentiment Index is our endeavour to capture the shifts in the pulse of the demographic as we navigate a radically altered post-pandemic world. We have selected relevant categories like inflation in household spends and expenditure on healthcare to account for everyday challenges affecting a significant percentage of the population. While the second wave negatively impacted economic sentiment around employment and business prospects, the index will aspire to demonstrate the accurate picture based on the remodelling of the vaccine distribution strategy, which has shown encouraging results. By plugging into economically and culturally significant data-points, the CSI will try to gauge, interpret, and predict the impact of macro factors on the lives of the average India across demography & geographies. Our mission is to bring out the most authentic voices via the rigour of data and analytics

All interviews are conducted through Computer Aided Telephonic Interview (CATI), among nationally representative sample of10865 adults across 21 states and 555 districts.63% of the people surveyed were Male and 37% female.Surveys are weighted in each district byage, gender, occupation, and region.

Key findings:

The overall Consumer Sentiment Score is moving in the positive direction with a score of +0.5 over the previous month. The overall consumer sentiment score is calculated by % Increase - % Decrease and is expressed as a number from -100 to 100; the score is negative when the sentiments show more decrease as compared to increase, and positive in the opposite situation.

Apart from capturing sentiments which is the measure of overall consumer confidence, the study also captured some interesting trends on topical matters:

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Household spends increased for 54% of the families post Covid: Axis My India report - Exchange4Media

Nestle India has tweaked its product packaging to incorporate a "mask" on each of their iconic products like Maggi, KitKat, Nescafe and Everyday. The move is a part of the brand's initiative to raise Covid awareness.

"Nestl India understands the need of the hour and wants to sensitize each and every individual about the one basic practice that we must all follow Masking up. To remind all of us and to create awareness on this very important safeguard, we have commenced work towards tweaking our product packaging that will see our iconic brands masked up. Our aim is to ensure that this important message gets reinforced every time when consumers look at our products.

By leveraging the power of iconic brands like MAGGI, KITKAT, NESCAF and EVERYDAY, we aim to spread even greater awareness on the importance of masking. Our brands have a rich purpose and in the past as well, packaging changes have been made to reflect important societal messages such as on Educating the Girl Child," said the brand.

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Maggi, Nescafe and other Nestle India brands 'mask up' to raise Covid awareness - Exchange4Media

MIRROR NOW in collaboration with exchange4media Group, is curating a series of video interviews, MIRROR NOW Dialogues with Vinay Tewari. In the fourth part of this series, Vinay Tewari, Managing Editor, Mirror NOW interacted with Suparna Mitra, CEO- Watches & Wearables Division, Titan Company Limited on the topic Titan: Keeping Up With The Changing Times.

The pandemic has drastically changed the way retail has traditionally panned out, and in many ways that one can imagine, be it consumer sentiment and traction or the ways brands are reaching out to their consumers. The discussion aimed at finding out what entails the new retail and how a legacy brand like Titan watches and wearables from the House of Tata is keeping up with the times.

The session opened with Tewari asking Mitra to sum up how the brand has adapted to the pandemic and is attempting a recovery. According to Mitra, the first wave was a dampener, and how and why will consumers return to a non-essential category like watches and wearables division remained a crucial question for Titan as well. Titan, a market player that enjoys a good fifty per cent market share had a slow climb back up until May this year. Mitra added We had to create reasons for consumers to come back to us. We did a theme Lets get India ticking which spread the message that the consumer class has to do their bit for the economy to recover. Apart from that we also pushed for gifting and occasional shopping. One of the biggest lessons that we learnt from this has been that people and relationships are the most important and thats what we took ahead to our consumers. Since June this year, we are seeing a good pace towards recovery.

Occasional shopping and gifting contribute to a considerable part of Titans sales, therefore, the predictions of a third wave could be a potential downturn on this front. Clearing the air on the same, Mitra shared While formal and large gatherings have come down, there are few things helping the situation. There has been an unprecedented boom in wearables like smartwatches, smart bands, and there has been a lot of interest amongst people about health in the last one and a half months. Also, with the number of people invited to weddings and functions being restricted to close family and friends, we saw about a 20 per cent uptick in the ticket size for wedding watches as people are redistributing their budgets. Overall, these are the silver linings among the challenges.

Titan, in the last year, pushed the idea of self-gifting in their advertising for consumers to make themselves feel good in the stressful times of today. Sharing insights behind the same, Mitra said It is a very evolved concept and thats why it makes for interesting advertising. Self-gifting is not a standard concept, and we also do a lot of programs around the birthdays and anniversaries of our loyalty program consumers. As far as gifting is concerned, watches make a very timeless gift.

Talking of being timeless and classic, Titan as a brand is a name that has a legacy attached to it. Therefore, reinventing the brand while also keeping that legacy intact can be challenging for the team. On this, Mitra elaborated This is an intellectual challenge that we deploy a lot of time and effort to solve. There are two aspects to it, first, in India, there is a great aspiration towards foreign brands, and in the watches category, most of our competitors are international brands. Secondly, the fact that we are known as excellent watchmakers goes in our favour. The trust and accessibility that comes with that help us a lot. We have taken cognizance of the fact that we need to premiumise our watches for the watch connoisseurs and people who look at the aspirational value. We have watches in the accessible range that starts at a few thousand to premium watches that go up to lacs. Yes, we are a legacy brand but there is an enduring quality to that legacy, its not a legacy that has an expiry date but a legacy that is building on itself.

Keeping up with the changing times also leads to the evolution of a brand over the due course. Talking about the evolution of Titan from being a timekeeper to an aspirational brand to health and fitness accessories providing brand, Mitra explained I think it is an opportunity for a lifetime to transform ourselves. We can say that we are a watches and wearables company, but at the heart of it, we are really a consumer company and we have always appealed to the vast Indian middle and upper-middle class. The changing and evolving needs of this consumer base is helping us evolve, learn new things and become more relevant and useful for the consumer and thats a big plus. We are very grateful that the pivot has happened, we are a big player in the fitness accessories category as well and we have ambitious plans going ahead.

Sharing insights on whether going ahead wearables will be a more significant part of the division as compared to watches, Mitra added The wearables growth is very monumental but the watches base is very large. Watches will continue because in India there is always an aspiring segment and they are always coming into the branded market. For example, Sonata, our economy offering that converts the unbranded to branded sees a lot of traction. It also depends on the ingenuity and the desire of the brand to arrive at newer and newer reasons to the consumers to buy watches. An Edge mechanical or a Raga are good examples that these needs will always be there, while new needs may have come up, the old needs will remain.

Mapping future business plans especially in times of a pandemic, Mitra revealed We believe in focussing on things that one can control. We have to have plans and be prepared, which we are doing by taking extraordinary safety measures in our ecosystem be it factories or stores with our staff and our consumers. The vaccination drive is giving us a sense of relief because between the two waves it was at a very infant stage. Public behaviour is difficult to predict and public memory is notoriously short. We concentrate on the things that we can do as a brand in terms of innovation, efficiency, execution, safety and planning. The first wave gave us an opportunity to do some soul-searching and to rethink our ways of doing things. We are very confident about not just recovery, but looking at this as a chance to relook, rearchitect and reimagine ourselves and craft a new future for the next 4-5 years as well.

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'Titans is not a legacy that has an expiry date but one that is building upon itself' - Exchange4Media

Most Virginia voters go for candidates with a D or R next to their name, but who should have dibs on the L?

This year, election officials preparing Novembers ballots were faced with the dilemma of how to differentiate the Libertarian Party from the Liberation Party, the newly formed initiative from gubernatorial candidate and social justice activist Princess Blanding.

We didnt want to list them both as L. Because thats a really bad idea, Dave Nichols, elections services manager for the Virginia Department of Elections, said at a state Board of Elections meeting Tuesday.

To resolve the issue, the state reached out to both parties for ideas.

We believe the identification of L for Libertarian has long been used in Virginia and voters understand that L officially represents a vote for the Libertarian Party, Joe Paschal, the chair of the Libertarian Party of Virginia, wrote in response. We believe it would be unfair to ask our party to change the ballot identification of L after spending years establishing this familiarity with voters. As such, we request L for the Libertarian Party on all ballots in Virginia.

The Liberation Party, which Blanding chairs, seemed to concur. In her own letter, Blanding suggested LP, LTP, or LBP as possible abbreviations for her party.

The state board voted to go with LP as the default abbreviation for the Liberation Party, keeping the other two suggestions on file for backup use.

Libertarian Robert Sarvis was on the ballot for governor in 2013 and the U.S. Senate in 2014. The party does not have any statewide candidates this year. However, there are a few Libertarians running for seats in the House of Delegates, meaning some voters will see both Libertarian Party and Liberation Party options on their ballots.

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Libertarian vs. Liberation creates third-party conundrum on Virginia ballots - Virginia Mercury

Many scientific findings continue to be disputed by politicians and parts of the public long after a scholarly consensus has been established. For example, nearly a third of Americans still do not accept that fossil fuel emissions cause climate change, even though the scientific community settled on a consensus that they do decades ago.

Research into why people reject scientific facts has identified peoples political worldviews as the principal predictor variable. People with a libertarian or conservative worldview are more likely to reject climate change and evolution and are less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

What explains this propensity for rejection of science by some of the political right? Are there intrinsic attributes of the scientific enterprise that are uniquely challenging to people with conservative or libertarian worldviews? Or is the association merely the result of conflicting imperatives between scientific findings and their economic implications? In the case of climate change, for example, any mitigation necessarily entails interference with current economic practice.

We recently conducted two large-scale surveys that explored the first possibility that some intrinsic attributes of science are in tension with aspects of conservative thinking. We focused on two aspects of science: the often tacit norms and principles that guide the scientific enterprise, and the history of how scientific progress has led us to understand that human beings are not the centre of the universe.

Sociologist Robert Merton famously proposed norms for the conduct of science in 1942. The norm of communism (different from the political philosophy of communism) holds that the results of scientific research should be the common property of the scientific community. Universalism postulates that knowledge should transcend racial, class, national or political barriers. Disinteredness mandates that scientists should conduct research for the benefit of the scientific enterprise rather than for personal gain.

These norms sit uneasily with strands of standard contemporary conservative thought. Conservatism is typically associated with nationalism and patriotism, at the expense of embracing cooperative internationalism. And the notion of disinterestedness may not mesh well with conservative emphasis on property rights.

Science has enabled us to explain the world around us but that may create further tensions especially with religious conservatism. The idea that humans are exceptional is at the core of traditional Judeo-Christian thought, which sees the human as an imago Dei, an image of God, that is clearly separate from other beings and nature itself.

Against this human exceptionalism, the over-arching outcome of centuries of research since the scientific revolution has been a diminution of the status of human beings. We now recognise our planet to be a rather small and insignificant object in a universe full of an untold number of galaxies, rather than the centre of all creation.

We tested how those two over-arching attributes of science its intrinsic norms and its historical effect on how humans see themselves might relate to conservative thought and acceptance of scientific facts in two large-scale studies. Each involved a representative sample of around 1,000 US residents.

We focused on three scientific issues; climate change, vaccinations, and the heritability of intelligence. The first two were chosen because of their known tendency to be rejected by people on the political right, allowing us to observe the potential moderating role of other predictors.

The latter was chosen because the belief that external forces such as education can improve people and their circumstances is a focus of liberalism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is skeptical of that possibility and leans more towards the idea that improvement comes from the individual implying a lesser role for the malleability of intelligence.

The fact that individual differences in intelligence are related to genetic differences, with current estimates of heritability hovering around 50%, is therefore potentially challenging to liberals but might be endorsed by conservatives.

The two studies differed slightly in how we measured political views and peoples endorsement of the norms of science, but the overall findings were quite clear. Conservatives were less likely to accept the norms of science, suggesting that the worldviews of some people on the political right may be in intrinsic conflict with the scientific enterprise.

Those people who accepted the norms of science were also more likely to endorse vaccinations and support the need to fight climate change. This suggests that people who embrace the scientific enterprise as a whole are also more likely to accept specific scientific findings.

We found limited support for the possibility that belief in human exceptionalism would predispose people to be more sceptical in their acceptance of scientific propositions. Exceptionalism had little direct effect on scientific attitudes. Therefore, our study provided no evidence for the conjecture that the long history of science in displacing humans from the centre of the world contributes to conversatives uneasiness with science.

Finally, we found no strong evidence that people on the political left are more likely to reject the genetic contribution to individual variation in intelligence. This negative result adds to the evidence that science denial is harder to find on the left, even concerning issues where basic aspects of liberal thought in this case the belief that people can be improved are in potential conflict with the evidence.

The two studies help explain why conservatives are more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals. This rejection is not only dictated by political interests clashing with a specific body of scientific knowledge (such as human-caused climate change), but it appears to represent a deeper tension between conservatism and the spirit in which science is commonly conducted.

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Many conservatives have a difficult relationship with science we wanted to find out why - The Conversation UK