What flashes in your mind when you hear of the Indonesian “traditional market”? Its inexpensive goods? Its crowdedness? Unhygienic environment? Maybe those are the words we often use to stigmatize traditional markets. With the initiatives to rebrand it, our three speakers in Ngopi #4 (Sunday, 5th July 2020) think the way through to change traditional market’s branding image to be what is called People’s Market. Why’s that?
Traditional market, aside from the stigmas it got from the community, has to face many fundamental problems. Some of them are the lacking quality of human resources, displacement by malls and modern markets, pretentious revitalizations by the government, and the inadequate involvement of its traders to revive the institutional structure. Rebranding “traditional markets” into “people’s markets” are expected to be able to present a new image in the community, which of course must be accompanied by innovation both in terms of buying and selling transactions and institutional structure.