Marketing in India

Last week I spent some time in Mumbai, India. I was thoroughly impressed with the marketing talents that I met. In the US and Europe we are always focusing strongly on the tremendous engineering talent that India has but we forget that there are already thousands of successful and brilliant marketers, in addition to the thousands of great marketers that are currently being educated.

Based on my (still limited) understanding of the Indian marketing landscape I believe that there are few critical forces that will decide over the next 5 years the impact that the Indian marketing community could have on a global scale:

• Knowledge transfer: The knowledge transfer of successful US based (most located in Silicon Valley) Indian entrepreneurs back to India is critical in developing an even more sophisticated marketing know-how and talent. This could happen in creating a very active marketing centric start up culture and mentality around, or by bringing additional capital into the key Indian centers, or by transferring additional management expertise to India
• Global Indian brands: India developed only a few global primarily B2B brands over the last decade. But it is still lacking in building out large Consumer brands that have global reach. I am confident that this will change, it’s just a question of how fast and how many. But it’s absolutely necessary to develop a strong Indian marketing community
• Move beyond back-office support functions to central value generation: There is still a tendency to consider India primarily as a back office provider for US and Europe based firms. It’s definitely necessary that India continues to develop stronger and stronger solutions for global firms but in addition it has to focus on becoming the center for proprietary and innovative core value generating solutions, too. This can only happen through developing state-of-the-art consumer facing marketing offerings.

I strongly recommend that any global marketer spends time in India and starts to learn about the growing impact on our marketing discipline. I am just at the beginning of my learning experience.