Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (49 page)

Of course Indians and Pakistanis have to be the primary actors in efforts to shape their future. History has shown that American actions can make a bad situation worse, and there is only limited evidence
that they can make things fundamentally better. Still, this is what friends do: encourage difficult but necessary moves and provide the reassurances needed to make such actions less risky. America must be more ambitious and assertive about this problem than it’s been, and India should be more receptive to U.S. prodding. Success will only strengthen the bonds that have at long last begun to link our two nations.

Christopher J. Graves

Christopher J. Graves is global CEO of Ogilvy Public Relations.

Mark Twain came to India in 1896, propelled by debt and honor. He was sixty years old and a global celebrity—the best-known and most beloved author of his day. But his business judgments were as poor as his writing was brilliant. A year earlier, ill-considered investments in book publishing and a newly invented typesetting machine had wiped out Twain’s considerable personal fortune and left him with debts of more than $70,000 (about $2 million today). To repay creditors, Twain embarked on a hundred-date, round-the-world lecture tour that took him from Cleveland, Ohio, to Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Mauritius, South Africa, and England.

Of the many stops along Twain’s extraordinary year-long odyssey, no destination seized his imagination like India. In a whirlwind three months, he visited a score of Indian locales, including Bombay, Poona, Benares, Lucknow, Baroda, Jaipur, Calcutta, and Darjeeling. Twain was exhilarated. He found India a land so vast, so colorful, and so diverse that it almost defied characterization. In
Following the Equator
, the popular travelogue Twain published after his return, reflections on India spill across nearly half the book’s 712 pages. In some passages, Twain sounds almost breathless as he extols the country’s wonders:

This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces
and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition. . . . So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds.

Twain owed his fame to his folksy, intuitive writing style and gift for crafting simple phrases that perfectly captured the essence of places and people. And yet, in India, this master wordsmith was so awestruck he could catalog only the country’s enormity and contrasts. “There is only one India!” he exclaimed. “Its marvels are its own; the patents cannot be infringed; imitations are not possible.”

Twain’s inability to succinctly sum up India foreshadowed the challenge faced by those struggling to develop a “brand” for modern India. How does one brand a nation that defies description? Indian leaders wrestled in earnest with that question in the early 1990s after a balance of payments crisis forced the government to abandon stultifying regulations and open the economy to outside trade and investment. Attracting tourists from overseas was an obvious solution for bringing in the foreign currency India needed to stabilize its economy. And yet, in the four decades since independence, India’s government had made virtually no effort to woo visitors from abroad. Sprawling India drew fewer foreign tourists than tiny Singapore. Travelers in key target markets in Western Europe saw India as destitute, dirty, and dangerous. Marketers knew that an ad campaign that merely pronounced India modern, clean, and comfortable would clash with foreign travelers’ long-held perceptions and risked dismissal or even ridicule.

In 2002, Ogilvy & Mather, working with the Indian government, helped fashion a branding solution that embraced the nation’s extraordinary diversity. At the heart of that strategy was the slogan “Incredible
!ndia.” The exclamation point replacing the “I” was meant to capture the feeling of wonder—even astonishment—expressed by Twain (“There is only one India!”) and many other first-time visitors. The campaign simply and elegantly portrayed the natural beauty of India. The key phrase was often paired with breathtaking visuals in which the exclamation mark was represented by natural sights or landmarks of similar shape—the finial spire atop the dome of the Taj Mahal, for example, or the taut calf of a yogi balanced on one leg. Piyush Pandey, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather India, says the goal of the Incredible !ndia campaign was to “change the image of India as a land of just snake charmers and bullock carts. We concentrated on a few destinations such as the Taj Mahal or the Red Fort. With rising awareness and much better infrastructure, we were able to expand the vision to include adventure tourism, nature, and wildlife tourism, a Buddhist tour for Japanese and medical tourism for Middle Eastern visitors.”

Overall, Incredible !ndia proved a great success. The campaign has endured for more than a decade under the oversight of several different advertising agencies. Its core message has seeped into every corner of India’s communications; even the immigration forms at India’s airports call out Incredible !ndia. Tourism receipts leaped to $18 billion in 2012, up from $3.5 billion in 2003 (catapulting India to sixteenth place globally, up from thirty-eighth). Foreign tourists have risen to 6.3 million in 2011, up from 2.7 million in 2003 (moving India to thirty-eighth place, up from fifty-third).

For all that, however, India still punches below its weight, attracting only two-thirds as many foreign tourists as Singapore, less than half as many as Thailand, and only a quarter as many as Malaysia. In 2011, India welcomed roughly the same number of foreign tourists as Bulgaria.

More important, as a vehicle for promoting important things other than tourism—trade and investment, to name two—the campaign has clear limitations. “Incredible” may be alluring and enchanting for tourists,
but it is worrisome for foreign investors, who crave stability, consistency, and opportunity. Investors don’t want India to be
in
credible. They want it to be
credible
.

A further complication: As India’s individual states grow and develop, many are exploring new brand identities of their own. The time has come for India to make a fundamental decision about its branding architecture: Will it be a “branded house” or a “house of brands”? Or will it try to be a bit of both?

A branded house refers to large, multiproduct companies that brand every product with the same parent company name. For example, Apple is a branded house. Everything the company makes and markets is clearly labeled as an Apple product. Even if a product has its own identity, such as the iPad, everyone knows it comes from Apple. In contrast, Unilever is a house of brands. The consumer giant’s thousands of products—from personal care (Dove, Lux, Pond’s) to foods (Lipton, Hellman’s, Chef Boyardee)—are each promoted under the name of its own product line rather than their larger Unilever provenance. Of course, both Unilever and its rival Procter & Gamble want consumers to be able to distinguish which products come from which parent company, so increasingly both also brand their products with marks identifying the corporate parent; even so, branding for individual product lines remains the primary aim.

Incredible !ndia started as a branded house approach. Increasingly, however, India’s states are finding the one house too confining and looking for ways to differentiate themselves as travel destinations. Some have opted to go it alone. Kerala is promoting itself as “God’s Own Country.” Bengal wants to be known as “Beautiful Bengal,” while Haryana touts itself as “A Pioneer in Highway Tourism.” Some states—such as Goa and Tamil Nadu—have added the parent brand of Incredible !ndia on top of their own state brands and slogans, while others have embraced a hybrid approach. Rajasthan, for example, sports its own logo featuring a red,
green, orange, and yellow sun, while calling itself “The Incredible State of !ndia.” Madhya Pradesh, not to be outdone, claims to be the “Heart of Incredible !ndia.” States employing this hybrid approach hope to weave their own distinctive identity into the larger tapestry of the national brand.

The danger, of course, is that all these locally distinctive patterns threaten the integrity of the tapestry as a whole, confusing foreign travelers and undermining efforts to consolidate Brand India abroad. “Incredible !ndia” has endured for over a decade. To abandon it, or even compete with it, doesn’t make much sense. In marketing to overseas travelers, India’s tourism industry as a whole will be far better off if states can resist the temptation to defect and go alone. Instead, they should work together to maintain the consistency of an overarching, outward-facing national brand effort in which local state tourism brands are permitted but with secondary emphasis.

Successful destination branding must go beyond slogans, however; it demands the hard work of pulling together an array of entities, from regulators, to hotels, to airlines, to travel agencies and trade associations. At a January 2013 panel of aviation and travel industry experts in New Delhi, many foreign panelists bemoaned the lack of collaboration across India’s travel and tourism industry. Gerard Brown, an international airline tourism development executive with UBM Aviation, decried the fragmentation of India’s travel industry as “overwhelming.”

Brand India faces an even greater challenge when it comes to attracting investors, who arrive looking to spend on far more than just a dazzling week’s holiday. The metrics that matter to India’s business visitors are far from reassuring. On the World Bank’s ease of doing business ranking, India sits at 132 out of 185 countries. On the Heritage Foundation and
Wall Street Journal
’s economic freedom index, India ranks 119th out of 177 (below Malawi, Greece, and Senegal). On the Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International, India is tied for 94th (with Benin, Colombia, Djibouti, Greece, Moldova, Mongolia, and Senegal) out of 174.

The narrative in the global press is no less discouraging. A March 2012
article in the
Economist
, for example, warned that after a burst of high growth in the 2000s, India’s economy was slouching back toward overregulation and torpor. “Like a Bollywood villain who just refuses to die,” the article intoned, “the old India has made a terrifying reappearance.”

Such dire assessments suggest that when it comes to business and foreign investment, India’s best strategy for nation branding is to abandon nation branding altogether. In travel and tourism, cooperation is the most sensible course. But in seeking to attract global investment, competition among states may be the most effective route.

Already some are doing exactly that. In Gujarat, Chief Minister Narendra Modi has launched “Vibrant Gujarat,” a Davos-style conference aimed at marketing the state to Indian and foreign investors.

Certainly, foreign experts and investors have learned to distinguish between Indian states that are probusiness and those that are not; few global executives buy into a Brand India. In his book
Inside Out: India and China, Local Politics Go Global
, the Brookings Institution scholar William Antholis explicitly differentiates India’s “forward states” (including Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu), “backward states,” and “swing states.” “Companies need to align themselves with states with strong leadership,” says U.S.-India Business Council president Ron Somers, an executive with more than two decades’ experience operating “state-by-state, dialect-by-dialect” in India. He envisions “a kaleidoscope of these chief ministers, awash in colors of their native dress, speaking their state dialect, and all saying ‘We’re open for business.’ ”

Aparna Dutt Sharma, who heads the India Brand Equity Forum, argues that a national umbrella brand and segmented subbrands can successfully coexist. “Umbrella branding needs to remain a distinct and visible part of a nation brand promotion strategy,” she says. “As nation brand strategies are generally geared to attract trade, investment, and
tourism, both umbrella nation branding and sectoral/segment-oriented branding have their own distinct relevance.”

India’s challenge now demands it embrace two distinctly different branding approaches simultaneously. To attract first-time foreign travelers, it must continue to create an alluring, emotionally bonding campaign for India as an overall concept. At the same time, to attract serious foreign investors and business builders, it must encourage its states to compete, each with its own distinct business-friendly brand, born of local strengths and segmentation, perhaps metaphorically replacing the exclamation point with a dollar sign.

Mark Twain found synergy in the two ideals. The lecture fees and book royalties he earned from his adventures in Incredible India earned him more than enough money to repay his debts and restore his own credibility. India, too, must find a way for the twain to meet.