When was the last time an Indian product truly wowed you?
When a product was crafted so beautifully and was so uniquely Indian that it taught you something new about the heritage of the people who created it...
When you were so enamoured by the product that you didn't really care what the price tag was, and all you wanted to do was procure it...
It is not that such products do not exist. We have all seen these products. In temple streets lined with overstocked shops, along highways near level crossings, at airports, at railway stations, and at the gazillion bazaars that 90% of India shops in. We just do not know these products - there's no popular brand associated with them. There's no colorful packaging that differentiates the product from a million other less distinguished sellers of the same product. This causes a grave unintended consequence which will prevent the product from ever generating large scale economic value - a lack of sophistication!
When a product was crafted so beautifully and was so uniquely Indian that it taught you something new about the heritage of the people who created it...
When you were so enamoured by the product that you didn't really care what the price tag was, and all you wanted to do was procure it...
It is not that such products do not exist. We have all seen these products. In temple streets lined with overstocked shops, along highways near level crossings, at airports, at railway stations, and at the gazillion bazaars that 90% of India shops in. We just do not know these products - there's no popular brand associated with them. There's no colorful packaging that differentiates the product from a million other less distinguished sellers of the same product. This causes a grave unintended consequence which will prevent the product from ever generating large scale economic value - a lack of sophistication!
Sophistication in a product comes from several different means - but the ultimate goal is always the same: improving customer satisfaction. It may come from a choice of better materials, it may have longevity arising from a simpler process of production and fewer constituents, it may offer a myriad of customizations, it may come from better insight into customer preferences or it may feature the best consumer preference: low cost. All of these improve the product by a notch and give the producer a measure of protection against competition, and drive innovation. A lack of sophistication makes the product replaceable by a better version. And in a globalized world, the better version is normally a cheaper version, mass produced in a factory in China, and sold by a "brand" that has spent some time applying the above mentioned sophistications.
With the advent of GST in 2017, India has the World's largest open market, and the largest population of consumers under the age of 35 in the World. No other market has a larger sample set of consumer preferences available to analyze and tune products to. And even in an era where e-commerce rises to new heights every day, a vast majority of purchases happen offline. This gives entrepreneurs at every level of the value and supply chain to understand and analyze customer preferences, build a better brand and improve their reach to a wider market. A few iterations of this Measure-Analyze-Improve-Scale routine can succeed in creating a sophisticated, well recognized product with wide ranging economic impact that generates wealth and creates jobs. All it takes is focusing on the customer the product is being created for.
It turns out, the best answer to the trillion dollar Make in India question, is Make for India.
