Changing Paradigms, Competitive Strategies and Role of “Integrated Marketing Communication in Building Brands in Indian Marketâ€

Building Brands in Indian market is on an evolutionary process. The behavior of Indian consumer can not be simply grouped as emerging market behavior. The demand level in the emerging market is flat at the base and the consumption is more commodities centric. The customers choose products and brands that satisfy the basic needs than for reasons of emotion or pleasure seeking behavior. Hence brands those deliver price value are more successful in the market. While building a brand the brand manager spends every media pie in talking about this basic proposition. Horizontally large chunks of the population do not have purchasing power in an emerging market and do not qualify to be customers of brand centric marketing. Though brands exist in these segments but they only play the identification and differential function; they are not delivery vehicles of brand value to the customers. The researches conducted on Indian market speak a different story. Segments, which are assumed to have no purchasing power, were found to be using quite a good number of product categories including the consumer durable. The Indian marketers avoided entering in to the rural markets due to poor purchasing power parity with urban customers, abysmal infrastructure network and lesser avenue for brand promotion. It is observed that the rural customer has started using the up market and urban brands faster and started using products and brands almost similar to the urban customers. Most of the FMCG majors and consumer durable companies are looking at rural markets as the growth drivers of the future. So this typicality in brand penetration and acceptance across demographics and geographic segments have brought unique attempts and experiments in building brands in Indian market. This paper is an attempt to conceptually evaluate the alternate brand paradigms and see how they contribute towards building brands as a competitive advantage. The author has also made an attempt to develop an alternative brand building model through the use of effective integrated marketing communication and advertising in particular in Indian market. This paper highlights situations where the brand manager can use alternate platform and copy formats in building brands.