Brands

Brand building initiatives, market dynamism drive record increase in value Five-year anniversary ranking adds insights for future growth.

Timing is everything.

That sentiment opened the first introduction for the BrandZ Most Valuable Indian brands five year ago when I welcomed readers to our first annual BrandZ™ India ranking, launched just months after the country elected a new government.

Conditions in India were ripe for building and sustaining valuable brands, and we promised to provide the knowledge and insight required to help brands grow in this rapidly changing country. In retrospect, our assessment of change and brand-building possibilities was conservative. Rapid digitization, lower prices for data consumption, and affordable mobile phones have democratized access to information. Striving for a better life, more people— rich and poor, urban and rural—have embraced brands: local Indian brands, multinational brands, and new arrivals.

Change has brought new challenges, of course. How could it not, especially in a country as vast and complicated as India, with over 1.3 billion inhabitants. In last year’s report we discussed the impact on brands of tax reform and demonetization—the effort to accelerate the transition away from hard currency to an economy based around digital financial transactions. This year we watched those disruptions fade in the rearview mirror. In 2018, the value of BrandZ™ Indian Top 50 Most Valuable brands increased 34 percent, the greatest year-on-year growth since the launch of the ranking in 2014. Over that five-year period the value of the BrandZ™ India Top 50 more than doubled, while the BrandZ™ Global Top 50 rose 60 percent and the China Top 50 rose 76 percent. These results are based on the eligibility criteria that have been in place for five years.

The expanded ranking keeps pace with the changes in India and keeps the promise I made five years ago—to chart India’s rapidly changing brand landscape and provide insights necessary for building valuable brands. ONCE AGAIN, TIMING IS EVERYTHING Five years ago, many India start-ups were gaining traction and the service sector was growing in importance. Today, our comprehensive picture of India’s brand landscape includes important unicorn brands and business-to-business leaders. We’ve added 30 Newcomers to the ranking, and seven of them are in the Top 15, including the payment system Paytm and Flipkart, the e-commerce leader. Flipkart illustrates the pace of change. Flipkart launched in 2007, the same year Walmart entered India with a local wholesaler partner to comply with regulations limiting the activities of global retailers. Five years ago, Amazon had just arrived. Today, Flipkart and Amazon are battling for e-commerce dominance and Flipkart has accepted Walmart’s bid to acquire a majority stake. With this deal, India becomes a hotly contested market where two of the world’s largest retailers go head-to head.

It is not only the size of the Indian market today that is attracting these giants and other brands, such as Ikea, but also the market’s potential to constantly create thousands of new consumers searching for products and services that will improve their lives. This potential is everything its seems to be—but, in some ways, it is also different from what it seems to be. Understanding the nuances is a central challenge for all brands now present in India or planning to enter the market.