But what is that idea? What, for that matter, is Brand India? A brand, the marketing gurus tell us, is a symbol embodying all the key information about a product or a service: it could be a name, a slogan, a logo, a graphic design. When the brand is mentioned, it carries with it a whole series of associations in the public mind, as well as expectations of how it will perform. The brand can be built up by skilful advertising, so that certain phrases or moods pop up the moment one thinks of the brand; but ultimately the only real guarantee of the brand’s continued worth is the actual performance of the product or service it stands for. If the brand delivers what it promises, it becomes a great asset in itself. Properly managed, the brand can increase the perceived value of a product or service in the eyes of the consumer. Badly managed, a tarnished brand can undermine the product itself.
So can India be a brand? A country isn’t a soft drink or a cigarette, but its very name can conjure up certain associations in the minds of others. This is why our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name ‘India’ for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed ‘Bharat’. ‘India’ had a number of associations in the eyes of the world: it was a fabled and exotic land, much sought after by travellers and traders for centuries, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Her Britannic Majesty Victoria, whose proudest title was that of ‘Empress of India’. Nehru wanted people to understand that the India he was leading was heir to that precious heritage. He wanted, in other words, to hold on to the brand.
For a while, it worked. India retained its exoticism, its bejewelled maharajas and caparisoned elephants cavorting before the fabled Taj Mahal, while simultaneously striding the world stage as a moral force for peace and justice in the vein of Mahatma Gandhi. But it couldn’t last. As poverty and famine stalked the land, and the exotic images became replaced in the global media with pictures of suffering and despair, the brand became soiled. It stood, in many people’s eyes, for a mendicant with a begging bowl, a hungry and skeletal child by his side. It was no longer a brand that could attract the world.
Today, the brand is changing again. As India transforms itself economically from a lumbering elephant to a bounding tiger, it needs a fresh brand image to keep up with the times. The government even set up, with the collaboration of the Confederation of Indian Industry, an India Brand Equity Foundation. They were tasked with coming up with a slogan that encapsulated the new brand in time for the World Economic Forum’s 2006 session in Davos, where India was guest of honour. They did. ‘India: Fastest-growing free market democracy’ was emblazoned all over the Swiss resort. Brand India was born.
But though it’s a great slogan, is it enough? Coca-Cola, for years, offered the ‘pause that refreshes’: it told you all that you needed to know about the product. Does ‘fastest-growing free market democracy’ do the same? India’s rapid economic growth is worth drawing attention to, as is the fact that it’s a free market (we want foreigners to invest, after all) and a democracy (that’s what distinguishes us from that other place over there, which for years has grown faster than us). But isn’t there more to us than that?
In fairness to the smart people who coined the phrase, the more attributes you try to get in, the clunkier and less memorable the phrase becomes. It’s easier for smaller countries that aim for one-issue branding. Regions of ancient India enjoyed branding before the term was coined — the ‘Spice Coast’, for example, for the stretches of Kerala to which European and Arab traders came, looking for pepper and cloves; or the ‘Silk Route’ passing through manufacturing and trading centres of silk across northern India. Such terms highlight the importance of getting the basics right, so the brand encapsulates what you want to be your core appeal to outsiders. What do we want the world to think of when they hear the name ‘India’? Clearly we’d prefer ‘fastest-growing free market democracy’ to replace the old images of despair and disrepair. But surely there are other elements we want to build into the brand: the exquisite natural beauty of much of our country, encapsulated in the ‘Incredible India!’ advertising campaign conducted by the tourism department; the glitz and glamour of Bollywood and Indian fashion and jewellery designs; the unparalleled diversity of our plural society, with people of every conceivable religious, linguistic and ethnic extraction living side by side in harmony; and the richness of our cultural heritage, to name just four obvious examples. Yet it would be impossible to fit all that into a poster, a banner or even a TV commercial. (And we’d still have left out a host of essentials, from Ayurveda to IT.)
The NDA government led by the BJP tried out a different kind of branding in the 2004 elections with the slogan ‘India Shining’. The question that inevitably arose was: who was India shining for? Those who felt that the still-incomplete transformation of India had not brought lustre into their lives were quick to react adversely to the slogan. The NDA lost the election, and the slogan was quietly buried. Good advertising copy cannot make a brand by itself; it must speak to a reality that everyone recognizes.
The importance of Brand India lies in the fact that India’s claims to a significant role in the world of the twenty-first century lie in the aspects and products of Indian society and culture that the world finds attractive. As I have already argued, our strength lies in our soft power, which lends itself more easily to the information era. Soft power is not about conquering others, but about being yourself. A country’s brand is judged by the soft power elements it projects on to the global consciousness, either deliberately (through the export of cultural products, the cultivation of foreign publics or even international propaganda) or unwittingly (through the ways in which it’s perceived as a result of news stories in the global mass media). National brands, in other words, are not merely created by governments; they emerge from a variety of sources, conscious and unconscious, planned and unplanned. Branding isn’t just what we can deliberately and consciously put on display; it’s rather how others see what we are. With many of the examples I have provided earlier in this chapter, we weren’t trying to impress the world, but the world said ‘wow — that’s India’. There’s your branding.
As I have argued, in the information age, it’s not the side with the bigger army, but the one with the better story, that wins. India must remain the ‘land of the better story’. To be a source of attraction to others, it must preserve the democratic pluralism that is such a civilizational asset in our globalizing world. An India that is open, accessible, diverse and creative, and that succeeds at creating a more decent life for its citizens, is always more likely to remain a positive force in the eyes of the world than its less admirable neighbours.
I believe that the India that has entered its seventh decade as an independent country is one open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the outside world, wedded to the democratic pluralism that is India’s greatest strength, and determined to liberate and fulfil the creative energies of its people. Such an India will tell stories the rest of the world wants to hear and is glad to repeat — and that will offer it an inestimable advantage in the global mass media of our information age. Today’s India truly enjoys soft power, and that may well be the most valuable way in which it can offer leadership to the twenty-first-century world.