Clash of cultures: India’s diversity demands a fresh marketing playbook
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. ‘It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ That may have been Sir Winston Churchill's oblique description of Stalin's Russia, but he may well have been referring to modern India. Closer home, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's view is equally relevant: ‘Whatever you can say about India, the opposite is also true.’ The fact is, India has never been easy to read.
It’s a continent-sized country of an amalgam of states, resulting in a smorgasbord of regions, cultures, religions, ethnicities, languages, food, clothing, lifestyles and political ideologies. It’s a veritable explosion of diversity, gamely, and often unsuccessfully, sought to be held together by a unifying ‘Idea of India’ or ‘One Nation’. Also read | Drivers of brand desire amongst new-age consumers in India While this national diversity, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, was always a reality, it was never really a stark and strident phenomenon.
People just went about their business knowing that there are different sections of society in India having their own cultures and traditions. But in the last decade or so, there’s been a surge in the sense of regional identity and pride. A sort of regional cultural revivalism or even activism, in flamboyantly displaying and celebrating their own unique traditions and ways of life, and often even manifesting in inter and intra-regional competitiveness.
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