India, the world’s biggest democracy, is rapidly becoming the key market to crack for international brands. In a new series of blog posts Anjul Sharma – fluent in Indian culture and languages Hindi, Punjabi & Urdu - looks at the approach to branding in one of the planet’s fastest growing markets.

Having started this blog series by exploring examples of India’s great customer service, it is time to look at another area where India appears just as impressively to be leading the way: innovation. Enter centre stage, the Tata Swach.

Produced by the Tata Group – who gave us the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car - this product has been in R&D for 10 years. The Tata Swach is a water purifier that uses ash from rice milling to filter out bacteria and tiny silver particles, thereby killing harmful germs that can lead to diseases like diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. Given 1 billion people globally are affected by lack of clean drinking water and the nasty diseases that go with it, this is quite a ground breaking innovation: it has a genuine application to a major human problem that knows no geographic boundaries. 

But its real ingeniousness is this: it does not need running water or electricity to work. It doesn’t need bromine, chlorine or iodine either. A water purifier that does the job without components that we in the West would think where essential is a pretty amazing feat I think. What’s more, at less than 1 metre high, it is pretty portable. And at £13.00 or US $21 it is pretty affordable for communities. Its performance capabilities, based on path-breaking nanotechnology, have been tested in the UK and Netherlands as well as India.

Small wonder, then, that on 11 November 2010 the Tata Swach won Gold at the Asian Innovation Awards. Out of 300 entries from 13 countries, an Indian innovation won.  And that’s not all – it also won the global ICIS award for best product innovation. ICIS, a leading global provider of news and information in the chemical and energy sectors, gave the award to the Tata Swach for the best overall innovation as well as best product innovation. The judges applauded Tata for their deeply established and embedded philosophies of social and corporate social responsibility which reflect on how they approach business and innovation.

Now at a personal level, I would be really excited about the next great innovation in hair straighteners to deal with my unruly thick curly hair, in fact, even more excited than the next woman along the line. However, a little part of me thinks I shouldn’t be quite so vain and frivolous. Whilst I respect great innovations in Western markets that lead to new brands, products and services, their impact rarely stretches beyond financials. Why the Tata Swach is so impressive is because this product is both commercially feasible and can have a phenomenally positive global impact.  How many innovations can truly be said to save lives from the shores of Haiti to the flooded plains of Pakistan?

For major global brands, ’Corporate Social Responsibility’ is becoming increasingly important, demanded by many consumers (especially in America and the UK in recent years) who question the morality of big business. It is great to see an Indian company not just creating a convincing CSR policy, but actually living it through the power of thoughtful innovation.

“Anonymous is an online living consciousness, comprised of different individuals with, at times, coinciding ideas and goals” (Anonymous manifesto)

So far so Matrixbut this week we saw the impact an online living consciousness can have on the market place when Anonymous launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon and successfully disrupted online payments for a short time.

There is a clear functional case for organizations to build up their DDoS defences in the face of such threats, but from a branding perspective there is a bit to learn as well…

Customer engagement with the brand, allowing customers to share their thoughts and tell their brand stories is one of the core objectives of brands in the digital world. Some brands have realised that they have to release some control of their own narrative to invite consumers to share their experiences and so create a richer, more nuanced and fluid brand story in which the official ‘brand’ morphs and evolves as consumers respond to and with it.

What this faceless and spaceless transnational community of Hacktivists has shown is that whilst most brand engagement can be both positive and beneficial, when a brand upsets its audience they now have more tools in their arsenal to share their less positive thoughts  about their brand experiences – a brand boycott seems decidedly old hat now compared to directly disrupting a company from carrying out its business!

Ernest Hemingway once took up a wager proposed by his friends. They declared it was impossible to write a story in 6 words or less. Hemingway disagreed. Thinking for a moment, he wrote his riposte: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn”. Poignant, powerful, with a beginning, middle and end. Hemingway won the bet.

This story inspired us at The Value Engineers to set ourselves a similar challenge: sum up the essence of our brand in 6 words or less. We thought we’d share some of the results wonderfully bought to life by our Studio…

From bringing concepts to life to scamping up pack designs, here’s a little clip of what our Studio can do…

You already know the marketing goals you intend to achieve next year. But is your team fully equipped to turn your plans into reality?

At The Value Engineers we recognise that marketing’s contribution to growth does not start and end with a brand strategy. Now more than ever, marketing teams need a mix of skills to deliver the results the organisation demands.

Following conversations with clients, we’re investigating how and where marketers could be building their capabilities to strengthen the contribution marketing makes to the bottom line.

In return for completing this this short survey, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of our final report (registration required).

The results will enable you to benchmark yourself versus marketers in other organisations across a range of core marketing capabilities and to pinpoint your strengths and development areas.