Doing Business in India For Dummies®

Understanding the Indian Consumer Market

The government of India is bent on opening up the economy, and already they’ve succeeded beyond the world’s expectations. Experts predict more boom time to come, and they base their optimism on a number of factors:

✓	Indian families are changing: Young, upwardly mobile Indians are embracing nuclear families, and the old joint family system is getting rarer all the time. Older family members are continuing to work and rejecting 60 as the retirement age, allowing them to remain financially independent as long as they’re healthy enough to earn a living. So in turn, households have more spending power and an increased need for a variety of products.
✓	Employment rates are rising: The number of Indians—particularly women—with jobs has been increasing. Indian women have an increasing level of income, and more and more of them are returning to work after starting families. All of this means a higher demand for consumer goods, and foreign businesses are capitalizing on the development.
✓	Children are a developing consumer group: Young Indians from newborns to teenagers are increasingly becoming pampered, and Indian parents can apparently deny them nothing. The demand for toys, children’s clothes, and gadgets is growing all the time.

The Indian market is wide open, and many have already taken the plunge. In this section I describe a few tactics that are certainly worth considering as you decide how to best court Indian consumers, and I provide examples ...