Three Mistakes Foreign Brands Make in India
Corinna: You're based in India, you know the market extremely well, and you've worked for international companies operating there. Based on your experience, what are the common mistakes when foreign brands enter India?
Jagruti: I'd frame it around three.
The first is treating India as a single market. Companies that haven't spent much time here often assume one strategy will travel across the country. It won't. There's metro India and there's Bharat, the shorthand we use for the towns and heartland beyond the big cities, and the two consume, aspire and decide very differently. Layer on the north-south-east-west differences, the language barriers and the income spread, and what you actually have is several markets under one flag. A “one India” strategy simply misfires.
The second is transplanting a global premium positioning without localizing the perceived value. Indian consumers are price-conscious, not cheap-seeking. They'll pay for value they can see and justify, but not for imported prestige alone. Yes, there is a segment that wants the satisfaction of carrying a Gucci bag. But the far larger population is asking a harder question: what am I getting for this, and does it make sense here?
The third is underestimating how long trust takes to build. Indian buying behavior is relationship-first. Trust comes from sustained local presence and community anchoring: CSR that is visible and meant, giving back before you ask. Brands that show up only to sell are read very quickly for what they are.
“Indian consumers are price-conscious, not cheap-seeking. They'll pay for value they can see and justify, not for imported prestige alone.”
Brands That Got It Right
Corinna: Do you have go-to examples of brands that got this right?
Jagruti: IKEA is the first name that comes to mind. They redesigned the entire assortment and price architecture for India: smaller pack sizes, lower entry price points, even a localized café menu. It looks very different from what you'd walk into in Europe, and that was the point. They read the pulse of the Indian consumer rather than exporting the Scandinavian playbook wholesale.
McDonald's India is probably the sharpest case, because they rebuilt the menu almost from scratch around Indian dietary and cultural norms: no beef, no pork, the McAloo Tikki as a hero product. What made it work was humility about what travels and what doesn't, and that humility is exactly what turned a difficult market into a durable one.
Hyundai is a useful contrast: early local manufacturing, a product engineered for Indian roads, and pricing calibrated to middle-class aspiration. Set that against brands that entered on heritage alone and stalled.
The common thread is adaptability. Get that right and India can be one of the most profitable markets in your entire portfolio.
“Adaptability is the common thread. India can be one of the most profitable markets in your entire portfolio.”
Localization Isn't Just a B2C Question
Corinna: Let's push into B2B because it's easy to assume localization is only a B2C topic. Do we need localization in B2B, and if so, where?
Jagruti: Let me answer from logistics, where I've spent a good part of my career, because the nuances there carry over to other B2B sectors like machinery and industrial services.
First, B2B in India still runs on relationships to a degree that surprises European teams. The question isn't only whether you have the right warehousing or cold chain. It's how well you understand your Indian customer compared with a local player who has been fighting that war for years and knows every workaround.
Second, the affordability of your technology. It isn't enough for your platform to be world-class. The fleet operators, distributors and partners around you have to be able to afford to adopt it, or your ecosystem never forms.
Third, geography. In much of Europe, A to B is a flight or a truck. The same distance in India might mean road, rail, sea and air in combination, across very different infrastructure. Can you still deliver the product in its original condition at point B? That's a brand promise, not just an operations question.
“Hyperlocalization and hyper-personalization genuinely help, in B2B as much as in B2C.”
Corinna: Which is also a nice example of why the marketing or brand department can't own this alone. It needs product management, sales, and the regional teams pulling in the same direction – and in my experience, that connection between operational, sales, and global brand teams often just isn't there.
Jagruti: Completely agree. This can't sit with the brand team alone. And I'd add geopolitics as a critical variable. We won't fully open that door in this interview, but on its own it can make or break a foreign brand's entry.
What Indian Brands Carry Abroad, and Where It Gets Difficult
Corinna: Let's flip it: what about Indian brands expanding into Europe or other markets? What do they carry with them, and where do they struggle?
Jagruti: What Indian brands carry well is a strong service orientation. It runs deep culturally and it cuts across industries. Add frugal innovation, pricing discipline and founder-led storytelling, and you have a combination that builds trust fast in relationship-driven markets.
In Europe, friction shows up as governance. European stakeholders may expect ESG disclosure and governance transparency before you scale, not after. Indian brands are mostly used to growing first and formalizing later, and that sequencing can leave them flat-footed.
Communication style is the other friction point. Indian corporate communication tends to be declarative, at times promotional in tone. European markets expect understatement and third-party validation over self-declared superlatives.
The Middle East is a smoother fit, because its relationship-first business culture aligns naturally with how Indian companies already build trust.
Two examples. The Tata Group's acquisitions abroad, Jaguar Land Rover and Tetley, are textbook cases of a hands-off playbook that preserved the acquired brand's local identity rather than “Indianizing” it. It's the mirror image of what foreign brands need to do coming into India. And the IT services majors, TCS, Infosys and Wipro, have built decades of trust abroad through consistent delivery rather than campaign-led branding alone.
“What Indian brands carry well is a strong service orientation. It runs deep culturally and it cuts across industries.”
Corinna: That resonates a lot with good managers, and it might explain why they're conservative with marketing budgets in the first place – they know they need to deliver on the ground before they talk about it.
Jagruti: Exactly. That's foresight, not timidity. In a new market, the proof has to land before the promise.
The Special Case of Highly Regulated Markets
Corinna: One last angle: highly regulated markets. In my own conversations in the APAC region about companies expanding into Europe, Europe was often at the very bottom of the list – partly because relationship-building works differently here, and partly because of regulation. How should companies, especially in regulated industries like pharma and healthcare, prepare for a highly regulated market?
Jagruti: The multinationals I've worked with in pharma and logistics are mature players who have been through the cycles, so regulatory or geopolitical shifts rarely blindside them. But surprises may still land: a new regulation, a sudden ruling on a specific molecule. At that point brand strategy folds into crisis communication. Preparedness is what separates the companies that absorb the shock from the ones that get defined by it.
In pharma and healthcare specifically, regulation changes the brand-building math entirely. Emotional storytelling alone doesn't work, because trust has to be earned simultaneously from patients, doctors, regulators and payers, and each of them has a different trust register. What helps most is message coherence: if a regulator or a customer challenges you tomorrow, your story has to hold together across every channel and every country.
The reference case that still holds up decades later is Johnson & Johnson's 1982 Tylenol recall: radical transparency and a full product recall at real short-term cost, which protected long-term trust. Compare that with brands that try to manage a crisis through messaging rather than substantive action. The market can tell the difference.
“If a regulator or customer challenges you tomorrow, your story has to hold together across every channel and every country.”
Corinna: How does that compare to other regulated or trust-heavy sectors you've worked in, like real estate?
Jagruti: Real estate trust is built on the tangible: possession deeds, RERA compliance in India, referral networks. Pharma trust is built on efficacy data and regulatory credibility. Different proof points, same discipline: what you claim has to match what you deliver.
Two shifts are worth watching in pharma. Patient advocacy communities and doctor influencers now shape online perception, so companies have to build a genuine digital trust footprint rather than lean solely on medical rep relationships. And ESG is intersecting with pharma trust: access-to-medicine narratives, pricing transparency, packaging sustainability. Regulators and investors are watching these far more closely than they were five years ago.
Staying “You” Across Every Market
Corinna: And for an Indian multinational operating across markets, how do you keep that narrative coherent globally?
Jagruti: If I'm an Indian multinational, I can't study Europe in isolation. My strategies for the US, Europe, the Middle East, wherever I operate, have to marry into a single narrative and brand architecture that says: this is who we are. The way I communicate can differ by market. The narrative has to stay consistent.
“Because tomorrow, if a crisis hits, whether governance-driven or AI-driven, it's that consistent core that saves you.”
Corinna: I think that's a lovely closing line, and it works both ways: whether you're an Indian company going global or a European company coming into India, it's still you as a company, wherever you show up.
Jagruti: Exactly. You'll see the same “me” in any country. How it's expressed changes. What it is doesn't.
Jagruti Kirloskar is a brand consultant and columnist based in Mumbai. With over two decades of experience leading marketing and communications across real estate, pharma, consulting, BFSI and logistics, she has built brand narratives at the intersection of global strategy and Indian market realities. Her academic grounding spans SIMC, MICA, ARU Cambridge, UK, an exchange at ZHAW Zurich, and an ESG certification from Harvard Business School. She can be reached on LinkedIn.