From Made in India to Made for the world

As India celebrates another Independence Day, the idea of Brand India is undergoing a significant transformation.

For decades, India was seen primarily as a vast market, a global services powerhouse and, increasingly, a manufacturing destination. Today, a more confident India is beginning to ask a different question: Can we create brands, ideas and intellectual properties in India that the world wants to consume?

That, I believe, should define the next chapter of Brand India.

We are already seeing the beginnings of this shift. Tata and Mahindra have built international businesses. Royal Enfield has evolved into a global lifestyle brand while retaining its distinctive identity. Indian brands across technology, fashion, hospitality, food and consumer products are increasingly looking beyond the domestic market.

But the opportunity is larger than exporting Indian products.

We need to build Indian brands for global consumers.

South Korea offers perhaps the most powerful example of what is possible. K-pop did not become a global phenomenon simply because Korean music travelled overseas. Korea systematically built an ecosystem around its music, cinema, television, beauty and fashion, transforming culture into intellectual property and intellectual property into global influence.

India has an even deeper reservoir of culture to draw from.

Our cinema, music, food, fashion, wellness traditions, festivals, art and storytelling already enjoy enormous recognition internationally. The challenge is to convert that familiarity into brands and IPs that India creates, owns and scales globally.

We have seen glimpses of what this can achieve.

IIFA took Indian cinema beyond Indian shores and created a travelling global property around Bollywood, taking the celebration of Indian entertainment to cities across the world. Indian properties and cultural platforms across music, literature, fashion, food and entertainment have similarly demonstrated that an idea originating here can find relevance well beyond its home market.

The next generation must take this much further.

Why shouldn’t India create a music property that travels across continents? A wellness brand with destinations around the world? A food, fashion or cultural IP that becomes an international franchise? Or an entertainment format conceived in India and licensed across markets?

Crucially, these cannot be designed only for the Indian diaspora. The real breakthrough will come when an Indian IP is consumed in London, Seoul, Dubai or New York simply because it is world-class, not because it is targeted at Indians living there.

That requires a change in mindset.

Indian businesses and creators must start thinking globally much earlier. We need to invest not merely in products and individual events, but in ideas that can become enduring intellectual properties, capable of travelling across markets, languages, platforms and generations.

There is also a larger national opportunity here.

Countries increasingly build influence through culture as much as commerce. America has Hollywood. South Korea has K-pop and K-drama. Japan has anime and gaming. These are enormously successful industries, but they are also powerful expressions of national identity and soft power.

India possesses the cultural depth to create its own global movements.

Make in India showed the world what India can manufacture. The next ambition must be to show the world what India can imagine, create and own.

Brand India will truly have arrived when we are not only one of the world’s largest markets for international brands, but also one of its most prolific creators of global ones.

This Independence Day, that should be our ambition: Indian ideas. Indian ownership. Global consumers.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.