IAMAI to Promote New-Age Indian Brands in Indian Market

In a bid to promote new age Indian brands across segments such as food, consumer durables, electronics, fashion, FMCG, etc., IAMAI has set up a founders’ community of direct to consumer Indian brands. The unifying features of these brands are that they are digital-first, innovative, competitive, and manufacture or produce in India.

At present there are at least 100 odd such brands in the market and more are emerging every day. These brands are innovative since they cater to a younger and often first-time shopper catering to a niche demand. They are competitive as they have to compete for mindshare and shelf space with large incumbents with deep pockets. They are digital-first catering to the internet using socio-economic segments and taking advantage of the digital infrastructure that has been created in India. Finally, they invariably manufacture or produce goods in India.

The industry at present running with the “founders’ fuel” needs a collective identity to help it charter through complicated government policies and regulations; buy-in from stakeholders such as e-commerce platforms, logistics and payments industry; and also earn lasting customer trust. IAMAI is best suited to execute this three-pronged strategy.

With the help of 35 such brands, it is a small beginning of organizing this potentially powerful business segment by formalizing a committee. The committee is chaired by Aman Gupta, Co-Founder and CMO of boAt audio and co-chaired by Manish Chowdhary, Co-Founder of Wow Skin Science. boAt audio and Wow, Skin Science are multi-million-dollar brands and have established themselves as category leaders by championing the internet-driven business model.

“To ensure a brand continues to do well, it is almost imperative for businesses to enhance their Direct to Customer (D2C) channel. The model enables a brand to listen to the unfiltered voice of their customer and is a natural progression from shifting the online shoppers to buy from the brand's website and own the experience, data, and lifetime value of the customer. The committee will bring the ecosystem together, indulge in knowledge creation, and put forth the best practices in a mission to build internet-driven iconic brands” said, Aman Gupta, Chairman of the IAMAI D2C committee.

Co-chairman, Manish Chowdhary said that the committee will jointly look towards building the consumers’ trust by engaging in better customer communication and other similar initiatives by D2C entities.

It is to be noted that in the current stand-off between India and China, there is a massive wave in favour of Make in India among the Indian consumers and channel partners. Further, the government of India has also stressed upon promoting Indian brands and encouraging Made in India brands. The importance of stressing upon indigenous production was realised when during lockdown, imports from China were completely stalled. Given the spread of virus from China and the shutting down of factories in its aftermath and then again, shutting off of supply chain in India as a process of lockdown impacted the IT industry the most of all, as most of the IT products are China-based. It was then that DQ Channels and DQ Week began to discuss about the importance of Make in India and received an overwhelming response from the IT channel community.