Destination Branding: Why the ‘Incredible India’ Campaign Failed
The perceived need to create a strong personality and global brand for India led to the development of a branding campaign known as ‘Incredible India’.
In crafting the key elements of the campaign, promoters of the effort realised that it was difficult to establish a clear, precise identity for a diversified country like India — unlike the relative ease of positioning and branding single-product destinations such as the Maldives and Mauritius.
India is a land of contrasts, a combination of tradition and modernity — a land that is at once mystical and mysterious. India is bigger than the twenty-three countries of Europe put together and every single state of India has its own unique attractions.
Therefore, India is a multiproduct country, and so ‘Incredible India’ was designed as the mother brand with the respective Indian states establishing their own brand entity and emerging as sub-brands.
In the campaign, India is depicted as a mesmerizing tourist destination with various aspects of the country’s rich culture, fascinating history, enthralling traditions and so on being highlighted through powerful visuals and information-rich content.
The creativity that was prevalent in the multimedia content for the campaign sought to capture and portray the colour of every aspect of Indian life — including the clothes, spices, and architecture.
The concept was tweaked imaginatively, so “red hot” became the description of chilies drying in the sun, while “pure white” perfectly described the purity of love that the Taj Mahal symbolises. As the former Joint Secretary of India’s Ministry of Tourism, and one of the principal creators of the Incredible India campaign, Amitabh Kant, pointed out, a new brand like ‘Incredible India’ had to out-think rather than out-spend competition.
Kant noted that it was necessary to be intensively creative, focus on the right clientele and ensure that the campaign was featured in select media. Of all the various creative elements that are incorporated in the multimedia content created for the campaign, the brand logo — Incredible !ndia — is especially noteworthy.
This is in the context of the idea that to be truly powerful, a brand must express itself not just in terms of a product benefit, but in terms of a greater socio-economic truth. For instance, Apple Inc. told a brave new world to reject the old order of IBM and “Think Different”, while Nike admonished procrastinating city dwellers across the world to stop making excuses and “Just Do It”, following it up with the brilliant ‘‘swoosh’’ icon, a graphic device that expressed energy and inspired sport without a word.
The ‘Incredible !ndia’ brand logo was designed in the same manner as the foregoing branding endeavours, with the aim of generating active and passionate responses toward the goal of creating a new personality and national brand for India.
The campaign is a multifaceted endeavour that incorporates diverse promotional and marketing strategies and channels. The Ministry of Tourism, as part of its on-going activities, releases print, electronic, online and outdoor media campaigns in the international and domestic markets, under the Incredible India brand slogan. In addition, the Ministry through its overseas offices, organises road shows, Know India seminars, workshops; participates in various fairs, exhibitions and events to promote various Indian tourist destinations and products.
The campaigns include holistic promotion of various Indian tourism products and destinations of the country. From a purely advertising perspective, the selection of media outlets for propagating the Incredible India message was a major challenge for the Indian Ministry of Tourism and the advertising agencies handling the campaign.
The Ministry of Tourism launched an educative sub-campaign named ‘Atithidevo Bhava’, endorsed by the famous Indian actor Amir Khan, with the aim of acquainting ordinary Indians with the right behaviour and etiquette as regards dealing with foreign tourists. Another important aspect of the campaign was the effort to instil a sense of responsibility among local people regarding the preservation of India’s heritage sites and culture and promoting cleanliness and hospitality in the tourist places.
Gains and Shortcomings of the Campaign
The Incredible India campaign was well received by travel industry enthusiasts and tour operators alike. A major surge was also noticed in the tourism sector, leading the country to achieve unexpected growth with regard to international tourist spending. Early evidence indicates that the campaign successfully established India as a high-end tourist destination, generating a 16 percent increase in tourist traffic in the first year. Reports also suggested that, as a direct result of the campaign, India emerged as the fastest-growing market in the Asia-Pacific in terms of international tourist spending.
However, in spite of the relative success of the campaign, some critics point toward a mismatch between the idyllic image of India depicted by the campaign and the reality on ground that tourists encounter in the country — especially in terms of inadequate infrastructure, too few hotel rooms, crowded cities, unsanitary conditions, and violent crime.
Critics also points that the campaign failed to cover the different aspects of India, in terms of the complexity and diversity of the country’s culture, people, geography, and tourist attractions.
The ‘Incredible India’ tagline was also argued as not effectively reflective of the rich differences between several parts of the country. And so, some critics imply that the promoters of the campaign did not fully appreciate the difference between selling a product and selling a multiproduct — in the sense that a country as large and complex as India cannot be successfully marketed using the same strategies applied for smaller, less diversified nations.
It is also argued that the Incredible India campaign does not take full advantage of the power of the Internet — particularly social media — in propagating the message about India’s position as an interesting tourism destination. Although the campaign has a Facebook page and a twitter handle, there is insufficient activity on these platforms to indicate a serious attempt at consistent social media marketing.
Some stats indicate that despite the considerable gains brought about by the Incredible India campaign, India still lags behind many countries in terms of annual tourist visits. A World Bank 2011 report shows that India attracted approximately 6.5 million visitors in previous years, which is a significant improvement from the roughly 2.2 million visitors it used to attract in the late 1990s — prior to the initiation of the Incredible India campaign.
However, for a country as large as India, the number of annual tourist visits is evidently small when compared to countries such as Malaysia (which attracts nearly 25 million tourists), Mexico (23 million), Ukraine (21 million), Thailand (19 million), and Singapore (10 million).
Further comparison with China, which is apparently India’s rival and de facto benchmark, shows the extent to which India’ tourism sector lags behind.
At 57 million foreign tourists a year, China is behind only the United States and France as the world’s most visited country. These figures, while not suggesting that the Incredible India campaign has been an outright failure, indicate that much still needs to be done to establish India as one of the world’s foremost tourism destinations.
