India’s growing middle-class and the country’s rapid adoption of technology and mobile communications presents marketers with strategic opportunities, although they must be careful in their execution, a leading marketing executive has said.

According to Sunder Madakshira, head of marketing at Adobe India, marketers will need to rethink the way they communicate with consumers as India progresses to become a $3 trillion economy.

He told attendees at the recent India Digital Summit in New Delhi that these new opportunities can be found in three main areas, which he defined as math (or technology), the middle-class and mobile. (For more, read WARC’s report: India’s trillion dollar opportunity.)

Referring to the first, he said: “We have a very long past, but that has not deterred India from looking at the future and embracing the new. I have observed in my career that India as a market adopts technologies much faster than most other geographies – and that is our big strength.”

He then highlighted the purchasing power of India’s burgeoning middle-class, which the National Council for Applied Economic Research estimates will account for about 547 million people, or 41% of the total population, by 2025.

“Today, the Indian middle-class is a huge number of educated people who are coming up with good economic strength, they are able to get their aspirations fulfilled and they look at the future with very different eyes from the past,” Madakshira said.

And it is the mobile phone which has helped to fuel these aspirations, he added, while cautioning that it is essential that marketers are upfront about how consumers’ data is used.

“Consumers need to know that they can trust how their data will be used. They will want to know if sharing of data will affect their privacy, or bring them harm in the future. So we as marketers have to be very transparent on how data will be used,” he said.

“If we aren’t transparent, consumers will find it very difficult to trust the brand, forget buying it. Secondly, technology has to be future-ready, at least for the medium-term future, so you are able to adapt to change very quickly.”

Sourced from WARC