The India Trap

Three conversations this month. Three global brands. Three different sectors — sportswear, entertainment IP, and an FMCG brand attached to a league property.

All three were asking the same question: "Why isn't India working for us?"

And all three had the same answer sitting untouched in their briefing documents: they built a strategy for India without talking to anyone who actually buys things there.

What follows is the pattern I keep seeing — and what genuinely needs to change.

— Nilesh

There's a version of India that lives in the PowerPoint decks presented in London and New York boardrooms. It has 1.4 billion people, a rising middle class, exploding digital penetration, and a young population hungry for global brands.

That version of India is real. The strategy built from it usually isn't.

India has become the most visited slide in every global growth deck — and the most quietly abandoned market in every revenue forecast. Brands arrive with confidence, spend two or three years not understanding why the numbers aren't moving, and either retreat to a minimal-presence holding strategy or exit entirely — having spent significant money learning lessons that were free if they'd asked the right people first.

Here's what's actually going wrong. Not the version you'll read in a market entry consultant's report—the version you'll recognise if you've been in a room with the people making these decisions.

The most persistent error global brands make is arriving with a product and assuming the demand exists in the form they're used to.

Sports merchandise is the clearest example. A global football club launches an India store. Jerseys at ₹5,000. Premium retail placement. The numbers don't move. The team concludes Indians won't pay for official merchandise.

Wrong diagnosis. The problem isn't price. It's that they skipped the step that comes before it: building the emotional infrastructure that makes someone want to spend ₹5,000.

In mature markets, that infrastructure took decades. The EPL has been building fandom in England since the 1880s. NBA fandom in the US runs three generations deep. In India, you're asking someone to spend premium money on a relationship that's maybe five years old, built mostly through a phone screen. You can shortcut time — but not through pricing or shelf space. You shortcut it through belonging: content, community, and cultural relevance that makes ownership feel like identity, not just consumption.

India is not a market. It is a collection of 28 states, 22 official languages, and enough cultural variation between a Tamil Nadu cricket fan and a Punjab IPL supporter to qualify as entirely separate brand territories.

The brands that fail to treat India as a single consumer. The ones that win ask: Which India are we actually entering?

Puma didn't crack India by running a national campaign. They built credibility in specific cities, through specific communities, through athletes and cultural moments that mattered in those places. The strategy scaled because the foundation was local.

For contrast: a major entertainment IP recently launched a merchandising programme for India with a single national retail partner, English-language packaging, and pricing benchmarked against Singapore. It underperformed. Nobody was surprised except the people who built it.

This one is uncomfortable — but important.

Many global brands structure their India teams to manage the relationship with headquarters: translate briefs, manage approvals, and ensure brand consistency. What they don't hire for is market intelligence — people with the cultural fluency and business relationships to tell London or New York that the brief is wrong.

The result is a local team that's excellent at executing a strategy they privately know won't work, because their incentive structure rewards execution over challenge. By the time the numbers prove them right, the budget is gone and the window has closed.

The best India market entries I've seen share one characteristic: someone in the room had genuine authority to say "we need to do this differently here" — and was listened to. That's rarer than it should be.

India has nearly a billion internet users. A piece of content can travel from Mumbai to Manipur in an afternoon. This creates a seductive illusion: that digital distribution is the same as market penetration.

It isn't. Reach is cheap. Conversion is earned.

Brands that mistake viral moments for market traction end up with impressive campaign metrics and flat revenue. The fan who double-taps your reel hasn't decided to spend money with you. That decision requires a different kind of work — trust built over time, a price they can justify, and a product they can actually get their hands on.

Digital is the entry point of the funnel, not the end of the strategy. The brands treating it as a substitute for everything else will keep producing great analytics and disappointing P&Ls.

Two failure modes. Both driven by the wrong metrics.

The first: a brand enters India with global revenue targets, fails to hit them in year two, declares the market not ready, and leaves. They were measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. Building a licensing market in India is a three-to-five-year exercise. The revenues in year two are not the revenues in year four. The brands that quit early are often the ones that were six months from a turning point.

The second: a brand stays in India indefinitely in minimal-presence mode — thin distributor volume, no real investment, a permanent holding pattern — because exiting feels like admitting failure. This is worse because it blocks the market position without building it.

The discipline is knowing the difference between "this market is hard" and "this strategy is wrong." One requires patience. The other requires a reset.

None of this is new information to the people building India strategies. The challenge is that the incentives inside global organisations often work against the right approach. Short planning cycles, global playbooks, and HQ-centred approval processes all push toward a version of India that is easier to present than to execute.

The brands winning in India right now share a small number of characteristics: local leadership with genuine decision-making authority; fan and community infrastructure built before retail infrastructure; pricing designed for the market they're in rather than the margin they're used to; and patience that their competitors — and sometimes their own boards — don't have.

India is not the market you turn to when Europe and the US are saturated. It's the market that rewards the people who showed up before everyone else — with respect, investment, and enough curiosity to actually learn it.

The PowerPoint version of India will keep disappointing the people who built their strategy from it. The real one is worth the work.

HardToonz has built one of the most quietly impressive creator IP cases in Indian digital media — and almost no one in licensing is paying attention. The animated Hindi-language channel, built around hyper-specific observations of Indian middle-class family life, has accumulated nearly 3.92 million subscribers and 441 million total views across just 36 videos — an average that most full-time creators with catalogues ten times the size would envy. Individual shorts have crossed nine million views by doing nothing more sophisticated than animating the exact arguments, relatives and school experiences that every Indian household recognises.

On Instagram, 280,000 followers have accumulated from just four posts — a follower-to-content ratio that signals an audience pulling toward the IP rather than being pushed content. There is no licensed merchandise programme, no character IP development, no branded product line — just a deeply loyal, culturally specific fan base sitting unmonetised, waiting for someone to build around it. HardToonz is precisely the kind of creator IP that a well-structured licensing partnership could turn into a genuine consumer-product business: the characters are recognisable, the audience is defined, and the cultural specificity that makes it feel niche is exactly what makes it commercially defensible.

This is the Indian creator licensing opportunity in its clearest form — not a question of whether the demand exists, but whether anyone will show up to meet it.

If this issue was useful, the next one will be too. Licensing Radar lands every week — one signal worth your time, written by someone operating in this market.