Selling services to Indian consumers

It’s not a cakewalk for companies to sell services to Indian consumers. Many say India is a land of opportunities; I say it’s a land of People. And when people are available in plenty, selling a service offering to them is extremely challenging. Not because there is no value to the offering, but because we are not used to appreciating the value of a service. I feel we might take another decade to increase our appetite for services. There is a strong reason why we have been behaving the way we have, for the past few decades. When we buy a TV or a bike or any other new product, we get emotional. We get personal with it and we take it into our lives. We think about it all the time (at least for the initial few days). We talk to it and we even dream about it. That’s when it starts playing with us; we become its toy (how ironic!)

There is no right or wrong to this. This happened to the West a century ago. That’s the reason we have some of the greatest inventions like Steam Engine,  Airplane, Automobiles and so on. They felt the same and thus worked on innovations for many decades in the past. Thomas Edison couldn’t stop with one experiment, because he was too emotional about his experiments.  He went to the extreme of living in a laboratory. That is when the experiments started using Edison for their inventions. They made him instrumental; and rest is history.

How I wish there is a button to repeat history. I would want India to take the baton forward and start the next wave of inventions, before this craze and craving dies its own death. By the way, it is not something new to us. Our great grandfathers have created history long time ago, Aryabhatta who invented ‘ZERO’, Sushruta who doctored medicine way back, CV Raman in Science, Tagore, APJ and many more inventors in recent past. One of the key differences that I noticed between India and America is that Americans have a pattern that we lack. They have a trend and they keep enhancing it. We need to improve our pace - our pace of thinking, acting, implementing and improving. It’s definitely easier said than done, but we need to start somewhere.

Indians are always in millions! A million fans for a movie star, on Facebook for a large cause, attending a political meeting, etc. The problem doesn’t end there; everybody has a Demi God. - Amitabh, Shah Rukh, Salman, Rajinikanth and many others. The problem here is that we are a billion people moving in million directions. We dig 1 meter deep at a hundred places in search of water instead of digging 100 meters at one place!! Our educational system talks about different syllabi - State, CBSE, ICSE, IB and each international school with its own affiliation to some University in US or UK.  We always have a problem of plenty. We want to do more in less time; and we end up doing nothing. We look for quick results and end up behaving like Zombies at times. Having said that, I admit that we also learn from our mistakes and take the right path.

Look at the houses in the US or Australia. Many of them are huge, some running into many acres. The people living here might have some of the best products at home like a 70 inch home theatre, oven, multi door fridge, Wi-Fi, security system, etc., but the same people have to do everything on their own when it comes to chores around the home -right from getting something repaired, driving to the grocery store, clearing up the lawn, laundry, etc. It’s exactly the opposite in India. We have people all around us to wash clothes, clean utensils, get the groceries, etc. But we might not even have a fancy phone at home. That’s the way we are and that’s how we were raised. Things are changing and we will see a huge queue for the next XBOX launch in India!

Going back to the point that I am making is same – Selling services to Indian customers is not a cakewalk. It’s difficult; needs a lot of thought, innovation and much more.