Indian Immigrants

A new week, a new blog, and this week we arrived in India. India has 1.2 billion inhabitants, that means that this country has the second largest nationality in the world. So it is not hard to understand that a lot of immigrants around the globe are from India. When we look a little bit further, we see that Indians are very religious. There are a lot of different religions and believes in the country but the most important one is the Hinduism. More than 80% of the inhabitants are Hindi. Again, it is not very hard to understand that a lot of marketers see this as an opportunity to attract new customers and to gain a lot of profit. 

In Belgium we have a lot of stereotypes. When you ask a Belgian to name the first thing that crosses his mind when you say the words “immigrants from India”, the first thing he will say is, “owner of a night shop”. Stereotypes are also a phenomenon that appears in the marketing world. I discussed it last week shortly when I talked about the Hispanics. But not every company is unknowing. Some businesses keep in touch with the most important days of a religion or nationality. Now we will confirm that with an example. 

When we go back to the Indian immigrants, we know that a lot of them are Hindi. And a very important festivity in the religion is the Diwali. Diwali is also called “Festival of Lights”. It is the equivalent of our Christmas and it is a time to be together with family and friends. 
I have read in an article that two kind of people are waiting for this festivity. On the one hand, the common people who are looking forward to celebrate and spending time together. On the other hand we have the marketers who really don’t want to miss this opportunity to increase their sales. 
Now, when we looked for some examples, we arrived in Canada. Here, Diwali marks also the beginning of the winter. Days are becoming shorter and darkness is falling sooner. A company that is taking advantage of this is Walmart. Their target is to attract new immigrants to buy their clothes for their first winter in Canada. We can see this in the next commercial:

I want to end this blog with a last example, namely Cadbury Schweppes. Besides the famous soda Schweppes, it also makes chocolate packs. And they entered the Indian market successfully by creating the ‘kuch meetha ho jaye’ campaign with a famous spot. (I will not post it on this blog because it is only spoken in Indian). It means “let’s have something sweet” and it has become so successful that this brand replaced the Indian chocolate brands as market leader.

Sources:

- http://quoteendquote.ca/multicultural-marketing-through-cultural-festivals-2/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ivNDf7sISY&list=UL3ivNDf7sISY
- http://blog.diversitymarketingservices.com/2012/did-you-miss-the-garba-diwali-and-eid-start- your-multicultural-planning-for-next-year/
- http://milindmohanpatil.blogspot.be/2010/11/diwali-marketers-delight.html
- http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/India#Religie
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuch_Meetha_Ho_Jaye
- http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadbury_Schweppes
- https://www.google.be/search hl=nl&safe=off&q=kuch+meetha+ho+jaye+cadbury&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.43148975,d.d2k&biw=1600&bih=767&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=Zvo1UerHAoPSPJr0gMAF#um=1&hl=nl&safe=off&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=kuch+meetha+ho+jaye+&oq=kuch+meetha+ho+jaye+&gs_l=img.3...0.0.2.830501.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1c..5.img.kTLkJ2ZQU4U&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.43148975,d.ZWU&fp=2835c25d48ff3d8c&biw=1600&bih=715