Aspiration Nation: India Beckons

Mark Hannant and Aditya Nair:

The UK-India Free Trade Agreement should be ratified in the coming weeks. It hands global communications leaders the most consequential, and complex, cross-border brief of the decade. Success requires a new playbook that’s built on cultural fluency.

The British Government expects the UK-India free trade agreement to give a £25bn annual boost to bi-lateral trade. In a post-Brexit world of stagnation and uncertainty, this offers the UK one of the most promising routes for economic growth in decades. Tariffs are down. Traffic is moving both ways because the deal also encourages Indian companies to invest and innovate in the UK. 

But Indian babus have been busy elsewhere too. The country has since signed free trade agreements with New Zealand, Oman, and the EU. Boardrooms in New York, London, Mumbai, and Auckland are already reviewing investment plans. 

A communications director somewhere is opening an email that says, “What’s our India narrative?” 

You’ll likely receive one soon. Are you ready?

The strategy may differ – establishing a local subsidiary, an acquisition, an R&D centre or a Global Capability Centre, a hiring plan – but the communications’ challenge remains the same. How to craft a story that has the cultural fluency to make it credible in Bristol, Brussels and Bengaluru? 

That fluency comes in many guises. We’ve distilled it into four pillars. These are the things to prepare for:

1. Own the internal story

The fastest way to torch an India announcement is to let the workforce hear about it second hand. 

When a British firm talks about its plans to expand into India, the boardroom gets excited about scale, demographic dividends, and opportunity; the workforce hears offshoring, job losses, and risk. What for some signals growth, others read as threat. 

Without a compelling story, the vacuum will be filled with hearsay and hyperbole. By the time you draft a townhall script, the story has taken root at the watercooler and over pints at the pub. 

You need to own the story, months in advance. AstraZeneca’s framing of its Karnataka R&D expansion as the engine for 20 new medicines by 2030 did not arrive at the press conference. It was rehearsed internally before any external announcement. HSBC’s “test in India, scale globally” line works because it is true and because it was institutionalised in language before the headcount moved. 

Your job is to make sure the internal narrative is written first, defended in the boardroom, and stress-tested by someone whose job is to find the cynical version of the story.

2. Own the investor narrative

India breaks the standard emerging-markets template. Third largest economy by 2030 yet languishing down the rankings for contract enforcement. Vodafone learned this in 2007 when an $11bn acquisition produced a £2bn retrospective tax bill. Diageo took a decade to make United Spirits work after assuming Rajpath (now renamed Kartavya Path) would behave like Downing Street.

Your next earnings call will have two kinds of investors on it: The burnt one’s price India as a long game requiring patient capital; the bold one’s price it as a frontier bet. You owe both a single story that acknowledges both truths. That means writing Atmanirbhar Bharat, production-linked incentives, GST reform and the UPI-enabled ease of transactions into the investor relations script. It means framing India exposure with a systemic approach because most global supply chains already touch India somewhere.

3. Own the ‘localisation’ playbook.

For decades multinational marketing has run on the assumption that a global campaign can be localised for India with a translation budget and a Bollywood star as a brand ambassador. That assumption doesn’t work for today’s young, brand conscious Indian consumers. Netflix won India by commissioning Sacred Games and Delhi Crime and offering a low-cost mobile-only subscription. IKEA earned its place by diching the Scandinavian minimalism in favour of storage solutions for multi-generational joint families living in cramped apartments.

The grammar of aspiration has localised. Cool kids are sporting desi brands. A comms leader who is still approving “global creative with regional translation” is behind the curve and out of touch.

4. Mine India for ideas, talent and credibility.

The most overlooked move in cross-border comms is reversing the direction of influence. The communicator who treats India only as a market to win has already conceded ground to the one who treats India as a place of collaboration, a source of ideas, innovation, talent and credibility the rest of the company can borrow. That second story is harder to write. But it is also defensible, ownable and impossible to copy.

London Stock Exchange Group talks about its India centres as a diversity dividend for the global workforce. SAP’s distributed R&D in India now feeds the global product roadmap. Harvard Business School’s Indian case studies are among its most downloaded globally. These are potent positioning moves.

The corridor is open.

Your goal isn’t a communications brief. It’s a cultural one. Success depends on your ability to set the narrative.

Audit the internal script for classic tells of offshoring and cost-cutting. Build a growth story that’s credible. Rewrite the investor script for an audience split between believers and burn victims. Strike “adapted” from the brand brief on your desk and replace it with “indigenous”. Find the Indian voices in your business and invite them into the conversation. Listen carefully. 

Cultural fluency is the communication function’s territory. Now is the time to step up.

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Co-located in London and Mumbai for the past 18 years, Mark Hannant advises ambitious UK companies entering India and Indian firms building international footprints. His book Midnight’s Grandchildren (Routledge, 2019) examines how a generation of young Indians is reshaping the world’s largest democracy.

Aditya Nair spent ten years building marketing and communications firms in India before founding an AI engineering firm in the UK focused on AI systems for brands and marketeers. He is a Fellow at the Yale Center for Customer Insights.