What Comes After the End of Incredible India

I wrote a column last month arguing that Incredible India, the tourism brand Amitabh Kant created in 2002, had run its course: India has outgrown the strategic problem the brand was built to solve, which was convincing outsiders the country was worth the trouble. 

The piece generated more response than anything I’ve published this year, and the most common reaction from tourism leaders was some version of: “Okay, if the brand is dead, what do we do now?” This column is my answer, and it has almost nothing to do with marketing.

At our Skift India Intelligence Summit in New Delhi in March, held on background under Chatham House Rules, a senior executive at one of India’s largest OTAs was talking through what drives Indian outbound travel. 

Some were obvious and appear in every strategy deck, like income, awareness, and category affinity. But there was one factor in his data that dwarfed everything else: the absence of friction.