Trash the caricature

MARKETING: James McGregor says "India Everywhere" was good, but India can market itself across the world better.

"Come to India, protect your intellectual property." This, according to James McGregor, is the adline India ought to use to draw global FDI "" though the Davos effort left him quite impressed too.

"The world is fed up with China on IPR," adds the founding partner of BlackInc, a China-focused business advisory, and author of One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China, a guide book he presumably doesn't expect to see pirated copies of in India.

China, McGregor contends, is vastly better marketed than India. Go to China, everything gleams. In contrast, "India looks like a war zone". But China is operating top down, and India is working its thoughtful way up "" now with unity of purpose too ("In 2000, I said 'what a waste of incredible talent', but that's changed.").

McGregor, a China expert who knows more than a smattering of mandarin, relishes the prospect of an Indo-China economic rivalry. "China is feeling very arrogant these days," he says, "It has a combination of a superiority and inferiority complex, and the superiority side is on the rise."

That's interesting. Does communism have anything to do with China's market characteristics? Oh, not at all, he retorts. "The Communist Party of China has nothing to do with communism... India is more communist than China," he offers. If that's not dramatic enough: "The Chinese are capitalist down to their bone marrow."

It's just that they're quite okay with their top-down system, having had one for some 2,000 years. "It's not a collectivist society, it is a conforming society." The status quo, thus, is seen as the stable option, and McGregor doesn't expect anyone to "get up and say, 'Jeez, I want democracy'".

Moreover, China's emergence is an independent phenomenon. "It is modernising, not westernising". The older generation that remembers the Cultural Revolution, in particular, remains deeply suspicious of anything too Western (beyond a few trivialities).

They've seen a few aspects of Western life too, and the very notion of "each man for himself" is enough to "scare the hell out of them".

In any case, adds McGregor, China is a "shame-based" culture ("do it, just don't get caught"), while India is relatively "guilt-based", like America (which works by self-regulatory values).

So a Chinese ad campaign for a cola that turns oral gratification into something the neighbours approve of, for example, need not worry too much about individual value conflicts (as you'd here).

Some things in China, however, are quite simple. The attitude, for example, to money. Or beijin zhuyi, rather "" to the supremacy of money. "China has no ideology," he shrugs, "except getting rich."

On China's glorious future, McGregor remains as bullish as ever, rivalry or no rivalry.

But is India, in his assessment, really up to it? It had better be, says McGregor. And for that, Indian business must figure China out, and fast (with the generous help of his book, of course). "Right now, you're competing against a caricature of China."

Perhaps so. But India does have a strategic edge in its diversity. This can translate into an enhanced ability to understand a wider cross-section of markets around the world.

The caricature, then, goes straight to the trash can.