Research

Demographic Data For Popular Brands in India 

I took 12 popular brands in India, some aspirational, some that you would think only appeal to older people with money and others that overwhelmingly appeal to females in the west. The male dominance is clear to see in the chart below. Based on the data below, we can draw a conclusion that Indian men like finance, talking, traveling, driving and of course drinking. Surprisingly, given their dominance across all other brands, men leave Surf Excel to the ladies. Shoppers Stop is another brand that has a much higher percentage of female fans than other Indian focused Facebook pages. 

It’s well known that Facebook overwhelmingly appeals to the younger generation in India. Older people are either not interested in engaging with brands or view the social network as a waste of time. The graph below illustrates just how much Facebook is used by younger people. People over the age of 30 are entirely missing and this could have ramifications for Facebook wanting to attract big advertisers because the age group with money to spend are simply not using the site.

It’s very interesting to see so many people ‘Liking’ brands that you would traditionally associate with an older demographic. For example, Yatra, the online travel portal has close to 70% of fans under 21. How many people under 21 are going to be booking flights and hotels? For other brands like Pepsi, MTV and KFC it’s understandable that so many fans are in the younger age bracket. ICICI is one of the stand-out brands here because it has 72% of fans in the 21-30 age range – maybe a result of all those corporate salary accounts! Vodafone too, has a high proportion of 21-30 year olds, which is unusual when compared to the rest of the telecom sector.

Given that in India, Facebook is the opium of the younger generation, it’s unsurprising that the vast majority of fans identify themselves as being single. It’s also unsurprising that so many people don’t provide their relationship status when compared with Facebook users in the West. Fans of Vodafone are more forthcoming with their relationship status and this is reflected in the higher number of single and married fans. Both Surf Excel and ICICI seem to appeal to those who society considers as settled: older and married. 

Another way in which the relationship demographics differs so much from the West is the number of people that identify themselves as being engaged. In the West it is typically 5-10% of fans, in India it is less than 1%. Again, this could be down to the vast majority of fans being young, it could also, in part, be due to the much shorter engagement periods in India compared to the West.

Trying to find the reasons why so many young people in India Like brands that are not targeted towards them would probably require a indepth study by itself. However, anecdotal evidence from the conversations I’ve had with younger people here suggest that they don’t ‘Like’ a page to engage with the brand, but more to present a certain image of themselves to their friends. Or, in other words, by ‘liking’ certain brands, it helps develop their own personal brand.

About the Author: I'm a data junkie, social media addict and an all round Internet geek. I love researching and analysing social media data to discover trends and insights which I can then share with others. I head up the marketing operations for Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company which provides competitive intelligence for global brands and answers the question "is that good?". Originally from England, I have lived in Chennai for the last 4 years.