In Search Of Consumer Connect

New consumer product companies get cracking.

- Goutam Das

THE PACKAGING ISN’T subtle. One of them borders on comic art with ‘Eargasm in the box’ printed. The products themselves can be loud with a definitive bass bias. That’s when EDM or electronic dance music gets heady. The 20-year-olds love that.

Three-year-old boAt sells earphones, headphones, speakers, travel chargers and cables. Yet, the start-up loathes to be called an electronics company; it prefers the tag of a ‘lifestyle brand’, a cool one that makes fashionable stuff such as cables in camouflage or denim colours for Apple products, portable speakers that are stone-shaped and not the usual egg-shaped, and Bluetooth headsets designed to complement those with a sense of “style, fashion, and craziness”.

Aman Gupta, boAt’s co-founder, who calls himself ‘Captain’, identified the company’s positioning early. Some companies were playing on price, while a few played on perception — top-end audio companies that market quality of sound. “We are somewhere in between,” says Gupta, who started boAt with Sameer Mehta. “Products for 18 to 24-year olds… that was the whitespace.” He implies that no one was really targeting this demographic.

If you survey the recent start-up landscape in India, you will discover many trends, and sub-trends. Foodtech has made a revival, so has grocery. Business-to-business companies are going strong, as are companies that are Artificial Intelligence (AI) -driven and those in fintech. There is a whole bunch of real estate start-ups, in the form of co-working spaces. Nonetheless, there is something about consumer product brands and their fast-paced growth. They are cool, innovative, have well-targeted products, and are ready to disrupt markets dominated by the established, in many cases multinational, companies. Many of them cater to a new consumer, the one Gupta talks about.