Just how global are India's non-corporate brands? The list we present is entirely subjective, drawn up on the basis of the not-so-considerable wisdom of our senior editors, and the not inconsiderable wisdom of marketing pros. To test our hypotheses, we commissioned research agency NFO MBL India to conduct a Global Brushstroke survey on each of the brands. The objective was to reveal the awareness level and recall of these non-corporate brands across randomly selected respondents across various countries. Totally, 148 respondents from the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Japan were surveyed. The results have been presented alongside each brand. How to read them? The proportion aware is a measure of how well-known the brand is globally. And the associations indicate what people know them for.

Goa Proportion Aware 44% Associated with: Beaches 19% Other Associations: Tourism, Island, Hippies, Portugese

Kerala Proportion Aware 26% Associated with: Tourism 30% Other Associations: Seafood, Dosa

GOA & KERALA
Land's End
Kerala & Goa are India's best-known holiday brands

Goa is a bit like the tried and tested Maruti 800: relevant but hardly different; well-known but certainly not esteemed; low-priced and, therefore, perhaps easily substitutable. Unlike the Maruti small car, however, the former Portuguese colony enjoys tremendous global recall, being more a household name in Stockholm or Copenhagen than in Surat or Ludhiana. Thanks to the good old rupee, Goa makes for a cheap, long, sun-kissed, lager-filled vacation. Reports indicate that Kashmir, Pakistan and Godhra notwithstanding, chock-full charter flights are readying to touchdown on Goan soil come September. Even in 2001 (as bad a year as they came), Goa managed to attract 2.6 lakh international toursits and earn around Rs 1,000 crore in revenues from tourism. Goa, as it is today, doesn't need much selling. What it needs is some efforts at making it more esteemed.

Kerala gets just about as many tourists as Goa and accounts for less than 3 per cent of the Rs 22,000 crore South Asia earns from in-bound tourism. But it has, arguably, a far more vibrant brand. "Kerala has taken the destination aspect of a travel brand and converted it into an unparalleled brand experience," says R. Sridhar, ceo brand.comm, a brand consultancy. Price is very much a part of the equation, but not all of it as it almost invariably is in Goa's case. The global Kerala brand may be younger than its Goan counterpart, but it is likely to be far more resilient.

Brian Carvalho & Shailesh Dobhal

Proportion Aware 96% Associated with: Monument 44% Other Associations: Beautiful Place, Wonder of the World

THE TAJ MAHAL
Grand Tomb
Ries and Trout couldn't have given the Taj Mahal a better history.

As many foreign toursists visited the Taj in 2001 as did the entire states of Goa and Kerala. "Globally, the Taj's recognition is virtually 100 per cent," says B. Narayanaswamy, Executive Director, Indica Research. From tea to hotels to casinos to a relatively obscure blues musician, everything and everyone has borrowed the Taj name to great effect. The lure of the brand is understandable: with its association with perfection and wild romanticism the Taj marries the physical and the ephemeral to great commercial effect.

It cost Rs 3.2 crore (in 17th century prices) to build the Taj. The monument-one of the seven wonders of the world-earned the Indian exchequer Rs 12.4 crore last year through entry fees, with 75 per cent coming of that from foreign visitors. In terms of what it does to the city of Agra, though, the Taj's simply priceless.

-Shailesh Dobhal

Proportion Aware 16% Associated with: Musician50%

A.R. RAHMAN
World Music
Bombay Dreams could catapult Rahman onto the world stage.

The numbers tell the story of Alla Rakha Rahman's standing in India: 107 million albums sold. International recognition has been nudging him for some time. With Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams, though, Rahman may have arrived. Miramax is taking the show to New York, and the buzz in Chennai (Rahman's base) is that he has signed on for a couple of Broadway musicals. The man himself is busy working on one of the five films he does every year, Rajnikant's Baba. And theatres issuing tokens that people can turn in for the cassettes and CDs when they are released are seeing serpentine queues.

-Nitya Varadarajan

Proportion Aware 14% Associated with: Cricketer 62%

SACHIN TENDULKAR
Sporting Star
His appeal may be restricted, but that could change soon.

A Google search on Sachin Tendulkar returns roughly a tenth of what one on Michael Schumacher does but, "Sachin," says his handler, WorldTel CEO Samir Singh, "is bigger than all sporting legends you can name in terms of the intensity with which people follow his game." "Why," he adds, "so many Americans associate India as the land of Sachin." Spoken like a true agent. But Singh does believe what he says: WorldTel is tying up the loose ends involved in the launch, in the US and in the entire Commonwealth family, of a Sachin range of branded sportswear (including shoes). If that works, the Sachin brand, valued at close to Rs 1,200 crore in India by some estimates, could go truly global. The International Cricket Council claims cricket is now played in 154 countries. Imagine what would happen if people in even a third of that number started seriously following the game. Schumi, Beckham, here comes Ten-dul-karrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

-Shailesh Dobhal

Proportion Aware 9% Associated with: Chess 25%

VISWANATHAN ANAND
Intellectual Appeal
Chess' universality could make Viswanathan Anand the best-known Indian sportsperson, ever.

Cricket has fanatic followers in ten, maybe fifteen countries. Chess has a smaller, but more rabid following in 150. In terms of sheer width of appeal, Viswanathan Anand's reach could make Sachin Tendulkar look like the immensely talented cricketer who lives down the road. The lightning kid's age-he is in his early thirties-and temperament helps. Not since Bobby Fischer has the chess firmament boasted a personality like him-and Fischer was cranky. "What really stands out about Anand," says Kuruvilla Abraham of Chennai-based TNG Sponsorship India which represents Anand (fine, he's paid to say nice things), "is that he is a humorous, friendly, approachable person, completely untouched by his fame and celebrity status". For the record, he may also be one of the three people of note (Newscorp's Rupert Murdoch and Reliance's Mukesh Ambani being the other two) to have appeared on Simi Garewal's chat show on Star World.

It's hard to put a value to the Anand brand. He doesn't do too many endorsements (he did one for NIIT and that fetched him a reported Rs 5 crore) and his net worth is estimated to be Rs 96 crore, as compared to, say, Michael Schumacher's career earnings of $197 million (Rs 965 crore).

Then, how do you value the intangibles: like the fact that the Spanish Prime Minister-Anand lives in Collano Mediano, Spain, see-once named him among the 40 most important people in Spain. Still want to argue about his brand status?

-Subhajit Banerjee

Proportion Aware 17% Associated with: Actor 85%

AMITABH BACHCHAN
Star Value
At 60, Amitabh Bachchan is probably the most global of Indian actors.

Aamir Khan may have a problem with that most-global tag: after all, wasn't Lagaan nominated for the Oscars? So too will Kollywood maharajah Rajnikant who has a huge fan following in Japan. Neither has a wax likeness at Madame Tussauds. And neither figured in a BBC News Online poll on the greatest star of stage and screen of the previous millennium: Bachchan topped it and despite the people who clocked in at #5 (Homer Simpson) and #10 (Govinda), it is an achievement.

There's no debating the man's status as Indian entertainment's #1 brand: he is reported to earn a cool Rs 3 crore a film and film-industry pundits put the value of his brand at close to Rs 200 crore. "No one commands the same recognition as him," gushes Taran Adarsh, Editor, Trade Guide, a Mumbai-based film-industry journal.

That's in India where Bachchan reigns large as corporate India's preferred endorser and celeb-model rolled into one. Globally, there's little, apart from the waxwork and the results of the BBC Poll to show. That could change; Bachchan has expressed an interest to work in Hollywood. "He can be a lot more powerful (as a brand) nationally and internationally," says Jagdeep Kapoor who runs brand consultancy Samsika out of Mumbai. We'll wait

-Abha Bakaya

Proportion Aware 50% Associated with: Indian Film Industry 32% Other Associations: Hollywood in India, largest film producing centre

BOLLYWOOD
B wants to be H
Circa 2002, Bollywood is set to make inroads into the global film biz. Will it?

In 1999 auteur Mani Ratnam's Dil Se became the first Indian motion pic to break into the UK Top Ten. Three others followed, Taal, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and K3G (the last grossed $1 million in its opening weekend in the US and entered the US Top Ten). Baz Luhrman was inspired enough by Bollywood to adapt a song from the Magnificent-Sevenesque China Gate for Moulin Rouge. Then Lagaan, Monsoon Wedding (one of the ten highest earning foreign pics in the US), Devdas, and Bombay Dreams happened. And a brand that accounts of sales of a not inconsiderable $100 million in the US-purely from DVD sales, rentals, pay TV, and live shows-had arrived. The big worry is that Occidental interest in this typically Asian sight-and-sound spectacle is but a passing fancy. "Bollywood's appeal," says Komal Nahata, Editor, Film Information, a Mumbai-based trade journal, "is restricted to Indians and Asian abroad." "But it has potential." That it does and Egypt, declares Kiran Khalap, founder of brand consulting firm Chlorophyll, offers a glimpse of the possible. "People spend their entire disposable income on Hindi films." There are the usual problems, of course: of identity-is Bollywood just about three hour song-and-dance fiestas-and of professionalism. "We need to be more professional in our approach," admits actor and director Anupam Kher. "Just having money doesn't work anymore." Part of that professionalism will have to be expended on the sourcing of funds: the underworld's connection to Bollywood financiers is fairly well-known but rarerly documented. Despite all this, the $3.5-billion industry-the global film industry is worth a staggering $300 billion-is among the most global Indian brands.

-Abha Bakaya

Proportion Aware 50% Associated with: IT/Silicon Valley 27%

BANGALORE
Soft Appeal
Technology has given Bangalore a brand cadence all its own.

Rs 9,000 crore in software exports. Visits, in the past 24 months, from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and Communist Party strongman Li Peng, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, and Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. ''Delhi is the political capital of India and Mumbai may be its commercial capital,'' says Vivek Kulkarni, it Secretary to the Government of Karnataka, ''but Bangalore is the infotech capital, a symbol of the country's new economy prowess.''

Bangalore is also, arguably, India's best known business brand. ''Whenever there is talk of technology, specifically, software, India, and increasingly, Bangalore's name automatically pops up,'' explains V. Ravichander, CEO, Feedback Consulting, a city-based research and consulting firm. He isn't exaggerating the case: Wired magazine gave the city the Boomgalore monicker, and Newsweek ranked it among the top 10 tech cities around the world.

Part of Bangalore's brand equity comes from the companies located there. Every tech MNC worth its name has a presence in the city. And Infosys and Wipro are not unknown in international corporate circles. ''Bangalore is a recognised name internationally,'' says Infosys ceo Nandan Nilekani. And the local government proudly claims that Bangalore is Asia's fastest-growing city; its population has increased 600 per cent over the past 40 years. Boomgalore it is.

-Venkatesha Babu

Proportion Aware 91% Associated with: Meditation 56% Other Associations: Mind Control

YOGA
Extension Brand
Yoga may be the most global Indian brand of them all.

You can't get any more global than the cover of Time magazine. And you can't any more marquee than Julia Roberts, Madonna, Sting, Angelina Jolie, and Jane Fonda (all die-hard yoga enthusiasts). Almost 15 million Americans include some form of yoga in their exercise regimen, and a $70-million yoga merchandise industry has mushroomed. Anyone for prana pants? It isn't just the US: from Gibraltar to Belize and Israel to Luxembourg, yoga schools and centres can be found all over the world. There are 180 Iyengar yoga schools around the world. Sivananda Ashram boasts a 250-acre facility near Montreal. And Kripalu Center runs the US' largest yoga school. It'll take some contortion for any other brand to emulate that.

-Vinod Mahanta

GURUS
Brands of God
Gurus have shaped the India-view of many global free spirits.

Proportion Aware 25% Associated with: Meditation 37%	Proportion Aware 7% Associated with: Ashram 37%	Proportion Aware 19% Associated with: Spiritual leader 37%

Spirituality sells. Just ask Satya Sai Baba, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Osho, Swami Chinmayananda, and Srila Prabhupada (he who founded ISKCON, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness). Each has built a multinational corporation that is the envy of lesser corporates. Ravi Shankar's Art of Living foundation has a presence in 135 countries. The Puttaparthi Godman has 1,200 Sai Baba centres in 137 countries. And ISKCON boasts 300 temples, 40 rural communities, 26 schools, and 40 restaurants in 71 countries. That's as global as they get. "Indian gurus are distinctive brands. In an area of generic offering, many have been able to carve out distinctive territories. They offer virtually trademarked 'paths' to salvation," says Alok Nanda, CEO, Alok Nanda Communications, a Brand Consultancy.

It's hard to put a value to the empires of these godmen (Sai Baba's is valued at Rs 2,500 crore; Ravi Shankar's at Rs 500 crore). It's harder to estimate their brand value: who's to assess God? The new millennium has brought with it a rising tide of disillusionment among erstwhile believers. That has translated into lawsuits against several gurus, but what the heck, even the Catholic Church is under threat.

-Vinod Mahanta