There are quite a few cultural challenges we will face out Ocho Chocolate when trying to get our product going in Chennai. One of which is the language barrier. This is because the most commonly spoken language in Chennai is Tamil, which is not much use to us when all of our branding and writing on our products is in English. We would have to have our ingredients and other write ups on our product written in Tamil for our products which would be sent over to Chennai. This is because if were to send over our products how they are now in English, locals in Chennai may just look past it as they may if issues with it such as wondering how much sugar is in it and otherthings. We will need to adapt to the market situation in Chennai, as we want to make our product as appealing as possible for the people in this market.
Another cultural challenge we will face when trying to enter the market of Chennai is trying to get around the corruption which is in place in India. This is due to the BBC reporting back in 2015 about how hard it is for small foreign businesses trying to establish a market for their business in India due to middle men in India wanting something extra to get them to do the work. This is because Indian locals know they are able to try and exploit foreign businesses, as they don’t know much about the culture and aren’t big enough to do anything about it. We will need to keep this in mind, because we will have to way up whether or not it is worth paying a fee which isn’t necessarily legal, but if it means actually getting our business set up then we may just have to do it. However, this goes against our beliefs as a company, so I’d assume we would just wait it out and hope the work gets done on its own time.
A third cultural challenge which we will need to overcome is finding a price which fits with what the people are willing to pay for chocolate. This is because the price of chocolate in India is far lower due to being produced differently to ours. This allows them to be cheaper, as they also have factories producing it in India. We need to some how sell our product as being worthwhile to purchase, as people in India aren’t usually willing to spend so much money on goods which can be seen as luxury goods.
These are three challenges which we at Ocho need to consider and find ways to overcome when we look to set up a market in Chennai.
Here is a link to the BBC article which was mentioned in the blog:
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150826-the-challenges-of-setting-up-shop-in-india
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