When you are putting your hard-earned money into tech, especially the ones that can’t be bought on the spur of the moment, you obviously want to get the best for your dough. Especially with audio products, where the preferences of consumers are so subjective that without experiencing a product in person, it is really difficult to separate the average great from the personal best. Sound preferences of consumers across the spectrum are so diverse that we cannot go with a one size fits all approach. You can make educated guesses to a certain extent by conducting market research and surveys, but at the end of the day, it remains a guess. Nothing else. Albeit one backed by research and statistics, of course. And, in a country like India, where the consumer base and spectrum of atomised choices is massive, making these guesses and decisions becomes even more tricky for audio brands.
With speakers, headphones, and TVs fitted with AIWA speakers being some of the best ones coming into the Digit Test Centre, I was curious to understand the philosophy of a brand when it enters the Indian market, especially for a foreign brand. In order to get some insight into these areas, I spoke with Mr Ajay Mehta, Managing Director at AIWA India. I picked his brains about AIWA's return to India after a brief hiatus, its perspectives into delighting the end user, the design philosophy of their branded products, and then some.
“We are doing the full line of beautiful audio speakers. We are positioned squarely against BOSE, Marshall, and some products of JBL,” emphasised Mr Mehta, while commenting on the importance of audio in AIWA's business in India.
When stepping foot back in India, AIWA has maintained its focus on two categories – audio and TVs. He added that even their Television business, which started in August 2022, has also gained a lot of importance in their product portfolio. “It is a very important and crucial part of the AIWA portfolio because it is still a COCO business,” he explained further. COCO, in case you don’t know, means Company Owned, Company Operated.
Now, when a brand is trying to enter the audio-visual segment, as prefaced earlier, providing the right experience to the consumers also becomes really important. Because “sound is very subjective," as Mr Mehta rightly mentions. Naturally, this subjectivity (or inherent challenge) also extends to TVs as well. To make sure that AIWA's consumers get the best experience that they can, the brand is rolling out a new initiative called ATP. It is a joint venture between AIWA and its partner stores where, along with offerings from other brands, products from AIWA would also be showcased. However, this will not be a regular showcase. There will be special arrangements made in the stores, which will aid the consumers in making educated choices when buying the brand's speakers and TVs. As mentioned by Mr Mehta, AIWA's products are made keeping a global audience in mind, and are designed by professionals in Japan, which makes initiatives like this, which is all about delivering the right customer expectation, is even more important.
As a part of this ATP initiative, store personnel will also be trained to make sure that they are able to handle all the queries put forth by the consumers, according to Mr Mehta. He further added, "Before Diwali, we hope to finish 100 ATPs across India. I think we started the program on the 1st of April. I am not sure exactly but I think we are at about 15. Television has also started, and we are almost in all the southern states in terms of our presence. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, we have well covered. Tamil Nadu has just started. Karnataka is going to start hopefully this month. Kerala has started."
Brands in India have had experience centres for a while now. Sony has its own line of Sony Centre stores, where they have an expansive collection of products. However, with AIWA going head to head with its competition in a multi-brand store, it will be interesting to see how they fare in this space.
AIWA's speakers have done well in the last few years, with their MI-X330 Bluetooth Speaker also winning our Digit Zero1 Award 2022 for the Best Bluetooth Speaker. And one thing that has stood out in all their speakers is their design language. Multiple speakers in AIWA's portfolio have a retro-themed design. Naturally, I was curious to know what drives brands to go for this, as we have seen others in this space too, making speakers that are designed to look as if they were straight out of the 1990s.
Mr Mehta explained the reason behind this, revealing how brands try to keep pace with their audiences, "You see, because the generation which remembers the AIWA brand, that generation will relate to this kind of design immediately. So if you look at a product like our Enigma, which is a ₹75,000 product, the design of that is a very good combination of retro and modern. It looks retro from afar, but you go close to it and you know, you see the number of controls and the number of cordless mics which connect wirelessly. Then you realise, oh, it's got a lot of tech in it." He definitely made sense to our Digit’s millennial editors, who get nostalgic at the drop of a hat around any discussion about the good old days of 80s-90s tech!
But nostalgia isn’t the entire strategy behind AIWA’s throwback retro design language, as Mr Mehta mentioned that the design of the speakers from the brand also gave them an identity of not being party speakers. They are speakers that cost a lot and are meant for a 'premium listening experience'. This matters for the target audience as well, if you think about it, who wouldn’t just want to buy a good-looking retro toy, but expect their nostalgic trip to sound better than the best as well.
This goes to show that the subliminal element of a product's design also holds a lot of importance. If you are reading this on Digit.in, chances are that you have looked at laptops. Now, depending on the positioning of the laptop, its design might vary a lot. Let's say there are two laptops – one targeted at hardcore gamers, the other is targeted at business professionals who like to have powerful hardware to wind up their games with a game or two. If they were to pick up laptops, the hardcore gamer would prefer a laptop that has a quintessential gamer aesthetic, RGB lights everywhere. The second individual would go for a laptop that does have powerful hardware under the hood but does not scream out loud – I AM GAMER; for example, the Razer Blade line of laptops. Design matters a lot!
Let us know what you think of the importance of design and consumer-brand connect in tech by writing to us at editor@digit.in, and for similar stories, keep following Digit.in.