Measuring the True Potential of Lifestyle Brands in India: A Consumer-Level Scale for Existing and Potential Investors(CL-LBSi)

Abstract

It is evident that among more than 5000 Indian lifestyle brands, only a few brands have created
true lifestyle brand image in their employees, investors, competitors, and consumer’s minds,
and the trueness level of a majority of Indian lifestyle brands is still in question. The majority
of developing and developed Indian lifestyle brands assume that the success of a lifestyle brand
is measured basis the revenue or profit they generate and are unaware of implicit long-term
strategical benefits of creating a true lifestyle brand image in consumer’s minds. In India, the
lifestyle category has also become one of the most sought-after categories for many start-up
entrepreneurs. Just because there is an evident gap for a certain lifestyle product category in
the market and just attempting to fill such a gap does not guarantee sustainable success. India
indeed is one of the countries with consumers belonging to the widest range of Religions,
Regions, Languages, Sub-Cultures and Economic backgrounds which makes it very difficultfor any lifestyle brand to own a true lifestyle brand image at National level and makes itfurthermore important for them to be more careful and efficient in ensuring adaptation of rightconsumer-level evaluation techniques and tools to regularly measure a brand’s the truepotential in attaining a sustainable profitable stage of its evolution. Both new and existinglifestyle brands in India inevitably require investors to fund their journey of attaining the finalstage of evolution which is known as a sustainable profitable stage. However, in the absenceof any inputs-driven consumer-level measurement instruments, investors are in a quandary togauge, estimate and forecast the true potential of lifestyle brands in India from the consumerpoint of view before they make any investment decisions and usually most of the investorsfollow traditional brand equity or valuation methods which are mostly skewed toward outputdriven measures and sometimes they are misleading. In this exhaustive empirical study, wehave studied a few select lifestyle brands, investors and investments to identify 68inputs-basedsub-elements across 4 key elements and 3 dimensions to design a simple consumer-levelinstrument named as CL-LBSi, which would measure the true potential of a lifestyle brand inIndia irrespective of the brand’s current age in the Indian retail market.