Decoding Indian millennials for a global home-appliance brand
PROJECT BRIEF
Help a multinational home appliances corporation understand millennial lifestyle preferences in the Indian landscape, and how different they are from traditional baby boomer and Gen X value systems to articulate design strategies for their refrigerators division.
OUTCOMES
Sociocultural consumer trends relevant to the Indian millennial lifestyle, key design directions, and context-specific functional and aesthetic implications for the internal Industrial Design team to leverage in their design process.
Millennials –– individuals born between 1980-99 — have grown up in a fast-changing globalized society and, contrary to their parents and grandparents, have had to adapt with the burgeoning demands of globalization, increasing urbanization, and changing social climate in addition to the developmental challenges in their transition to adulthood.
The socioeconomic context that this generation grew up in — access to education, healthcare, and a global outlook — makes the current cohort quite distinct from the previous generations and from most of their rural peers. What does this mean for this population? Emerging adulthood may look and mean something different in India than in the West.
A leading consumer electronics brand approached Turian Labs to discover the lifestyle trends of an Indian millennial, such that they are able to answer one simple question: How are Indian millennials different from their predecessors and global peers?
The annual practice of forecasting industry-agnostic ‘Megatrends’ by Turian Labs assisted the interdisciplinary team of design researchers, trend forecasters and industrial designers to generate key hypotheses that were validated and enriched by in-depth interviews with expert academicians and practitioners with decades of experience belonging to various domains like fashion, furniture, food, architecture, media, and social sciences across 4 cities.
“They don’t chase the brand or the brand logo. They chase the purpose. One has to keep reinventing the brand.”
Turian Labs facilitated an immersive co-creation workshop with client design teams to prioritize and augment emergent design directions that were impactful for consumers and Indian in its nature. The workshop produced meaningful strategies to leverage trends intelligence in the client design process while also creating stakeholder buy-in.
The culmination of design research, synthesis, workshops, and Megatrends intelligence manifested itself into a rich media knowledge repository which illustrated strategies to leverage functional and aesthetic concepts in key scenarios of refrigerator usage in the context of the Indian millennial.