Club Med India Entry: Research-Led Market Expansion
Used layered consumption and infrastructure data to expand Club Med's India consideration set from one city to four viable coastal destinations
Ujjwal Priydarshi
Assistant Manager at Invest India
From their time as
Assistant Manager
Invest India โข 2022
Overview
Ujjwal worked with Club Med on their India entry at a point when the brand had a very specific and narrow brief: a site within two hours of Mumbai, with international airport access, beachfront land, and a specific acreage. India is a hard market for any international operator to read quickly, and Club Med's constraints were keeping them anchored to a single metro corridor.
The Story
Ujjwal worked with Club Med on their India entry at a point when the brand had a very specific and narrow brief: a site within two hours of Mumbai, with international airport access, beachfront land, and a specific acreage. India is a hard market for any international operator to read quickly, and Club Med's constraints were keeping them anchored to a single metro corridor.
His first move was to understand the drivers behind the brief. He looked at Club Med's expansion patterns across Asia, including Oman and Indonesia, to understand what physical and demographic characteristics they were actually optimizing for. The Mumbai constraint was a proxy for something more specific: proximity to high-income consumers, infrastructure reliability, and a leisure-quality natural environment.
With that framing, he built a state-by-state and city-level analysis covering GDP per capita, branded hotel inventory by city, social infrastructure quality, employment sector composition, and demographic profiles across major coastal destinations. The goal was to show Club Med that the characteristics they were looking for in Mumbai existed in other Indian markets.
The data shifted their position. Club Med moved from considering only Mumbai to evaluating four coastal destinations: Karnataka, Kerala, Puducherry, and Jammu and Kashmir (with Gujarat excluded due to its no-alcohol policy). Ujjwal and his team are currently assisting them with a site in Puducherry and a ski resort in Jammu and Kashmir.