2 Hermès T-shirts Equal a Nano

Hermès recently opened its store in Delhi, their first in India. It carries the hallmark of the famed high fashion French brand. The use of high quality material and appraised hand-craftsmanship drives the price points for Hermès merchandise well into the top end. Not surprising then that Hermès has a t-shirt priced just under Rs50,000.
Interestingly, you could buy a Nano for the price of two such t-shirts. Two highly admired brands worldwide. Hermès has built a global brand with a very high value perception while Nano is applauded for its unparalleled engineering and innovation in the automobile industry.
Hermès is the finest example of brand building on the back of pristine product quality such as the Hermès scarf woven from the silk of 250 mulberry moth cocoons, hand printed and hand stitched. The brand boasts a clientele that includes aristocracy, divas, Hollywood superstars and business czars across the globe. Its famous Kelly bag named after Grace Kelly and the Birkin bag named after the Hollywood actress Jane Birkin promise a stairway to style heaven. The company has never licensed any of its products.
Nano is the poster child of Indian innovativeness. As developed economies looked towards emerging markets for growth, they began to realise that for these highly price conscious and value driven markets, products needed to be designed from scratch and innovative solutions were to be found in the markets themselves. China took it a step further - they used scale and innovative ways to produce goods at rock bottom prices for the rest of the world. Tata Motors set itself the challenge of producing a car at the unheard price of Rs1lakh that would make the Indian dream a reality. In a country of 1bn people, car ownership is a mere 1%. Nano gave the world a blueprint for low priced cars.
More recently, global brands have been rushing to set up R&D labs and innovation centres in emerging markets where there are invaluable lessons to be learnt about price and value. Today, everything about emerging markets makes headlines. Every economic and marketing forum is focused on them.
However, let us not forget that when it comes to building brands, we have a lot to learn from developed economies. There are lessons aplenty; Coca Cola, McDonald's, Microsoft, Nike, Starbucks, Apple, Google, and so on. It is perhaps not too early for us to learn lessons on global brand building.
However, Hermès is perhaps one of the most valuable lessons - how do you create a value perception for your brand where even a somewhat less glamorous and casual piece of clothing like a T-shirt will get consumers to pay half the price of a car even if that car is the cheapest in the world!