Amul is today one of India’s most beloved brands, but had it not been for the insistence of its founder, it might have been called something that sounded a lot more western.
Dr. Verghese Kurien, the architect of India’s White Revolution, once recounted the story of how Amul got its distinctly Indian name. His words offer a glimpse into a time when Indian brands struggled for recognition in a market dominated by western-sounding names. Kurien’s insights are particularly relevant because even 75 years after Amul was named, many Indian companies still keep western-sounding names for their brands.
“When we started manufacturing products like butter and milk powder and baby food, it had to have a trade name,” Kurien began, explaining the early days of Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union, which later became Amul. “Now, how to have a trade name? The government’s Delhi Milk Scheme had been producing butter for the last 30 years and nobody in Delhi knew its name. That is because it was named ‘Delhi Doodh Kendra Makhan’. Now, who will go to a shop and ask for ‘Delhi Doodh Kendra Makhan’?” he said.
He continued, highlighting the impracticality of such a cumbersome and regionally specific name. “Clearly, I cannot also call our butter ‘Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union’… nobody will buy. That is not marketing,” he said.
So Kurien got a team together to think of a new name, and they came up with Amul — Anand Milk Union Limited. It sounded like Amulya, which means “invaluable” in Sanskrit. But his marketing experts weren’t convinced with the choice. “You cannot use this name. How can you sell anything in India with an Indian name. No respectable Indian will buy it” Kurien remembers them telling him.
“You have to call it (something like) Prince of Wales butter, or Lord’s butter, or Express Butter, or Paulson Butter,” the marketing experts told him. “All names must give the impression it is made by foreigners and is probably a foreign product. No Indian buys anything that’s Indian,” they told him.
“This is unfortunately the legacy inherited by us due to colonialism,” Kurien says. “But I said that our character as a cooperative demands that we have an Indian name,” Kurien told them. The marketing experts warned that his name could fail. “This is the first time that an Indian name is being put on a butter. You may not succeed in selling it,” they told him.
But Kurien backed his convictions, and put his credibility on the line with his name choice. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t sell it. That’s the name we’re keeping,” he said.
That’s how Amul was born, and eventually became not only a national hit, but is now the 8th largest dairy company in the world. In India, though, many companies still create foreign-sounding brands because they’ll appeal to Indian consumers — brands like Peter England, Louis Phillipe and John Jacobs are fully Indian, but have western-sounding names to sound foreign. Amul’s name, though, hasn’t kept it back — in fact, its Sanskrit-inspired name is now even sold in many foreign markets including the US. And Kruriens insistence in the 1950s on an keeping an Indian name, against market trends, led contributed to the creation of an iconic brand that not only embodies the spirit of cooperative enterprise but resonates with Indian and international users alike.