Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADI) is a semiconductor company providing analog bridge to the digital world which offers a range of ground-breaking products by investing 19 percent in R&D. Headquartered in Norwood, Massachusetts, the company has a current market cap of $17.94 billion.

Marketing is always a jigsaw puzzle. One needs to piece together requirements of each age group, gender, cultural and social background, and blend them to visualize a product or service in a form that is appealing to the user and will generate significant and sustained revenues and margins. Home Audio market is no different and the consumer requirements in India to some extent are different from rest of the world. Selling internationally successful audio products in India may not be the only option as they may or not fully meet the local requirements. At the outset, it is important to identify the market requirements and put all the pieces of this puzzle on the table and then piece them together to create a product definition that will find significant volumes in the country.

India is culturally very diverse and rich in music and dance. Take a walk in any colony and you will hear classical music, popular Bollywood songs, folk music or some bhajans or some audio from blaring speakers on roof tops, tractors or small street side hawkers. The audio requirement for these use case scenarios is very different.

There is a segment of population that is extremely rich who can afford to pay for high quality audio equipment and will quite likely select an internationally renowned brand. There is also a huge population of poor for whom cost is an extremely important factor, irrespective of quality of audio and robustness of the product. In between these two categories, there is sizeable population of middle class and is close to 400 million people, who can afford to buy low-end to mid-range products. Within this segment, user requirements are still very diverse.

Religious institutions, political assemblies and audio systems mounted on tractors use systems that essentially generate high decibel levels and don't necessarily worry about frequency response characteristics. An Indian classical music listener would like to recollect and revise the beats and ragas or enjoy the melody, oblivious to high quality music as a possibility. Bollywood music lovers often want to give importance to the thump, music and lyrics and recollect the visual that they have seen while watching the movie, rather than a surround sound effect and the spatial spread. Similarly, folk music listeners care about the lyrics instead of the accompanying instruments and fidelity.