Kingfisher - The Maruti of Indian Beer

28th July 2010

A friend of mine who is not very fond of Kingfisher Beer made an interesting observation. He said that it is like Maruti 800. Back in the 1980s when Maruti was launched in India there were only two cars available in India - Ambassador and Premier Padmini. Both the cars were unchanged, externally as well as internally, since their launch. Since then so many cars have been launched a lot of them much better than Maruti 800 but if you say the word car, the image that comes to the mind of most Indians is a Maruti 800. Similarly at a time when only smaller, local breweries existed Kingfisher was launched and since then so many beers, a lot of them much better than Kingfisher has been launched but Kingfisher enjoys the same recall among beers as the Maruti 800 in cars.