V Sunil
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
When the iconic tourism campaign Incredible India first appeared in the early 2000s, it marked a clean break from the India the world thought it knew. Gone were the familiar clichés of snake charmers and peacocks. In their place was a country presented through design and culture, and tourism eventually became one of India’s most recognisable expressions of soft power. Now more than two decades later, the campaign is being asked to do something far more ambitious. It must sell an India that competes not only with other destinations, but with algorithms, travel creators, boutique experiences and an increasingly crowded global tourism market. That ambition sits at the heart of Incredible !ndia by IndiGo, a new public-private partnership between the Ministry of Tourism and the airline. “In the beginning, when we started, it was purely a brand-building exercise to establish the words Incredible India. Slowly, it became a platform and went beyond a typical tourism campaign. We took that platform to cities like New York and Berlin, where people experienced India through food, art, culture and business,” says V Sunil, one of the creative minds behind the original Incredible India campaign and now part of the team behind Incredible !ndia by IndiGo.
