Much more than just a wedding

How much is too much? That's the question many in India are asking as the months-long wedding festivities for the youngest son of Asia's richest man approach their culmination.

Ambanis’ youngest son Anant, 29, is marrying his longtime girlfriend Radhika Merchant, 29, in a star-studded ceremony in Mumbai that is being be attended by celebrities and politicians, such as Kim Kardashian, Mike Tyson, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson during the three days of celebratory receptions.

For the Ambanis, this is much more than just a wedding.

It is a show of strength and of the clout they command, Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist, told BBC. “It’s a show of the fact that this family is a magnet that attracts people from all walks of life - business, politics and entertainment.”

One unnamed executive at Reliance called the event a “powerful symbol of India’s growing stature on the global stage”.

“The presence of esteemed individuals highlights India’s economic, political, intellectual, and scientific prowess,” the note, shared with reporters, said.

The media blitzkrieg around it, he adds, is also a way for them to make a personal event “even more personal to the whole world” – such as the consumers of Reliance products and services for instance – who would never have got an invite.

If the Ambani patriarch, Dhirubhai, was credited with introducing the stock market to India’s retail investors, his son Mukesh is well recognised for creating a myriad touchpoints between his businesses and the average Indian consumer.

A bulk of what Indians consume today, from the shows they watch, to the clothes they wear and potentially even how they will transact in the future, comes from the Ambani stable.

And that is why there couldn’t have been a better occasion than a dazzling wedding for the family to market its brand to India’s burgeoning consumer class.

And sure enough, the wedding has captivated people in India and across the world.

In recent years, Reliance has brought some of the world’s most celebrated luxury brands to India, from Valentino to Versace and Burberry to Bottega.

Among other things, the company now owns a team in the world's richest cricket tournament and the iconic British toy retailer Hamleys.

In 2021, it acquired the historic country club Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire for £57m.

Earlier this year, Reliance signed a binding pact to merge its entertainment platforms with Disney, in its latest attempt to transform the company’s industrial moorings. It is a deal that makes Mukesh Ambani a formidable player in the digital streaming space, with rights to cricketing tournaments and international shows.

But the conglomerate really began its shopping spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it got billions of dollars in investment from more than a dozen global players, including Meta and Google. The plan with Meta has been to connect WhatsApp’s more than 400 million users in India with its online grocery platform JioMart.

The company’s aggressive pricing strategy has mounted a serious challenge to foreign entrants like Netflix and Amazon.

Privately, foreign players, who compete in the same sectors as Reliance, sometimes complain of a lack of level playing field, claiming the Ambanis are among a select few who’ve benefited from the Indian government’s policy of awarding preferential contracts to local tycoons.

“Foreign players face a difficult choice,” James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, tells BBC. “They can either fight with Reliance or get into bed with Reliance. Zuckerburg has chosen to partner with them, while Amazon has decided to fight. But these battles are often very costly, and foreigners end up losing.”

Now, Mukesh Ambani's next target is financial services, with Reliance entering into a joint venture with US-based BlackRock for a brokering and wealth management business.

Source: BBC, Al Jazeera