Variability of the infrastructure is tangibly manifest in the quality of products that arrive on the market. They have been through a sourcing, production, and delivery system that at every stage is subject to non standardized treatment. Delivering on the central promise of branding, consistent quality over time, is a difficult task in such an environment. But it is precisely this variability in the environment that puts a premium on brands that are able to deliver consistency. In order to deliver consistent quality, products need to be designed to cope with variability. Typically, products from developed markets are designed for fairly standardized usage and handling conditions, and do not tolerate wide environmental variance. Whirlpool found that, in India, its machines needed to be designed to restart from the point in the washing cycle where they had left off when the power and/or water was interrupted, rather than return to the start as they are designed to do in developed markets where uninterrupted power and water supply are taken for granted.*
*excerpt from a paper analyzing the failure of Whirlpool's first entry into the Indian market.
Designing products for India
Neelakantan has a thoughtful post on products specifically designed for India here. Implicit in there is the concept of designing for environmental variability.