Some of the most interesting conversations I have had recently were with clients building young brands. There's a particular kind of candour that comes with that territory, especially the honesty around the pressure they are under to skip past foundations and go straight to scale.
What strikes me is not the ambition. That makes complete sense. What stays with me is how little room there seems to be to stop and ask the quieter questions. What do we actually want people to feel when they encounter us? What connections are we creating consistently, before we hit the accelerator? Is the goal just to grow, or is it to last?
I don't ask this critically. I ask because many of us in this space have lived that particular tension: between moving fast and building something that holds.
India Inc. is extraordinary right now. The pace of expansion, the appetite, the sheer confidence of it. But speed has a way of outrunning reflection. And one of the things I've been sitting with is how often businesses are sending signals into the market, to consumers, to talent, to partners, without fully reckoning with what those signals add up to over time.
There's a difference, I think, between building visibility and building meaning. They can look similar from the outside, especially early on. But they compound very differently.
The conversation I find myself having most often is about demand generation versus brand building, framed almost always as a choice. Short-term versus long-term. Measurable versus intangible.
I have come to believe that this framing does everyone a disservice.
The strongest brands do not treat the two as competing priorities. They move demand with real force and they're quietly building something underneath, emotional memory, cultural familiarity, trust. Not because they're being strategic about it in some textbook sense, but because they understand that over time, the efficiency of demand itself begins to depend on what the brand has already made people feel.
Asian Paints is one such example. It didn't win by outspending anyone. It won by showing up, decade after decade, as a dependable brand at a moment that is emotionally charged and fraught with uncertainty, the repainting of a home. This message was not just delivered through insightful communications, but rather the lived insight that Asian Paints seemed to understand, that it wasn't really in the paint business at all. And that understanding, never loudly declared but consistently expressed through every touch point and service ecosystem, is what turned a commodity into something with feeling and intent.
That's really what I mean when I say that brand and demand do not compete. And brands that are playing the long game have understood that what you make people feel today is a powerful indicator of how hard or easy it will be to acquire and retain them as customers for tomorrow. Brands like these start to occupy something more durable than attention. They occupy relevance.
Now add to that the idea of consistency. Amul is a genuine study in what consistency compounds into. Decades of showing up in the same recognisable way, through humour, through cultural commentary, through a product that never pretended to be more than it was and yet the brand has outlasted trends, categories and economic cycles over time.
Closer to today, I look at Paper Boat’s commendable strategy of a nuanced bet on memory and emotion rather than just staking yet another claim on refreshment. They were selling a feeling before they were selling a drink. Whether or not the business scaled the way investors hoped, the brand found a place in people's hearts that few FMCG entrants manage in their first decade. These aren't perfect companies. But they understood something important: that what you consistently make people feel becomes, over time, your most defensible asset.
But the magic doesn't happen quickly. That's the honest part. It happens through a brand promise that once crystallised is delivered consistently through storytelling, through product and packaging, through the way the brand connects and shows up, consistently, over time at a human level. That is when conviction in a brand pays off as demand and most importantly, strong foundations to build scale.
Fortunately we are, as a growth market in India, uniquely poised to deliver on both, brand first thinking and leveraging this powerful asset to build efficiency at scale. That in my view, is what playing the real long game looks like.
Geet Nazir is Managing Director, Landor.
What strikes me is not the ambition. That makes complete sense. What stays with me is how little room there seems to be to stop and ask the quieter questions. What do we actually want people to feel when they encounter us? What connections are we creating consistently, before we hit the accelerator? Is the goal just to grow, or is it to last?
I don't ask this critically. I ask because many of us in this space have lived that particular tension: between moving fast and building something that holds.
India Inc. is extraordinary right now. The pace of expansion, the appetite, the sheer confidence of it. But speed has a way of outrunning reflection. And one of the things I've been sitting with is how often businesses are sending signals into the market, to consumers, to talent, to partners, without fully reckoning with what those signals add up to over time.
There's a difference, I think, between building visibility and building meaning. They can look similar from the outside, especially early on. But they compound very differently.
The conversation I find myself having most often is about demand generation versus brand building, framed almost always as a choice. Short-term versus long-term. Measurable versus intangible.
I have come to believe that this framing does everyone a disservice.
The strongest brands do not treat the two as competing priorities. They move demand with real force and they're quietly building something underneath, emotional memory, cultural familiarity, trust. Not because they're being strategic about it in some textbook sense, but because they understand that over time, the efficiency of demand itself begins to depend on what the brand has already made people feel.
Asian Paints is one such example. It didn't win by outspending anyone. It won by showing up, decade after decade, as a dependable brand at a moment that is emotionally charged and fraught with uncertainty, the repainting of a home. This message was not just delivered through insightful communications, but rather the lived insight that Asian Paints seemed to understand, that it wasn't really in the paint business at all. And that understanding, never loudly declared but consistently expressed through every touch point and service ecosystem, is what turned a commodity into something with feeling and intent.
That's really what I mean when I say that brand and demand do not compete. And brands that are playing the long game have understood that what you make people feel today is a powerful indicator of how hard or easy it will be to acquire and retain them as customers for tomorrow. Brands like these start to occupy something more durable than attention. They occupy relevance.
Now add to that the idea of consistency. Amul is a genuine study in what consistency compounds into. Decades of showing up in the same recognisable way, through humour, through cultural commentary, through a product that never pretended to be more than it was and yet the brand has outlasted trends, categories and economic cycles over time.
Closer to today, I look at Paper Boat’s commendable strategy of a nuanced bet on memory and emotion rather than just staking yet another claim on refreshment. They were selling a feeling before they were selling a drink. Whether or not the business scaled the way investors hoped, the brand found a place in people's hearts that few FMCG entrants manage in their first decade. These aren't perfect companies. But they understood something important: that what you consistently make people feel becomes, over time, your most defensible asset.
But the magic doesn't happen quickly. That's the honest part. It happens through a brand promise that once crystallised is delivered consistently through storytelling, through product and packaging, through the way the brand connects and shows up, consistently, over time at a human level. That is when conviction in a brand pays off as demand and most importantly, strong foundations to build scale.
Fortunately we are, as a growth market in India, uniquely poised to deliver on both, brand first thinking and leveraging this powerful asset to build efficiency at scale. That in my view, is what playing the real long game looks like.
Geet Nazir is Managing Director, Landor.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
