“Should we get a celebrity to promote our program?”
That was the first serious suggestion in a branding meeting I attended recently. Not “Why are customers drifting away?” Not “Has our audience changed?” Not even “What exactly are we trying to fix?” We didn’t know the problem and what are we trying to achieve but the room knew which celebrity will fit in? Why? Because competition did something similar, they had this celebrity so we need someone coming with the similar personality. It struck me because it wasn’t the problem of the room, it was the problem of our industry.
Kuch nahi ho raha? Let’s launch a campaign. Commission a film. Increase digital spends. Find influencers. Buy more visibility. Campaigns have almost become corporate comfort food. They make everyone feel something is being done.
The irony is that campaigns are not an issue, people strategizing those briefs and campaign are because halfway through that meeting, I interrupted the discussion and asked a question that wasn’t part of the presentation. “Who is the TG?” The answers arrived without hesitation. CXOs. Entrepreneurs. HNIs. Global travellers. Then I asked something that received a very different response. “When was the last time anyone in this room actually spent time understanding how these people make decisions?” Not through a market research report. Not through audience data. I mean sitting with them, listening to what they read, who they trust, what occupies their mornings and what finally convinces them to spend money.
Nobody answered. That silence wasn’t uncomfortable because people lacked experience. It was because hum hai toh 2026 mein but baatein 2016 ki hai!
That’s a mistake our industry makes more often than we’d like to admit. Marketing evolves quickly. Consumers evolve even faster. Yet our understanding of them often stays frozen.
Take luxury. For years, luxury communication in India followed a familiar script. Beautiful imagery. Invitation-only events. International aesthetics. Premium magazines. There was nothing wrong with that. It reflected the market of its time. But today’s affluent consumer isn’t as predictable. The promoter sitting in Kolkata or Gujarat may spend more time reading financial newspaper than a luxury publication. An investment banker may get a vacation idea or destination ideas through podcasts of the person he follows than glossy magazines. A second-generation entrepreneur often follows founders, investors and technology leaders on LinkedIn before paying attention to lifestyle influencers. None of this makes traditional luxury media irrelevant. It simply means influence has become far more dispersed than our media plans sometimes acknowledge.
I’ve often wondered whether brands confuse looking premium with reaching influential people, because how things are sold it, this magazine is available at the most high end clubs of the country, but the real question is when people enter those high end clubs do they read the? Or just fulfil their agenda, which can be a dinner or a meeting and move on as those aren’t always the same thing.
The businesses that build lasting reputations seem to understand this instinctively. Think about Vantara. Long before it became a widely discussed destination, people were already recommending it to one another. Curiosity travelled through conversations first. Advertising came later. Look at private aviation. Its growth wasn’t driven by a clever campaign. It reflected a shift in how entrepreneurs valued time. Consumer behaviour changed before communication did. Even Mercedes-Benz owes its position to something much deeper than advertising. Decades of product consistency, engineering and ownership experience built that reputation. Campaigns reminded people why they trusted the brand. They didn’t create the trust from scratch.
Perhaps that’s the difference we sometimes forget. Communication can strengthen belief. It cannot replace it.
Looking back at campaigns that failed, I rarely think the creative team was the problem. Most agencies produce good work. The bigger issue is that the brief itself is often written around assumptions that no longer hold true. We spend weeks debating scripts, production houses, celebrity choices and media budgets. Imagine if we invested the same amount of energy understanding how our customers have changed over the last five years. The outcome might look very different.
Campaigns will always matter. Good storytelling will always matter. But neither should be the starting point of a branding exercise. The starting point is curiosity. Curiosity about people. Curiosity about behaviour. Curiosity about how influence is actually built today rather than how we assumed it worked yesterday.
