Indian Brands Are Done Selling Products

Amit Syngle said it plainly at BWS 2026: Asian Paints doesn't do product marketing, it does emotional marketing. That's not a feel-good soundbite — it's a statement about where durable brand value actually comes from in a market flooded with performance spend.

Sanjiv Mehta made the same argument from a different angle. Brands that outlast trends aren't built on features or price points. They're built on meaning — something a consumer carries into the next product cycle, the next category, the next decade.

This is a real shift in how India's senior marketing class is talking publicly. The Shark Awards showed UltraTech, ITC, and Mindshare taking stage — none of them are brands you associate with experimental creative risk. Yet the dominant conversation at the same event was emotional resonance, not ROI dashboards.

The tension worth watching: India's digital-first brands are still deep in performance marketing — measurable clicks, attributable conversions. The legacy players are pulling in the opposite direction, toward the slower, harder work of cultural meaning.

For founders building brands right now, the signal is uncomfortable but clear. If you optimise entirely for the bottom of the funnel, you're building market share that someone with a bigger ad budget can buy tomorrow. The brands that get remembered — in India specifically, where word-of-mouth and family recommendation still move serious volume — are the ones that meant something before they were useful.