A Man of Intuition

Piyush Pandey made creativity feel legitimate in boardrooms that once regarded it as indulgence

- SANTOSH DESAI

PIYUSH PANDEY'S DEATH FEELS like the closing of a chapter not only in advertising but in Indian business itself.

What leaves with him is a way of thinking about brands as living, breathing presences in people’s lives—not engineered constructs optimised for performance. He represented an instinctive understanding that commerce and culture were never separate, that selling could be an act of participation in the national conversation.

In the years when India was learning the language of markets, Pandey gave those markets a vocabulary rooted in emotion, idiom and mischief. He made brands stand not for propositions, but for felt human ideas. Fevicol became a metaphor for endurance, Cadbury for celebration, Asian Paints for belonging. These were not coincidences of creative luck; they were acts of cultural translation. Pandey recognised that in a country as layered as India, persuasion works only when it sounds familiar. A good line was one that felt overheard.

That sensibility came from a temperament rare in business—one that trusted feeling as a form of intelligence. Pandey was not allergic to data or discipline, but he placed intuition first. He saw the consumer not as a data point to be decoded but as someone to be felt, to be empathised with.