Old Brands Tumble As Consumers Chase The Bare Essentials

Marketing companies are waking up to the new reality that the small is slowly replacing the big, as customers are realising less is more. This minimalism is rattling brands

- HARISH BIJOOR

Marketing in India is shedding its clothes. Brands are going 'naked'. The more clothes you wear, the less appealing you are. The more you shed, the more you are loved. That's the new trend I spotted in the initial months of 2025. The big brands of yesteryears are buckling, and their brand volumes are tumbling in double-digit percentages all of a sudden. This is jolting the marketing company of yore. Add to it the other big jolt for companies of not being able to take the customary annual price increases they have so gotten used to, and corporate boardrooms are in a tizzy of summer discontent. This is the biting reality today.

Brands are on the morph. This morph is more of the making of the consumer out there in the great Indian market. The consumer is today quite bored with brands. Branding has been around as a subject of immense involvement for the last three decades. Consumers have lived with brands, logos, colours, slogans, packaging, package-sizes, prices, discounts, offers of every kind, and more.

With high-decibel exposure to all this over a reasonably long period, aggressively marketed brands are suddenly very boring. Very predictable in what they do next. Very predictive in the algorithm they lay out to get the consumer in. The big brands that clutter your bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, and your outdoors are looking rather pedantic and predictive. That skin cream has a brand name that is so predictable. It represents the generic category even. It's so boring. It's so 2024.