Branding with Ashita

As speed becomes a design principle, brands succeed by respecting customer memory and proving authenticity through action, not explanation

If 2025 had a slogan for Indian marketing, it might be: Ship fast, say less, prove more. The year felt like a constant refresh. New channels became must-haves, familiar ones grew more complex, and the internet’s patience did not grow at all. Yet it wasn’t chaos; it was a pattern. Look closely, and 2025 delivered clear, practical lessons that will shape how Indian brands win in 2026.

Lesson 1: Heritage, Machines & The Cost Of Forgetting Your Customer
This was the year brands discovered that their customers have longer memories than their strategy decks assume. Cracker Barrel removed Uncle Herschel from its logo, only to reinstate him within. Coca-Cola handed its Christmas advertisement to a machine for the second year running and watched the backlash grow louder than before. Each entered 2025 convinced that boldness would signal confidence. Customers read it instead as abandonment.

We have long assumed rebrands succeed by looking forward, by signalling evolution beyond origins. The evidence from 2025 suggests otherwise. Customers do not want brands to evolve past them. A rebrand that treats existing customers as baggage will find those customers happy to oblige.

Lesson 2: Quick Commerce Reshaped What “Good Marketing” Looks Like
When the promise is ‘10 minutes’, marketing cannot feel like it took three weeks and four approval committees. Brands that worked in 2025 treated speed as a design principle: short creative cycles, crisp offers, and messaging built for the moment of need. “Running out” beats “brand love” at 11:43 pm.

Swiggy’s ₹10,000 crore QIP to scale Instamart effectively buys speed—dark stores, density, and selection—as much as it buys marketing.

Lesson 3: Culture Is Not A Moodboard; India Demands Provenance
One of 2025’s most instructive brand moments involved a global player stepping into an Indian cultural lane. Reuters reported Prada’s plan to launch ‘Made in India’ sandals after backlash over designs resembling traditional Kolhapuri chappals. The episode crystallised a broader rule: India does not want representation alone; it wants receipts — who made it, who benefits, and whether the storytelling is respectful.

The same expectation increasingly applies domestically. Heritage, craft, language, and festivals are not campaign themes; they are lived identities.

Lesson 4: AI Became Ambient, So Gimmicks Stopped Working
By late 2025, AI was no longer a novelty; it had become infrastructure. A December Reuters report noted how leading AI players offered free premium access via Indian telco partnerships to attract users and multilingual training data, highlighting India’s strategic importance in the global AI race.

For brands, that means two things: consumers are more comfortable with AI in daily life, and expectations are higher. AI must help, not just show up.

Lesson 5: AI Works Best Backstage, Not Onstage
Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas advertisement became, for the second year running, one of the season’s most discussed campaigns — with discussion almost entirely negative. Despite technical improvements over 2024, the backlash intensified. The issue was not quality; it was origin.

Dove offers a sharp contrast. The beauty pledged never to use AI-generated women in its advertising, citing research showing that nine in ten women and girls encounter harmful beauty content online. The pledge was ethical positioning — and shrewd market differentiation. In a world saturated with synthetic imagery, real humans signal authenticity competitors cannot replicate without abandoning cost efficiencies.

AI does not care whether an image feels authentic or human. It reproduces patterns embedded in its training data. When research shows AI-generated women skew thin, white, and able-bodied, the technology is not malfunctioning; it is revealing the biases it has absorbed.

Monday Morning In 2026
For brand leaders, 2025 suggests several principles worth testing against reality:

•  Audit heritage before discarding it. Heritage is equity competitors cannot replicate. The question is how to reframe history for new customers, not whether to erase it.
•  Build reversal mechanisms. Cracker Barrel’s rapid logo restoration limited damage. HBO’s eventual return to HBO Max corrected a strategic misstep. Bold decisions need not be irreversible.
• Separate AI as infrastructure from AI as voice. Using AI to optimise logistics, personalise recommendations, or analyse data creates value with reputational risk. Using it for customer-facing creative delivers efficiency at the cost of authenticity, with savings that are immediate and reputational costs that surface later.
• Personalisation remains a compounding asset. Customers gravitate towards brands that understand them as individuals. Those that excel see higher spend, greater frequency, and deeper loyalty.
• India is noticed. If global brands borrow imagery without partnership, they diminish culture. Provenance, sourcing, and shared value will matter more — and Indian brands should demand collaboration, not cosmetic inclusion.
• Creative and supply chain will fuse further. Winning brands will design offer → availability → delivery → post-purchase as one experience, not four silos.

A brand is a relationship, not a strategy document. In 2025, those that forgot this lesson paid for it. Those that remembered are wondering what the fuss was about. If 2025 taught Indian brands anything, it’s that attention is easy to spark and hard to sustain. In 2026, the brands that look effortless will be doing the hardest work behind the scenes—governance, measurement, operations, and cultural intelligence—so the customer experience lands cleanly, without explanation.

Published in BW Marketing World