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.
Advertising has done the branding movement no good as well. Brands have used every allure there is to dangle. Not once, but time and again. The USP (unique selling point) as a device has been exhausted in intent. The ‘Big Idea’ of the brand has been flogged to ‘deathness’. Brand positioning stances have been taken through the laundromat of public acceptance to a point of cynicism. Brands are therefore overdone. Overdone even to the point of consumer annoyance.
The consumer today is sitting up and wondering whether he, she, or they are an idiot. Am I such a moron that advertising dished out to me treats me as one? As consumers wake up to this sentiment one fine morning, they do a quick audit of what they buy and use. All of a sudden, every brand seems to be screaming some degree of inanity or the other at me.
There are just too many words out here, too many creative hooplas, too much semantic wordplay even. Everything is complex and complicated. What has happened to the simple anyways? I, as a consumer, need to be super intelligent and complex to even keep pace with what brands are up to. Brands are hard work today. And after all this hard work, I am treated as a moron?
Consumers are sitting up and smelling the burn. Even as they do, they are making overnight changes. Quick and sudden changes that are giving the mass-marketer a jitter or two, if not more. Your wife is replacing her entire, elaborate bathroom shelf with names unknown. The known brands of yore are so boring. They are stuck in a time warp of their own.
Little-known names are replacing the big names all of us know, are reminded about everyday on the hoardings en-route to our workplace, and advertised widely. Minimalist is not only a name, it is a movement. The gaudy and in-the-face large packaging is being replaced by the medicinal and the sedate. Brands of cosmetics just don’t look like they used to before (just 20 days ago). The less known a brand name, the more unique it must be. The less-advertised, the better. The more word-of-mouth and its digital cousin, word-of-digital, the better.
All of a sudden, the big brands from the biggest of MNCs are looking like ration-shop brands and are suddenly boxed into the “not-for-me” category. Brand loyalty is such a “yesterday thingie”. It was a ‘situationship’ customers found themselves in. As options emerge, time for mass consumers to go niche. Mass consumers are climbing into the cocoons of the niche being offered to them by not one, but the many.
Small is suddenly beautiful again. The beauty of it is that small is different. Small is not belligerent. Small is nifty. Small delivers more of what the big have been promising to. The small and different brands of today embody within their DNA the differentiation that sets them apart. These are brands that are good for you, the consumer. They are consumer-driven brands. They are brands that are ahead of the consumer-want curve. They are literally consumer-curated brands that fulfill not the basics but much more.
Marketers have typically climbed the hierarchy of consumer needs, wants, desires and aspirations. These new age small offerings are at the bleeding edge of consumer ‘fantasy’. And that’s a new top rung item that I add to the non-conventional marketers toolkit. Understanding the realms of consumer fantasy that even the customer is still discovering, is where the bleeding-edge branding science lives and thrives today.
Brands are therefore shedding their clothes. The less you wear, the less opaque you are. Brands get to be more transparent in what they offer. More real. The product becomes the hero once again as opposed to the brand advertised by celebrities (but seldom used by them). Even the brand names are telling a story. Minimalist tells it loud and clear. The Whole Truth Foods, as opposed to the “half-truths” that the brands of yore have become, or are portrayed to be.
Brand nakedness is the new mantra. Less is more. More transparent is the new way to be. Most of these new brands live in a space of their own making. These are not mass-distributed brands. Instead they are D2C offerings that depend on the seamless power of D2C distribution for a start. They begin in the niche, dominate the niche and want the niche to drive the future of brand franchise, loyalty and consumption.
All of marketing and indeed all of life is cyclical. In the beginning was the commodity. It was the base product. Naked. Less processed. Low cost. Real. And then came the quasi-brand. Categories of rice that were promoted to be better-tasting than the rest. And then came packaged rice with a brand name that you ran after. With time, brands are now telescoping back to what they were. A quasi-brand. Lesser known. Differentiated. Showcasing the real as opposed to the unreal. And with the quasi-brand movement emerges the naked brand. Brands are going naked now. Naked is in!
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and founder of Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)