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In the early 2000s, Surf Excel had HUL's full weight behind it. Ghadi Detergent had a Kanpur factory and a distribution team that treated every village kirana store like a key account. By 2012, Ghadi was India's bestselling detergent by volume. Here is how.
Brand of the Month: June 2026. India's 5 Most Interesting FMCG Plays
In 1983, C.K. Ranganathan watched the shampoo category and thought the unit could go smaller and cheaper. The resulting ₹0.50 sachet unlocked 500 million rural consumers who had never bought shampoo before and forced every multinational to rethink their India strategy from scratch.
Marico inherited a commodity: coconut oil sold loose by the kilo. Harsh Mariwala turned it into a branded FMCG franchise worth ₹90,000 crore by premiumizing a product Indian women had always sourced informally. Here is exactly how.
By the late 1990s, Britannia was synonymous with Marie Gold and flat growth. The mass biscuit market was a margin war and the brand was aging visibly. What followed was one of Indian FMCG's most deliberate premiumization plays, and it started with a mascot.
Wheat flour was a commodity Indian households milled at their local chakki. The idea of paying a brand premium for it seemed absurd. ITC spent ₹100 crore in two years to prove otherwise and created a category worth ₹15,000 crore in the process.
Salt has no taste differentiation, no visible quality signal, and no rational loyalty driver. Tata Consumer Products built ₹1,500 crore of brand value on it anyway, using a line that made buying salt feel like choosing the right side of history.
Brand of the Month: June 2026. India's 5 Most Interesting FMCG Plays
Hajmola was a digestive tablet for upset stomachs. Dabur repositioned it as a tasty daily candy for children without changing the formulation, and without losing the parents who trusted it as a remedy. That dual positioning is one of the hardest things to pull off in FMCG branding.
Vahdam Teas sells Indian tea to American, European, and Australian consumers directly from India, with no retail presence and packaging designed to compete with the world's most premium tea brands. Here's the D2C design playbook that built a ₹200 crore brand.
Bajaj Almond Drops didn't just create a product. It created a category. And the yellow packaging was the primary vehicle for communicating the category's defining benefit before a single word was read.
Mahashay Dharampal Gulati "Mahashayji" appeared in every MDH advertisement from the 1970s until his death in 2020 at age 97. He was not a brand ambassador. He was the brand. And the results speak for themselves: MDH became India's largest spice brand by revenue.
In 2001, "Who is Digen Verma?" appeared on billboards across India. No product. No logo. No explanation. For two weeks, India argued about who Digen Verma was and then Frooti revealed the answer. It was a masterclass in intrigue-based brand communication that still hasn't been matched.
The Lijjat Papad rabbit mascot wasn't designed by a brand agency. It emerged informally from the cooperative's women members over decades. And yet it does more brand work per square centimetre of packaging than most professionally designed mascots.
Britannia spent decades as a biscuit brand. Then it added "Think Better" to its identity. That small change signalled a profound strategic shift and the visual identity followed. Here's what the rebrand tells designers about how positioning and aesthetics must move together.
In 1907, a hakim in Delhi named Abdul Majeed Hamdard created a concentrated sherbet syrup. He bottled it in a…
Emami owns BoroPlus, Navratna, Fair and Handsome, Zandu, Kesh King, and over a dozen other major brands. Most Indians have no idea they're made by the same company. That's not an accident, it's a deliberate brand architecture strategy with a significant hidden cost.
