Words by Sai Ponugoti
In a market as layered and fast-moving as India, building brands that endure requires more than scale. It requires empathy, agility, and the discipline to keep listening.
There is a line I keep coming back to, one that has stayed with me across markets, categories, and decades of building consumer businesses: the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed. In India, that truth has never felt more urgent or more full of possibility than it does today.
I spent close to a decade working across international markets before returning to India in 2022. Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa. And the single most important thing I learned in each of those markets was not a strategy or a framework. It was humility. When you arrive somewhere new, you arrive without assumptions. You go to the ground. You listen to the consumer. You let the market teach you before you try to teach it anything. That approach, what I call a go-local strategy, shaped everything I did: locally relevant products, locally resonant communication, locally qualified packaging. Scale, I came to understand, is not built through uniformity. It is built through the respectful acknowledgment of difference.
India demands exactly that. The consumer here is not one person. She is many. Different states, different cohorts, different moments in her own evolving relationship with brands and with herself. And she is moving fast. The consumer is surfing through giant waves of change, in how she discovers products, how she makes decisions, how she expects to be spoken to. If you are not constantly recalibrating, you are already behind.
This is why the old rules of brand building no longer hold. The logic of launching many variants and hoping some stick has given way to something more demanding: fewer brands, deeper investments, sharper consumer insight. Innovation that used to run on long, linear cycles has had to become genuinely agile, starting with the consumer, experimenting, learning, and being willing to kill what is not working. And media, once the domain of consistent mass communication, is now a fragmented, digital-first landscape where content must be not just relevant but alive to how people are actually consuming it.
Nowhere has this shift been more meaningful, or more personal, than in women’s wellness. The categories we operate in at Piramal, from sanitary care to emergency contraception, have historically been wrapped in silence. Not long ago, a sanitary pad would be handed across a pharmacy counter folded inside a newspaper. The conversation did not exist. Building brands in this space requires something that goes beyond product efficacy or communication strategy. It requires genuine empathy: a willingness to sit with the consumer’s experience, normalize the conversation, and build trust before you ask for anything in return. Our learn, relate, choose model is rooted in exactly that. Educate first. Help the consumer relate. Then earn the right to be chosen.
And it starts from within. We run a programme called ‘Her Story Hour’ for our women employees. Seventy percent attend voluntarily. They open up about challenges, about their career journeys, about the things that often go unspoken in a professional environment. The insight we take from that programme back into our consumer work is more valuable than any focus group. You cannot build empathy externally if you have not built it internally.
The third force reshaping how we operate is technology. AI today allows us to read real-time signals, understand what is actually driving the business, and respond faster than ever before. What is coming next with agentic AI will make that even more nuanced. The brands that win in this environment will be the ones that can process those signals intelligently, stay close to the consumer, and keep reinventing themselves without losing the thread of who they are.
I think about this often, and not just in a business context. Some of my sharpest lessons have come from sport and from the physical challenges I have set myself over the years, skiing through every level after turning 40, cycling 1,500 kilometres in two months, trekking five days through the Garhwal mountains at minus 10 degrees with my family. What those experiences taught me, consistently, is that the mountain and the terrain does not adapt to you. You adapt to it. Mental fitness matters more than you think. And the team around you, each person with different strengths, is what makes scaling the summit possible.
That is, in the end, the lesson that translates most directly back to building a consumer business in India. The market does not owe you relevance. You earn it, daily, by staying curious, staying close, and being willing to constructively disrupt yourself before the market does it for you. The consumer is always surfing. The only question is whether your brand is catching the same wave.
The author is CEO of Piramal Consumer Healthcare
