For companies that have spent decades earning consumer trust, the challenge is no longer simply staying relevant. It is learning how to evolve without losing the reason people trusted them in the first place.
Words by Karan Karayi
There is a particular danger in being a legacy brand. The thing that made you successful can quietly become the thing that holds you back.
You have history, recognition, distribution, and millions of consumers who know your name. But the market around you does not stand still. New brands arrive without baggage. They speak the language of the internet, build communities rather than customer bases, and launch products at a pace that can make established companies look ponderous.
For a brand like Crompton, which has been part of Indian homes for generations, the question is therefore not whether to change. It is how to change without throwing away the accumulated value of everything that came before. That is the thinking behind Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals’ recent Master Brand Refresh.
Tanmoy Prusty, CMO of Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals, however, is careful about the terminology. This is not, he says, a reinvention. It is an evolution, built on a brand that is already in remarkably good health.
“Crompton as a brand was in fantastic shape,” he says. “You saw the brand gets picked up in 10 crore homes across the length and breadth of the country. That’s literally one in three households.” That kind of penetration is not something a marketing team can manufacture overnight. It is accumulated trust, built over decades. The challenge is to make that trust relevant to the next decade.
“We are adding elements. We are evolving the brand to start reciprocating and talking to the world of tomorrow,” Prusty says. “More than a refresh, it’s actually a statement of intent from us towards the direction the Crompton brand and the Crompton organization is going to take.”
Evolution, not erasure
The refreshed Crompton keeps some of its most recognisable assets intact, including its word mark, while adding a new monogram, sonic identity, and the tagline “Amazing every day”. The changes are deliberately incremental. The bigger shift is what sits underneath them: a more explicit intention to connect Crompton’s legacy with smart technology, design, energy efficiency, and a new generation of consumer expectations.
“Many things remain the same, while many new start getting added,” Prusty says.
The new tagline is intended to bring those different pieces together. Crompton has expanded far beyond its historic associations with fans and electrical products, and now operates across a broad portfolio of products that increasingly touch different parts of the home.
“The aspiration” has been packaged into the three-word promise of “Amazing every day”, he says, describing it as “an evolution of the Crompton promise”.
From the comfort of a fan to the illumination of a light, or the appliances that increasingly occupy the kitchen, Crompton is trying to create one coherent brand story across categories.
There is a larger consumer trend behind this. The Indian home itself is changing. The consumer who once bought a fan because it moved air may now care about design, energy consumption, connectivity, convenience, and how seamlessly it fits into a smart home. The same shift is taking place across appliances. Function remains important, but it is increasingly accompanied by aspiration. And that aspiration is no longer restricted to India’s biggest cities.
The premiumisation of everywhere
One of the more interesting aspects of India’s consumer economy is how quickly premiumisation is travelling beyond the metros. Tier-II and Tier-III consumers are not simply waiting for yesterday’s products to reach them at lower prices. They increasingly want access to the same design, technology, and experiences available to consumers in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, or Hyderabad.
For Crompton, this creates an opportunity that many younger challengers cannot easily replicate: scale can become a democratising force. Prusty believes the appetite for technology and design-led products “does not exist just in the metros. It’s really there across the length and breadth of the country”. The company’s answer is to use its distribution and manufacturing scale to take sophisticated products to a much larger audience.
He points to Rhion as an example. The technology takes an approach associated with large-scale desalination and miniaturises it into a consumer-ready product. “A large scale, literally a desalination plant, miniaturized many times over, brought it out in a retail-able technology, which will then now be provided across the length and breadth of the country,” he says.
There is something distinctly Indian about that proposition: take sophisticated technology, industrialise it, and make it accessible at scale. It is also an increasingly important part of the country’s broader economic story. India’s next consumer wave is unlikely to be driven solely by the number of people buying their first appliance, car, smartphone, or home. It will increasingly be driven by consumers trading up, looking for better experiences, and expecting technology to make everyday life easier.
The challenge for Indian brands is to meet that aspiration without pricing themselves out of the mass market.
Old dogs learn the new game
That brings us to the other disruption reshaping consumer businesses: digital commerce.
The conventional narrative is familiar. Legacy brands have scale, but young D2C companies have speed. Established players have distribution, but digital challengers understand social media. The old guard owns the shelves; the new guard owns the screen.
Prusty is not convinced the distinction is that simple. Crompton’s website attracts around 1.5 crore visitors a year, he says, while its retail pages on e-commerce platforms generate around four crore views. More interestingly, the company has built some categories with digital channels at their centre. Its air coolers and water heaters, for instance, were “actually built on e-commerce first”, according to Prusty.
That makes the supposed divide between legacy and new-age brands less meaningful. “It’s not that e-commerce is for the young and the kicking,” he says. “It’s for everybody who is wanting to be intentful and do something at scale.”
That line is quite revealing, highlighting that the real challenge facing legacy companies isn’t ageas much as it is complacency.
A company that has been successful for decades can easily become too attached to the formula that made it successful. But scale, if combined with curiosity, can be an enormous advantage. Established companies have manufacturing capability, distribution networks, consumer trust, data, and capital. They can experiment while also having the ability to take successful innovations nationwide.
The trick is to retain the institutional muscle without acquiring institutional inertia.
The consumer comes first
For Prusty, that is ultimately what the refreshed Crompton is about. He resists the idea that the company is “redesigning” itself. “It’s about refreshing. It’s about really evolving. It’s about incremental changes, which is packaging it all together in a nice, impactful way,” he says.
The distinction might sound semantic, but it speaks to an important truth about brands. A successful legacy brand should not need to introduce itself all over again. It needs to demonstrate that the promise consumers already associate with it remains relevant as their lives change.
That means putting the consumer ahead of the technology, rather than the other way around. “We are very clear. Crompton wants to be a consumer-centric organization, so we are going to work consumer backwards to build, fulfill new products which solve all of consumers’ pain points.”
Technology, design, and energy efficiency are not the destination, in that formulation. They are simply the means. “All of these are pillars. All of these are mechanisms through which we are going to deliver our promise of making life better for consumers.”
That may ultimately be the real test of the Master Brand Refresh. A new logo can attract attention. A new sonic can create recognition. A new advertising campaign can generate conversation. But none of those things can substitute for a better product.
The most successful legacy brands understand this instinctively. Their history is not the product. It is the permission to keep building.
Crompton has spent generations earning a place inside Indian homes. The next challenge is to make sure it still deserves that place in the homes India is building tomorrow.
That is not reinvention. It is something considerably harder: staying recognisable and continuing to rule minds and hearts while becoming new.
