A brand’s true litmus test is how well it’s connected with consumers: Kunal Sharma

For a brand that has spent decades building its equity on consistency, the enduring association with Amitabh Bachchan is less about star power and more about shared values. Kunal Sharma, vice president for marketing and organised trade at KRBL Limited, points to something less visible than recall metrics—rigour.

That diligence, Sharma suggests, mirrors what the company wants its flagship brand India Gate to represent: custodianship of quality, cultural continuity and a certain seriousness about craft. It is a useful anchor as the 1889-founded company navigates a market that now demands agility as much as heritage.

KRBL today controls roughly a quarter of branded basmati rice exports and nearly a third of the domestic market, underpinned by a 200-acre milling facility in Punjab. Yet, the past year signals a deliberate pivot. The launch of India Gate Uplife, a wellness-led edible oil range, and the entry into biryani masalas this March, point to a broader ambition; one of evolving into a multi-category FMCG player. For legacy brands like KRBL, adjacency is no longer optional; it has become a hedge against stagnation.

From visibility to participation

The digital ecosystem has made one thing abundantly clear: attention cannot be bought, only earned. Sharma’s articulation of this shift is unambiguous.

“The currency that brands like us need to look at is how much of conversation and engagement we can drive. Gone are those days where you would create a commercial around a particular day and show it to people; because people are not engaging with the content,” he claims.

Instead, the emphasis is on immersion. “It should be something that's flowing into my mind, and while I'm watching it, I could be subliminally relating to it. At the same point of time, more conversations are happening and through those conversations, engagement and participation, you are bringing consumers more intrinsically into the brand. The true litmus test for brands is how well connected you are with your consumers.”

For marketers accustomed to campaign spikes around calendar moments, this presents a structural challenge. The traditional model of high-decibel bursts around festivals or occasions is increasingly insufficient. Continuous, low-friction engagement, often driven by creators and communities, is becoming the baseline.

In the FMCG sector, trust is often treated as the ultimate metric. Sharma complicates that assumption noting that a lot of effort and time goes into providing consistent product quality every time to consumers. “That’s a fundamental tenet that brands need to ensure happens. Because unless you do that, all these conversations around trust are superficial,” he stresses.

Yet, he is quick to point out that trust alone is no longer a differentiator. He believes that as categories get competitive with the entry of more food brands, they should be able to create a distinctive imagery and own up a unique space. That is a bigger challenge today than the challenge of trust. “But the larger challenge is creating a distinct brand identity in a cluttered FMCG space,” he maintains.

KRBL’s attempt to build that distinction operates across multiple layers. At a functional level, it leans on product quality. At an emotional level, it positions itself as the default choice for hosting and hospitality. At a cultural level, it invokes Indian values through storytelling. And at a social level, it deploys initiatives like ‘Grains of Hope’.

“We have a midday meal kitchen at our plant, where we feed 15,000 children every day. So as a brand, through these initiatives we create a differentiation versus the clutter of brands in the market,” Sharma notes. The linkage between brand and social impact is not new, but its integration into the core narrative—as opposed to peripheral CSR—signals a shift in how legacy brands attempt to stay relevant.

Cohorts, creators and calibrated messaging

If Bachchan anchors mass communication, KBRL’s newer playbook is increasingly cohort-driven. Sharma is explicit about abandoning a one-size-fits-all approach.

“While looking at reach, we look at senior celebrities for television and reach-based mediums to take our communication to larger masses. Having said that, with access to data and consumer understanding, we have much more ability to create cohorts of consumers with different mindsets about food. With all that understanding, we are able to create relevant cohorts of influencers and content to sharply target them,” he said.

Food, once considered a broad-based category, is now fractured into micro-communities defined by lifestyle, aspiration and even identity politics. This means that straightforward but often under-executed segmentation is not merely demographic but attitudinal.

To frame the strategy with clarity, the brand talks about India Gate rice being a custodian of Indian values through large-scale TV commercials and connected TV featuring Bachchan, to reach the masses. At the same time, on Women's Day, it decided to use content creators like Nayab Midha, Ayesha Khan and Harshita Gupta alongside a network of nano influencers to reinterpret the cultural connotations of biryani. The objective behind #NotYourBiryani campaign was not scale alone, but resonance among younger, urban consumers who are increasingly sceptical of overt brand messaging.

“We decided to use influencers…to land our values to a set of new-age consumers. So, for a brand of our size and scale, we talk to different consumers in different ways, through varied KOLs and don’t have one single approach,” Sharma explained.

Gender, lifestyle and the rise of new cohorts

Among the more notable shifts is KRBL’s move towards gender-agnostic communication. Traditionally, food brands in India have skewed heavily towards the ‘homemaker' archetype. Sharma acknowledges this legacy but signals a departure.

“As a brand, we know that there is a consumption target audience, which is the decision maker in the family. Given India’s construct, it is largely the lady of the house. However, given the shifts we are seeing in society, as a brand we feel the need to talk to a gender-agnostic audience, and be seen as a progressive brand.”

This recalibration is not cosmetic. It reflects the emergence of cohorts such as young men living independently or first-time cooks—segments that were historically peripheral but are now culturally and commercially relevant. The challenge lies in engaging them without appearing performative.

Sharma’s answer leans heavily on tone and format for the new-age consumer value system, which is changing rapidly. They don't like content to be pushed to them; they prefer something coming organically to them and are able to resonate better with it. They value brands who talk like them and have value systems with significant overlap with their own.

“So it's increasingly important for legacy brands to understand their minds and to take their messaging in a non-intrusive and less pedantic way to them, which seamlessly fits into their lifestyle,” Sharma notes. This is where influencer ecosystems become less about amplification and more about translation. And it comes down to adapting brand narratives into culturally native formats that feel less like advertising and more like participation.

The discipline of choice

If content remains central, the proliferation of platforms and formats has made decision-making more complex. Sharma resists the temptation to romanticise data abundance.

As a marketer and a CMO, he claims to have always believed that content still rules. But what’s underpins its criticality is what is played out to consumers, adding value to every piece of communication. The challenge lies in restraint.

“Marketers are spoiled for choices. We have data and its profusion sometimes tends to confuse us because at the end of the day, budgets have not grown at a level for brands as much as the choices have proliferated. It's very important for marketers to make those choices and do what they do well, because there is a temptation to do a lot,” Sharma cautions.

Consistency, rather than constant reinvention, emerges as the operative principle. The fundamental basics of doing things consistently and significantly, not working with a single influencer on a particular day, will really move some metric for the brand, unless they do it consistently over a period of time. This is especially important in an amorphous world, which is unlikely to get any more definitive for a marketer in the near future. This is a cautionary note for an industry often drawn to the next technological promise—be it AI-driven personalisation or immersive formats—without fully exhausting the potential of existing channels.

Experimentation with intent

Despite advocating consistency, Sharma underscores the importance of experimentation. The distinction lies in how it is structured and evaluated.

“One reason marketers are not able to judge the effect of what we are doing is because we don't define the metrics that a particular intervention is supposed to influence. For example, if the objective is to drive conversations, then I'll measure conversations. I can't start measuring sales against it,” he argues.

The logic is deceptively simple: clarity of objective precedes measurement. Only once an activation does well, should one consider expanding its scale. At the same time, unless a marketer does it at scale, and consistently, they will not be able to decide whether it has truly worked for the brand.

KRBL’s Women’s Day activation serves as a test case, where disproportionate engagement signalled the potential for scaling similar interventions. The broader takeaway is that experimentation is not about sporadic pilots but about building a pipeline of ideas with clearly defined success metrics.

Sharma also questions the industry’s fixation on calendar-led marketing. While acknowledging the visibility that such moments provide, he points to their limitations. “There is so much noise and clutter and all brands have finite budget, so they want to shout out at the time to be visible to the consumer.”

Instead, he advocates for insight-led entry points. “There must be a baseline consumer-insight led occasion, rather than creating newer days or moments for consumers, because that is very difficult to do as brands independently.”

For KRBL, this translates into a flexible approach to the marketing calendar. It evaluates occasions such as New Year, Eid or Diwali not as obligatory spikes but as opportunities contingent on category relevance.

For legacy FMCG brands, the path forward appears less about radical reinvention and more about disciplined evolution. KRBL’s approach, which is anchored in heritage while experimenting with cohorts, content and categories, reflects the tightrope many incumbents must walk.

The larger question for marketers is not whether to chase relevance, but how to do so without diluting identity. In a market where trust is assumed and attention is scarce, the brands that endure may be those that learn to speak less like advertisers and more like participants that are consistent, contextual and, above all, credible.

Source: Campaign India