In a marketplace flooded with challenger brands, algorithm-driven discovery, and consumers whose attention spans now disappear in seconds, India’s legacy brands continue to hold an almost unfair advantage: they are already part of people’s lives.
From the unmistakable blue of Parachute oil bottles to the comforting familiarity of Johnson's Baby, Cadbury, Colgate, and Saffola, these brands are not merely products sitting on shelves. They are routines, memories, rituals, and inherited trust passed from one generation to the next.
However, nostalgia alone no longer guarantees survival. Today’s consumer expects brands to move at the speed of culture. The modern Indian shopper may still trust a decades-old name, but they also want cleaner ingredients, trend-aware communication, creator-driven storytelling, regional relevance, and formats designed for platforms rather than television screens. Legacy brands are therefore facing a balancing act of staying recognisable while constantly reinventing themselves.
For Vikram Karwal, CMO at Marico Limited, the staying power of brands such as Parachute and Saffola comes down to one thing: consistency. He believes consumers continue to default to these household names because they have spent decades delivering on a “clear, credible promise”. Yet he is equally clear that familiarity without evolution can quickly become irrelevant.
That evolution, according to Karwal, now happens through meaningful innovation and culturally resonant communication. While the trust remains intact, the expression changes. Legacy brands are being modernised through lighter formats, trend-led ingredients, and storytelling designed for younger audiences without diluting the original equity that made them successful.
At the same time, Marico’s youth-focused brands such as Livon and Set Wet are being built very differently. He explains, “Here, relevance is driven by cultural participation, leveraging creators, communities, gaming ecosystems, fashion platforms, and regional contexts to embed brands in the spaces young consumers actively engage with. Campaigns today are designed to be platform-native, creator-led, and rooted in self-expression, identity, and individuality, values that matter deeply to this cohort.”
This strategy is also visible in the brand’s media spending. Karwal notes that digital now accounts for nearly 55 per cent of Marico’s core advertising spends, even as traditional media continues to play a crucial role in scale and credibility building. Influencers, in this ecosystem, are no longer just amplifiers but “modern media vehicles” capable of bringing contextual storytelling and cultural fluency at speed.
Yet even as digital reshapes the advertising landscape, the core strength of legacy brands still lies in emotional memory.
Manish Solanki, COO and Co-founder at TheSmallBigIdea, argues that heritage brands begin with a significant advantage because they are not introducing themselves from scratch. Consumers already know them, trust them, and often associate them with deeply personal memories.
“Legacy brands don’t just sit on a shelf; they sit in people’s memories,” he says, describing how these products become embedded in kitchens, routines, and childhood habits. In a world where new brands can go viral overnight, long-term trust remains significantly harder to manufacture.
Still, Solanki believes emotional loyalty needs constant nurturing. “The brands that are still on top of their games aren’t just leaning on nostalgia, they often show up in ways that feel current, that reflect how their consumers live now, what they care about now. The heritage gives you the foundation. Relevance is what keeps you standing on it.”
That need for reinvention is especially visible in categories built on trust and care, such as baby products.
At Johnson's Baby, the challenge is not simply acquiring new consumers but reintroducing the brand to a generation of parents that already grew up using it. Peeyush Unikkat, Commercial & Equity Lead, describes inherited trust as both the brand’s greatest strength and its biggest responsibility. “Legacy without moving forward is just nostalgia,” he says.
Rather than leaning solely on decades of familiarity, Johnson’s Baby is now reframing its communication around nourishment through its Milk and Rice range. Instead of focusing only on safety and protection, the brand is expanding the conversation towards skincare nourishment for babies, supported by science and research-backed positioning.
The communication strategy itself reflects how legacy marketing is changing. Instead of beginning with a traditional film-led awareness push, the brand launched an offline experiential ritual involving influencers from across the country before scaling communication digitally. The approach signals how even long-established brands are increasingly prioritising community validation and creator conviction before mass-market storytelling.
For Chetan Asher, Founder and CEO of Tonic Worldwide, this transformation is fundamentally altering the structure of storytelling itself.
He describes modern legacy marketing as “modular”. The big brand idea still exists, but executions now stretch across six-second hooks, creator collaborations, vertical edits, AI-personalised content, and regional adaptations. The emotional truth remains the same, but the delivery is constantly being reformatted for the feed.
Interestingly, some of the oldest brand assets are proving surprisingly resilient in this fragmented ecosystem. Mascots, jingles, and recognisable visual cues now travel seamlessly across formats, from television to Instagram Reels to connected TV.
Asher also points to a noticeable shift in ad spending patterns. Legacy brands are directing larger budgets towards digital, especially short-form video and creator-led ecosystems, while simultaneously investing in D2C extensions and always-on content strategies.
That duality perhaps defines the modern legacy brand best.
The old rules of mass advertising are no longer enough, but neither is internet virality. Consumers may discover products through creators and algorithms today, yet trust is still accumulated slowly over time through consistency, reliability, and emotional familiarity.
In many ways, India’s biggest heritage brands are no longer winning because they are old. They are winning because they understand that survival now depends on behaving young while remaining deeply familiar.
