When Brands Found Their Voice

Every generation has a soundtrack. Sometimes, it is made up of film songs or the music played at weddings, school functions and family celebrations. And sometimes, unexpectedly, it is made up of advertising jingles—a few notes from a ringtone, a familiar voice singing a brand name, a melody drifting out of the television while the family sits together in the living room. Suddenly, you are eight years old again. Or 15. Or back in the house you grew up in, watching the same commercials between your favourite programmes.

That is the peculiar magic of a great brand tune. It can outlive the campaign, the product and sometimes even the brand itself.

This month, one of India’s most recognisable brand sounds achieved a noticeable milestone. Airtel’s signature tune, composed by A.R. Rahman and first introduced in 2001, completed 25 years. Five notes, repeated across decades, became a sonic signature recognised almost instantly.

But Airtel is hardly alone. There are several Indian brand tunes and jingles that did something similar—escaped the commercial and became cultural memory. We revisit some of them.

1. ‘Washing Powder Nirma, Nirma’

First Appeared: 1982

Agency: Purnima Advertising

Composer: Vedpal Varma

Lyricist: Vinod Sharma

Did you start humming the jingle the moment you read its name? That is the effect ‘Washing Powder Nirma’ has had on generations of Indians.

The song arrived in the early 1980s and quickly became inseparable from the brand. The melody was simple, repetitive and almost impossible to forget—precisely the qualities that made it so effective. It was heard in living rooms during the Doordarshan era, between programmes that families watched together. It was sung by children who may not have had the slightest interest in detergent. It was repeated, parodied and used in everyday conversations.

An earworm in the truest sense, the Nirma jingle is remembered today because of its simplicity. You do not need to hear the whole thing. ‘Hema, Rekha, Jaya aur Sushma’ are enough to bring back the rest.

2. ‘Asli Masale Sach Sach, MDH’

This jingle became iconic due to the familiar voice, the unmistakable refrain and, eventually, the smiling face in the red turban—Mahashay Dharampal Gulati.

That is what makes the MDH jingle so distinctive in the history of Indian advertising. The tune and the face reinforced each other. You heard ‘Asli masale sach sach…’ and saw the familiar Dadaji. And somewhere in your head, the jingle started playing.

The commercials kept returning to television, the tune kept returning to the commercials, and the brand kept returning to the same simple musical memory. The jingle's familiarity became its strength. Perhaps that is why it still feels so deeply nostalgic.

3. ‘Hamara Bajaj’, Bajaj Auto

Composed by Louis Banks, the song made the humble Bajaj scooter feel almost monumental. Its real power lay in how easily it could be remembered and sung. The melody rose with an unmistakable sense of pride, and the words were simple, but they carried a distinct feeling of belonging.

The song did not merely say the scooter belonged to India; it made the brand feel like something Indians collectively owned. Decades later, ‘Hamara Bajaj’ remains one of the clearest examples of a brand jingle becoming bigger than the commercial that carried it.

4. ‘Jab Ghar Ki Raunak’, Nerolac

Nerolac’s ‘Jab ghar ki raunak badhani ho’ jingle carries a special kind of nostalgia. It belongs to the era when paint advertising was not only about colour charts and product benefits, but about the emotional transformation of the home. First released in 1990, the jingle was composed and sung by Vishwajeet. Then came the version that would become particularly iconic—the painters' commercial, created by DraftFCB Ulka in 1998.

The melody became so deeply embedded in memory that Nerolac could take the commercial off air and still find that people remembered it. Over the years, the jingle has been revived and reinterpreted several times, each time with contemporary touches while retaining the melody that people already knew.

A new artist can sing it. A new generation can hear it. The arrangement can change. The campaign can move from painters to celebrities, from television to digital. But the moment those opening words play, the memory returns.

5. ‘Kuchh Khaas Hai’, Cadbury Dairy Milk

A cricket match is underway. The tension is rising. Then the batsman hits the winning six. Somewhere in the stands, a young woman suddenly gets up and starts dancing. She runs onto the field, arms in the air, celebrating as if the victory belongs personally to her. Playing in the background is the song ‘Kuchh khaas hai hum sabhi mein, kuchh baat hai hum sabhi mein…”

This ad, for Cadbury Dairy Milk, became one of the most recognisable images in Indian advertising, but it was the melody that gave the campaign its emotional afterlife.

Led creatively by Piyush Pandey, the campaign and the jingle established the chocolate’s association with joy, spontaneity and the sudden, unplanned moments of happiness that make ordinary life feel special. Sung by Shankar Mahadevan, the song felt warm and instantly hummable.

The brand revived the jingle and the campaign in 2021, only this time, a batswoman hit the winning six and a young man celebrated. The melody stayed because the thought stayed—there is something special in all of us.

6. ‘Googly Woogly Wooksh', Pond’s

There are some advertising jingles that make sense. There are some that make a promise. And then, there are some that are so wonderfully silly that they stay with you forever. Pond’s ‘Googly Woogly Wooksh’ belongs firmly to the third category.

The jingle had no complicated message to remember or product explanation to process. Just three playful words set to a catchy tune, that also had the rare quality of being fun to utter. It could be repeated by children, shared between friends and remembered years after the skincare commercial left the television screens.

Over the years, Ogilvy India has revived the phrase for different Pond’s campaigns. The most recent one introduced boys to the magic of skincare through their Super Light Gel.

7. ‘Docomo', Tata Docomo

Before the music begins, there is a voice. Then another joins it. Then another. A beat begins to take shape. Voices layer over voices until a simple brand tune becomes something bigger—a small, spontaneous chorus that sounds as if it could have been created by anyone.

When Tata Docomo entered India’s telecom market in 2008, it arrived as the new kid in a category dominated by familiar names. Its advertising needed to sound younger, more energetic and less weighed down by the seriousness that often surrounded telecom communication. The answer was this catchy jingle.

The tune, which appeared in the brand’s ‘The Friendship Express’ campaign, became such a recognisable part of Tata Docomo that it was later carried into other consumer touchpoints. Years later, the brand may have disappeared from the telecom landscape, but the tune remains tied to a very particular memory of India—the late 2000s, when mobile phones were rapidly changing everyday life.