Double-Engine Brand Sarkaar: Grab attention and money!

A deodorant brand nobody posts about on Instagram overtook Axe to become India's market leader. No celebrities. No viral campaigns. Just one boring claim repeated until 72 percent of consumers could recall it unprompted: "No Gas, Only Perfume." This is the contradiction that should keep marketers awake: we have never been better at creating attention, yet we have never been worse at converting it into growth. We celebrate the brands everyone talks about while the brands everyone buys quietly dominate their categories.

The comfortable lie is that matter equally- awareness and sales, reach and revenue, brand and performance. The uncomfortable truth is that most attention we generate is worthless. Not inefficient. Not suboptimal. Worthless.

Of course, the marketing funnel exists. Attention leads to awareness, awareness to consideration, consideration to purchase. But modern marketing has become obsessed with filling the top while ignoring that the funnel is broken. The leakage between attention and action is so massive that pouring more into the top is like fixing a burst pipe with higher water pressure.

Consider Tanishq's 2020 controversy. An advertisement depicting an interfaith family triggered nationwide outrage. #BoycottTanishq trended for days. The stock dipped. Political leaders weighed in. Millions watched, shared, argued. And then? Nothing. Sales continued normally. Quarterly results showed no impact. All that attention was intense, sustained, and commercially meaningless. The brand was infamous for a week, and the infamy was irrelevant by the next quarter.

Similarly, Zomato’s social media presence, meme-based content, and witty brand voice achieved high engagement and viral traction among younger audiences. Brand engagement rose, but publicly-documented evidence of large share or sales jumps attributable to the campaign was lacking.

This is not an anomaly. It is the norm.

SOCIAL MEDIA & WORSHIPPING FALSE GODS

The platforms have trained us to worship false gods. Meta will show us exactly how many people saw the ad, for how long, and whether they liked it. What Meta cannot show us is whether those people will think of us three months later when they actually need to buy our category.

The confusion starts with a misunderstanding of how brands actually grow. Growth does not come from just engagement. It comes from mental and physical availability. Being easily recalled when someone enters the category, and being easy to find and buy, are what matter. When someone needs toothpaste, Colgate surfaces not because of its Instagram strategy but because it owns the word "toothpaste" in the minds of millions.

That ownership is built through boring consistency along with creative brilliance. The Amul girl has not changed in decades. Fevicol has used the same visual language for generations. These brands understood something we forgot: memory formation requires repetition, not novelty.

Recent research tracked how long advertising actually affects sales. Online video ads? Six days. After a week, YouTube pre-roll might as well have never existed. Television ads lasted four times longer. Not because TV is magic, but because it forces attention in a way that skippable, scrollable, ignorable digital content does not. Yet we keep buying six-day impact and wondering why the business fails to grow.

Fogg deodorant grasped this when it entered the market in 2011. Axe dominated with celebrity seduction fantasies. Wild Stone promised to make you irresistible. Park Avenue sold sophistication. Fogg sold one thing: more sprays per bottle because no gas inside. Boring. Functional. Repetitive. Fogg spent 23 percent of revenues on advertising, triple what competitors spent. But instead of celebrities or creativity, it bought frequency. The same ad, the same message, the same promise, hammered continuously. Within a year, Fogg overtook Axe. Today, it owns almost 20 percent market share while Axe has fallen to 6 percent.

Balaji Wafers built a Rs 5,000-crore snack empire, spending less than 2 percent on advertising. No memes. No influencers. Just chips in every store, more weight per pack than Lays, and prices that make sense. It now commands a 65 percent share in Gujarat and Maharashtra, competing against PepsiCo's marketing machine. These brands never trend on Twitter. They never win at Cannes. They just grow, quarter after quarter, boring their way to dominance.

ATTENTION & MUCH MORE

What about campaigns that went viral AND drove sales? Cadbury's personalized Diwali campaign with Shah Rukh Khan generated massive views and 35 percent sales growth. But examine it closely. The campaign worked because virality aligned with the purchase occasion of festival gifting and the emotion the nation was experiencing- COVID-19 had affected sales of smaller businesses. The attention had a job, and the job was aligned with a calendar and context. Most viral campaigns are unemployed, existing only to be noticed.

Marketers can miss this at their own peril. The trap is seductive because it feels sophisticated. We have more tools to measure attention than ever before but we are perfecting our measurement of the wrong game. The brands that escape this trap ask different questions. Not "how many people saw this?" but "how many will remember it when they need our category?" Not "what's our share of voice?" but "what's our share of mind at the moment of purchase?" Not "did we trend?" but "can we raise prices?"

These questions have uncomfortable answers. Most advertising that ignores context and the ‘job to be done’ fails to encode memories. Most campaigns fail to change behaviour. Most of what we call "brand building" is actually brand noise. Activity that feels like progress but leaves no lasting trace.

The solution is not to abandon measurement or ignore attention. It is to recognize that productive attention looks different from empty attention. Productive attention builds mental availability and pricing power. It is often boring, consistent, and compounds slowly. Empty attention generates metrics but not margins. It is exciting, varied, and evaporates quickly.

Whenever faced with a choice, one can optimize for the metrics that make good presentations: impressions, engagement, and sentiment. Or you can optimize for the metrics that make good businesses: mental availability, physical availability, and the ability to charge more than competitors. The metrics one chooses reveal whether we are in the entertainment business or the brand business.