Everyone wants the billboard. No one wants the barcode.
In most marketing meetings, there’s a moment when the lights dim, the deck comes up, the room leans forward: someone clicks to the “big idea” slide. A 30 second film. A shiny digital concept. A line that will apparently “change the conversation”. Heads nod. Budgets get ring fenced. Awards are imagined.
Meanwhile, in a corner of that same room, a lonely keynote page waits its turn: “Packaging routes”, “POS options”, “Music track TBD”. The real workhorses of the brand are treated like housekeeping – necessary, but not a priority.
But brand building doesn’t only happen in the 30 seconds you paid for. It happens in all the tiny moments you barely notice – the ones you never put in the reel.
That’s the great irony of modern marketing – we pour our energy into the things people skip, and neglect the things they live with.
Those are the underrated assets in a brand’s journey.
1. Packaging – the brand you take home!
If Advertising is the promise, Packaging is the proof.
The pack sits in the consumer’s hand long after your ad has disappeared into the algorithm. It’s on the shelf, in the kitchen, in the fridge, on the bathroom counter…quietly repeating your story every single day.
Think about the last time you bought something as simple as a packet of biscuits.
You did not wake up that morning reciting the latest TV script. You stood in front of a shelf or scrolled through a feed and your hand or thumb moved almost automatically toward something familiar. A flash of colour. A shape.
A word you trusted. A face you’d seen somewhere before.
In India, Parle G is a masterclass in this quiet, persistent presence. For decades, in paan shops and kiranas, on trains and canteen counters, that beige yellow pack with the wide eyed child has held its ground. The brand has done different campaigns, but the pack has been the constant – a visual handshake repeated billions of times.
The same is true of Amul butter. The little girl with polka dots has travelled from hoardings to cartoons to social media posts, but her most powerful stage is a cold shelf in a small shop. Mothers, students, hostel cooks, all reach out not for “a butter”, but for that particular yellow pack, that particular character. It’s not just packaging. It’s continuity. So is the Cadbury Diary Milk purple.
Yet in most brand rooms, packaging is relegated to the junior most and reviews sound like: “Can we add the new claim? We need the QR code. Legal wants this line. Sales wants the offer. Also, make the logo bigger.”
We squeeze years of equity and months of strategy into a noisy postcard, then wonder why the consumer cannot hear us.
2. Sonic Branding – When a brand walks in before you do!
If packaging is the face that stays, sound is the voice that lingers.
We live in a visually exhausted world. Timelines, banners, reels, stories – the eye spends its day sprinting. The ear, on the other hand, still has space. Sound can slip in while you’re cooking, driving, working, waiting for a call to connect.
Airtel understood this early. Long after individual campaigns faded, a few simple notes kept walking into rooms uninvited. At railway stations, in small towns, in metros, you would hear that tune and know, instantly, who was speaking. The brand had built something rare: an identity that travelled without needing a screen.
Think of how powerful that is in a country of many languages. A visual line needs to be translated; a tune just needs to be heard.
Yet, how do most marketers brief sound? At the end. “We’ll figure music closer to the edit.” As though it were wallpaper. As though it were an accessory.
Sonic identity, when treated as an asset in the brand’s journey, behaves more like a logo than a background track. It punctuates your radio spots, app opens, store chimes, IVR messages. It becomes the thing people hum when they are not thinking about you at all. That is branding in its purest form.
3. POS – The last honest conversation!
Now picture the point of sale – physical or digital.
For all the science and spreadsheets, the moment of truth is disarmingly simple: a person, a product, and a choice.
In a modern trade store in Mumbai, you’ll see two kinds of brands. One has quietly colonised its space: a clean block of colour, a clear hero SKU, a single minded shelf strip that says one important thing. The other has sprayed itself across the aisle in a jumble of wobblers, flash cards, and clashing offers, each added by a different meeting.
Guess which one feels confident.
POS is not decoration. It’s the last chapter of your story told at arm’s length. It should finish the sentence your pack began. “You know me. This is what I do. Here’s why now.”
But we often treat it like a notice board. Everybody pins something on. Trade wants visibility. Sales wants a deal. Brand wants a tagline. Before long, the most valuable real estate in the journey looks like a corporate intranet.
Digital is no different. The “hero image” on an e commerce site is today’s front of pack. If your brand doesn’t read at thumbnail size, if the benefit isn’t legible in a lazy scroll, it is effectively invisible. And yet how many brand teams review that tiny image with the same care they give to a full screen TV frame?
The journey, not just the ad
Sir John Hegarty often says, “Do interesting things and people will find you.” The corollary for our times might be: “Do interesting things in the places people actually meet you.”
A brand is not built only in the glare of a prime time spot or your digital scroll. It is built:
- In the split second a child’s hand hovers over two biscuit packs
- In the half heard tune that plays while you unlock your phone
- In the quiet authority of a product that owns its shelf, without shouting
The underrated assets in this journey are not glamorous. They don’t get case study films set to swelling music. But they are the parts of the story the audience re-reads every day.
The question for any marketer, especially in a market as noisy and nuanced as India, is not “What’s our next ad?” It is: “What will they live with? What will they touch, hear, and see again and again when the campaign is over?”
Because in the long run, that’s where brands are really built – not just in the thirty seconds we buy, but in the thousands of small moments we design and too often ignore. WYSP is all about going beyond the obvious and also focusing on the assets that matter in the long run.
(Views are personal)
