The integrated read from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit. Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
We ran the 17th edition of the Digital Leadership Summit at the Taj MG Road in Bengaluru on 31 July, together with Google and Cheil. The theme on the invite read Building Brands for the Next Decade. Nine sessions, a room full of marketing leaders, and categories as far apart as diagnostics, accounting software, pressure cookers, deep tech, groceries and online degrees.
We expected the panels to pull in different directions. They did not. By the third session it was obvious that every speaker was answering the same question from inside a different category.
For First Club and Orange Health Labs, that thing was speed. For Tally, MTR and TTK Prestige, it was reach and distribution. For every company in the room, AI is doing it to execution right now. Same problem, three different decades of arrival. And it is the most honest brief for brand building we have heard in a while, because it forces you to separate what competitors can buy from what they cannot.
Both consumer brands on our convenience panel won their first customers on speed, and both spent this year taking speed out of the promise. First Club, the Bengaluru grocery brand, keeps the words quick commerce away from the brand entirely. Orange Health Labs sold itself for five years as India's fastest diagnostic lab, then retired the line for Speed Meets Science.
Lucky Saini of First Club gave the cleanest proof that a repositioning had landed, and it did not come from a brand tracker. His customers stopped writing in about late deliveries and started writing in about the fruit. Why is this apple bruised. Why is this mango not sweet. The complaint moved off the promise and onto the product, which means the customer moved with it.
Smita Murarka made the same case from diagnostics. Speed only became defensible once Orange Health could explain what produced it: automated labs with little manual handling, sample integrity from collection onward, and reports back in six hours. The new line does not throw the old promise away. It puts a reason under it. The second promise, not the first, is what brings a customer back.
The incumbents in the room are living the other end of the same shift. Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige described Prestige selling pressure cookers and gas stoves on quick commerce platforms, where nobody actually needs a cooker in ten minutes. Her read: the platform has stopped being a delivery channel and become a discovery surface, and its search bar now does the job Google's search bar used to do for the category. Vibhor Ronge of MTR described the same platforms in media terms, with the impression and the conversion happening inside one session, which has changed how a hundred-year-old brand tests budgets.
Convenience did not stop mattering. It stopped being an argument. Any brand positioning still built on it is standing on the floor and calling it a ladder.
The second pattern across the day was brand trust, and the sharpest version came from the least glamorous category in the room.
Kapil Thukral of Tally described the offline communities around the company: chartered accountants, business owners, tax practitioners, content creators, tens of thousands of people. None of them are paid. None of them expect to be. The only commitment Tally makes is to do everything in its power to make them successful, and it evaluates those communities on what it can do for them, not on what they sell.
"In long-term brand building, the role of a well-wisher cannot be bought with any amount of paid advertising."
 Kapil Thukral, Tally
Every marketer in that room has an influencer line in the budget. Almost nobody has a line for well-wishers, because there is no rate card and no dashboard for one. That is exactly why it compounds.
Ankit Kedia of Capital A gave the operational version in his fireside, and it was the line of the day.
"Marketing states the promise and the factory keeps it."
 Ankit Kedia, Capital A
When a bottle leaks, no customer blames the cap. They blame the brand. Packaging, tooling, dispensers, supply chain: none of it appears in a brand deck, and all of it is the brand as far as the customer is concerned. His argument was that the old standoff between operations and marketing is dissolving, because the remaining edge is control over what you make.
Akila added the constraint side of trust. Heritage is a benefit and a baggage at once. An iconic brand cannot run twenty experiments to see what sticks, because decades of imagery ride on every one. And she named the challenger playbook precisely: a startup takes one narrow segment out of a forty-year portfolio, sharpens a proposition on that one thing, and puts every rupee behind it. When ten challengers do that at the same time, the incumbent has to answer all ten. The real asymmetry is not budget or speed. It is focus.
Every panel touched AI in marketing, and nobody on stage was playing evangelist or sceptic. These were operators describing where they had drawn a line inside a live business, and the line was remarkably consistent.
Rahul Datta of NoBroker runs a customer-facing voice agent with a supervisor agent watching live calls, and still will not let AI launch or change a campaign. His reason had nothing to do with capability.
"You need a neck to catch."
 From the NoBroker exchange on the AI panel
Somebody has to be answerable for the call, which means somebody has to make it. Sandesh Gupta of Oolka said AI now does his research and his content, and that execution at scale on Meta and Google is not there yet, whatever the agency decks claim. Lucky Saini refuses AI creative for a fresh food brand while automating nearly everything in paid media except deployment and policy. Smita Murarka uses AI to get seventy to eighty percent of the way and never for the final work, because a diagnostics brand sells trust and the story has to be real.
Read together, they all land in the same place. Automate the layer where the output is a number. Keep humans on the layer where the output is a promise. Most teams are currently doing the reverse.
Kiran Kumar R of UNext supplied the piece with the shortest fuse. The SEO fundamentals have not changed, he said, but discovery has. Users are arriving through AI models now, and UNext can see that traffic. Around seventy percent of its business comes from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, so this is not a metro early-adopter story. Put that beside Kapil's point that zero-click results have made search winner-takes-all, and the conclusion is hard to avoid: being cited in the answer is starting to matter more than ranking on the page. Generative engine optimization is the name for that work, and hardly any brand has a budget line for it yet. It is the gap we built GEO Pulse to measure, and most brands still cannot say whether they show up when an AI engine answers a buying question in their category.
On the panel with Nikhil Khemani of Google, Varun of Epik and Gandharv Bakshi of Neosapien, the old framing got dismissed inside the first few minutes. If the idea is strong, the brand campaign drives performance and the performance campaign builds brand. The split is dissolving.
The more useful part was the CFO conversation underneath it. Gandharv described the proof he trusts: Neosapien has raised prices and cut discounts, and demand has held. That is a brand marketing argument that survives a finance meeting in a way aided recall never has. Varun's version was repeat, retention and lifetime value, plus a detail worth stealing: around ninety Epik employees carry the brand in their LinkedIn profiles, and branded search moved before any campaign did.
The honest summary from that room: the longer the horizon, the more performance marketing depends on the brand. Early-stage companies are right to be performance-heavy. They are also borrowing against a bill that comes due.
Three moves, in the order you can actually do them.
Since 2012 we have watched Indian brands win a category on one attribute and then spend years defending it. What was different in that room was that the best operators are no longer defending. They are retiring the attribute that built them while it is still working, and moving the argument up a level.
That is the pattern under all of it. Speed became infrastructure. Distribution became infrastructure. AI is turning execution into infrastructure right now, faster than either of the previous two. Anything that becomes infrastructure stops being a reason to choose you.
What is left is narrow and hard to copy: the second promise, the mechanism behind the claim, the people who vouch for you unpaid, and the judgment about what to make and what to kill. None of it is fast. All of it compounds. That is what building brands for the next decade actually looks like.
Thank you to Google and Cheil, to every speaker, and to the team who built the day. For the marketing leaders who were in the room, one question to take back: which of your current advantages will be infrastructure in eighteen months, and what are you building on top of it?
Brand marketing builds memory, preference and trust before a purchase is on the table. Performance marketing converts existing demand into a measurable action such as a lead, an install or a sale. The panel at Digital Leadership Summit 2026 argued the split is dissolving: a strong idea does both jobs, and over a long horizon your performance numbers depend on the brand you have built.
Performance marketing is paid advertising planned and optimised against a direct, measurable response: leads, installs, purchases, account openings. It is the right early bet for most young companies. The catch is that its efficiency is not independent of brand. As brand strength grows, click-through rates rise, acquisition costs fall and price sensitivity drops, which is why performance-heavy spending without any brand investment gets more expensive every year.
Brand building is the work that makes a customer choose you, and choose you again, without being convinced from scratch each time. It covers positioning, product experience, trust, communities and the operational discipline that keeps the promise. Unlike speed or distribution, it cannot be commoditised, which is why it is the part of marketing that compounds.
Assume today's differentiator becomes tomorrow's infrastructure, then invest in what survives that shift: a second promise beyond the entry fee, a visible mechanism behind your headline claim, advocates who vouch for you unpaid, and clear human judgment on which decisions a machine may make. Speed, reach and AI execution will all be available to your competitors. What you build on top of them will not.
Over longer horizons, yes. The evidence shared on stage: Neosapien has raised prices and cut discounts with demand holding, Epik tracks repeat, retention and lifetime value as its brand proof, and branded search moved when its own employees put the brand in their LinkedIn profiles, before any campaign ran. These are speaker claims from the stage, and they line up with what most mature accounts show: stronger brands pay less for the same conversion.
The Digital Leadership Summit is Social Beat's flagship event for marketing leaders. The 17th edition ran on 31 July 2026 at the Taj MG Road in Bengaluru, together with Google and Cheil, under the theme Building Brands for the Next Decade, with speakers from First Club, Orange Health Labs, Tally, TTK Prestige, MTR, NoBroker, Capital A, UNext and others.