Theme two of three from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit, Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
The most useful thing said all day came from a B2B software company, and it was about people who are not paid anything.
Brand trust gets discussed in Indian marketing as if it were a media outcome. Run enough campaigns, keep the message steady, and trust will eventually show up in the tracker. What Friday's sessions made clear is that the trust which survives commoditisation is built somewhere else entirely: in unpaid communities, in decades of consistent delivery, and in the factory that keeps the promise marketing makes.
Kapil Thukral, who leads digital marketing at Tally, was asked whether the chartered accountants and business owners around the brand work as an influencer channel. His answer was no.
His reasoning cuts against how most B2B marketing budgets in India are being written right now. Conventional B2B influencer marketing does not really work for business software here, he argued, because the supply of credible voices does not exist. And it does not exist because the demand never did. Nobody built a career reviewing accounting software, so there is no bench of trusted reviewers waiting to be paid.
What Tally has instead is community marketing in its oldest form: offline networks of chartered accountants, business owners, tax practitioners and content creators that run into tens of thousands of people. None of them are paid. None of them expect to be. The only promise Tally makes is that the company will do everything in its power to make them successful, and it evaluates those communities on what Tally 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
Sit with the second half of that line. Every Indian marketer reading this has an influencer row in the budget sheet. Almost nobody has a row for well-wishers, because there is no rate card and no dashboard for them. That is exactly why they compound. This is word of mouth marketing at its most honest: recommendations that carry weight precisely because no money changed hands. And it means community led growth is not a SaaS playbook imported from the US. Tally has been running it offline for decades.
Kapil was equally clear about the cost side. Being trusted by a business community for decades is an asset; it opens doors a new brand has to force. It also means every decision has to pass through the customers who have trusted you for ten, twenty, thirty years. Not just the next customer. All of them, at once.
That is the part that rarely makes it into the brand trust conversation. Trust is not only an accumulator. It narrows your decision set. Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige put the same idea in sharper commercial terms: an iconic brand cannot run twenty experiments and see what sticks, because there is too much riding on each one. Not just money, but imagery built over decades.
Akila drew a distinction we will be using in pitches for the rest of the year. For an established brand, the digital conversation starts at brand authority, not brand education. Consumers already know who you are. You are not buying awareness. You are buying relevance to a modern use case, which means the money moves down the funnel into consideration and intent instead of sitting at the top.
She was also honest about heritage as both benefit and baggage. Prestige, she said, is effectively five companies. Cookware competes with one set of brands, mixer grinders with a completely different one, and each segment needs its own answer.
Then she described the startup counter-move with unusual precision. A challenger picks one narrow segment out of a portfolio the incumbent spent forty years building, sharpens a single proposition, and puts every rupee behind it. When ten startups do this at once, the incumbent has to answer all ten, because a heritage brand cannot walk away from a segment it has served for decades. That is the real asymmetry between legacy brands and challengers. Not speed. Not budget. Focus.
Vibhor Ronge of MTR, part of Orkla India, described the discipline on the other side. A hundred-year-old Bengaluru institution that invented the rava idli mix carries an obligation to its legacy, and that makes the team more careful rather than less hungry. They do catch trends, he said, but not all of them. Only the ones relevant to their consumer that add something back to the brand.
In a year when every brand is being told to post more and post faster, that restraint is worth naming. For heritage brands, relevance is not about matching the content velocity of a two-year-old D2C label. It is about choosing the few moments where showing up strengthens the equity instead of spending it.
The line of the day came from the fireside chat with Ankit Kedia, Founder and General Partner at Capital A, who built and sold a packaging business before he started investing.
"Marketing states the promise and the factory keeps it." Ankit Kedia, Capital A
His illustration was simple. If a shampoo bottle leaks, no consumer says the cap failed. They say the brand failed. Packaging, dispensers, pumps, tooling: none of it appears in a brand deck, and all of it is the brand as far as the customer is concerned.
He argued that the old war between operations and marketing is dissolving, because packaging is commoditised and the only remaining edge is either the range of solutions or the agility that comes from controlling production yourself. One wellness foods brand in his portfolio now manufactures roughly eighty percent of its products in house, and he was blunt about how much harder the first two years were when the business depended on external vendors and minimum order quantities.
For anyone doing brand building in India, this is the least glamorous and most reliable trust lever available. The customer cannot audit your supply chain. They experience it every time they open the pack.
Kapil was asked what a well-funded startup does better than Tally right now. He did not get defensive. He said they can do everything, and that creativity is available to almost anyone today. Then he came back to the only durable answer he could see: whether a business chases what is currently popular, or works on the real problems of real people.
He also dropped a remark that deserved more attention than it got. Nine years at Tally, and every single year someone has announced that SEO is dead, content is dead, advertising is dead. His conclusion was not that the announcements are wrong. It was that the job is to keep evolving and find the way through. With zero click search, he noted, discovery has become a winner-takes-all market. Both things are true at once, and marketers who hold only one of them make bad decisions.
Three moves, in order of how quickly you can make them.
Which of your customers would defend you in a room you are not in? And when did anyone at your company last do something for them?
Brand trust is the confidence customers have that you will deliver what you promise, built through repeated proof rather than repeated messaging. It compounds because it has no rate card. A competitor can match your media budget in a quarter, but it cannot buy the recommendations of people who have watched you keep your word for years.
Consistency, delivery and community, in that order. Marketing states the promise; the product, the packaging and the service keep it. Add unpaid communities of practitioners and customers who benefit from your success, and trust starts building itself. What you cannot do is shortcut it with spending.
Rarely in India, and Tally's experience explains why. Credible B2B voices barely exist because the demand for them never did. Communities of practitioners, chartered accountants in Tally's case, do the job influencers are hired for, and they do it unpaid, which is exactly what makes them believable.
Community marketing means building and serving networks of customers and practitioners around your product, measured by what you give them rather than what they sell for you. Community-led growth is the compounding effect: those networks recommend, teach, and defend the brand, and the growth they produce costs nothing per impression.
Brand education spends money teaching the market who you are. Brand authority assumes the market already knows, and spends on relevance instead. For established brands, that means budgets move down the funnel into consideration and intent, not into awareness they already own.
By protecting focus rather than chasing velocity. Catch only the trends that add something back to the brand, the way MTR does. Avoid running twenty loose experiments, the way TTK Prestige refuses to, because each one carries decades of imagery. And answer challengers segment by segment, since the one thing they hold that you cannot copy is focus.