Theme one of three from the 17th Digital Leadership Summit. Bengaluru, 31 July 2026.
Two of the sharpest consumer brands in the room last Friday built their early businesses on speed. Both spent this year pulling speed out of the promise. First Club, the Bengaluru grocery brand, has decided the words "quick commerce" will not sit anywhere near it. Orange Health Labs spent five years selling itself as India's fastest diagnostic lab, then retired that line for "Speed Meets Science." Neither move was a coat of paint. Both were a read on the same shift: 10-minute delivery has stopped being a reason to choose you and turned into the price of entry. What follows is a brand repositioning story, and some version of it is now sitting in front of most teams working in Indian quick commerce.
The short version
We moderated that panel with Lucky Saini, Head of Marketing at First Club, and Smita Murarka, who runs marketing and the consumer business at Orange Health Labs. The part that stayed with us was not the repositioning itself. It was how each of them knew it had worked.
Lucky Saini described the change in customer complaints. Early on, people wrote in about delivery times. Now, when an order runs a few minutes late, most customers let it go. What they write in about is the fruit. Why is this apple bruised? Why is this mango not sweet?
That shift is worth more than any brand-track study we have seen presented in a review meeting. The complaint moved off the promise and onto the product. Recall tells you a message reached someone. A complaint tells you what they now expect from you. When customers start holding you to a standard you set on purpose, the position has landed. When they are still holding you to the old one, it has not, whatever the tracker says.
Most brands never look here. Support tickets sit with the CX team, positioning sits with marketing, and the two data sets never meet. They should. Read a month of complaints, and you learn what your brand actually promises, as opposed to what your deck claims it promises.
First Club's line is "curated slow, delivered fast." Lucky Saini was blunt about why the word "slow" is in there. People do not notice anything without contrast. If you are building a new category, you have to break the existing frame of reference, and you cannot do that with a line that sounds like everyone else's, only turned up a notch.
This is where a lot of Indian D2C positioning falls over. The category says fast, so the challenger says faster. The category says pure, so the challenger says purest. That is a comparative, not a contrast, and comparatives get beaten by whoever has the bigger budget. "Slow" sitting next to "fast" makes a reader pause for a quarter second. That pause is the entire job of a brand positioning line.
Lucky Saini named the harder task in front of him now. He has to turn a claim about quality into something a customer can actually see. His phrasing was about making the process of quality so obvious that people cannot unsee it. Every premium brand in India reaches this point. You can assert quality for one funding cycle. After that, you have to show the mechanism.
Smita Murarka made the same case from the other side of the market. Orange Health started during the pandemic, when a diagnostics brand that came to your home fast was solving a real and urgent problem. Speed was the wedge. It was also, in time, the ceiling.
Her point was that speed became defensible only once the brand could explain what produced it. In their case, that is automated labs with little manual handling, sample integrity from the moment of collection, and reports back in six hours. "Speed Meets Science" does not throw away the original promise. It puts a reason under it.
She also drew a distinction Indian brands get wrong all the time. Orange Health is not positioned as premium. It is positioned as fairly priced for the quality you get. Lucky Saini said the same about First Club: good design reads as expensive in this market, and a big part of his job is separating the two. Indian shoppers have been trained to assume that anything that looks considered must cost more. Both brands are trying to break that link rather than cash in on it.
Smita Murarka said retention runs above fifty percent, which is high for a category built on one-off tests. If that holds, it is the strongest number on the panel. The second promise, not the first, is what brings a customer back. For any D2C brand, that is the whole game. The first promise buys the trial. The second promise earns the repeat.
The convenience question was not limited to our panel. In the Iconic Brands session, Akila Chandrasekar of TTK Prestige described something we did not expect. Prestige moved early to put consumer durables onto quick commerce, and pressure cookers and gas stoves now bring in a real share of its online sales.
Nobody needs a pressure cooker in ten minutes. Her read was that the platform has stopped being a delivery channel and become a discovery surface, a shift we called out in our digital marketing trends for 2026. The search bar on a quick commerce app now does the job the Google search bar used to do for that category. The query, the comparison, the shortlist, and the decision all happen in one place. She framed these platforms as closer to a partnership than a marketplace, partly because they pick a small set of category leaders to build the category with.
Vibhor Ronge of MTR, part of Orkla India, described the same thing in media terms. On a quick commerce app, retail and media land on the same screen. The impression and the conversion happen inside one session. For a hundred-year-old food brand, that has changed how budgets get tested: smaller bets, faster reads, a hypothesis built on a narrow segment and then scaled once the signal is clear. This is retail media doing its real job, and most brands are still treating it as a listing fee.
Akila also named a constraint that pure D2C brands do not carry. An omnichannel brand has to hold price hygiene across every channel. It cannot discount hard online without hurting the offline relationships it spent decades building. That is a real strategic limit, and it is one reason incumbents look slower than they are.
Three moves, in the order you can actually do them.
The convenience era did not end. It became the floor. The question every brand in that room was answering, in its own category, was what sits on top of it.
So here is the one to sit with. If your category matched your fastest promise tomorrow, what would you sell on instead, and would your customers already believe it?
Quick commerce is the delivery of everyday products, mostly groceries and essentials, in ten to thirty minutes through hyperlocal dark stores. In India, it has moved from novelty to default. Speed is now expected across the category, which is why the strongest brands are competing on quality, range, and trust instead.
Dark stores are small, delivery-only warehouses placed inside neighbourhoods. They hold a tight, fast-moving product range and exist only to fulfil online orders, not to receive walk-in shoppers. They are the reason a quick commerce app can promise ten-minute delivery across dense urban areas.
Quick commerce works in India because of dense cities, low delivery costs, and a large base of shoppers who order small baskets often. Dark store networks sit close to demand, and habit has done the rest. Ordering in ten minutes has become normal rather than remarkable across most metros.
Not on its own. When every serious player offers ten-minute delivery, speed becomes the price of entry rather than a differentiator. The advantage now sits in the second promise: product quality, a clear reason behind the speed, and enough trust to bring the customer back for the next order.
Brand repositioning is the deliberate shift of what a brand stands for in the customer's mind, usually to move past a claim that has become common. First Club dropping "quick commerce" and Orange Health retiring "India's fastest lab" for "Speed Meets Science" are both examples of repositioning above a commoditised promise.
Read your complaints. When customers stop holding you to the old promise and start holding you to the new one, the reposition has landed. First Club saw this when complaints moved from late delivery to the quality of the fruit. A tracker tells you a message landed. A complaint tells you what people now expect.