A small shop opened up in Koramangala. It does not have a billboard on MG Road that would cost ₹2,25,000. It does not run Instagram ads, either. Rebecca, its co-founder, says those don’t convert the way people expect them to. What they do instead is make reels, show up at bigger food fests, and instead rely on the act of word of mouth.

It is also, in its own way, a portrait of the bind that small brands find themselves in. The platforms that were supposed to democratise marketing have become unnecessarily expensive. This is the part of the story about creativity and growth that usually goes untold.The creative timidity usually associated with large brands is now showing up in businesses that have barely left the starting line. 

Idea Cellular once made an advertisement that asked an uncomfortable question. In a country where caste governs who sits next to whom, who marries whom, Idea suggested that a mobile number could replace it all. The ad was called What an Idea, Sirji, and it was the kind of thing that made you stop for a second. Which is not what most advertisements are designed to do.

That was in 2009. During 2018, Idea merged with Vodafone India to form Vi. Its advertisements do what advertisements are supposed to do. They have not in the years since, made anyone stop in their tracks. Whether it’s a consequence of the merger or simply having more to lose is a question worth asking.

The question of what happens to a company’s creative instincts as it grows is one that the marketing industry tends to answer with excitement. Maturation, brand discipline and strategic consistency is what they call it.

Samuel has a name for what gets lost. He has spent enough years in brand strategy across companies small enough to be unnoticed and large enough to know better, that he no longer finds the pattern surprising. “The nothing-to-lose attitude almost always declines,” he says. “The better question is whether what replaces it is better, worse, or just different.”

In the initial years of a company, creativity is not a strategy that they go for.

Small brands, and fresh companies all have more to fear from obscurity than they do from embarrassment. They are under no obligation to protect their reputation and have no shareholders that may stop them from trying something new. 

In 2009, Vodafone deployed a series of characters who stumbled through day-to-day situations. But, during the IPL season that year, Vodafone aired almost 30 TV commercials. Each one of them told a story that ended with a service. Cricket updates, caller tunes, data etc. As time passed, people began waiting for them to air. They became one of the most popular searches, which is quite an achievement for a fictional white creature that promotes voicemail. In the subsequent quarter, Vodafone’s subscribers increased approximately 3.8 per cent.

Samuel describes the death of such advertising as the “safety of blandness”. After an idea is created, the process of it moving vertically through the chain of higher up makes it much more universal and safer.

Shruti Bhatt has spent her career as founder and chief copywriter of Linkingwordz, senior Gujarati reviewer at Magnon eg+, and linguist at PhonePe. That background, straddling creative work and the mechanics of how brands communicate, gives her a vantage point on where the two come apart. 

Another more subtle trap that brands often fall into is one because of success, according to Shruti Bhatt. A. She refers to it as the ‘Hilltop Problem.’ This is in reference to Coca-Cola’s 1971 campaign, I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke. 

Shot on a hilltop with an international choir with the message about the world and harmony. As per Shruti Bhatt, there is constant effort to make something which would either be more popular or similar to the first one. Somewhere along the lines, they stop making anything new. Such irony is rich: the campaign that proved what a brand can do is now the thing which stops it from doing anything else. 

Creative-forward brands understand the importance of working under healthy conditions to produce better results. Although this seems easy, it is very difficult to do so in practice. As Shruti Bhatt observes, this creates a situation where we insulate the marketing team from the layers of legal and financial approval until the idea is fully developed. 

“The brands I’ve seen hold onto their edge,” Samuel says, “are the ones that still have someone in the room willing to say, this idea is strange, and we’re doing it anyway.”

They also ignore the brand handbook, which is the kind of document that lists approved typefaces and color palettes. Shruti Bhatt differentiates between two types of marketing which are often mistaken. Performance marketing and brand marketing. 

Performance and brand marketing run on different logics. Performance marketing can be measured. It provides almost immediate results and it is scalable. You spend a rupee and track what it returns. It gives an advantage to optimization. The longer you do it, the better the data; the better the data, the more formulaic the approach. 

Brand Marketing is different. The returns from it are long-term and harder to pin down. By definition, it is almost an investment in cultural presence.”Performance marketing gets more formulaic and data-driven as you grow,” she says. “That’s fine and efficient. Brand marketing is where they invest in creativity to maintain their cultural relevance.” The mistake large brands make, Shruti Bhatt suggests, is allowing the logic of performance to colonise brands.

A 2023 study by the IPA found that emotionally led brand campaigns delivered twice the long-term profit growth of rational, product-led ones. The brands that understood this the earliest were rarely the biggest ones in the room.

So can growth kill the creative edge?

Not exactly. What it kills in almost every case, is a particular kind of creativity. That is the creativity of having nothing to protect. Of running at an idea because there is no one to stop you from doing so. That specific quality does not survive scale, and it would be naive to expect it to. 

What can survive is a commitment to the conditions through which good ideas are possible. The brands that have managed this tend to do a few things consistently. ‘The Souled Store’ is a good example of this done right: A brand that has managed to create a distinct following by keeping their identity fun, and visually appalling, while still leaving space for their work to feel alive. 

Brands that still have their creative edge sharp, seem to always stray away from approval processes, while believing in saying something that actually matters. The question is what growth does to creative instinct and why the conditions for creative risk are becoming harder to access.