No rain in a waterproof paint ad? What in-home immersions in Kerala taught Asian Paints || ft. Naveen Murali

Why would a waterproof paint ad leave out the rain?

Naveen Murali, now VP of Marketing at SUGAR Cosmetics, looks back on a campaign from his Asian Paints years. At the time, exterior paint ads in Kerala shared rain as a common theme. After spending time in consumers’ homes across the state, the team behind Asian Paints Ultima Protect discovered something about how customers judged a good paint. That insight led them to take a different route with the campaign. By Naveen’s account, sales doubled within three months of the new campaign going out.

In this episode of Down and Dirty with Dr. T., host Taapsi Ramachandani explores the business of insights from the brand side: how a marketing team decides which consumer findings deserve a campaign, how leadership comes to back them, and how an insight travels from a living room to a script, a pack and a retail counter.

The Aha moments:

• How a first market visit reset Naveen's picture of who buys a premium product
• A recent Sugar launch where a format that won pre-launch consumer trials met a mass audience that used it differently, and how reviews, a founder video and an on-pack sticker closed the gap
• Why Ultima Protect plateaued in Kerala with satisfied buyers, and what a side-by-side screening of category ads showed about sameness in communication and the pull of a strong parent brand over its sub-brand
• How the team structured its immersions: homes of Ultima Protect buyers, Ultima buyers and competitor buyers, plus the painters who influence what gets bought
• How one painter's remark about what he saw in the paint became the central idea of a campaign, and how that idea reached dealer counters through painters' written purchase lists
• Why the campaign went without rain, and how the front of the pack carried the same cue as the ad so shelf and screen told one story
• Why Tamil Nadu and the Telugu markets called for a different territory from Kerala, with an ingredient-led idea in one state and a process-led idea in the others, and how that learning shaped the national campaign
• How taking brand managers, marketing leadership and other functions into the field produced alignment before the debrief
• Naveen's advice on briefs and research: keep each ad to one message, observe people while they use the product, and enter research ready to be surprised

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About guest: Naveen Murali is VP of marketing at Sugar Cosmetics, where his remit covers performance marketing, the in-house creative agency and consumer insights. His earlier career includes marketing leadership at Pepperfry, years at Asian Paints and a role at Oracle. He has been named to the Impact CMO 40Under40 list and recognised as an Economic Times Young Leader, and he is an alumnus of NIT Warangal and IIM Kozhikode.

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