Readers Write In #834: Something Borrowed, Something Blue

By Sai Prasath

Brand building in 2025 feels likes a bad marriage of years gone by – built on convenience and easy access, with very little meaning left to hold it together.

If borrowed identity is a virus, then LinkedIn is ground zero.

And I’ll admit, it’s my guilty pleasure. The moment something remotely newsworthy happens, like India losing a cricket match or some global chaos, I open LinkedIn, not Twitter. Because you know it’s coming: “5 leadership lessons from the Jadeja-Washington partnership” “What the Coldplay incident teaches us about ownership?” Even a war will get a carousel, with a punchline and a profile pic in grayscale.

Everything’s content now. And everyone is a brand.

And weirdly, they all look like they got married to the same aesthetic. but none of them really know why. Blame it on the Anushka-Virat wedding. India hasn’t recovered from that pastel vibe since. No one’s original. Everyone’s polished.

But this isn’t branding. This is costume. Borrowed fonts, borrowed positioning, borrowed voice. Rented identity, created with Canva.

Positioning today feels like rental furniture. It matches the curtains. It trends well. It works, until it doesn’t. You’re always one scroll away from replacing it.

But personality? That’s ownership. You choose it with intention. You keep it through bad lighting. You grow with it. It can’t be copied. You can borrow the vibe, but the feeling won’t follow.

Just to be clear, I am not asking everyone to be original. I’m not even saying every brand or a person looking to build their own brand needs a purpose. (God knows I don’t want to hear yet another sustainability lecture from a leather jacket brand.)

Some of the best brands were built on just being cool. But even cool needs commitment. If your brand shapeshifts every quarter, people stop bothering to remember it.

That’s my issue with so much of today’s brand work. It all sounds “clever”. But it all sounds the same. They’re fun, yes. But more often, I hear the creator more than the brand, Tanmay over Cred and AIB over Swiggy. And that’s where it starts to fall apart.

If I like the ad but can’t recall the brand, did the branding even happen? Ironically, I wrote an entire piece once called “I Reference, Therefore I Am”, a love letter to how pop culture helped me find my voice. But maybe that’s the point: referencing should reveal identity, not replace it. I keep going back to Fevicol. They’ve changed over the years, but they still feel like themselves. Their humour is still unmistakably theirs. Of course, not everyone has Fevicol’s luxury of time. Repetition takes years. But distinctiveness? That’s a choice. The Whole Truth, for instance, is a much younger brand, in a noisier category. Every time they speak, you know it’s them. That’s what conviction looks like. They don’t need to chase trends, even though most of the times they stick the landing when they try. They’ve built trust. And trust isn’t some big declaration. It’s repetition. It’s showing up as the same person again and again.

I can’t say the same about most brands today. They feel like relatives who keep changing houses. Nice decor, but no memories.

But The Whole Truth or Fevicol? That’s like going back to your grandparents’ home. You don’t need a brand book to explain that feeling. You just know.