Paint brands give festive marketing a fresh coat of storytelling as competition intensifies

The festive season brings a familiar ritual: homes are cleaned, lamps are lit, and walls receive fresh coats of paint. It is the creation of a blank canvas for new memories, a physical manifestation of hope and celebration. What appears to be simple home maintenance carries deeper cultural weight, and for the paint industry, this period represents the year's most critical sales window.

The sector, long a master of creative and emotional advertising that gave the culture iconic phrases like 'Har ghar kuch kehta hai', now faces its most challenging festive season in years. The entry of ambitious, well-funded challengers has ignited intense competition, marked by aggressive pricing and a flurry of new promises. The comfortable dynamics that once defined the market have been upended.

The category has been "very busy lately," observes Anirban Mozumdar, Chief Strategy Officer at TBWA\India. He says, "Challengers and established players are both trying to impress customers with promises of warranty and repainting assurances". This has created a vibrant but cluttered landscape, where the primary challenge for every brand is to, as Mozumdar puts it, "break the clutter with a message that matters, built around a meaningful proposition that consumers can make sense of and moves preference in the immediate term".

The old formula, a ‘freshly painted home’, no longer cuts through the noise. We find out how the industry is marketing amid new challenges this festive season.

Product features to cultural purpose

The briefs that have landed on agency desks this festive season have reflected a fundamental recalibration. There is growing recognition that brand recall alone is insufficient currency in this new competitive reality. According to Samhita Chaudhuri and Kshtij Rajoria, Senior Vice Presidents of Planning at Ogilvy Mumbai, the briefs from established brands have evolved dramatically, now asking advertising to "build relevance and deeper cultural connection with consumers" by "embedding the brand meaningfully into people's lives and celebrations".

Yet not everyone perceives a genuine transformation. Nidha Luthra, Executive Director at Thought Blurb Communications, voices a more critical assessment. She argues that paint has been a stagnant category. She says, “This is the main business problem facing most of these brands. The strategy and execution has followed similar patterns. Outdoor paints were always about longevity and water resistance. Indoor paints were about decor and family bonding. Brands were indistinguishable from each other.”

This divergence in perspective reveals the industry's central tension: whether brands are genuinely evolving or simply repackaging familiar promises with new language.

Competing philosophies on display

The strategic differences become concrete when examining how major players are approaching the ongoing festive season.

Birla Opus has staked its position on emotional resonance. Their tagline, 'Duniya Ko Rang Do', signals an intent to transcend transactional relationships. "Our approach, rooted in Duniya Ko Rang Do, is about more than selling paint. It is about helping people add joy and beauty to their homes during moments that matter," explains Inderpreet Singh, Head - Marketing, Birla Opus Paints. The brand views its recent Ganpati campaign as validation that emotional storytelling can differentiate in a crowded market.

JSW Paints has taken a different path, positioning itself as a ‘thoughtful brand’ through what they call disruptive transparency. Their campaign, 'Dabba Padho, Bachat Karo', is built around their disruptive promise of 'Any Colour One Price' and features popular actors to urge consumers to be more mindful when purchasing paint. Ashish Rai, CEO of JSW Decorative Paints, frames this approach as their "way of making painting homes both joyful and rewarding, while staying true to our Think Beautiful vision". 

The strategy bets that in a market rife with pricing confusion, clarity itself becomes an emotional benefit.

Asian Paints, meanwhile, has been leveraging its decades-long cultural fit as its primary competitive advantage. Rather than loud declarations, the brand's strategy involves becoming inseparable from the celebrations themselves. This has manifested through initiatives like painting Kolkata taxis with art and images of Durga Ma, celebrating the creativity of pandals through the ‘40th edition of Sharad Samman’, and introducing limited-edition festive packs inspired by local culture in southern states.

Emotion and function

The strategic dilemma facing all players is how to balance the heart and the head, the emotional pull of celebration against the functional demands of a considered purchase. The most sophisticated approaches attempt to hold both truths simultaneously.

Chaudhuri and Rajoria of Ogilvy Mumbai articulate this as an explicitly dual mandate. "It is two pronged, really. Strengthen love for the brand à Increase preference for our product(s)," they explain. The first element aims to create communication that makes people "pause and step into the brand world — to experience the values and emotions that define us". The second must operate differently, delivering messages that are "competitive, functional and sharp on solving people's most important needs.”

Even brands leading with emotion ground their appeals in functional commitments. Inderpreet Singh of Birla Opus Paints describes his company's latest initiative, "What I am most proud of is our latest Birla Opus Assurance campaign, which promises repainting within the first year if problems arise. It is a genuine commitment that builds trust and shifts the focus from product to overall experience". 

Ashish Rai of JSW Decorative Paints describes how his brand's functional transparency takes on emotional dimensions during the festive period. While the year began with heavy discounting, he notes that "festivals are when trust, quality and transparency matter most. Consumers reward fairness during this period, and that's exactly what JSW Paints stands for. Early festive indicators are positive, with our clear and consistent promise winning consumer confidence".

Where strategy meets reality

The distance between strategic intent and market impact depends heavily on execution, both in creative expression and in the physical infrastructure of purchase.

There is a notable shift away from grandeur for its own sake. Chaudhuri and Rajoria of Ogilvy Mumbai observe that clients are not really asking for "grand, cinematic spectacles" but rather for "hard-working, relevant communication that solves the business problem". They point to a campaign celebrating contractors as "Deewar ke Kalaakar" (Artists of the Wall) as an example of how even tactical briefs can build brand equity when rooted in genuine cultural insight.

Media strategy reveals another fault line in thinking. Luthra of Thought Blurb Communications maintains a traditional stance. "In this category, TV always leads the strategic brand building, because that's the nature of the beast," she states. Others, however, describe a reality where many campaigns are now conceived as "digital-first, or even digital-only," reflecting where consumers actually search for inspiration.

Perhaps most revealing is the paint category's unusual purchase journey. Mozumdar of TBWA\India highlights, "Consumer usually depends on intermediaries and, except in Tier 2 & 3 cities, consumers do not even go to the store to buy the paint. This makes mass advertising essential for creating brand love and enquiries from an in-market audience.” But it also elevates the importance of offline touchpoints, including retail shops and experience centres, to build confidence. "Physical availability’ and visibility matters a lot in this category – when the brand is seen as being widely available, it really improves consumer and influencer confidence," Mozumdar of TBWA\India explains.

The implication is stark: no matter how emotionally resonant the advertising, brands are faltering this festive if they are failing to deliver at the moment of decision, a moment that often happens without the consumer present.

What comes next

The turbulence in festive paint marketing shows a broader shift in consumer expectations and market structure. The comfortable assumptions that once governed the category are being tested.

Mozumdar of TBWA\India sees this as creating genuine openings. He says, "Challenger brands have a genuine opportunity to gain and get share from a new generation of millennial Indian Consumers. People who are open, far more conscious and research-oriented to navigate by the comfort of the default, there are no holy grails anymore – consumers are open to being convinced even by newer brands that genuinely solve a problem better.”

What has been observed this festive season is that the industry's ambitions are expanding beyond the transactional. The goal is evolving from selling paint to becoming integrated into the entire experience of home-making. Inderpreet Singh of Birla Opus Paints articulates this broader vision: "With strong consumer sentiment, growing premiumisation and positive market indicators, I see the industry moving towards holistic home beautification, at Birla Opus Paints, our ambition is clear, we are here to enable people to create joyful, meaningful spaces".

Whether this festive season has marked a genuine inflection point or simply a noisier iteration of familiar patterns, remains to be seen. What is clear is that the industry can no longer rely on inertia. In a market where trust must be earned rather than inherited, and where new entrants are questioning old certainties, the brands that succeed will be those that understand that painting a wall is never just about the paint. It is about homes that come to life.