When we spoke with Geet Nazir last year, she had recently stepped into her role as Managing Director at Landor in India. More than a year on, we caught up with her again to talk about how the conversations around brands and growth are changing in India.
Nazir discusses the shift from brand refreshes toward deeper business transformation, the challenge of balancing global consistency with local relevance, and why experience increasingly extends far beyond visual identity.
She also shares her perspective on India’s accelerating premiumization, the pressures facing CMOs, and what international brands need to understand about connecting with consumers across one of the world’s most diverse markets.
When we spoke last year, you’d just stepped into the role. A year-plus on, what’s changed most in the conversations you’re having with clients around growth, transformation and the way they’re thinking about brands today?
Over the past year, the nature of client conversations has shifted from aesthetic refreshes to deep operational reality. Leadership teams come to us because they hit an inflection point in business ambition. They are expanding into new categories, navigating market fragmentation or correcting a gap where brand behavior has lagged behind the business they have actually become.
In boardrooms across India, clients are recognizing that fragmented brand systems represent a massive leakage point. Rapid scale creates complexity across SKUs, channels and regions. That complexity turns into confusion for consumers, which ultimately forces brands to rely on discounts to sell.
The conversation today is about moving away from price-driven selling toward building long-term pricing power and trust. A brand is no longer treated as just a marketing layer or a logo. It is being viewed as core business infrastructure that unlocks enterprise value.
Last year, you described Landor India operating on two fronts: brand transformation for local and global clients and a growing global delivery hub. Can you share some of the work that’s come out of that, what has “from India to the world” looked like in practice?
It has been an incredible evolution to watch not just over the past year but in recent times overall. Our Indian teams are shaping how brands speak and are experienced on a global stage, build multisensorial brand systems and experience frameworks that scale seamlessly across multiple international markets.
We are proving that world-class design systems can originate directly out of India.
In practice, this duality works in many ways. On one hand, we are helping global brands adapt complex systems with local cultural nuance. On the other hand, we are taking ambitious Indian conglomerates and helping them structure their corporate brands to project global authority. It is about bringing high-level craft, strategic rigor and agility to brand building. We are proving that world-class design systems can originate directly out of India.
One of the recurring challenges for global brands is balancing consistency with local cultural relevance across fragmented audiences. How do you approach that challenge, and what does getting it right actually require?
Getting this right requires moving away from rigid, legacy playbooks that relied purely on consistent application of brand principles. Historically, brands have tried to control everything, which made them feel distant. Or then they have swung in the exact opposite direction, localizing aggressively and risking their core identity.
At Landor, we like to first examine what a brand’s asset strategy could through the lens of fixed assets and flexible expressions. This doesn’t mean that we deviate from the foundational promise and core strategic anchors of a brand.
That said, the expression, which includes how the brand shows up across regional touchpoints, sensory details and local contexts, needs room to adapt in order to truly connect in the manner intended.
Experience design has become a much broader conversation than visual identity alone, the idea that a brand lives across every interaction, not just its logo, campaigns or products. How does Landor approach that in practice, and can you share a recent project that brought it to life?
We view brands as a sum of behaviors, not just a static set of assets. A logo can get you recognized, but a consistent experience and a lived promise build authenticity in the long term.
In practice, experience design means mapping the entire journey so that the brand promise comes alive at every single point of consequence. The experience therefore isn’t just about the visual identity on the storefront or app. It lives in every dimension of a brand, be it human interactions in retail or over a customer service line, discoverability online or offline, spatial signatures that aid navigation or packaging that informs and delights.
We go the length to evaluate practical choices, for instance, for one client brand that was built with sustainability at the heart of its promise, we ensured design choices that positively impacted digital energy consumption and physical print ink usage. When all these touchpoints align, you create a cohesive brand environment that drives customer preference naturally.
What’s capturing your attention in the Indian market right now, and what are the conversations with clients that feel most interesting?
What fascinates me most about India right now is the incredible pace of premiumization and category creation. Legacy family enterprises are modernizing their corporate architectures, while digital-first platforms in fintech, consumer goods and retail are maturing into multi-faceted ecosystems.
What fascinates me most about India right now is the incredible pace of premiumization and category creation.
We find that the most compelling client conversations therefore are happening around brand intent and relevant amplification. This is great news because in the long term, these are the decisions that help build long-term enterprise value, reduce customer acquisition friction and build a solid foundation for any brand. In the consumer space we also see discussions around shifting from price-driven customer acquisition to building brand-led confidence and differentiation. This is where the most exciting work is happening.
What’s the biggest challenge you’re hearing from CMOs in India right now?
I would say these challenges are positive in that they are in service of growth. We do sometimes hear about the friction between short-term performance demands and building for long-term equity. At other times we solve for products that may be functionally comparable to competition and therefore need a moat to strengthen brand love.
Furthermore, given the growth and ambitions of legacy organisations, we do see clients coming to us with challenges around their existing brand architecture and how it can be re-imagined to fuel their next phase of growth. These are of course broader themes, and as partners to clients we know that each organisation has its own unique ambitions and challenges.
For brands, local or international, looking to get India right, what’s your advice? What does it take to connect with consumers across such a diverse market?
My primary advice is to think of India as a landscape of multiple micro-markets where aspirations, cultural contexts and value systems change rapidly.
Indian consumers are famously value-conscious, but that does not mean price-sensitive.
To connect here, you need two things: an understanding of cultural nuance and a core product truth in line with your promise. Indian consumers are famously value-conscious, but that does not mean price-sensitive. It means they demand clear utility and proof before granting their trust.
If you are an international brand, simply placing a global template over local communications isn’t enough. You have to do the localisation work upstream to ensure your brand behavior, product quality, and customer experience are built to connect with a very varied and growing consumer set.
