The Big Consumer Question
Podcast: How to scale in 2026?
As India enters the second half of this decade, its consumer landscape is undergoing a structural reset. About 86% of Indian households now possess at least one smartphone. Digital payments now account for the majority of retail transaction volumes. Quick commerce, marketplaces, and social platforms have compressed discovery cycles from months to minutes. Against this backdrop, Singularity AMC recently hosted a consumer roundtable with Arindam Paul of Atomberg, Nikhil Vora of Sixth Sense Ventures, and Rishabh Mariwala of Sharrp Ventures, moderated by Avnish Anand, to discuss what truly lies ahead for Indian consumer businesses.
The conversation moved beyond surface-level trends to examine how value will be created, captured, and sustained as India’s consumption engine matures.
Brand Awareness Is High, Loyalty Is Fragile
Indian consumers today are more informed than at any point in history. Digital reach, influencer ecosystems, and algorithmic discovery have dramatically lowered the cost of awareness creation. However, this has come with a sharp decline in brand loyalty.
Data across categories shows that repeat purchase cycles are shortening and experimentation is rising, especially among urban and younger cohorts. Consumers are willing to switch brands for marginal improvements in design, functionality, price, or perceived values. This is visible across apparel, personal care, appliances, and packaged food.
For new brands, this creates opportunity. Distribution is no longer controlled by a handful of legacy players. Marketplaces, quick commerce platforms, and direct-to-consumer channels have broken historical gatekeeping. A challenger no longer needs national general trade presence to reach a meaningful share of its target audience.
At the same time, this abundance of choice has made scale harder to achieve. Building a niche brand is easier. Building a category-defining, long-lasting business is significantly harder.
Indian Consumers Upgrade & Rarely Look Back
One of the most important behavioural insights discussed was that Indian consumers rarely downgrade once aspiration shifts upward. While consumption may pause during inflationary periods, long-term trading down is uncommon.
Over the past decade, this pattern has played out clearly. Categories such as packaged foods, personal care, home appliances, and apparel have steadily moved towards premium and mid-premium segments. Even in mass categories, growth is increasingly coming from higher price points rather than volume alone.
Crucially, this phenomenon is no longer limited to metros. Tier two and tier three cities now account for a disproportionate share of incremental consumption growth across beauty, fashion, and home categories. Improved logistics, rising disposable incomes, and digital access have collapsed the traditional urban-rural aspiration gap.
The challenge for brands is not demand creation, but supply chain and product architecture. Aspirations often run ahead of incomes. Companies that can deliver quality, design, and reliability at accessible price points without breaking unit economics are best positioned to win.
Health Has Become a Signal of Status
A defining shift across demographics is the rise of health as a form of social signalling. Fitness, nutrition, sleep, and performance optimisation are no longer private choices. They are visible markers of discipline, awareness, and aspiration.
Data reflects this clearly. India’s fitness and wellness market is growing at a double-digit rate, with wearables, athleisure, functional nutrition, and sports-led categories expanding far faster than traditional discretionary segments. Younger consumers are entering gyms earlier, spending more on performance gear, and adopting habits once associated with older or wealthier cohorts.
Importantly, the focus has moved from prevention to performance. Consumers are not just trying to avoid illness. They want to optimise energy, strength, recovery, and longevity. This shift is creating white spaces across supplements, devices, apparel, and digital services.
Why Product and Supply Chain Trump Marketing
Despite the explosion of brand storytelling, the panel repeatedly returned to fundamentals. Sustainable consumer businesses are built on product differentiation, supply chain control, and execution depth.
Categories that appear crowded on the surface often have weak underlying innovation. Many brands rely on marketing arbitrage rather than structural advantage. As customer acquisition costs rise and loyalty weakens, these models struggle to scale profitably.
Atomberg’s journey illustrates a different path. By anchoring differentiation in engineering, energy efficiency, and in-house manufacturing capabilities, the company created pricing power and margin headroom. Backward integration, scale-driven efficiencies, and continuous R&D investment allowed it to expand categories while protecting economics.
Similar patterns can be observed in food, appliances, and home improvement. Brands that invest early in supply chain capabilities, product reliability, and quality control tend to compound advantages over time, even if their early growth appears slower.
India’s Consumer Market Is Still Under-Competitive
A provocative but data-supported argument was that India’s consumer market remains structurally under-competitive. Legacy FMCG companies have generated extraordinary returns on capital for decades, driven largely by distribution dominance rather than defensible intellectual property.
What is changing is not competition within legacy categories, but fragmentation of wallet share. Disruptors are not attacking incumbents directly in soaps or staples. Instead, they are capturing consumption in adjacent formats, new use cases, and emerging sub-categories.
For example, cleansing has expanded from soaps to face washes, serums, and specialised personal care formats. Food consumption has shifted from staples to ready-to-eat, functional, and premium offerings. Appliances are increasingly evaluated on efficiency, design, and technology rather than price alone.
As a result, incumbents may appear stable in market share terms, but are steadily losing relevance in high-growth consumption pools.
Offline Still Holds the Profit Pool
A consistent conclusion from the discussion was that building a large, profitable consumer business in India without offline presence remains extremely difficult.
In most categories, 70 to 90% of volume still flows through offline channels. Profit pools tend to be even more concentrated there due to lower commissions, higher average selling prices, and better control over merchandising.
Offline retail also builds trust, which is critical in evaluated purchases such as appliances, apparel, and personal care. It improves retention, lowers lifetime acquisition costs, and enables brands to influence the point of decision through retailers, installers, and local advocates.
Digital channels are powerful entry points for discovery and experimentation. But offline execution remains essential for durable scale and profitability.
AI Is Improving Efficiency, Not Rewriting Business Models Yet
Artificial intelligence is beginning to deliver tangible benefits, but largely through operational efficiency rather than headline growth.
Marketing creative costs are falling as content production becomes faster and more iterative. Data analysis, reporting, and decision-making cycles are compressing. Customer service automation is reducing response times and cost-to-serve.
One of the most promising frontiers is offline intelligence. AI-enabled video, audio, and sensor data can finally bring visibility into footfall, dwell time, conversion, and in-store behaviour. Historically, offline retail lacked granular data. This gap is now closing, with meaningful implications for store productivity and experience design.
However, panelists agreed that it is still early. AI is a layer of advantage, not a substitute for strong products or execution.
Where the Next Decade’s Opportunities Lie
Looking ahead, several categories stand out where structural tailwinds exist but scaled leaders remain limited. These include health and wellness, sports and fitness, toys, climate-resilient agriculture, longevity-focused products, elderly care, and women’s health.
These segments benefit from demographic shifts, rising incomes, and cultural change. Yet success will depend less on speed and more on discipline. The winners will be those who combine product depth, supply chain control, thoughtful distribution, and patient capital allocation.
Closing Thoughts
The Indian consumer story in 2026 is no longer about access or discovery. It is about endurance. The next generation of category leaders will not be defined by how fast they grow in their early years, but by how well they balance aspiration with affordability, innovation with execution, and growth with profitability.
The opportunity remains enormous. But the standards for building enduring consumer businesses in India have decisively risen. Watch the complete podcast below.
Checkout our recent podcast on Electronics: