Diageo’s Amitabh Pande outlines 5 shifts reshaping brand building

For years, brand building has largely been associated with what marketers put out into the world: the positioning, the communication, the campaign and the experience they design for consumers. But as consumers gain more influence over how brands are interpreted and experienced, that control is beginning to look less absolute. At the Pitch CMO Summit 2026 in Bengaluru, Amitabh Pande, Chief Strategy Officer, Diageo India, offered five reflections on how the rules of brand building are changing. His argument is not that the old principles have disappeared, but that marketers may need to rethink what sits at the centre of them.

Brands need meaning beyond consumption
For Pande, meaning is no longer simply about identifying a consumer need or articulating a functional benefit. It is also about understanding the tensions consumers navigate, having a distinctive point of view and increasingly, standing for something beyond the act of consumption. “How am I helping consumers navigate multiple conflicts that they have in their lives? Am I helping them? Am I distinctive? Do I have a point of view which is different from what the category is all about?”

But for Pande, the question of meaning goes further, towards what a brand stands for beyond what it sells. He asked: “Does your brand have a purpose beyond just consumption? You have a brand stand for something which is just beyond wanting to eat more, drink more, buy more, sell more.”

That question becomes particularly relevant as younger consumers increasingly look at brands through the lens of values and identity. “And the more and more, especially as the next generation is coming in, we're seeing, what do you stand for in the world? What are you? What is your value system? Who are you as brands are becoming increasingly important?”

Marketers need to get comfortable with brands without control
The next shift is perhaps the most uncomfortable one for marketers. Pande believes brands are increasingly being shaped by people outside the marketing department. “You can't control the brands that you're building. Your brands are being built by somebody else.”

Social media, creators, retailers and consumers have all expanded the number of people who can influence what a brand becomes. That makes the traditional idea of tightly controlling brand expression increasingly difficult.

Pande puts the consumer expectation even more starkly: “Increasingly, what consumers are looking for as brands, I don't want to be part of your story. You need to be part of my story. And how are you helping me live my life?”

For marketers, the answer isn't necessarily to try to regain control. Instead, Pande believes brands need to be clear about their identity while allowing consumers room to shape the rest. “We need to be very sharply defined on who we are as a brand, and the use of what we call key brand assets and visual and audio visual memory. If that is clear, the rest of it, you let consumers control,” he added.

Brands are bigger than the marketing department
Pande also challenges the tendency to treat brands primarily as marketing assets. As brands increasingly influence business value, he argued that responsibility for them needs to extend well beyond marketing. “Brands are not marketing responsibility. Brands are corporate responsibilities,” he asserted.

That changes the question marketers need to ask. It is no longer enough to know whether a campaign built awareness or whether brand equity moved. The larger question is what the brand contributes to the business and its stakeholders. “And therefore, what this means is how are we leveraging brands to deliver ROI to the business? How are we driving wealth creation for our consumers, wealth creation for our consumers, and for our investors? That comes from brands.”

That also means rethinking measurement. “You have to go beyond the metrics. Brand equity is not enough. You need to get sophisticated about how you're measuring the ROI that the brands are giving to our business because they're corporate assets. They're not marketing assets,” said Pande.

Brands are competing with experiences, not just other brands
The next shift moves the conversation beyond products and communication. As consumers increasingly spend on experiences, brands themselves need to find ways of becoming part of those experiences.

Pande puts the competitive challenge plainly: “Increasingly consumers, brands are losing to experiences. If you're selling products, the more you sell products, the more the wallet of consumers is going to experience.”

For Pande, this makes experiences another competitive arena for brands. “Brands are competing with experiences. So the more brands can deliver experiences, the better share of wallet you're likely to get.”

In this environment, a brand does not necessarily need to communicate its identity through conventional advertising alone. It can allow consumers, communities and other participants to experience and shape it.

Brands need roots in an AI-driven world
Pande's final tenet is about roots, authenticity and provenance. He argued that roots have become increasingly important as brands operate in a world where politics, identity, technology and culture are increasingly intertwined.

But AI adds another dimension to the argument. As machine-generated content makes it harder to distinguish what is human from what is manufactured, history and provenance can become powerful sources of differentiation. “In the age of AI and machine intelligence, it's getting very hard to differentiate what's real and what's not, what's human and not.”

His conclusion is that roots can offer something technology cannot easily replicate. “Again, if AI doesn't have any roots, but brands can have roots and legacy and history. I think that differentiates machines from humans.”

That becomes even more important in an environment overloaded with information, where consumers are increasingly asking whether a brand or institution is actually credible. “Its consumers and people are genuinely looking for institutions and people and brands and leaders that are authentic, and have source credibility.”

Ultimately, Pande's five reflections point towards a brand-building model where marketers still have an important role, but perhaps not the role they once did. The job is increasingly about defining meaning, creating a strong identity, building business value, designing experiences and establishing credibility, while accepting that consumers will shape much of what the brand becomes. As Pande puts it, the five tenets are: “Brands with meaning. Brands without control. Brands beyond marketing. Brands with experiences. And brands with roots.”