Inside Crompton 2.0: Tanmay Prusty on how the brand is rewriting its marketing playbook

India’s consumer electronics and home durables sector is on a robust growth trajectory, driven by rising disposable incomes, rapid urbanisation and a growing middle class that increasingly values comfort, connectivity and convenience. According to industry estimates, the overall Indian consumer electronics market was valued at approximately $89.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to expand to nearly $158.4 billion by 2034.

Within this broader electronics landscape sits the consumer durables segment, where once purely functional categories are steadily evolving into experience-led ones. Demand patterns are shifting away from price- and specification-led decision-making towards a greater willingness to trade up for products that deliver energy efficiency, reliability, design aesthetics, smarter interfaces and clear lifestyle relevance.

In parallel, traditional media-heavy playbooks are giving way to hybrid strategies that combine mass reach with digital engagement, content-led storytelling and platform-first approaches. This shift is also intensifying competition. Global majors are expanding their footprints and private labels are becoming more aggressive. Consumers increasingly expect brands to do more than just function. It looks like the rules of growth are being rewritten in the category.

Against this backdrop, legacy brands such as Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals are seeking to reinvent how they engage with consumers and drive growth beyond functional differentiation. In an exclusive interaction with exchange4media, Tanmay Prusty, Chief Marketing Officer, said Crompton has been undergoing a quiet but significant reset—internally referred to as Crompton 2.0.

During the interaction, he shared how Crompton is rethinking the role of marketing under this 2.0 journey, from conducting one of the largest consumer studies in the category and aligning marketing more closely with R&D, to driving premiumisation through platform-led innovation and balancing traditional mass media with digital, content and on-ground activations.

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Crompton’s Marketing Reset

Prusty, who took over as CMO of Crompton just under a year ago, sits at the centre of this transformation. With stints across FMCG, consumer electronics and e-commerce, and experience spanning ITC, Reckitt, Amazon and Tata Consumer Products, his mandate at Crompton is less about incremental change and more about structural rewiring of how marketing operates within the organisation.

“It’s taken about 11 months for me, and Crompton 2.0 represents a fundamental shift in how we as an organisation will approach growth. Fundamentally, we are saying we will start with the consumer rather than the product,” Prusty said.

At a tactical level, this has meant rethinking marketing as a core input into value creation. One of the earliest manifestations of this shift was Crompton’s decision to invest heavily in consumer intelligence. The company undertook what Prusty describes as one of the largest studies in the consumer durables category, engaging with nearly 18,000 consumers across India.

“The idea was to deeply understand how consumers interface with our categories, across the day, across seasons, and across different life stages,” he said. “Their pain points, triggers, barriers and feature expectations were all distilled into learnings that we now use in everyday business.” Crucially, these insights are being embedded into product ideation, innovation roadmaps and communication development.

The company is transitioning from a manufacturing-led organisation to a truly consumer-first, marketing-led brand. At the heart of this reset is a conscious effort to push marketing upstream, from being the last step in the value chain to becoming one of the first. “Marketing is moving away from the last step to the first step. If you want to do this at scale, you have to embed consumer understanding into product development, communication platforms and decision-making,” he added.

This has led to a much tighter alignment between marketing, R&D and product teams. Earlier, innovation and manufacturing decisions at Crompton were often made in parallel, with marketing coming in closer to launch. Under Crompton 2.0, these functions are being brought together far earlier in the process. “R&D, product teams and central marketing are now deeply intertwined, from ideation to implementation and launch,” Prusty said.

From a playbook standpoint, this has changed how Crompton evaluates innovation. Instead of leading with specifications or technical superiority alone, teams are now anchored around consumer problems and usage contexts. Whether it is airflow, water flow, energy efficiency or safety, the starting point is increasingly the consumer’s lived experience rather than the factory floor. Marketing, in this model, acts as the connective tissue, which translates consumer insight into briefs for R&D, and later translates innovation into clear, relevant narratives for the market.

This redefinition of marketing’s role is also reflected in Crompton’s stepped-up investments behind brand building. Over the past two years, the company has meaningfully increased its advertising and promotion (A&P) spends, signalling a sharper focus on marketing as a growth lever rather than a support function.

Prusty said the company’s A&P investments are now in the range of 3.5–4% of revenue. “Increased investment has to be underpinned by capability building and consumer understanding,” he said.

As previously reported by exchange4media, Crompton raised its advertising spends by 14% in FY25.

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Crompton’s Push To Premiumisation & Omnichannel Scale

As Crompton reorients its marketing engine, premiumisation and e-commerce have emerged as parallel growth levers. Rather than choosing between performance-led digital growth and traditional brand building, the company is deliberately leaning into a hybrid model that reflects the realities of its category footprint.

“While we are progressively increasing our presence in future-facing mediums, we also remain one of the most well-distributed offline brands, particularly in categories like fans.” Being one of the largest water heater brands on e-commerce while also maintaining deep offline penetration, he added, demands marketing strategies that work seamlessly across channels. “You have to do justice to both ends, online and offline, while continuing to experiment, scale what works, and move on from what doesn’t.”

Premiumisation has become a key outcome of this approach. In fans, Crompton’s largest category, premium products now account for nearly 25% of its sales, up from the mid-teens three to four years ago. According to Prusty, this shift has been driven less by cosmetic upgrades and more by platform-led innovation.

Beyond fans, Crompton has extended this consumer-first premium thinking across categories. Some of its recent launches include its AirIQ chimney, an India-first innovation that uses real-time AQI sensors to address indoor air quality spikes during cooking, as well as Intellisense panels for water pumps, designed to reduce consumer anxiety around water availability through automated sensing and transfer.

The company has also introduced anti-scale water heater technology built specifically for Indian hard water conditions, extending product life and reliability. Each of these innovations, Prusty noted, begins with a clearly identified consumer problem and works backward, creating room for trade-up and stronger value perception.

E-commerce has played a critical role in accelerating this shift. Crompton’s online business now exceeds Rs 1,000 crore in annual revenue and is growing at over 20% year-on-year.

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Crompton’s Storytelling Shift

In a category traditionally dominated by functional messaging, Crompton is also rethinking how it tells its brand story. “For a long time, consumer durables communication has been driven by functional claims. But our products are deeply intertwined in consumers’ lives,” said Prusty.

The shift, he explained, is towards demonstrating innovation through everyday lived experiences rather than technical superiority alone. “We are trying to show innovation through quieter kitchens, safer water temperatures for families, visual comfort through lighting, and through the way our products interact with consumers every day,” he said.

This approach allows Crompton to move into more emotionally resonant brand territories. “You can talk about comfort that feels personal, trust that is earned through relentless performance in the consumer’s home, and modern living through intelligent products that simply do what they’re meant to do,” Prusty added.

Over the last two years, Crompton has also retooled its communication architecture—from a largely category-led approach to a more consistent master brand narrative. While the brand is widely recognised as one of India’s largest fan manufacturers, it also has a significant presence in kitchen appliances and water heaters. This breadth, he said, enables Crompton to speak about homes, kitchens, bedrooms and living spaces through a unified brand lens rather than fragmented, category-specific messaging.

The company’s media mix has become far more integrated. While television continues to play a central role in delivering mass reach, it is now complemented by increased investments in digital platforms, content partnerships and on-ground activations. Crompton has partnered with high-reach platforms such as Cricbuzz, sponsored podcasts, and experimented with newer content-led associations. On-ground visibility has also been strengthened across high-footfall touchpoints such as airports, malls and metro stations, reflecting the brand’s intent to balance scale with contextual, moment-led engagement across platforms.

Looking ahead, the brand's focus is on scaling this hybrid marketing model while deepening premiumisation across categories and expanding relevance across regions. For the company, the Crompton 2.0 journey is less about short-term reinvention and more about building a durable, consumer-first growth engine, one that balances mass reach with modern commerce, and scale with sophistication.