Published on: September 11, 2026
Consistency is the word every brand claims and almost no brand can defend once someone asks for specifics. At The CMO Assembly’s Comment Café, a room of CMOs and marketing heads tried anyway.
The Comment Café ran live on LinkedIn, hosted by Vivek Sheth, founder of The CMO Assembly, under the heading “One Brand. Many Screens. Are We Still Showing Up as One?” Twelve marketing leaders were tagged in and the comments ran past seventy inside the hour.
Adtech Today Editor Neha Parikh joined the session live, putting questions to the panel. Their responses are woven through the conversation below.
The panel converged quickly on one point: consistency is not the same as sameness. Priyanka Shah, Head of Digital Marketing at Bajaj Auto, argued that the strongest brands hold a consistent point of view while letting every screen tell the story differently. Prashant Ray, Director of Marketing, Asia, at Channel Factory, made the same case from another angle, insisting that recognisability in the first two seconds matters more than a stable layout, and that it comes from a stable idea rather than a stable design system.
Neha Parikh pressed the point with Dr. Ashish Bajaj, co-founder of 10on10foods and author of The Martech Playbook, asking whether platform-owned brands like Noiceverse are actually doing “one brand, many screens” better, simply because they were never built screen by screen. His answer reframed the whole debate in one line: “They never saw different screen from legacy lens.”
She took the same idea into quick commerce with Vaibhav Rathi, Head of Marketing at Dabur, asking whether a ten-minute delivery promise changes what the brand needs to say, or only how fast it says it.
“Q-commerce compresses the distance between user intent and benefit. So brands don’t necessarily need a new proposition; they need content that brings alive the moment of intent and makes the end benefit immediately accessible.”
— Vaibhav Rathi, Head of Marketing, Dabur
Abhijitt Panicker, Marketing Director at Chai Point, distilled the panel’s working rule into one line: repeat what makes a brand recognisable, refresh what makes it interesting. Vikram Jeet Bhayana, Head of Marketing at Bajaj General Insurance, put the failure state even more simply, the moment an audience can finish a brand’s sentence before it does.
Sidharth Gupta, founder of Nvecta, traced the disconnect to budgets rather than blind spots. Every channel has its own dashboard and its own numbers to hit, so planning still follows the org chart rather than the customer. Priyanka Shah had made a similar case earlier, arguing that channel planning needs to become consumer journey planning. Neha Parikh asked her whether that thinking actually shows up in the numbers at Bajaj Auto, or whether the measurement stack is still the blocker.
“We’ve been moving in that direction. At Bajaj Auto, we increasingly tie media investment to either a business outcome or a measurable brand KPI movement, rather than evaluating channels purely on platform metrics. True cross-channel incrementality is the next opportunity. The measurement stack, data integration and clean experimentation are important enablers, but the mindset shift is equally important.”
— Priyanka Shah, Head of Digital Marketing, Bajaj Auto
Prashant Ray had argued that attention, not inventory, should be the real planning unit. Neha Parikh asked him whether anyone in India is actually buying media that way yet, or whether it remains more pitch deck than practice.
“Honest answer: mostly pitch deck. Attention gets talked about far more than it gets bought against. The plans I see are still built on reach, CPM and viewability, with attention slotted in as a post-campaign study rather than a planning input. The block isn’t belief, it’s that nobody wants to be the one who trades a guaranteed reach number for a better one they’d have to explain upstairs.”
— Prashant Ray, Director of Marketing, Asia, Channel Factory
The closing question split the room. Sidharth Gupta expected fragmentation to win out for now, since every platform’s AI only learns from the slice of the customer it can see. Vikas Iyer, Marketing Head at Lenexis Foodworks, put the risk in its sharpest form: AI could make brands more relevant and far less recognisable at the same time.
“Consistency isn’t uniformity, it’s recognisability under different lighting.”
— Vikram Jeet Bhayana, Head of Marketing, Bajaj General Insurance
