Madhukar Parekh, the Man Behind Fevicol's Household Name
Getting a whole country to use your brand name as the word for the product itself is what decades of consistent storytelling on top of a good product buys you.
Fevicol is one of the small number of Indian brand names that became a generic noun, the word people reach for when they mean any strong adhesive, regardless of which company actually made the bottle in their hand. Madhukar Parekh has spent over five decades inside the company responsible for that, and his job for much of it has been making sure a brand that dominant did not become complacent.
Joining a business his father built
Parekh joined Pidilite in 1972 after a stint at Abbott Laboratories in the United States, arriving with a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin. The company itself traces back to his father, Balvant Parekh, whose chemistry work produced Fevicol in the first place. Taking over stewardship of a brand invented by your own father, in a category as unglamorous as industrial adhesives, is a specific kind of inherited pressure that a founder never has to deal with directly.
Turning an ingredient into a household name
The harder brand problem Pidilite faced was not chemistry. It was making a product nobody buys for its own sake, an adhesive is only ever a means to some other end, memorable and even beloved in its own right. Fevicol's decades-long advertising partnership, most visibly its collaboration with advertising legend Piyush Pandey, built warm, funny, deeply Indian stories around a category that had no obvious emotional territory to draw on. That advertising did not happen by accident. It required an unusually patient, consistent brand owner willing to keep investing in storytelling for a product most people only think about for the few seconds it takes to open the bottle.
Getting a whole country to use your brand name as the word for the product itself is not an accident of chemistry. It is what decades of consistent storytelling on top of a good product actually buys you.
Building an empire around one core insight
Under Parekh's stewardship as executive chairman, Pidilite expanded well beyond the original adhesive into construction chemicals, waterproofing, art materials and a wide portfolio of specialty chemical brands, while protecting Fevicol's specific cultural position as the flagship. Extending a beloved single-product brand into a genuine conglomerate without diluting what made the original name trusted is a real test of brand discipline, one many family-run Indian manufacturers have failed.
What the numbers eventually confirmed
By late 2024, the Parekh family's holding in Pidilite was valued highly enough to place them among the wealthiest business families in the country on Forbes India's rich list. That outcome is the lagging indicator of a brand-building choice made decades earlier: that an unglamorous industrial product, told well and consistently for long enough, could become one of the most recognised names in the country regardless of category.
The discipline of not messing with what works
Perhaps the clearest lesson from Parekh's decades at Pidilite is restraint. Fevicol's advertising voice, warm, funny, unmistakably Indian, has stayed remarkably consistent for a generation, in a market where brand refreshes and repositioning happen constantly. Protecting that consistency, rather than chasing every new trend in Indian advertising, is its own form of brand building, quieter than a founder's original idea but just as necessary to keep it alive.
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