Why Moment Marketing Works Only When the Brand Has a Point of View
When every brand jumps on the same trend, they all vanish together. The ones you remember had something the rest did not.
On the evening of 23 August 2023, India landed a spacecraft near the south pole of the Moon, and within the hour it landed something else, which was a flood of brand posts. Nearly every marketing team in the country had a Chandrayaan-3 creative ready. The trouble is that most of them had the same one.
The night everyone had the same idea
The food-delivery apps were the clearest example. Myntra said its order had been delivered on the Moon. Blinkit posted that your order was successfully delivered. Burger King joked that it, sadly, does not deliver to the Moon. Read them side by side and you cannot tell the brands apart. Three companies, one joke, zero memory. This is the dirty secret of moment marketing. When a moment is big enough for everyone to chase, the chase itself flattens every brand into the same shape.
Sixty years without blurring
Now compare that with a brand that has done this for nearly sixty years without blurring into anyone. Amul does not post on a trend because the trend is there. It posts because being a cheeky, affectionate observer of Indian life is the fixed, unchanging job of the butter girl, and has been since 1966. The mascot never changes. The point of view never changes. Only the news changes. That consistency is why an Amul topical still reads as an Amul topical, even in a feed drowning in identical space puns.
A brand that sells glue, not entertainment
Fevicol works the same way, and it is worth studying because the brand sells glue, not entertainment. For over three decades, Ogilvy built Fevicol on a single idea, the unbreakable bond, and every ad is just a new joke about that one thing. When the brand moved into social and topical content, partnering with the agency Schbang from 2017, it did not abandon the idea to chase trends. It reapplied it. The bond is the point of view. A trend is only useful to Fevicol if the bond can carry the joke. That single rule is what separates a topical that belongs to the brand from a topical that could belong to anyone.
Even divisiveness survives a strong point of view
Even divisiveness is survivable if the point of view is strong. CRED's absurdist humour irritates plenty of people, and its ads have often been accused of being too clever to bother explaining the product. Yet nobody confuses a CRED ad for anyone else's. In a feed built on sameness, being unmistakable is worth more than being universally liked. A brand with a real point of view will always beat a brand doing a loud impression of everyone around it.
The failure mode is easy to spot
The failure mode is easy to spot once you know the pattern. Cast your mind back to February 2021, when the Pawri ho rahi hai clip took over Indian timelines. Dunzo, Tinder, Oyo, SBI, Netflix, Domino's and a crowd of others all rewrote the line in their own words within days. A few were genuinely clever. Most were simply present. And presence is not a point of view. It is attendance. When the trend faded, almost none of those posts left a trace, because almost none of them said anything only that brand could have said.
Attention is rented, affinity is owned
The industry has started to put language around this. Subramanyeswar S, a senior strategist at Omnicom, frames it as the difference between two things a brand can have.
Attention is rented, affinity is owned. And the rent expires quickly.
A trend rents you a crowd for an afternoon. A point of view is the thing that turns some of that crowd into people who actually feel something about you. The brand consultant Harish Bijoor puts the discipline even more bluntly, warning that moment marketing hands the opportunist marketer many opportunities, and that every one of them must not be grabbed. The skill is not in joining. It is in choosing what to skip.
There is a governance cost too. Manisha Kapoor of the advertising standards body has pointed out that a lot of moment-marketing output has weak links to the brand's actual strategy, which is a polite way of saying the brand forgot who it was in its hurry to be seen. That is the real risk of the trend chart. It tempts a brand to borrow a personality for a day rather than express its own.
The test before you post
So the test before you post is not whether this is trending. Everyone can see what is trending. The test is whether only you can say this, and whether it sounds like you. If the answer is no, the kindest thing you can do for your brand is to stay quiet and let the other twenty companies crowd into the same joke without you.
A point of view is not a creative luxury. It is the filter that decides which moments are yours. Without it, moment marketing is just noise wearing your logo.
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