Language in business is supposed to enable precision. When a founder says they are building brand equity, a marketer says they need community, and an investor says the model does not scale, everyone nods. Nobody checks whether they meant the same thing.
And in that gap between the words and their meanings, strategies get built on shared assumptions that were never actually shared.
The Indian startup and marketing ecosystem is particularly susceptible to this problem. A word gets used in a notable pitch, appears in a Shark Tank episode or a YourStory feature, and within six months it is in every brand meeting across Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi. By the time it reaches the tenth meeting, it has accumulated so many different meanings it has effectively lost the one it started with.
This isn’t about being overly strict or picky. Precise language produces precise thinking. When a brand team genuinely agrees that they do not have a community they have an audience that single distinction immediately changes the strategy, the budget allocation, and the metric they use to measure success.
The word matters because the decision that follows it matters.
Below are ten of the most used and least agreed-upon terms in Indian marketing and business. Each entry has three parts: the honest definition, the most common misuse, and the question you should ask the next time someone uses the word in a room you are sitting in.
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Brand Equity
What it actually means: The value a brand adds to a product beyond its functional attributes, the premium a customer is willing to pay, or the preference they express, specifically because of the brand name. Brand equity is built over time through consistent experience, emotional association, and trust. It is what makes a customer choose Amul butter over an unbranded equivalent even when both are on the same shelf at the same price.
The most common misuse: Treating it as awareness. ‘Our brand equity is high’ in most Indian marketing conversations means ‘people have heard of us’ and that is brand awareness, a related but fundamentally different thing. You can have high awareness and zero equity. A brand that everyone has heard of but nobody feels strongly about has awareness without equity. The two get conflated because awareness is easier to measure and more flattering to put in a deck.
The question to ask: would our customers pay more for this product because of our brand name or would they pay the same for an unbranded version of equivalent quality?
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Community
What it actually means: A group of people with shared identity and mutual investment — who interact with each other, not just with the brand. The real community has member-to-member relationships. People know each other, reference each other, and help each other. The brand may have created the conditions, but a genuine community exists independently of the brand’s content calendar.
The most common misuse: Treating it as synonymous with the audience. A brand’s Instagram followers are not a community. They are an audience. An audience has a relationship with a broadcaster. A community has relationships with each other. The distinction matters enormously for strategy: building an audience requires content, building a community requires infrastructure, rituals, and reasons for members to interact. These are different investments producing entirely different outcomes. The word community has become so attractive that brands now apply it to any group of people who follow them anywhere.
The question to ask: do our members talk to each other or do they only talk to us?
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Premium
What it actually means: A perception of superior value held by the customer, not declared by the brand that justifies a higher price without resistance. Premium is not a price point. It is a belief. A customer who pays more willingly, who does not comparison-shop before buying, who feels the higher price is fair or even appropriate, that is a premium relationship. The brand does not decide it is premium. The customer does.
The most common misuse: Treating premium as a synonym for expensive. Indian brands routinely describe themselves as premium after raising their prices, upgrading the packaging, moving into modern trade, adjusting the MRP upward. None of that makes a brand premium. It makes it more expensive, which is a very different and considerably more precarious position. Premium is earned through years of consistent experience, aspirational positioning, and emotional association. A brand that raises its price before earning premium perception does not become premium. It becomes overpriced.
The question to ask: does the customer feel our price is fair or does it feel high?
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Authentic
What it actually means: Is consistent alignment between what a brand says, what it does, and what it actually is sustained over time, not manufactured for a campaign. An authentic brand behaves the same way whether it is being watched or not. Its values show up in its pricing decisions, its hiring, its supplier relationships, and its response to criticism not only in its advertising copy.
The most common misuse: Treating authenticity as a production aesthetic. In Indian influencer and brand marketing, authentic has come to mean lo-fi shaky camera, no script, casual tone. These are stylistic choices. Authenticity is an ethical quality. A brand can produce glossy, expensive content and be completely authentic. A brand can film everything on a phone and be entirely performative. Production value and authenticity are unrelated. The conflation has produced a generation of authentic-looking content that is calculated to within an inch of its life.
The question to ask: would this brand say the same thing if nobody was watching and if the answer is no, what does that tell us?
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Disruptive
What it actually means: The term comes from Clayton Christensen’s specific theory of a product or business model that begins at the low end of a market or in an entirely new market, gradually improves, and eventually displaces established players who were focused on their existing, more profitable customers. Jio disrupted Indian telecom by starting with free and eventually forcing structural change across an entire industry. That is disruption in the precise sense.
The most common misuse: Applying it to anything new or bold. In Indian pitch culture, disruptive has become synonymous with ‘we are doing something different’ which describes almost every startup and meaningfully distinguishes none of them. A new flavour of protein bar is not disruptive.
A better designed app is not disruptive. A premium version of an existing product is not disruptive. Calling something disruptive when it is merely innovative inflates the claim and obscures the actual strategic ambition. It also makes it impossible to have an honest conversation about competitive strategy.
The question to ask: who are we displacing and are they already starting to feel it?
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Scalable
What it actually means: A business model where revenue grows faster than costs where acquiring the next thousand customers does not require proportionally more resources than acquiring the first thousand. Scalability is an economic property of the model, not a description of growth ambition. Software scales. A bespoke consulting practice does not, not without fundamental structural change. The scalability question is always about unit economics at different sizes.
The most common misuse: Treating it as equivalent to ‘big’ or ‘expandable.’ The phrase ‘this is scalable’ in most Indian business meetings means ‘we could serve more people if we wanted to’ which is true of almost any business and says nothing about whether doing so makes economic sense. A restaurant group that wants to open fifty locations has a growth ambition. Whether that growth happens without destroying the margin is the scalability question, and it is almost never the one being asked when the word appears.
The question to ask: what does our cost structure look like at ten times current revenue and does the margin improve or deteriorate?
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Purpose
What it actually means: The reason a brand exists beyond making money embedded in its operating model, not just its communications. A brand with genuine purpose makes business decisions that are constrained or shaped by that purpose, including decisions that cost money in the short term. Purpose built into the structure of a business looks different from purpose that only appears in the advertising budget.
The most common misuse: Treating purpose as a campaign theme or a CSR line item. In Indian marketing, purpose has largely become a tone-of-voice choice. A brand runs a campaign about women’s empowerment or environmental sustainability, describes this as its purpose, and considers the work complete.
Real purpose shows up in sourcing decisions, in how the brand prices for lower-income consumers, in whether the company’s supply chain practices are consistent with the values it advertises. If the purpose only appears in the communications strategy and never shows up as a constraint on any other business decision, it is not the purpose. It is positioning dressed in more virtuous language.
The question to ask: does our purpose cost us anything or is it only convenient to have?
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Engagement
What it actually means: A signal of audience attention and response likes, comments, shares, saves, time spent that indicates content resonance. Engagement tells you that people noticed and reacted. It is useful evidence about what content is working and what kind of audience you are building. What it is not, on its own, is a measure of commercial intent, brand loyalty, or purchase likelihood.
The most common misuse: Presenting engagement as proof of brand-building or sales impact. High engagement on a meme does not mean the audience wants to buy the product. A post that generates fifty thousand comments from people who found it funny is not evidence of a brand relationship, it is evidence of a good piece of content.
Indian brands and their agencies routinely present engagement numbers in monthly reports as proof that brand-building work is delivering commercial outcomes. The metrics are measuring entirely different things, and conflating them produces strategies that optimise for entertainment rather than value.
The question to ask: are the people engaging with our content the same people who are buying our product and how exactly do we know?
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Storytelling
What it actually means: Communicating brand values, identity, and differentiation through narrative which requires a protagonist, a conflict, and a resolution. Story creates emotional investment and memory in a way that claims and feature lists cannot. The best brand storytelling puts the customer as the protagonist and shows how the brand helps them overcome something real in their life.
The most common misuse: Treating storytelling as a synonym for content or copywriting. ‘We need better storytelling’ in Indian marketing meetings almost always means ‘we need better captions’ or ‘our videos should feel more emotional.’ The story requires conflict. A brand video that shows happy people using a product and ends with a logo is not storytelling, it is a visual product catalogue.
The word has been applied so broadly to any brand communication that it has lost its structural meaning. Real storytelling is harder to produce and more uncomfortable to approve because it requires a brand to acknowledge that its customer has a problem which many brand teams would rather avoid.
The question to ask: what is the conflict in this story and who or what resolves it?
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D2C
What it actually means: A business model where a brand sells directly to the end consumer owning the full customer relationship, the transaction data, and the experience without retail or marketplace intermediaries. D2C is defined by the directness of the relationship, which gives the brand visibility into customer behaviour and control over the end-to-end experience in a way that selling through platforms does not.
The most common misuse: Treating it as synonymous with having a website or being online-first. In India, D2C has come to mean ‘we sell on our own website in addition to selling on Amazon, Nykaa, Blinkit, and Zepto.’ A brand that derives eighty percent of its revenue from marketplaces and twenty percent from its own site is not D2C it is a marketplace-dependent brand with a website.
The distinction matters because genuine D2C economics, customer ownership, and brand relationship dynamics are entirely different from marketplace economics. Calling a marketplace-dependent business D2C flatters the model and obscures the actual dependency on platforms the brand does not control.
The question to ask: do we own our customer relationship or does the platform own it on our behalf?
The Point Is Not the Definitions
The point is not to correct people who use these words. It is to replace the assumption of shared meaning with an actual conversation about what the word means in this context, for this brand, making this decision.
The brands that are clearest about what words mean tend to be clearest about what they are building. That clarity is not a style preference. It is a competitive advantage because most of the market is making strategic decisions based on shared vocabulary that nobody has bothered to define.
The next time someone says we need to build community or this is disruptive or we are a purpose-led brand do not nod. Ask the question. The answer will tell you more about where the strategy actually stands than the word ever could.
