Dealers are the most powerful brand medium

Payal Babbar, Head – Marketing, Shree Cement, explains how cement branding has fundamentally outgrown its identity as a support function and is more focussed on building an ecosystem of trust.

The cement bag has not changed. What has changed is everything around it — the consumer who researches brands on social media before laying a single brick, the mason who compares products, the dealer who advocates for brands that treat him as a partner. Payal Babbar, Head of Marketing, Shree Cement, has been operating at this intersection of behaviour change and brand strategy long enough to know that the old rules no longer apply. In this interview, she dismantles the notion that cement is a low-involvement category and explains why emotional differentiation must be earned rather than claimed.

How has branding evolved from being a support function to a strategic growth driver in the cement industry?
Historically, cement branding centred on brand name, persona, promise, quality and of course, price. It was considered a low involvement category because it’s a grey, non-differentiated powder that could simply be ‘sold’. The shift happened when brands stopped treating the product as the hero and started treating the consumer’s life as the story.
When the Individual Home Builder (IHB) is planning his home today in a tier II or III city, he has a preferred brand in mind. He is well-researched, consulted his contractor, checked with friends and family, and is invested in making the right choices. He isn’t price-sensitive – he is value-sensitive, specifically towards the value of his home. The moment this demand pull began happening at the consumer level, brand shifted from support cost to a revenue lever. Today, brand strength directly influences demand pull, price realisation, dealer preference, and the ability to enter new geographies without buying market share through discounting. That is the definition of a strategic growth driver.
So, we stopped defining Shree and Bangur Cement by our communication budgets and started measuring them by what our dealers and consumers say about us when we’re not in the room.

What are the key pillars that define a strong and differentiated cement brand today?
A strong cement brand rests on four pillars, and weakness in any one creates vulnerability across the entire brand standing.
Functional credibility comes first. The brand must deliver its promise. Consistency across batches, geographies, applications, users and constructions, is the non-negotiable. In a category where failure is structural, credibility is an earned reputation. If the contractor doesn’t know what the brand stands for or if the retailer cannot justify the price premium, the brand evaporates at the moment of truth. Genuine equity requires last-mile investment as seriously as mass media.
Channel trust is second. Dealers are the most powerful brand medium. If they believe in the product and its business integrity, they advocate without prompting. If they don’t, no amount of advertising will compensate. Channel trust is built through transparency, fair practices, delight and genuine partnership- not just margins.
Predictability is third. Keep promises, show up when committed and tell your target audience what to expect. When the channel knows your plans, they can plan theirs. When the customers know your service levels, they can choose better. When the architect/engineer knows you’re consistent, they have one less issue to worry about.
Emotional differentiation is fourth. It must be real, not claimed. In cement, this means standing for what the consumer genuinely cares about: getting their dream home right, family safety, the permanence of their home, the confidence of zero rework and communicating it in ways that feel honest rather than manufactured.

How do you balance product performance, trust and emotional appeal in your
branding strategy?
The honest answer is: you do not balance them as three separate things. In reality, they are sequential layers. You build them into a single coherent idea and let each reinforce the other. You cannot skip to emotional appeal without having earned functional credibility and trust. The architecture matters. Product performance is the non-negotiable foundation. A brand that invests heavily in emotional storytelling while allowing product inconsistency is building on quicksand. The homebuilder who has a bad experience will not be swayed by a great advertising campaign – they will become an active detractor, and in the age of WhatsApp and YouTube, that voice travels far.
Trust is the compound interest on consistent performance. It accumulates over years of good behaviour. It cannot be manufactured in a campaign; it can only be reflected in one. Emotional appeal is where the brand finds its distinct voice, and this is where the most exciting work happens. Our communication works best when it positions us as the guide who enables their success – the trusted partner who helps them build something that matters. When all three layers are functioning, the brand becomes genuinely difficult to displace.

What role does digital marketing play in influencing dealers, contractors, and end consumers?
Digital plays three distinct roles in our value chain, and conflating them is a common and expensive mistake.
For the individual home builder, digital is primarily a trust-building and education medium. This consumer, often in semi-urban or rural India, has a smartphone, active data and is no longer passive. They research before they buy. They watch videos, ask questions in WhatsApp groups, and seek guidance. To show up with genuinely useful content, helps earn long term trust at this stage.
For contractors and masons, WhatsApp is the professional operating system and Instagram and YouTube are their education channel. They share product feedback, seek expertise, compare brands, and influence recommendations. We focus on building genuine engagement through technical education, recognition and community.
For dealers, digital is a business tool. Order tracking, scheme communication, inventory updates and margin visibility are the things that make a dealer’s functioning more efficient. We have digitised this relationship to progress from being a supplier to being a partner.
That shift in relationship depth translates into recommendation behaviour.
The unifying insight is that digital has compressed the influence funnel. We can now be present and relevant at every stage of our TG’s decision making.

How do you measure the effectiveness and ROI of your branding initiatives?
We track at three levels, and we have been deliberate about not letting short-term volume metrics crowd out the leading indicators.
Consumer mind metrics: Unaided awareness, consideration, and recommendation scores in our key geographies, tracked through independent research on a rolling basis.
Trade pull metrics: How often is our brand asked for by name at the retail counter without dealer prompting? What is our recommendation rate among contractors in contested markets? These are harder to measure but more honest than ad recall scores.
Business outcomes: Price realisation versus category benchmarks, volume growth in markets where brand investment has been heaviest, and uptake on premium products specifically. Premium product mix is a direct measure of whether the brand is earning its right to charge more.
What we avoid is the false comfort of media metrics like impressions, reach, views. These measure exposure, not persuasion. However, the impact of campaigns on these levers over a rolling 18-to-24-month window is the real measure, not short term.

How has consumer awareness changed the way cement brands communicate their value proposition?
The informed consumer has made lazy category communication impossible. A decade ago, a sledgehammer-on-wall commercial sufficed. Consumers had no other frame of reference. Today, they do.
The Indian individual homebuilder walks into the outlet remarkably well-researched: watched YouTube videos, read reviews, spoke to neighbours who built recently, and participated in WhatsApp groups where experts share opinions. The category has been democratised from an information standpoint, and changes everything about how brands must communicate. The value proposition has had to become more honest and more specific. Generic claims of ‘strength’ or ‘quality’ no longer cut through because every competitor makes the same claim. What cuts through is either a distinct emotional territory or a specific functional promise backed by proof points and third-party validation.
In a world of marketing sameness, winning brands must be brave enough to stand for something specific and potentially polarising to earn genuine advocacy rather than vague goodwill. In cement context, this means choosing a position that is narrow enough to be meaningful and sticking to it with discipline. The consumer’s growing awareness has raised the bar for authenticity. Brands that try to be everything to everyone will be remembered by
no one.

What challenges do cement manufacturers face in building brand loyalty in a largely commoditised market?
Purchase infrequency is the first. Most people build a home once in their lifetime. There is no repeat purchase loop reinforcing brand experience. Once the wall is up, the brand is invisible. No visible badge of the brand that the homebuilder carries into the world. You invest heavily in building preference, the consumer makes one purchase, and then the relationship maybe effectively over.
The recommender chain is the second. Dealers, retailers, masons, and contractors are permanently present through a multi-layered influence ecosystem in ways the brand cannot be. Loyalty requires alignment across this entire chain; expensive and complex to build, easy to disrupt. If they don’t believe in the brand, no consumer advertising rescues the sale.
Price sensitivity paradox is the third. In a product where the stakes and fears are so high, consumers know intellectually that they should not compromise on quality. Yet price remains a dominant decision variable because the financial pressure of construction is enormous. Building premium positioning that survives this pressure requires sustained communication about the cost of getting it wrong.
We address these challenges by building loyalty, not with the end consumer alone but with the ecosystem of channel, masons, contractors, engineers whose repeated recommendation creates the aggregate brand pull that individual purchase loyalty cannot generate.

What branding trends do you believe will shape the future of the cement industry over the next five years?
Five trends stand out with early signals already visible in how the category’s leading brands
are investing.
Ecosystem brand over product brand: The cement bag is becoming the entry point, not the destination. Brands offering a comprehensive homebuilding guidance system like technical advisory, material planning, contractor referral, quality verification will own the consumer relationship across a two-to-three-year construction journey, not just the purchase moment. The brand that becomes the trusted guide, will be near-impossible to dislodge.
Hyperlocal relevance: North and East India are not one market. Construction practices, climate, soil types, and trust networks vary dramatically between Punjab and Bihar, Rajasthan and Bengal. Earning deeper loyalty requires genuinely localised brand propositions, not just translated national campaigns.
Sustainability as real differentiator: Urban homebuilders and institutional buyers are increasingly scrutinising environmental credentials of construction materials. Green cement, low-carbon production, and sustainability certifications will move from nice-to-have to mandatory in large project specifications within five years.
Informed influencer ecosystem: Not celebrity endorsements – the civil engineer with 200,000 YouTube subscribers reviewing construction materials with genuine credibility. This peer-review culture will increasingly shape brand preference. Brands building authentic relationships with these technical voices will hold a significant advantage.
means we respect the weight of what they’re building. Not just the physical structure, but the security and status it represents for their family.

• Kanika Mathur