I confess to a moment of genuine dismay the other day. There I was, subjected yet again to a high-decibel, full-page, blocked-across-newspapers campaign for State Bank of India’s digital platform, YONO—replete with youthful slang, frenetic energy, and an earnest attempt to appear with-it. The dismay was all-encompassing – from the branding, to the creative tone, to the media strategy.
This is from an institution whose core promise, for generations of Indians, has been profoundly simple: your money will be safe here, whatever the vicissitudes of life. It felt rather like watching a dignified grandparent trying to break into a viral dance routine at a wedding—well-meaning, energetic, and faintly tragic.
Which brings me to the idea of brand senescence. Not the inevitable ageing of brands—age is not the enemy—but the failure of some brands to carry their equity forward from one generation to the next, even when that equity is entirely transferable.
Every generation rewrites culture, but it does not rewrite human needs. Trust, nourishment, play, reassurance, belonging, self-expression—these are constants. Brands that anchor themselves in such human truths can, in principle, remain relevant across decades. Brands that root themselves in period-specific social arrangements—scarcity, authority, protected markets, technological constraints—are far more vulnerable. Yet even brands built on enduring human values can fail if they misunderstand what renewal actually requires.
SBI is a textbook case. For decades, it stood for reliability, scale, and a kind of sovereign reassurance – the bank that felt permanent. That equity did not become irrelevant with Millennials or Gen Z. If anything, it should have become more valuable in an age of fintech collapses, app outages, data breaches, and financial anxiety. What SBI needed to do was translate trust into modern utility. Instead, with YONO, it tried to translate trust into youthfulness.
The problem was not digitisation. It was performative modernity. The tone of communication seemed embarrassed by SBI’s own gravitas, eager to sound cool rather than competent. In doing so, the bank diluted its strongest asset—reliability—without convincingly acquiring a new one. Young users didn’t find YONO delightful in the way they do fintech apps, while older users didn’t find it reassuring in the way they do SBI. The brand fell awkwardly between stools.
This failure mode repeats itself across categories.
Consider Life Insurance Corporation of India. Few brands in India command the level of trust that LIC does. For decades, it has been the default answer to the question of where one should insure one’s family. That equity was absolutely transferable to Millennials and Gen Z. What changed was not the relevance of trust, but its definition. For younger consumers, trust is no longer just institutional longevity; it is transparency, flexibility, and control.
LIC modernised cosmetically—apps, websites, refreshed campaigns—but not structurally. Products remained opaque, processes heavily agent-driven, and user agency limited. Fintech insurers reframed trust not as authority but as clarity. LIC did not lose relevance because it was old. It lost relevance because it did not translate trust into empowerment.
A similar story played out with Air India, at least in its pre-Tata incarnation. The airline possessed enormous latent equity—national pride, long-haul competence, and emotional ownership. But attempts to appear contemporary through advertising ran well ahead of operational reality. Cabin interiors, service consistency, digital experience, and punctuality told a different story. For younger consumers, the gap between promise and experience became ironic rather than aspirational. One cannot advertise modernity faster than one operationalises it. When brands try, they become punchlines.
Then there is Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. BSNL should, in theory, have been the natural bridge between rural India, affordability, and a digitally native generation. Its reach and public trust were formidable. But as private players redefined telecom from access to experience, BSNL remained locked into an earlier mental model. By the time it tried to catch up, it lacked speed, UX coherence, and cultural relevance. Here again, the equity was not obsolete; the translation simply never happened.
The fact that all four examples that come to my mind are from public sector organisations is not accidental. Perhaps an inherent weakness of the bureaucratic mindset is in thinking through marketing strategy
This pattern, however, is not uniquely Indian or public-sector.
HSBC has long struggled with youth relevance despite immense institutional trust, often softening its gravitas without delivering fintech-grade digital experiences. IBM flirted in the early 2000s with being “cool,” before sensibly retreating to its true strength—depth, infrastructure, and long-term thinking. IBM survived by becoming quieter and more powerful, not louder. And Facebook illustrates another variation: a brand whose equity of universality failed to translate to Gen Z, even as its sibling Instagram inherited youth relevance. The parent brand came to feel cluttered, surveillant, and vaguely desperate.
The contrast becomes clear when we look at brands that have managed intergenerational continuity. Amul has kept its product reassuringly boring while its cultural commentary remains relentlessly contemporary. Parle-G continues to ride on nourishment, affordability, and habit—values that survive every lifestyle shift. LEGO, after nearly collapsing, rediscovered that everything it did had to deepen play; expression evolved, the core did not. Dove has continuously re-audited its purpose against changing cultural anxieties, from Photoshop to filters to AI-generated perfection.
These brands do not chase youth. They invite inheritance.
Brand senescence, then, occurs when either the equity itself is no longer anchored in a human constant, or when management lacks the imagination—or courage—to translate that equity into contemporary forms. SBI’s mistake with YONO was not that it went digital. It was that it assumed youth is a tone to be adopted, rather than a relationship to be earned.
Gen Z does not reject old brands. It rejects brands that appear embarrassed by their own strength. For an institution like SBI, boring reliability could have been reframed as a virtue—the app that works when others crash, the bank that stays standing when cycles turn. Instead, it tried to dance.
Brands do not grow old because consumers change. They grow old because they forget how to be translated. And sometimes, the most radical act of modernisation is not pretending to be young, but having the confidence to be exactly what you are—newly useful.
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