How Perfetti’s marketing formula endures amid India’s changing tastes

For someone who has spent 25 years inside Perfetti Van Melle (PVM) India, Nikhil Sharma’s view of marketing is disarmingly grounded. “Young marketers have stars in their eyes… thinking of crafting award-winning ads,” he tells Campaign. “But marketing is a lot about understanding the product, what sells, understanding the whole piece to deliver a winning proposition.”

Sharma, now managing director of PVM India, has travelled the long arc from management trainee in 1999 to leading the company at a time when India’s confectionary landscape is more crowded, more fragmented and more price-sensitive than at any point in recent memory. Over these years, he has watched a familiar marketing paradox play out repeatedly: theory idolises creativity, but brand endurance still belongs to those who can translate fundamentals into memory structures and distribution muscle.

It is not accidental that Happydent — immortalised by the 2006 ‘Palace’ TVC that won at Cannes and became a cultural marker for Indian advertising — is today the fastest-growing gum brand in India, according to Nielsen. That ad didn’t just give the brand a quirky identity; it built an asset PVM continues to refine: the ‘sparkling smile’.

Humour as strategy, not nostalgia

Sharma is quick to swat away the suggestion that PVM trades on nostalgia, saying that these words are not used in the company’s meetings. “We’re only about saying: how can we tell the consumer in a nice, funny, memorable manner that there is a new product in the market,” he notes.

According to him, humour is less a creative indulgence and more a necessity in an impulse category where media budgets cannot afford high frequency. “Let’s make communication that is funny and hope that with little relatively less exposure it drives top-of-mind recall,” he emphasises.

Yet, the cultural afterlife of campaigns like ‘Palace’ or the Chlormint ‘Dobara Mat Poochna’ films continues to follow the company. Perfetti’s ads often turn into memes not because the brand is chasing nostalgia, but because simplicity, humour and clarity travel easily across formats that barely existed when those ads first aired. That reality matters in a market where laughter is increasingly a currency of attention.

An advertising playbook that refuses to age

The topography of marketing has shifted radically during Sharma’s time in the business. Linear channels have given way to a messy sprawl of CTV, social, digital and retail media. Yet PVM’s creative process begins much as it always has: with a single core TV idea.

“We don’t deviate too much from either core brand value or brand asset,” Sharma explains. For Happydent, that asset continues to be the ‘Sparkling Smile’. For Alpenliebe, the target is anyone between four to 44 years of age.

In recent years, though, Happydent has taken the smile into more socially conscious terrain. The brand now highlights small civic acts people should ideally be doing, without turning moralistic.

“Happydent isn’t telling people to do the right thing; it is merely suggesting that people should do it,” he says. The brand’s shift into this long-form narrative still relies on humour, lightness and subliminal suggestion rather than instruction. PR extensions are calibrated the same way: visible but not preachy.

Few legacy brands manage to evolve a decades-old creative device without estranging younger audiences. PVM’s ability to do so says more about brand consistency than brand nostalgia.

A market that grows, yet behaves the same

Sharma’s career mirrors the company’s growth: from roughly INR 150 crore in revenue when he joined to closing FY25 at INR 3,500 crore. PVM expects FY26 to touch INR 4,000 crore, aided by revived demand, distribution depth and, crucially, shifts in its price-point mix.

Despite India’s seismic consumption changes, the confectionary core remains surprisingly familiar. “These are still bite-sized treats that consumers buy on her way back from school,” Sharma says. Jellies did not exist 15 years ago; now they do. Choices have widened. But the habit loop is intact.

Distribution, however, is where endurance is built. PVM reaches six million outlets. That scale is difficult to replicate, particularly for digital-native confectionary brands that thrive on e-commerce visibility but struggle to cement mass presence. “To go really mass, you need a setup like Perfetti’s, which takes time, money and effort,” he says.

Legacy positioning comes with a constraint: the INR 1 price point. It anchors the category but limits manoeuvrability. PVM has managed to push 30% of its portfolio beyond INR 1, a shift Sharma would have considered unlikely five years ago, but the company cannot abandon its base. “We’d like an INR 5 product to be present in two million outlets,” he notes, signalling the company’s push toward a more balanced price ladder.

Where does nostalgia fit into this? In PVM’s case, it is not engineered; it is inherited. Many consumers grew up with Centerfresh, Alpenliebe or Big Babol. As they age, they switch formats—gums, compressed mints, lollipops, jellies—while staying within familiar brand worlds. That soft loyalty is powerful in a category where the barrier to trial is almost nonexistent.

The financial dip, and what comes after

Sharma is frank about last year’s subdued performance across FMCG. High commodity inflation, particularly in sugar and glucose, forced price hikes that sparked volume declines.

“Consumers were making tough choices,” he says. The wholesale inflation tide is now receding; October 2025 numbers hovered around 1.21–1.5%. Combined with rural recovery, he sees early signs of a healthier FY26.

Rural consumption, he argues, remains a critical barometer. Wholesale behaviour in smaller towns reflects broader FMCG demand cycles. “If demand for soap and shampoo in a small town picks up, then several other categories pick up.” Confectionary often rides those waves rather than driving them.

Inflation invariably forces manufacturers into uncomfortable trade-offs. Sharma rejects the popular assumption that companies manage cost pressures by reducing grammage or ‘cheating the consumer’.

“Our first instinct is to protect the consumer because we know that acquiring consumers is tough,” he says. The work begins with production efficiency, line optimisation and P&L discipline. When commodity spikes force price increases, volumes take a hit, which is why expanding higher-priced packs becomes strategically important.

He repeatedly returns to one structural tension: preserving affordability while future-proofing margins. The upcoming GST reforms — a recurring theme in his analysis — may relieve some pressure. “GST is well-intended… in the medium to long term, you will see its impact come in across the board.” Cheaper innovation, he believes, could be one of the downstream effects.

The limits of expansion

PVM advertises five to six brands: Centerfresh, Centerfruit, Alpenliebe, Mentos and Chupa Chups, with Frutella among those that stay off media. Importantly, the company has no plans to add new brands.

“We have our hands full,” Sharma says, preferring to diversify within existing umbrellas rather than launch fresh ones. In a category where brand-equity transfer is high and consumer expectations are consistent, this conservatism is pragmatic rather than defensive.

White spaces exist, he concedes, but they do not always justify investment. With a 30% market share, the company sees far more headroom in strengthening penetration of INR 1 confectionary than in venturing into adjacent snacking or food categories.

Ask Sharma what has stayed constant through two decades of shifting channels, consumer behaviour and economic cycles, and he steers the conversation back to basics. Marketing, he insists, is not just campaigns. It is product clarity, distribution coherence and pricing discipline—often the first things obscured when creative buzz takes centre stage.

PVM’s story is not about nostalgia, humour or even the sparkle of a Happydent smile. It is about the long, disciplined work of brand endurance in a country where millions of purchases happen in seconds, for a rupee at a time, in outlets without signage. In an industry increasingly distracted by platforms and formats, that might be the most instructive story of all.