By Olga Dulinskaya
India enters 2026 with strong momentum. Even amid global trade slowdowns and tariff uncertainty, the country is still projected to grow at around 7.4%, reinforcing its position as the world’s fastest-growing major economy. But for Indian businesses, the bigger question has shifted. It’s no longer just about how fast the economy grows, it's about how companies grow within it.
For much of the last decade, growth meant expansion. Brands chased scale by entering new markets, adding channels, increasing headcount, and pouring money into customer acquisition. In a demand-heavy environment, this worked. Consumption was rising fast, digital reach was widening, and capital was abundant. Growth rewarded speed.
Today, the context is different.
Demand is still strong, but it’s more fragmented. Consumers are more selective. Marketing costs are higher. And leadership teams are under pressure to show not just growth, but profitable, repeatable growth. In this environment, expansion alone is no longer the safest lever. Efficiency is.
This shift is already visible in how India’s most competitive brands operate. Take Hindustan Unilever, which has increasingly focused on portfolio rationalisation, sharper category plays, and targeted distribution rather than blanket expansion. Or consider Zomato, which moved decisively from growth-at-all-costs to improving unit economics, refining its customer mix, and optimising marketing spend. These companies didn’t stop growing. They learned to grow better.
Marketing is where this shift becomes most visible.
In earlier years, growth was driven by reach: more impressions, more installs, more stores, more campaigns. Today, that logic breaks down quickly. Customer acquisition costs are rising, attention is fragmented, and undifferentiated spend delivers diminishing returns. Brands that win now are the ones improving conversion quality, retention, and lifetime value, not just top-of-funnel volume.
Efficiency in this context means clearer segmentation, sharper targeting, faster feedback loops, and better alignment between product, pricing, and communication. It means understanding which customers actually drive profitability, which channels genuinely convert, and which markets deserve focus, while having the discipline to deprioritise the rest.
The same logic applies operationally. Scaling without fixing internal complexity often creates friction: slower decision-making, bloated cost structures, and inconsistent customer experiences. Many Indian companies grew fast, but their processes didn’t mature at the same pace. The result is size without proportional strength.
Efficiency, on the other hand, compounds quietly. Small improvements in go-to-market speed, media effectiveness, supply chain coordination, or decision-making can create meaningful long-term advantage. These gains may not always make headlines, but they show up where it matters in margins, resilience, and the ability to adapt.
Capital discipline is reinforcing this shift. As funding becomes more selective and investors focus on profitability, brands that can do more with the same resources gain flexibility. They can weather shocks, test faster, and reinvest intelligently. Expansion-heavy models, by contrast, often lock companies into fixed costs that reduce agility just when agility is critical.
This is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument for precision.
India’s next phase of growth will reward companies that refine before they multiply. Brands — that improve marketing efficiency, shorten go-to-market cycles, optimise channel mix, and align spend with real demand — will outperform those chasing raw expansion. Efficiency is not about restraint. It is about control and clarity.
At the national level, India’s growth story remains compelling. But at the corporate level, the winners of the next decade will be defined less by how aggressively they expand and more by how intelligently they operate. India Inc is moving from an era of opportunity capture to an era of value extraction.
The growth is still there. The lever has simply changed.
(The author is the Founder & CEO at KIT Global)
