In May this year, Prime Minister Modi gifted Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni a packet of Parle Melody in Rome, and within hours social media had turned it into a full blown moment. “Melodi” was trending, memes were everywhere, and dozens of brands rushed to insert themselves into the conversation with topical posts and quick creative. For about 48 hours, it felt like every marketing team in the country was talking about the same toffee.
Then the moment passed, the way viral moments do, and most of those brands went right back to being invisible.
When the Moment Faded
Getting attached to a viral moment can feel like a win while it’s happening. Engagement goes up, the brand gets tagged, someone screenshots it for the internal deck. But a spike like that has no memory attached to it. The audience remembers the moment, not the brand that showed up for it, and by the following week most people couldn’t say which companies jumped on the Melodi trend at all.
The one brand that genuinely benefited was Parle itself, and only because the connection was obvious and needed no explaining. Everyone else piling on with a “we love this too” post borrowed attention that had nowhere to attach itself, because there was no existing story underneath it.
This is the same pattern behind almost every brand that gets a burst of press and then fades. A funding announcement, a founder feature, a product that goes viral, all of it gets covered, sometimes extensively. And because there’s no brand narrative sitting underneath the coverage, the story has nowhere to go next. The brand becomes a headline that happened once, not a name people actively track.
Coverage vs Narrative
Did people notice?
Coverage tells you whether people noticed.
What do people expect next?
Narrative tells you whether people know what to expect from a brand the next time they see its name.
Most PR strategies are built to win the first question and never get around to the second, which is backwards, because the first resets to zero after every news cycle while the second compounds.
Building that narrative comes down to being able to answer a few questions without hesitation:
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1
What is the one thing this brand wants to be known for, not five things, one ownable idea that can be restated in every piece of coverage without ever sounding repetitive.
ZOMATO
Zomato has built its entire public identity around one idea, a witty, internet-native voice that makes it feel like a friend rather than a food delivery app, and it shows up the same way whether it’s a tweet, a customer support reply, or an ad.
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2
What tension does the brand actually resolve for the people it serves, since the strongest brand stories are built on a problem, not a product description.
CRED
CRED resolves a specific tension, making financially responsible people feel recognised and rewarded instead of ignored, and every campaign it runs circles back to that same idea.
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3
Does the next campaign add to that same story, or does it quietly start a new one from scratch.
SWIGGY INSTAMART
Swiggy Instamart is a good example of getting this right, every campaign it runs, regardless of format, reinforces the same underlying promise of near-instant delivery, so each new push adds to the same story instead of starting a fresh one.
Should you avoid such moments completely?
None of this means brands should sit out moments like Melodi. Jumping on a cultural moment can work well, but only as a top up to a story that already exists, not as a substitute for one. A brand with a strong identity uses the moment to reinforce what people already associate with it. A brand without one just borrows attention it has no way of keeping.
The next time a trend like this comes around, and in India there is always another one coming, the real question will not be whether to participate.
