For years, the health food drinks aisle in India ran on a single parental fear: is my child growing tall enough, fast enough.
Complan built its entire identity around height and weight gain claims, memorably running ads that compared a “Complan Boy” against a “Horlicks Boy” and implying one grew faster than the other. Horlicks, the older and larger brand in the category, pushed back with its own claims about taller, stronger and sharper children. The Advertising Standards Council of India stepped in more than once over the specific comparative claims each side was making.
Neither brand ever definitively won the scientific argument. That was never really the point. Both brands understood something more useful: a parent buying a health drink isn’t reading clinical studies at the shelf. They are trying to resolve an anxiety, quickly, before the school year starts.
The category grew because two competitors kept escalating the same emotional stake rather than competing on taste, price or ingredients. Whoever framed the fear most vividly, in that specific advertising cycle, tended to win the shelf that season.
Surf Excel ran a version of this same insight in an entirely different category, turning a parent’s fear of dirty clothes into a reason to buy more detergent, not less. Paper Boat works the same emotional register from a different angle, selling nostalgia instead of anxiety. And Tanishq‘s approach to sensitive social narratives shows how far a brand can lean into an emotionally charged conversation once it decides to own one.
In health drinks, science was always secondary. The real product was reassurance.
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