Marketing Nobody Sees.

Nobody has ever fallen in love with a pipe fitting.

No one has stood in a server room, run their hand along a concealed heating valve, and felt something. No one has picked a flooring brand the way they pick a phone. In every category I've built a career in — flooring, plumbing systems, sanitaryware, heating and cooling solutions — the brand I was building was, structurally, invisible. Buried in a wall. Installed under a floor. Specified by an architect who will never use the product themselves, for a homeowner who will never know or care what brand made it.

Here's the structural problem these categories force on you.

In most consumer marketing, you're selling directly to the person who feels the outcome. Buy the phone, hold the phone, love the phone. There's a straight line between message and emotion, and a good brand story can carry real weight on its own.

In my categories, that line doesn't exist. The person making the purchase decision — a specifier, a contractor, a procurement team — is almost never the person who experiences the product. A flooring buyer is buying square footage and specification compliance, not the way morning light hits a floor. A plumber isn't loyal to Viega because he loves Viega — he's loyal because the installation is faster, the fittings don't fail, and the brand didn't waste his time. You cannot borrow emotional shortcuts you don't have access to. You have to build the case on its own merits, every time, to an audience that has heard every vendor make the same claims.

That's the discipline nobody talks about: when you can't lean on desire, you're forced to get good at proof.

A few things this actually taught me:

Nobody reads your brand book if the specifier doesn't trust the spec sheet first.

At Forbo, I wasn't marketing flooring to homeowners — I was building trust with architects and specifiers who'd stake their own reputation on a recommendation. The emotional brand story came second. First was always: does this material perform the way you say it performs, and can I prove that to someone who audits these claims for a living?

At Viega, the plumber installing the product and the distributor stocking it had completely different motivations — the real customer and the paying customer were often two different people, and the strategy had to serve both without confusing them. That's why I built “Viega Masters,” a loyalty program aimed specifically at plumbers — the people actually touching the product, and the most overlooked stakeholder in a category obsessed with architects and specifiers instead. Onboarding 10,000+ plumbers in year one wasn't a content win. It was recognising that the invisible installer mattered more than the visible spec sheet.

There's a layer under that which makes it harder still:

In two of these roles, I wasn't just selling an invisible product — I was selling a category the Indian market barely had a vocabulary for. At Forbo, the Indian flooring market runs on tiles and ceramics. We were trying to sell linoleum, electrostatic dissipative flooring for industrial use, and luxury vinyl tile — categories with no real prior demand to tap into.

At Viega, the market was dominated by CPVC and PVC pipes from players like Astral and Supreme. We were selling stainless steel pipes, roughly ten times the cost of CPVC, along with polymer pipes and concealed systems — categories so early that Astral and Supreme themselves only launched polymer pipe lines years later. In both cases, the job wasn't “convince someone to prefer our brand.” It was “convince someone the category itself was worth considering” — a fundamentally different, harder problem, before brand ever entered the conversation.

Sanitaryware actually complicates this whole argument, and I'd rather sit with that than smooth it over. At Kerovit, I built the governance system — logo rules, brand principles, visual standards — behind a ₹400 Cr brand ($40M). But unlike flooring or plumbing, this is a category where the end consumer genuinely does notice — at least when someone's buying for their own home rather than through a builder. That's exactly why brands like Kohler and Jaquar spend so heavily on glamorising sanitaryware: a faucet or a wash basin is visible, every day, and something a homeowner actually picks for themselves in an individual house. In a builder-driven apartment, that choice disappears into the developer's spec sheet, and the brand goes invisible again. The same category sits on both sides of this argument, depending entirely on who's making the purchase decision.

There's also a ticket-value problem most marketing advice doesn't account for.

In FMCG, or a direct-to-consumer phone brand, a single purchase is low-value and fast — a phone starting at ₹5,000–10,000 can be sold end-to-end through an e-commerce site and a good ad campaign. My categories don't work that way. Even one bathroom means faucets, a wash basin, sanitaryware, fittings — easily running into thousands of rupees, sometimes lakhs, depending on what you choose. That's not an impulse purchase, and pure e-commerce doesn't translate to it.

What does work is an online-to-offline (O2O ecommerce) model — I ran this at Viega through IndiaMART, where discovery happens online but the transaction and fulfilment still go through a dealer. The buying cycle is long, the ticket size is large, and the channel strategy has to account for both — not just copy what works for a five-thousand-rupee phone.

Where nobody's emotionally invested, you're also forced to find the mechanism that actually works, not the one that just feels good. I've watched marketers in high-visibility categories ride on vibes for a full campaign cycle. That was never available to me. Every campaign I've run had to answer plainly: why does this matter to someone who doesn't care about brands, and what changes for their business if they believe me?

I'd be lying if I said I chose flooring and plumbing marketing because I saw the strategic upside on day one — I didn't. But somewhere between Forbo's specifier database and Viega's plumber loyalty program, I noticed the pattern: the categories with no glamour to lean on were quietly teaching me the parts of marketing that actually hold up under pressure. Message clarity. Real stakeholder mapping. Proof over feeling.

That's the thing about learning where nobody's watching. You don't get to fake it. And once you've built the discipline to make someone care about a concealed pipe fitting or a wall-hung basin, a category where people actually want to be sold to isn't harder. It's just easier.

I learned marketing where it's hardest. That's why it works everywhere else.