Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Fundamentally, stories align the audience and the storyteller—get them on the same page, so to speak. But like any relationship, this has its challenges. Because both the audience and the storyteller can evolve in different directions over time. 

The longer the time, the farther the distance. How, then, can you find a unifying narrative? 

It’s a question that all long-standing brands have to deal with eventually. And Ghaziabad-headquartered consumer goods company Dabur is no exception. 

With a revenue of over Rs 10,000 crore (US$1.2 billion), Dabur is the largest Ayurvedic and natural healthcare product company in the world. But as its audience (market) evolves in a seemingly different direction, the company is starting to reshape its identity. 

Just last week, Dabur announced the acquisition of one of the largest spice brands in India—Badshah Masala. And that’s just one part of the larger strategy Dabur seems to be executing. 

Reinventing Ayurveda for a new brand of customers.

Dabur’s fashioning a brand-new story for a brand-new audience

To understand where it’s going, we first need to look at where Dabur came from. 

For a long, long while, Dabur was primarily known for prescription ayurvedic medicines. Its founder Dr S K Burman, the story goes, prepared natural cures for diseases like cholera, malaria, and plague. He founded Dabur about 150 years ago. 

But imagine, in this day and age, trying to sell something most people wouldn’t buy unless they were sick and allopathic medicine wasn’t helping. 

And so Dabur has evolved over the century and a half of its existence, to eventually selling a lifestyle that covers food, personal care, and everything in between. 

Its new story is actually turning out to be a lot closer to the real meaning of Ayurveda as a lifestyle than its original business roots, one of the company’s former marketing executives told me. The company is expanding into new categories like kitchen essentials—including wheat flour, tea, and edible oils—and it is acquiring companies like Badshah Masala. It is not just expanding how it can associate every consumer good with concepts like pure or herbal or goodness, but also leveraging its vast distribution network spread across the country for these new products. 

At the same time, it is also modernising old products that have Ayurveda as a foundation, but selling them with a new story—with new packaging and over newer mediums like e-commerce, as another of its former marketing executives pointed out. All in a bid to retain old customers while still appealing to the new ones. 

A fresh new narrative. And there were three key developments that pushed Dabur to seriously focus on building it.