It’s not about slapping a logo: Hunger Inc’s Namita Mitla on what makes marketing work

MUMBAI: In a marketing landscape where brands are constantly competing for consumer attention, being visible is no longer enough. For Namita Mitla, Head of Marketing at Hunger Inc Hospitality, the more important question is whether a brand is showing up in the right places and saying something meaningful to its audience.

For Hunger Inc, the hospitality company behind The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro, Bombay Sweet Shop, enthucutlet, Veronica’s and Papa’s!, storytelling remains central to that approach.

“We’re a hospitality brand. And storytelling sits at the top, right where food and services, storytelling kind of sits at the same level,” Mitla says.

That philosophy shapes the company’s approach to choosing marketing platforms. Rather than evaluating a medium purely on its scale or visibility, Mitla says Hunger Inc looks for opportunities that allow its brands to communicate their personality and the experience they offer.

“Any medium that allows us to tell our story will always be at the forefront,” she says.

Beyond visibility, the focus is on the experience

Social media has become particularly important for the brand because it allows Hunger Inc to showcase aspects of its restaurants that consumers may not otherwise see.

“Social media today, for example, is really, really important to us because we’re able to tell stories, we’re able to show the BTS, we’re able to show what happens in a restaurant that you don’t see,” Mitla explains.

For an experience-led category such as hospitality, that ability to take consumers behind the scenes can be more valuable than simply placing a brand name in front of them.

This is also why not every large-scale media opportunity automatically becomes relevant for the company. Mitla points out that a straightforward brand integration — where a logo is simply placed within a property — may not necessarily communicate what Hunger Inc stands for.

“A lot of times in reality shows where it’s just slapping a logo, you put it as simply as that, may not work for us,” she says. “Because you’re not able to actually put forward what the brand is about.”

While reality formats can offer brands visibility and an established environment of consumer trust, Mitla believes the larger consideration should be whether the platform provides an opportunity to build a genuine connection with the audience.

For Hunger Inc, that also means ensuring that the platform and audience make sense geographically. “We’re Bombay-centric, right? So it has to be something that works for Bombay,” she says.

‘A brand can’t be part of every trend’

The same emphasis on relevance extends to how Mitla approaches Gen Z.

The generation is often characterised as being highly trend-driven, but Mitla believes marketers need to challenge that assumption before building their strategies around it.

“A lot of people say Gen Zs follow trends,” she says. “I think what’s really important to know is that Gen Zs don’t mindlessly follow trends.”

For brands, this means resisting the temptation to participate in every viral conversation simply because it is generating attention.

“And a brand can’t be part of every trend,” Mitla adds.

Instead, marketers need to step back and assess whether a particular trend has a genuine connection with both the brand and its audience.

“Taking a step back and seeing what trend is really relevant for your brand and for your audience and only taking part in those is something I’d recommend,” she says.

For Mitla, relevance therefore becomes a filter across marketing decisions — from the platforms brands choose to the trends they participate in and the stories they tell.

In an environment where consumer attention is increasingly fragmented, the marketing advantage may not belong to the brands that are present everywhere, but to those that understand where they belong and why.