With rising consumer mistrust, can transparency build long-lasting brands?

When we walk through a shopping mall aisle or swipe on one product after another on our phones, loading our carts with products of every variety, checking the label is one task we rarely take seriously. Our reluctance to question brands, our willingness to trust them blindly rather than decode the unreadable jumble of words on the back, has often put our health at risk.

But can we really blame ourselves? The average product label is a mountain of jargons, scientific terms in microscopic print, information overload masquerading as disclosure. The common consumer never stood a chance.

This, however, is precisely where the old model of branding is beginning to become irrelevant. The carefully crafted ‘narrative’ that brands used to sell us is failing, eroded by a generation that refuses to be sold to. "In order to maintain relevance to people at large and build trust, the work of brand building needs to shift from managing to embodying," explains Anand Murty, Founder and CSO, Fundamental. "It needs to shift from thinking of users as needing to be sold a narrative to being what people need and being meaningful."

Revant Himantsingka aka FoodPharmer, Inmage: The Telegraph

Something is shifting. Social media has armed consumers with a new weapon: accountability. Influencers and creators have begun calling out brands that once operated with impunity. In India, one of the most prominent voices is FoodPharmer, a creator who has systematically taken on brands that stand like mammoths in the market, untouchable for decades. Thanks to crusaders like him, consumers have become more conscious, and considerably more skeptical.

Brands have noticed. Some have embraced ‘radical transparency’ as their unique selling point, their north star. In India, this movement is led by startups like The Whole Truth, a food brand that built a following by doing something revolutionary: putting its full ingredient list on the front of its packages, daring consumers to actually read it.

Yet even these champions of openness have stumbled, caught in moments where their transparency wasn't quite so radical after all.

These stumbles are forcing a critical question: Is radical transparency a sustainable business model, or is it a brilliant, high-stakes marketing tactic that inevitably implodes under its own weight?

The new rules of distrust

The market that ‘glass-box’ brands entered is fundamentally broken. According to a 2025 report from the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), a staggering 98% of digital ads reviewed required modification. The food and beverage sector was a particularly egregious offender, with 61% of ads carrying misleading health or nutrition claims.

Consumers, particularly in India, are hyper-aware. A 2024 PwC report found that 75% of Indian consumers actively seek information on food sustainability. They are armed with social media ‘truth-tellers’ and, increasingly, AI-powered tools to decode the labels that were designed to confuse them.

This is the new battleground. But the transparency strategy is a double-edged sword. "People WILL find out," Murty warns. "And they WILL haul the brand... over coals. Sugar that's hidden in extra fine print. Health claims are akin to hot air... You can be sure people will catch on, do the homework and the math and expose you."

Welcome to the "Transparency paradox": the more you show, the more people expect. The more they scrutinise, the more likely they are to find a flaw. A brand built on being 100% perfect is, by definition, built to fail.

The "failure" often isn't even a lie; it's a nuance. It's the difference between "no added sugar" and "sugar from jaggery." To a food-tech company, this is a clear and honest distinction. To a skeptical consumer primed to detect deception, it can feel like a betrayal.

The campaign, not the culture

The most catastrophic failure occurs when transparency is revealed to be what it was all along: a marketing campaign, not a core value.

"Transparency has to come from the culture of the brand, not just its campaigns," says Siddhant Jain, Partner at Three Fourth Solutions. "When it's a true value, it shows in everyday actions—how a company communicates, handles mistakes and responds to feedback."

Jain argues that the market can smell the difference between performance and principle. "The line is crossed when the information starts serving the brand's image more than the consumer's understanding."

Sanchita Roy, Chief Strategy Officer at Havas Media India, echoes this, positioning true transparency as a "leadership commitment to openness and intent." When this commitment is real, she explains, "collective intelligence has a compounding effect on deliverables and over time becomes structural advantages."

This authenticity must start internally. "Internal transparency is where real authenticity begins," Jain adds. "You can't project openness to customers if your own people are kept in the dark."

Roy agrees, noting that this internal openness is the bedrock of external trust. "When leaders share contexts, employees trust the decisions, even the tough ones," she says. "Employees perform well, takes better decisions only when they know the full picture... There are no hidden agendas when there's transparency!"

Without this foundation, transparency becomes theater, impressive to watch, hollow to experience.

The ‘plumbing’ of scale

For brands that are genuine in their commitment, the real test isn't ideology. It's growth. It's one thing to be transparent with one supplier and ten employees. It's quite another to maintain that purity with a global supply chain, thousands of SKUs, and quarterly investor pressure breathing down your neck.

This is where idealism meets infrastructure, and infrastructure usually wins.

"The hardest hurdle is the plumbing. Not intent, not creativity," says Vikram Kharvi, CEO at Bloomingdale PR. "It is scattered data, scattered ownership and slow approvals across regions and teams."

Kharvi paints a vivid picture of what breaks first when a startup scales:

  • One source of truth disappears as products, policies and prices live in different systems across different continents.

  • Version control fails across English and regional languages, creating a game of telephone with critical information.

  • Legal, compliance and brand approvals stack up and transparency slows to a crawl, strangled by bureaucracy it never anticipated.

This is the operational nightmare of transparency at scale. To meet surging demand, a brand might need a new supplier. Can it 100% vouch for that supplier's practices when it barely had time to vet them? To cut costs and stay competitive, it might need to substitute a ‘clean’ ingredient for a ‘clean-ish’ one. Will it announce that change with the same pride and fanfare as its launch?

When the choice is between shipping a product on time and being 100% transparent about a last-minute compromise buried in the supply chain, the "plumbing" of a scaled business will win almost every time.

The Indian playbook

While TWT is the most visible example, other Indian brands are navigating transparency in ways that are uniquely tailored to the local market. The consensus is that for Indian consumers, hard data alone isn't enough; it must be paired with a human element.

"In India, empathy still drives loyalty, not just data," says Siddhant Jain. "Numbers help prove responsibility, but people connect more deeply with human stories and real examples of change."

This approach—blending proof with "people and process" stories—is seen as more resilient. "A brand that can say ‘here’s what we’ve done’ and also show ‘who made it happen’ earns trust that lasts beyond campaigns," Jain adds. "The goal isn’t just to report impact but to help consumers feel part of it."

This "honesty" isn't confined to F&B. Anand Murthy points to another example of Airtel Payment Bank. He argues that their success shows that "when it is at the core of the brand, radical transparency can indeed be sustained." Their specific transparency wasn't about ingredients, but about their role: "honesty about being a secondary bank account for day-to-day expenditure." By not over-promising, they built trust.

To combat cynicism, this proof must be accessible. Vikram Kharvi advocates for a simple, layered approach. "Keep proof simple on the surface and deep under the hood. One screen to trust. One click to verify," he says. He suggests brands must "back claims with third-party audits, certifications and links to full methods." 

The accountability matrix

How a brand handles these inevitable stumbles defines its fate. But how it communicates its stumbles, or its virtues, is just as critical as the act itself. This is where data and narrative must merge into something more powerful than either alone.

"When data is used to build narratives, it establishes an emotional connection," says Sanchita Roy. "Raw and hard data alone lack emotional resonance... People + Process stories backed by data humanise the brand."

This blend of human narrative and verifiable data is the core of true accountability. Two case studies, separated by industry and geography but united by crisis, illustrate this divide perfectly.

Patagonia's 15-year apology

For decades, the outdoor industry, including global brands like Patagonia, relied on "forever chemicals" (PFAS) for waterproofing. They were effective. They were also a health and environmental nightmare.

Patagonia wasn't ‘exposed’ by a whistleblower or a regulatory body. Instead, it voluntarily went public with the problem, announcing to its customers that its products, products they trusted, products they'd put on their children, contained these toxic chemicals. Then it did something even more remarkable: it documented its 15-year, excruciatingly expensive, and imperfect journey to find a replacement.

This was a perfect ‘People + Process’ story. They even admitted to a "regrettable substitution" when their first replacement (C6) was also found to be harmful. There was no triumphant press release, no glossy rebrand. Just the slow, humbling work of trying to do better while admitting you'd gotten it wrong.

This is not radical transparency; it is radical accountability. They were transparent about their failure, not just their successes. It was uncomfortable, costly, and it cemented their trust for another generation.

GitLab's live-streamed meltdown

In 2017, a GitLab engineer accidentally deleted a primary database, wiping out six hours of customer data in an instant. For most companies, this is a "contain and control" PR disaster, lock the doors, lawyer up, craft the statement.

GitLab's response was unprecedented. They live-streamed the recovery on YouTube. They opened a public Google Doc for engineers to brainstorm solutions, and the world watched, and chimed in with suggestions. They followed this with an exhaustive, brutally honest public postmortem that spared no detail of what went wrong and who was responsible.

They showed the world their most catastrophic failure in real-time, with no filter and no spin. By doing so, they proved their transparency was not a marketing slogan; it was their operating system. The vulnerability was terrifying. The trust it built was ironclad.

The verdict

So, can radical transparency be scaled? The case studies suggest that pure, absolute transparency cannot. It's a fragile state of idealism that cannot survive contact with the real-world "plumbing" of scale, the compromises of growth, the chaos of global supply chains.

But the question itself is a red herring. Consumers, it turns out, don't actually demand perfection. They demand respect. And as Vikram Kharvi notes, "Loyalty built on respect beats loyalty bought with points. Transparency is simply respect in action."

The true "failure" isn't the stumble. It isn't finding sugar in a "clean" product or being challenged by a regulator for an overzealous claim. The "failure" is the cover-up. It's the defensive crouch, the wall of legalese, the pivot to a shiny new marketing campaign designed to distract rather than address.

Anand Murthy believes this is the new frontier for brands willing to operate honestly in an age of radical skepticism. "What's also clear is that every stumble isn't necessarily a failure and every failure isn't necessarily existential."

Brands that are built to "absorb heat," in Kharvi's words, will be the ones that survive the coming decade. The ones that "take these hits on the chin, show genuine empathy and responsiveness," says Murthy, "end up building greater trust than brands simply out to delight."

The glass box is here to stay. The brands that win won't be the ones who pretend their house is perfect. They'll be the ones who are honest about the cracks in the foundation, and who let us all watch them try to fix it, one imperfect day at a time.




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