Featuring: Ashish Rai, CEO — Decorative Paints, JSW Paints
Host: Nikhil Chaudhary, VP Marketing at BeatRoute
Paint is not just a product; it is an experience. What makes it unusual is that much of what decides whether a consumer ends up happy happens before a single rupee is spent — and continues long after the can is empty.
That one shift is quietly rewriting the paints industry: how brands sell, who they sell through, and where technology genuinely earns its place.
Few are better placed to read it than Ashish Rai, CEO of the Decorative Paints business at JSW Paints, who entered paints two years ago after more than two decades in leadership roles at FMCG majors such as Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive.
In this episode of The BeatRoute Podcast, he breaks down the paint industry, explains how the consumer journey is changing, sets out what to expect from channel partners, weighs the role technology needs to play, and maps the road ahead.
Paint Sells As Experience, Not Just Product
In FMCG, a product sits on a shelf and the consumer picks it up. Paint works nothing like that. It has to be mixed, tinted, and applied to a wall, and once it is on that wall the brand itself becomes invisible. All that remains in the consumer’s mind is the outcome.
Because of this, the influencer sits at the centre of the sale. Architects, interior designers, contractors, and retailers each add value somewhere between the can and the wall, shaping not only which brand gets chosen but whether the final result actually satisfies.
“Paint is not just a product, it’s actually an experience.”
Why The Paints Market Is Transforming Right Now
None of this is happening by accident; several macro forces are converging at once. As disposable incomes rise, spending naturally shifts toward homes and building materials. The pandemic deepened the trend, leaving consumers far more invested in the spaces they live in.
On top of that, digital media has steadily raised aspirations for how a home should look — and as those aspirations climb, the repainting cycle has compressed from a once-in-five-years event into a far more frequent act of self-expression.
“With around 2,500 USD per capita income in India, which is moving to 4,000 or 5,000 in the next few years, some of the categories that really take off are categories like building materials and homes — because these are the categories where people spend their money.”
Inspiration Now Begins On The Consumer’s Phone
As a result, the decision no longer begins at the retail counter; it begins on a screen. Consumers now walk into the store already knowing what they want, asking the retailer to execute a vision rather than help them discover one.
This effectively inverts the old funnel. Where the store was once the first point of discovery, it has become the place where pre-formed inspiration finally meets execution.
“The path to purchase in paints is changing because the inspiration for what a consumer wants is now available on her digital devices, through an Instagram, a YouTube or a Pinterest. They know exactly what they want.”
AI Turns Endless Shades Into Confident Choices
Yet inspiration alone creates a new problem. The biggest dissonance in the category is the gap between a colour on Instagram and that same colour on a living-room wall at night. This is precisely where AI visualization tools earn their keep, showing the consumer how a shade will look in morning light, under a tube light, or in the dark, all before she spends anything.
Closely related is the problem of choice overload. A palette of 2,500 or 5,000 shades does little to help a time-poor consumer; if anything, it paralyses her. The real job of technology, then, is to narrow the options rather than expand them.
“Giving her as close to reality information of how it will look like, so that she can make an informed decision.”
The Painter Becomes A High-Stakes Brand Partner
Once the colour is chosen, execution becomes everything — and execution is where labour, not material, dominates the cost. That economics makes the painter and contractor decisive, because they are the ones who translate the consumer’s vision into the finished wall. When the finish disappoints, the brand quietly loses both referrals and repeat business.
Consequently, the relationship has had to change. A brand can no longer simply use a painter for reach; it now holds a direct stake in that painter’s success, equipping them to turn inspiration into reality on site.
“40% of the cost of painting is the material in the cities, and 60% would be the labour, or the cost of the contractor or the painters who paint it.”
Dealers Now Influence Rather Than Dictate Sales
If the consumer arrives already decided, the dealer’s old gatekeeping role inevitably shrinks — but a new and arguably richer one opens in its place. The retailer still tints the final shade, flags the watch-outs on a given product, and lends the kind of expertise no consumer can pick up online.
Beyond that, there is real room to upsell across the many surfaces of a home — statement walls, textures, wallpapers — provided it is done through recommendation rather than pressure.
“There is a significant opportunity to upsell, but you can’t hard sell, because the consumer will then suddenly go into a shell if you try and hard sell.”
Why Dealers Back A Challenger Beyond Margin
For a challenger brand, none of this comes easily. It rarely walks into a store as the first name on the shelf; far more often, it enters with low counter share and has to earn its way up.
And earning that share takes far more than margin or favourable payment terms. It takes educating the retailer, understanding what their consumers are asking for, and standing behind a product that has to last on a wall for years. In the end, it is service and reliability, not margins, that steadily grow counter share.
“We are the challenger brand and we start with a low counter share, and our growth hypothesis is to gain counter share.”
Technology Frees Dealers To Sell, Not Manage
Much of a paint retailer’s day, however, has little to do with the consumer at all. In a business this intense — where big-city dealers reorder three or four times a day across a thousand-plus SKUs, and shelf space is always at a premium — the hardest questions are operational: what to keep, what to order, and how to run inventory just in time. Layered on top is the constant pull of the books: the account balance, overdue billing, when the next cheque will land, and how to rotate working capital without locking it up in the wrong stock.
This is exactly the load technology can lift. When an app, or even WhatsApp, surfaces likely demand, the higher-margin lines worth stocking, and a live statement of account, the retailer no longer has to carry all of it in their head. Once the backend more or less runs itself, their attention returns to where it actually earns money: the consumer standing in front of them.
“You would want the retailers to focus on consumer engagement rather than managing their backend operations.”
Frequency, Not Headcount, Defines Influencer Engagement
A similar logic applies to influencers. Most brands count them in the lakhs yet hear from only a fraction, which is why the number on the rolls means so little. What actually matters is how often each one transacts.
The answer lies in segmentation — working out where to drive higher frequency and where to drive higher value — then connecting one-on-one in the local language, with discounts and loyalty points credited instantly to the partner’s bank account.
“It doesn’t matter how many influencers deal with me in a year; what matters is how frequently they deal with me and use my products.”
AI In Paints Is Here And Now
Underpinning all of these shifts is data — every tint, every scan, every order. And the practical use cases built on that data are already in motion: briefing a sales rep on what an outlet is likely to need before the visit, predicting replenishment from tinting and scan signals, and instantly generating local-language product and scheme communication for thousands of retailers.
Crucially, adoption follows utility and habit. A retailer ordering four times a day will know within days whether a recommendation holds up, so trust forms quickly — provided the tool lives inside an existing habit like WhatsApp rather than demanding a new one. The goal is never to chase buzzwords; it is to solve a real business problem faster, cheaper, or at higher growth than before.
“AI is here and now.”
The Road Ahead
Looking ahead, three forces will define the next five years in paints, and each points to the same operating need.
- The consumer moves to the centre of every decision, wanting more information and more control along the way. That raises the bar on orchestration: architects, painters, dealers, and reps all have to move around a single consumer journey rather than work in silos.
- That same consumer grows steadily more money-rich and time-poor, needing help to choose well in fifteen minutes rather than more options to wade through. Meeting that moment depends on intelligence at the point of sale.
- Technology gradually absorbs the repetitive work, freeing the brand and its channel to compete on the one thing that endures: a better, cleaner, more seamless consumer experience.
Taken together, they point to the same need: as the consumer moves to the centre, brands need a connected, goal-driven way to execute around that consumer across every stakeholder in the route to market — from reps and dealers to painters and influencers.
About BeatRoute
BeatRoute is the only SFA + DMS platform built to execute building materials sales goals across all three pillars: retail execution, demand generation, and project conversion. It is trusted by leading building materials brands including Pidilite, Magicrete, Kerakoll, Henkel, and Dangote, and serves 200+ enterprise brands across 20+ countries and 10 industry verticals.