It is difficult to imagine a restaurant that has not changed over the past 45 years. It has the same seating (which some find uncomfortable), the same crockery and cutlery (you get to use the latter only if you insist on going against its .
A young couple sharing a laugh - in the living room over a Polish joke book, on the beach, in the rain - with the tagline, Made for each other , hung from billboards at prominent street corners from the 1960s to the 1990s.
It was a campaign for one of the largest selling cigarette brands in India, Wills (Navy Cut) from the ITC stable, that resonated with a generation of smokers and non-smokers alike till the curtains came down on tobacco advertising in 2004.
As we prepare to welcome 2024, ITC has metamorphosed from a tobacco giant into a conglomerate straddling multiple large-sized businesses. In the mind space of Gen Z or millennials, the company represents a gamut of branded products - from frozen food (ITC Master Chef), noodles (YiPPee!), and cookies (Sunfeast) to snacks (Bingo!) and notebooks (Classmate), and so on and so forth.