How Center Fresh's "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam" Turned India's Biggest Mental Habit Into Its Most Relatable Campaign

Gunjan Khetan, Director of Marketing at Perfetti Van Melle India, describes the origin of the "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam" campaign in the most honest way a marketer can: it didn't come from a brief. It didn't come from a brainstorm. It came from watching people.

Watching someone rewrite the same WhatsApp message five times before sending it. Watching a colleague stare at a food delivery app for twenty minutes as if the choice between biryani and pasta carried the weight of a life decision. Watching, in the quiet corners of everyday Indian life, the endless mental loops that people spin themselves into — over nothing. Over everything. Over a boss who replied with a two-letter "Ok" at 10 PM and then went silent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctEb5AUKfh8

That observation eventually became a campaign. And that campaign — Center Fresh's "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam," released in August 2025 — became one of the most widely recognised and culturally resonant campaigns of the year. Reaching over 362 million people through earned media alone, and accumulating over 2.4 billion cumulative views across platforms, it did something rare in advertising: it made an entire country look at a film and say, "That's me."

This is the story of how it happened. Every detail of it is real, documented, and worth learning from.

The Insight That Grew Into a Report

The campaign's foundation was not built on instinct alone. Center Fresh, working with international research firm YouGov, commissioned the India Overthinking Report — a dedicated study into how deeply and how frequently Indians overthink in their daily lives.

The findings, when they arrived, were not just useful for advertising. They were startling for life. The report revealed that 81% of Indians spend over three hours a day caught up in overthinking. It found that 63% of people said it is harder to decide what to order for food than whom to vote for — a statistic that captured, with quiet absurdity, just how easily the Indian mind gets trapped in tiny decision loops. It found that 35% of people overthink their Instagram Stories, debating filters, timing, and background music more carefully than the content itself.

And it confirmed, with data, what the marketing team had already observed with their eyes: overthinking was not a quirk that belonged to a few anxious individuals. It was a universal, cross-generational, thoroughly Indian experience. It was happening everywhere — in homes, offices, WhatsApp chats, Instagram accounts, and restaurant menus — and nobody was talking about it as a cultural phenomenon.

Center Fresh decided to be the first to name it.

The tagline they built around this insight was "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam" — put a rein on your mind. And the brand they positioned as the solution was already in people's pockets: a small, minty gum whose burst of freshness, they argued, could break the cycle of overthinking and bring the mind back to the present moment.

Two TVCs, One Irony, and a Director's Touch

The creative execution, conceptualised by Ogilvy India, took the form of two TVCs — each depicting a different flavour of the overthinking habit, each blending humour with warmth, each designed to trigger instant recognition in anyone who has ever spun out of control over something small.

The "Naughty Boy" film — the fifty-second Hindi TVC at the heart of this discussion — centres on a moment that millions of Indians have experienced: a deleted message.

The protagonist notices that a message has been deleted by the sender. One small, unremarkable event. But for an overthinker, it is not small and not unremarkable. It is a starting gun. The mind races. Why was it deleted? What did it say? Was it bad news? Was it about me? The protagonist's internal spiral escalates with perfect comic timing — and the situation takes a hilarious turn when the boss calls back to clarify about the deleted message in a way that only adds to the chaos.

Both TVCs were directed by Nitesh Tiwari — the filmmaker known for acclaimed work in Hindi cinema — and the choice of director brought a naturalistic sensitivity to what could have easily become broad, slapstick territory.

What is remarkable about the on-set experience, as Gunjan Khetan described it, is that the actors barely needed direction. The scenarios felt so close to real life that the reactions came naturally. During the deleted-message sequence, a member of the crew spontaneously remarked: "Arey ye toh mere saath bahut bar hua hai" — this literally happens to me all the time — and the entire unit burst into laughter. That moment of unscripted recognition, Khetan noted, was the confirmation that they had captured something honest.

The Ogilvy team also went through their own version of the campaign's insight during production. When both scripts kept rising to the top of the creative shortlist, the team faced a classic marketer's dilemma: which one do they choose? As Khetan reflected: "The irony wasn't lost on us. The campaign about overthinking was making us overthink."

The campaign's final shape was also sharpened by a moment in the pre-production meeting, when the director offered a subtle behavioural reinterpretation of the Naughty Boy film. It was not a dramatic overhaul. It was a small nuance — the boss calling back to clarify the deleted message in a particularly hilarious way — that tightened the entire narrative and gave the film its mischievous, distinctive tone.

Launching Insight First, Advertising Second

The campaign's release strategy was as deliberate as its creative. Rather than leading with the TVC, Center Fresh launched the India Overthinking Report first.

Before any film went live, the data did. The report's findings sparked conversations across publications and social media. A high-impact feature on The Lallantop with Saurabh Dwivedi and Zakir Khan gave the insight its biggest early push — sharp, relatable, and rooted in the kind of everyday behavioural truth that resonates with mass Indian audiences.

By the time the TVC dropped, the conversation was already happening. The audience had seen the insight, recognised themselves in it, and shared it. The film, when it arrived, did not need to explain overthinking. It simply needed to show it. And because the ground had already been prepared, the TVC landed with unusual force — not as an advertisement arriving into silence, but as a punchline to a conversation that India was already having with itself.

The campaign ran across TV, digital platforms, and social media, with Center Fresh available across more than 3 million outlets in India.

As Anurag Agnihotri, Chief Creative Officer – West at Ogilvy India, described the creative intention: "We wanted to capture those universal moments of overthinking that people silently battle every day. Reading too much into a deleted message, wondering if your own cash looks like a bribe — these moments perfectly reflect how the smallest trigger can send your brain into complete overdrive."

5 Marketing Lessons from Center Fresh's "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam"

Lesson 1: Data-Backed Insight Is Not a Research Tool — It Is a Campaign Strategy

Most brands commission research to validate a creative idea they already have. Center Fresh did the opposite: they commissioned the India Overthinking Report with YouGov to genuinely understand the depth of the insight before deciding how to express it. The resulting data — 81% of Indians overthinking for over three hours daily, 63% finding food orders harder to decide than election votes — gave the campaign something most advertising doesn't have: unassailable cultural authority. For marketers and BBA/MBA students: when you build a campaign on research that quantifies a lived truth, the insight becomes the campaign's most powerful communication asset, before any film is ever made.

Lesson 2: Lead with the Insight, Not the Advertisement

The decision to release the India Overthinking Report before the TVC was one of the most strategically astute choices this campaign made. By the time the films went live, the conversation was already in motion. The audience arrived at the advertising with existing context, existing recognition, and existing emotional investment in the idea. The TVC didn't have to do the full job of awareness and persuasion — it only had to confirm what people already felt was true. For students studying integrated marketing: sequencing matters as much as content. An insight released before advertising creates a prepared audience; a prepared audience creates far more powerful advertising impact.

Lesson 3: Recognisable Over Exaggerated — The Most Powerful Comedy Is the Kind You've Lived

The scenes in the Naughty Boy TVC did not need exaggeration. A crew member's spontaneous exclamation on set — "Arey ye toh mere saath bahut bar hua hai" — was the proof. The best comic advertising does not invent situations; it recreates situations so accurately that the audience feels they are watching their own life play out on screen. Nitesh Tiwari's direction leaned into this — restraining the performances to the point where the humour came from recognition, not performance. For marketers: humour built from precision observation of real behaviour outlasts humour built from exaggeration. When audiences laugh because they recognise, they remember the brand. When they laugh because something is funny, they remember the joke.

Lesson 4: The Brief Should Be Reflected in the Process

The campaign was about overthinking. And the team — by their own admission — overthought every decision along the way. They overthought the script choice. They overthought the launch strategy. They found themselves living inside the insight even as they were trying to communicate it. This is not a failure of discipline; it is a sign that the insight was genuinely deep. Gunjan Khetan noted that this irony became a small but revealing confirmation that the team had found something real. For BBA/MBA students: when your own team responds to a campaign brief with the same behaviour the campaign is about, you have found a universal insight. The best insights are not the ones that your audience has and your team doesn't — they are the ones that your entire team shares with your audience.

Lesson 5: A Cultural Platform, Not Just a Product Claim, Creates Enduring Brand Space

Center Fresh's "Dimaag Pe Rakhe Lagaam" did not position the product as a breath freshener or a flavour experience. It positioned it as a mental reset — a small, accessible, everyday pause that brings an overthinking mind back to the present moment. This is a cultural positioning, not a product claim. It gives the brand a role in the consumer's mental and emotional life, not just in their mouth. For marketers thinking about long-term brand strategy: when a brand can occupy a genuine, useful role in a consumer's daily emotional experience — not just their daily functional routine — it earns a kind of loyalty that competing on product features can never produce.

Closing Thoughts

There is something quietly perfect about a mint gum brand finding its most resonant campaign in the one universal human experience that no amount of mints has ever actually solved: the overthinking mind.

Center Fresh did not promise to make the spiral stop forever. It promised something more honest and more achievable: a minty pause. A small moment of freshness. A breath between the spiral and the next thought, where clarity might briefly show up.

In that modest, human, entirely relatable proposition — backed by data, executed with precision, launched with strategic intelligence, and delivered with the kind of humour that makes a film crew burst into spontaneous laughter on a Tuesday afternoon — lies one of the most complete campaigns India's confectionery advertising has produced in years.

Dimaag pe rakhe lagaam. And if you can't manage that — at least pop a Center Fresh.

Written for marketers and management students (BBA/MBA) interested in consumer insight, data-driven campaign strategy, humour-led advertising, and building cultural brand platforms in the Indian market.