Licious's #BaatBadalDe: The Campaign That Used Chicken to Change Conversations
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
In 2019, Licious — the Bengaluru-based tech-first fresh meat and seafood brand co-founded by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta — arrived at exactly that question. The brand had already built something remarkable. Established in 2015, it had spent four years quietly revolutionising the way India bought meat: antibiotic-free, preserved without artificial additives, delivered cold-chain intact, packaged with a hygiene standard the unorganised local market had never even attempted. It had served over three million orders. It had earned the trust of meat lovers across multiple cities. It was, by every operational metric, a success story.
But a supply chain is not a brand. And Licious knew it.
The Brief That Changed Everything
The task that Licious set itself in 2019 was not a small one. The brand wanted to move beyond being known purely for freshness and quality — important as those things were — and build what the founders described as "a higher-order emotional connect" with its audience. They wanted people to feel something about Licious, not just depend on it.
To achieve this, the company worked with two powerhouses. Santosh Desai, Managing Director and CEO of Future Brands, was brought in to provide a new strategic framework. And Piyush Pandey — global Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy and Executive Chairman India — and his agency were entrusted with shaping the creative narrative that would carry that strategy into the world.
The brief, as it crystallised through their collaboration, was built on a consumer insight that Licious had gathered through extensive research. What the research revealed was this: for the true meat lover, eating meat is not a transaction. It is an experience. An ardent meat lover is excited about juicing out the most pleasure possible from the act of eating meat — pleasure in the meat itself and in the experiences surrounding it. It is joy. It is gathering. It is the satisfaction of a great dish shared with someone you love.
And then the creative team went deeper. If meat creates such powerful experiences, what if it could also change the emotional temperature of a room? What if great chicken could do what pride, stubbornness, and years of cultural prejudice could not — soften a hardened heart?
That idea became #BaatBadalDe. Meat that changes the conversation.
The Campaign: Two Films, Two Truths
The #BaatBadalDe campaign launched with a renewed brand identity for Licious and a set of films that were, in the words of Piyush Pandey, "focused on the products and not on recipes, as every home has its favourite recipes." The films took a deliberately lighthearted approach, showing how great quality meat and seafood wins hearts every time. The stories were brought to life through banter between friends and family members, and they showcased how extraordinary, drool-worthy dishes practically make themselves when the ingredient is right.
The first film was built around one of the most culturally loaded relationships in Indian domestic life — the Punjabi mother-in-law and her Bengali son-in-law. The scepticism between these two worlds, played out in millions of Indian households where different regional identities, food habits, and temperaments collide, needed no explanation to the audience. Every viewer knew exactly what that tension felt like. In the film, a sceptical Punjabi mother-in-law — doubtful, guarded, perhaps a little dismissive — ends up fawning over her Bengali son-in-law's signature fish curry. The food does what diplomacy, good intentions, and months of trying to impress had failed to do. It changes the conversation. It breaks the wall. It melts the resistance — just as surely as it melts on the tongue.
The second film worked with an equally vivid archetype: the irate landlord. In India, the landlord-tenant relationship is its own ecosystem of suspicion, negotiation, and power dynamics. The film featured a gunda-like rent collector — the kind of character whose arrival at the door makes tenants immediately tense — who changes his entire tune after accepting a bite of the tenant's chicken dinner. The menace dissolves. The frown softens. The conversation shifts. The chicken did it.
Both films carried the same philosophical undertow. Food — specifically, great quality food made with fresh, honest ingredients — is not merely nourishment. It is a disarmer. It is a social lubricant of the most ancient and universal kind. When the food is extraordinary, the person eating it cannot help but respond with their most human self.
The Movement: Licious as an Idea
What made #BaatBadalDe more than a campaign was the ambition behind the language chosen to describe it. The brand and its founders were explicit: "Licious is an idea, a movement — a way of life. Licious ek aisi soch hai jo Baat Badal De."
That framing was deliberate and significant. A brand that positions itself as a movement is making a claim that goes beyond product benefits. It is saying: we are not just here to sell you chicken. We are here to participate in how India thinks about meat, how India buys it, how India cooks it, and — most importantly — how India connects over it.
Piyush Pandey, reflecting on the campaign, put it plainly: "Working with the young and passionate Licious team is a great experience. The campaign 'Baat Badal De' is focused on the products and not on recipes as every home has its favourite recipes. It's a big brand in the making."
The campaign was distributed digitally, in print, across outdoor advertising, on radio, and in cinema — a full-spectrum launch that signalled Licious was no longer thinking of itself as a startup. It was thinking of itself as a national brand with something to say.
The #BaatBadalDe energy carried forward into the pandemic year of 2020, when Licious extended the thought with a follow-up campaign titled "Ghar Baithe Baat Badal Do," conceived by Ogilvy, capturing families discovering the joy of cooking at home together during lockdown. The brand was consistent in its message: wherever people gather around food, Licious belongs in that story.
5 Lessons Every Brand Should Learn from Licious's #BaatBadalDe
1. Know When to Stop Talking About Your Product and Start Talking About People
Licious had spent four years perfecting its supply chain, its cold-chain delivery, its antibiotic-free promise. All of that was real and important. But #BaatBadalDe made a calculated and courageous decision to let the product recede into the background and let human relationships take centre stage. The chicken was the vehicle, not the destination. The lesson: at a certain point in a brand's maturity, the most powerful thing you can do is stop explaining what you sell and start showing what your product makes possible in people's lives.
2. Cultural Tension Is Your Creative Raw Material
The mother-in-law and son-in-law story worked instantly because it was drawn from a genuinely recognised cultural reality — the friction between regional identities in Indian households. The landlord and tenant story worked for the same reason. Neither scenario needed explanation. The audience carried all the context. The lesson: the richest creative territory is always the tensions that already exist in your audience's world. Don't manufacture drama. Find the drama that is already living in the room and give it a stage.
3. Brand Building and Storytelling Are Inseparable
The decision to partner with Santosh Desai for strategic framework and Piyush Pandey at Ogilvy for creative execution was not a coincidence. It was the recognition that becoming a national brand requires both the architecture of brand strategy and the craft of genuine storytelling, working together. Neither alone would have produced #BaatBadalDe. The lesson: great brand strategy without great creative is a blueprint that no one ever sees. Great creative without great strategy is a beautiful film that sells nothing. The two must work in concert, and choosing the right partners for both is a decision that compounds over time.
4. A Movement Needs Consistent Energy to Stay a Movement
Licious did not run #BaatBadalDe as a single campaign and move on. The idea was carried forward into "Ghar Baithe Baat Badal Do" during the pandemic, keeping the core thought alive even as the context changed dramatically. The willingness to evolve the expression while protecting the idea showed brand discipline. The lesson: a campaign becomes a movement only through consistency and commitment. Brands that change their core idea every year never build the kind of cultural recognition that makes them feel like a part of people's lives.
5. The Category You Operate In Is Never the Limit of the Story You Can Tell
Licious operated in the fresh meat and seafood category — a category that, until Licious arrived, had no organised brand storytelling at all. The default conversation in that space was entirely transactional: freshness, price, availability. #BaatBadalDe refused to be limited by category convention. It told stories about family, culture, warmth, and human connection. The meat was simply the catalyst. The lesson: the category you are in sets the context, not the ceiling. The best brands always tell stories that are larger than their category — and in doing so, they redefine what the category is capable of meaning.
The Takeaway
"Baat Badal De." Change the conversation.
It is a simple phrase. But behind it sat a very sophisticated understanding of what food actually does in Indian life — and what a brand that truly believed in its product could claim to be part of. Licious did not say it made the best chicken. It said its chicken changed the room. Softened the sceptic. Dissolved the tension. Turned a suspicious mother-in-law into someone who cannot stop smiling. Turned a menacing landlord into someone who pulls up a chair.
That is a bigger claim than freshness. And #BaatBadalDe proved that Licious had earned the right to make it.
Comments