Reliance Digital and the Fear Nobody Talks About: The Story of Technology Se Rishta Jodo

She is at a family gathering. The conversation moves around her, warm and fast, and she participates — in the way she always has, through warmth and food and the kind of presence that does not need a smartphone to make itself felt. But when the phone comes out — when her son pulls up something to show her, when her granddaughter tries to share a video, when friends compare devices across the table — she pulls back. Slightly. With the particular, practiced discretion of someone who has learned to make their hesitation invisible.

Later, the comments come. Not unkind — never unkind — but pointed. The son says something. The granddaughter laughs. The friends exchange the kind of look that is never meant to wound but always does. And the grandmother absorbs it, as she has absorbed many things: with the quiet dignity of a woman who knows her worth and has simply, in this one specific domain, been left behind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3EON0bBh9Q

She does not need a lecture. She does not need a manual. She needs a friend.

This was Film One of Reliance Digital's Technology Se Rishta Jodo campaign — launched in January 2023, conceptualised by L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, and built on a truth so universal that every person watching it knew, immediately, exactly who they had in mind.

The Mother Who Always Made Aloo Paratha

The second film lives in a different kitchen and a different anxiety, but the same fundamental story.

A mother is packing lunch boxes. The food is Aloo Paratha — reliable, nourishing, and, as far as her children are concerned, the most predictable item on the menu. The children compare notes: their classmate's mother has an oven. He gets pizza. They get Aloo Paratha. Again.

The mother overhears. The specificity of the wound is precise — it is not her cooking that is being questioned, it is her capability. Her unwillingness, or inability, to adapt. To try something new. To bring into her kitchen the technology that her children's world has already moved into.

She serves samosas to visiting friends. They predicted it, they say. Of course she would make samosas. The comment lands softly but lands nonetheless.

In the privacy of her own reckoning, she tries something. She makes a cake — in a cooker, the way she knows, the way she has always improvised around the tools she doesn't have or doesn't know how to use. The cake is, inevitably, not quite what it should be.

And then she walks into a Reliance Digital store.

The salesman does not demonstrate the oven to her with the enthusiasm of someone trying to close a sale. He shows her how it works with the patience of someone who knows that what she needs is not a demonstration but permission — permission to try, to fail safely, to learn without being judged. To touch the technology and find it less frightening than she imagined.

The film ends with a dinner party. The guests arrive expecting the familiar. What they find is something unexpected — a dish that the mother has made with her new oven, in her new confidence, in the kitchen that has grown to include her.

The Insight That Changed the Category

Reliance Digital is one of India's largest electronics retailers, with presence across more than 800 cities. It operates in a category that, by its own admission, had been dominated almost entirely by price and offers-led advertising — the screaming specification list, the unbeatable price, the limited-time deal. These are the conventions of electronics retail. They are efficient. They are also, the L&K Saatchi & Saatchi team recognised, profoundly incomplete.

Because the real barrier between millions of Indian consumers and the technology they needed was not price. It was fear.

Not fear in the dramatic sense — not a phobia, not a paralysis. The quiet, quotidian, entirely reasonable fear of someone who has watched technology evolve faster than their ability to keep up with it. The devices they were comfortable with have become obsolete. The new devices look unfamiliar. The salespeople at electronics stores — in the conventional retail format — speak a language of specifications and features that makes the gap feel wider, not narrower.

Brian Bade, Chief Executive of Reliance Digital, articulated this with precision: "It's based on a simple insight, that everybody needs technology, everyone is fascinated with it, but not everyone is necessarily comfortable with it. That's because technology is changing all the time and it's easy for a lot of people to feel left behind. Within this rooted cultural reality we believe that Reliance Digital is the catalyst that will enable a large mass of people to connect with technology by creating a welcoming retail tech experience."

This was the reframing that the campaign was built on. Reliance Digital was not just a store. It was a tech playground — a place where people were encouraged to touch, feel, experience, and enjoy new technology, guided by a team of expert tech advisors. Not to be sold at. To be accompanied. To be made friends with.

The Campaign That Was Also a Philosophy

Kartik Smetacek, Joint National Creative Director of L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, described the creative shift the campaign represented: "We re-imagined the role of Reliance Digital and wanted to shift the conversation away from the category conventions that are led by price ranges. We wanted to delve deeper, and find a more meaningful approach. The constant march of ever-evolving technology tends to leave a lot of people behind. The company isn't just an electronics store. It's a tech playground. It encourages people to touch, feel and become familiar with new technology in a place that's encouraging and empowering."

Paritosh Srivastava, CEO of L&K Saatchi & Saatchi, went further: "This is an idea that is special because of the truth it captures and the powerful role it appropriates to Reliance Digital as a retailer. It's not just a campaign or an idea, it is the guiding philosophy and role that Reliance Digital wants to play in people's lives. The brand intends living this idea through the whole consumer lifespan of the relationship, at every consumer touchpoint and experience."

The campaign films were produced by Chrome Pictures, with Abhishek Notani and Rajat Gulati as producers. The creative team at L&K Saatchi & Saatchi included Trishay Kotwal, Vikas Gaur, Avinash Jakhalekar, Anand Vyas, Prashant Patankar, Yogesh Tajane, Suresh Warekar, Darshan Jalgaonkar, Smita Misra, Kushal Garde, Akanksha Sinha, and Mehek Ahuja, with account management led by Noorbanu Qureshi.

The choice of protagonists — an elderly grandmother and a small-town mother — was deliberate and important. Smetacek described it as a representation of reality. These were not edge cases or sympathetic exceptions. They were the majority: the vast population of Indian consumers for whom the march of technology had been faster than their capacity to keep pace, and who had been quietly, consistently, left outside the category's advertising imagination.

Five Lessons We Should Learn From This Campaign

1. The Most Radical Positioning in a Category Is Often the Most Human One

Every electronics retailer in India was, at the time of this campaign's launch, fighting on the same battlefield: price, deals, specifications, brand associations. Reliance Digital had a pan-India presence in 800+ cities and the scale to compete effectively on every one of those fronts. And it chose, instead, to compete on empathy. To step off the battlefield entirely and ask a different question: what does our customer actually feel when they walk into our store?

The answer — that many of them feel left behind, uncertain, and afraid of looking foolish — was not flattering to the category. But naming it honestly was the most differentiated thing the brand could have done. The lesson: in categories defined by homogeneous competitive behaviour, the brand that is willing to speak to what customers actually feel — rather than what they can be persuaded to want — will always find unoccupied creative territory. Empathy is the rarest competitive advantage because it requires honesty about the customer's experience, not the brand's aspirations.

2. Fear Is a More Powerful Barrier to Purchase Than Price

The conventional wisdom of electronics retail held that the primary barrier to purchase was price. The Technology Se Rishta Jodo campaign was built on a different and more uncomfortable insight: that for a significant segment of Indian consumers, the primary barrier was not what the product cost but what engaging with it felt like. The grandmother who would not touch the phone on display was not holding back because of the price tag. She was holding back because the act of touching it — of interacting with something unfamiliar in a public space — felt exposing and risky.

The lesson: understanding what actually stops your customer from buying is more valuable than understanding what motivates the customers who are already buying. The non-buyer has a story worth hearing. And often, the story is not about price, features, or competitors. It is about a feeling — usually some form of fear or self-doubt — that no amount of product demonstration addresses unless you first acknowledge that the feeling exists.

3. The Store Environment Is as Much a Part of the Brand as the Advertising

The Technology Se Rishta Jodo campaign was not only a set of two television films. It was, as Paritosh Srivastava described, a guiding philosophy for everything the brand did — how our stores are designed, how the sales staff interact, the way demos are carried out and the manner in which after-sales service is delivered. The films could promise a tech playground, an ally, a friend. But that promise was only as good as what happened when the grandmother walked through the door.

This is one of the most demanding things a brand can do: commit to a campaign promise that the entire organisation must deliver. Not just the marketing team, not just the creative agency, but every salesperson in every store across 800 cities. The lesson: the most powerful brand campaigns are the ones where the communication and the experience are the same thing. A film that promises warmth and welcome must be backed by stores designed to deliver it — or the campaign becomes the most expensive way to highlight a gap between promise and reality.

4. Casting Against Type Is the Fastest Route to Authentic Storytelling

Indian electronics advertising in 2023 was not full of elderly grandmothers and small-town mothers. It was full of aspirational young professionals, tech-savvy millennials, and the confident early adopters who had already made peace with the category's rapid evolution. These characters were credible. They were also already converted. The grandmother and the mother in the Reliance Digital films were not aspirational projections of who the brand wished its customers were. They were honest representations of who many of its customers actually were.

The lesson: authentic storytelling in advertising requires the courage to cast the customer who is most difficult to reach, not the one who is easiest to please. The characters who carry the most emotional resonance are the ones whose hesitation, confusion, or fear the audience recognises — not the ones whose confidence they admire from a distance.

5. A Brand That Solves a Feeling Earns More Than a Sale

At the end of the grandmother film, she lets go of her fear. At the end of the mother's film, she surprises her family with something they did not expect. Neither film ends with a product purchase in the conventional retail sense. Both films end with something more valuable to the brand: a transformation. A person who was held back by fear is now moving forward. And the place that made that transformation possible — the place that encouraged her to touch, to try, to fail safely, to learn — was a Reliance Digital store.

The lesson: when a brand can attach its identity to a transformation — not a transaction — it earns a relationship with its customer that no competitor can easily displace. A store that helped you feel less afraid of technology is not interchangeable with a store that offered you a better price. It is something you remember. Something you return to. Something you tell other people about when they are standing in front of a display phone, hesitating, wondering if it is all right to touch.

The Store That Said: Go On. Touch It.

There is a moment in both films where a Reliance Digital salesperson says, in effect, the same thing: go ahead. It is all right. This is a place for exactly this. The phone is meant to be touched. The oven is meant to be tried. You are not going to break it. You are not going to embarrass yourself. You are in a tech playground, not a showroom. This is what we are here for.

It is a small moment. In the larger grammar of advertising, it is not the stuff of which award reels are made. But it is the moment that carries the entire campaign's weight — because it is the moment that every person who has ever hesitated before a new device has been waiting for someone to say.

Technology Se Rishta Jodo. Build a relationship with technology.

Not a transaction. Not a purchase. A relationship. The kind that begins with a small act of courage — touching a phone that is not yet yours — in a store that has been designed, from its layout to its sales culture to its advertising, to make that act feel possible.