Shikhar Pan Masala has taken a page straight out of Rajshri Pan Masala’s advertising strategy: use a socially charged, seemingly unrelated storyline to earn attention a pan masala brand wouldn’t normally command.
The three-minute film opens like a missing persons case. A brother storms into a police station, pressuring an officer to track down his sister. The officer assures him she’ll be found soon, hinting she may be caught up in the Gen Z-led protests against the government. But the brother’s urgency has nothing to do with her safety – it’s Raksha Bandhan, and he simply wants his rakhi tied on time.
The twist lands when he asks the inspector to stand in for his missing sister and pulls out the ritual essentials. It turns out the inspector is his sister. The “missing person” report was a prank all along, meant to guilt-trip her for skipping the festival. The siblings end up celebrating Raksha Bandhan right there at the police station.
The Shikhar Pan Masala branding appears only in the final seconds, a deliberate late reveal designed to jolt viewers once they realise how disconnected the brand and category are from the sentimental storyline they’d just watched.
This approach isn’t new territory for Indian advertising. Rajshri Pan Masala has built years of equity around this exact mismatch strategy, running films featuring Anu Kapoor on causes like water conservation, blood donation, road safety, and girl child adoption, using the disconnect between category and content to spark conversation.
The bigger question the ad raises: why did Shikhar choose to replicate Rajshri’s formula instead of carving out an original path of its own?
