How Nike, ITC’s e-Choupal and Mahindra’s Electric Origin SUVs Moved From Selling to Inhabiting

Three very different mornings, one common thread. A runner in Bengaluru is coached through a guided run by the Nike Run Club app. A farmer in Madhya Pradesh checks local soya prices on a screen in a neighbour’s home, a ritual first seeded by ITC twenty-five years ago. On Valentine’s Day, a man in Pune books an electric SUV from Mahindra, a launch choreographed as an invitation, not a transaction.

None of these people are being sold to. They are, according to a new framework articulated by practitioners Ranjan Malik and Reva Jhingan Malik of Primalise, living inside worlds that those brands deliberately built. The couple call the discipline Brand Worldbuilding. Its core premise is simple: the most enduring brands are not those we buy most often, but those whose internal language, rituals and lore we inhabit so completely that the brand becomes part of our identity.

The distinction they draw is sharp. A campaign, however brilliant, persuades someone to buy. A world invites them to belong. A campaign ends when the budget stops. A world keeps running, quietly, whether anyone is advertising that day or not. The Maliks, who helped shape the strategy behind Mahindra’s electric SUVs, contend that in an era where almost every functional advantage can be copied, a lived-in world is the moat that cannot be manufactured at speed.

The Mechanics of a World That Holds Together – And What Each Example Teaches

Nike: Giving the Hero’s Part Away

Nike’s founding belief – if you have a body, you are an athlete – already recast the ordinary person as the protagonist. The famous athlete is merely a measuring stick. When the Run Club app narrates a guided session, Nike is not selling shoes; it is helping the runner close the gap between who she is and who she means to become. The antagonist is elegantly chosen: not Adidas, but the snooze button, the plausible excuse. This framing ensures the story never runs out, because every sunrise renews that internal struggle.

The lesson for brand builders is that a transactional enemy – a rival firm – runs out of narrative the day you overtake it. An internal, human opponent is replenished daily, and the brand becomes an ally in that private contest.

ITC’s e-Choupal: A World That Outlasts Technology

Twenty-five years ago, ITC placed internet kiosks in the homes of farmers and called the network e-Choupal, after the traditional village square. The innovation was not just technological; it was social. Smallholders, who previously carted their harvest blindly to distant markets, suddenly saw ITC’s offer and competing mandi prices before setting out. Crucially, the screen sat in the home of a local ‘Sanchalak’ – a fellow farmer, not an ITC salesman.

Every character was given a dignified role. Even the old commission agent became the ‘Samyojak’, coordinating logistics inside a system that had ended his information monopoly. Daily price checks became ritual; the first computer ever seen in the village became lore. Today four million farmers inhabit that world. The technology has been rebuilt four times – kiosk to mobile to app to AI – but the world has not been rebuilt once. The authors’ maxim captures it: a world is the thing that remains when the technology changes.

Mahindra’s Electric Origin SUVs: A Decade of Hesitancy Dissolved

For years India’s electric car was sold on logic: good for the planet, good for the wallet. Neither argument ignited the market. Mahindra instead named its November 2024 launch Unlimit India, positioning the antagonist not as the petrol car but as the quiet taming of ambition itself. The vehicles – the BE 6 and XEV 9e – were presented as ‘Electric Origin SUVs’, born electric, with an origin story rather than a spec sheet.

The world was fully furnished. Cabin moods (Calm, Cozy, Club) came scored by A. R. Rahman. Showrooms were restaged as admissions, not negotiations, with inverted screens and projected electric skeletons. Drive modes read like a day: Range, Everyday, Race. A lifetime battery warranty retired the category’s oldest fear. India answered: 30,179 bookings on day one, worth ₹8,472 crore, in a country that had sold roughly 100,000 electric cars in the entire preceding year. Three out of four chose the top variant – desire visible on a sales report. And then a crossover with Warner Bros for a Batman edition sold all 999 units in 135 seconds, the surest sign of a living world that can trade with other worlds.

Applying Worldbuilding: The Four States a Brand Must Walk Through

The Maliks’ method distils into four states a brand must consciously move through. For leaders and marketing teams the sequence offers a practical, testable path:

  • ‘As Found’ – audit who actually authored the world you already have. Often it is customers, culture or critics who built a narrative around your brand while you were absent. Naming that authorship is the first, humbling step.
  • ‘As Willed’ – define a purpose rooted in a genuine cultural tension, not a workshop slogan. Nike’s tension is the gap between intention and action. ITC’s was the knowledge asymmetry between farmer and market. Find the dignified antagonist.
  • ‘As Inhabited’ – cast every person the enterprise touches as a character with their own story, not a cog. The Sanchalak, the Samyojak, the runner – each has agency. The brand becomes a setting, not the hero.
  • ‘As Lived’ – build rituals, language and artefacts that make the world real every day. The price check, the guided run, the scored cabin mood. These are the elements that keep the world alive when no one is buying.

None of this requires a blank-canvas start-up. The method begins with the world your brand already inhabits, whether authored by you or not. The only risk is ceding the pen entirely – as WhatsApp discovered when users coined WhatsApp University, a world built around the product without the company’s participation.