List of “Tasteless” Companies in India - When Commercial Success and Good Taste Are Not the Same Thing
India does not suffer from a shortage of ambitious companies.
It sometimes suffers from a shortage of taste.
That statement requires an immediate distinction. Calling a company tasteless is not the same as calling it corrupt, incompetent, exploitative, or unsuccessful. Some aesthetically mediocre companies are extraordinarily well run. Some beautifully designed companies are terrible businesses.
Taste is a different dimension.
It concerns what a company chooses to put into the world: its buildings, products, advertisements, interfaces, packaging, language, retail environments, architecture, typography and cultural footprint.
A useful question is therefore:
If this company disappeared tomorrow, would India’s visual and cultural environment become uglier—or cleaner?
That gives us the beginning of a Corporate Taste Test.
What Makes a Company Tasteless?
A tasteless company tends to exhibit several recurring characteristics.
Visual pollution. Advertising occupies every available surface. Bigger logos substitute for better design.
Imitation over authorship. Products follow whatever is fashionable globally without developing an identifiable design language of their own.
Luxury without restraint. Gold, marble, glass, LEDs and gigantic structures are mistaken for sophistication.
Attention extraction. Interfaces, advertisements and notifications constantly demand attention rather than respecting it.
Architectural indifference. Buildings are designed primarily as containers for commerce instead of contributions to the city.
Cultural shallowness. Indian imagery is deployed decoratively without meaningful engagement with India’s enormous artistic and intellectual traditions.
Incoherence. Products, advertisements, stores and digital interfaces appear to have been designed by completely unrelated organizations.
Taste, in other words, is not simply minimalism.
Jaipur is not minimalist. Neither are Indian miniature paintings, Mughal gardens, Durga Puja pandals or the temples of South India.
They can nevertheless possess extraordinary aesthetic coherence.
Taste is fundamentally about intentionality, proportion, craftsmanship and context.
A Provocative Watchlist
The following companies are better understood as candidates for criticism, not recipients of some objective verdict. Enormous corporations contain hundreds of products, designers and subsidiaries, so judging an entire organization by a single aesthetic label inevitably simplifies reality.
Reliance Industries / Jio
Reliance may be India’s clearest example of the tension between extraordinary industrial ambition and inconsistent cultural taste.
Jio helped transform India’s digital infrastructure. Reliance operates businesses across telecommunications, retail, energy, media and consumer markets.
Yet scale can become an aesthetic philosophy of its own.
Gigantic retail environments, omnipresent branding, sprawling digital ecosystems and aggressive commercial visibility can produce a feeling that more is automatically better.
The interesting challenge for Reliance is therefore not whether it can build something enormous.
It clearly can.
The question is whether it can make enormous systems feel graceful.
Adani Group
Adani’s businesses are heavily concentrated in infrastructure: airports, ports, logistics, energy and related industries.
Infrastructure companies rarely receive the aesthetic scrutiny applied to fashion houses or consumer-electronics companies. They should.
Airports, roads, stations, ports and urban infrastructure become part of a civilization’s physical vocabulary.
The relevant test for Adani is consequently architectural:
Does infrastructure merely function, or does it leave behind places worth inheriting?
Patanjali
Patanjali represents an interesting contradiction.
Its commercial identity draws from yoga, Ayurveda, Indian traditions and ideas of natural living—domains containing exceptionally rich visual possibilities.
Yet much mass-market Indian FMCG packaging, including portions of Patanjali’s visual universe, can feel crowded and informationally dense.
Traditional Indian identity does not require visual clutter.
An Indian company could derive inspiration from handmade paper, botanical illustration, Ayurveda manuscripts, regional typography, terracotta, textiles and classical systems of proportion while still creating thoroughly contemporary packaging.
BYJU’S
The deeper aesthetic problem surrounding much educational technology is not merely graphic design.
It is the transformation of learning into a conversion funnel.
When education starts resembling aggressive consumer marketing, something valuable can be lost even if the interface itself looks polished.
A tasteful educational institution should make knowledge feel expansive, curious and intellectually serious—not merely optimized.
OYO
OYO attempted something genuinely difficult: standardizing fragmented budget hospitality at enormous scale.
But hospitality demonstrates why standardization and taste are not identical.
A hotel room is not merely inventory.
Lighting, furniture, materials, typography, smell, sound, neighborhood and local character collectively create an experience.
The danger of hyper-standardization is producing places that work everywhere precisely because they belong nowhere.
Large Indian Real-Estate Developers
Rather than singling out one developer, an entire segment deserves examination.
Consider the vocabulary:
Royal. Imperial. Heights. Grande. Crown. Palace. Elite. Platinum.
Then come enormous gates, pseudo-European façades, reflective glass, ornamental columns and lawns disconnected from local ecology.
This phenomenon might be called aspirational kitsch.
India possesses millennia of architectural intelligence—from courtyards and stepwells to shaded streets, jaalis, verandas and sophisticated responses to heat.
Yet developments sometimes borrow superficial imagery from European aristocracy instead.
Few industries could improve India’s everyday aesthetics more dramatically than real estate.
Mass-Market News Television
Here the company almost disappears behind the industry.
Many Indian television-news interfaces historically compete through visual intensity: tickers, banners, animations, dramatic typography, multiple information boxes and constant breaking-news graphics.
The television screen becomes a battlefield for attention.
Good information design should establish hierarchy.
Important things should look important.
Secondary things should recede.
When everything screams, nothing actually has emphasis.
Indian Political Consulting and Campaign-Media Businesses
Political communication frequently demonstrates another form of tastelessness: excessive personality branding.
Faces become enormous. Slogans become enormous. Posters multiply. Public space becomes advertising inventory.
Whatever one’s politics, democratic communication does not inherently require visual pollution.
A mature democracy should eventually develop standards concerning how political communication occupies shared physical and digital space.
The Industries With the Largest Taste Problem
The more interesting exercise may actually be to examine industries rather than individual corporations.
Some sectors structurally incentivize bad taste.
Industry
Recurring problem
Real estate
Aspirational kitsch
Television news
Visual overload
Outdoor advertising
Public-space pollution
FMCG
Packaging clutter
EdTech
Conversion-funnel aesthetics
FinTech
Gamification of serious decisions
Luxury weddings
Excess confused with elegance
Shopping malls
Placeless architecture
Political advertising
Personality saturation
Mobile applications
Notification and attention overload
Infrastructure
Function without civic beauty
Corporate offices
Imported Silicon Valley imitation
This suggests something important:
Tastelessness is often systemic rather than individual.
If every competitor screams, the quiet company risks becoming invisible.
Bad taste can therefore become a Nash equilibrium.
What Would a Tasteful Indian Corporation Look Like?
The alternative is not making every Indian company resemble Apple.
That would itself be imitation.
India should develop its own modern corporate aesthetics.
Imagine a technology company learning from Indian mathematical diagrams.
A financial company borrowing the restraint of old Indian currency engraving.
A hotel company studying regional architecture rather than reproducing the same room across the country.
A railway company treating stations as civic monuments.
A healthcare company using environments designed around psychological calm.
A consumer-goods company commissioning contemporary Indian illustrators.
A real-estate developer studying stepwells, courtyards, shade, ventilation and indigenous materials.
A digital company designing interfaces in Indian languages from the beginning rather than treating them as translations of English software.
That would not mean returning to the past.
It would mean continuing a civilization rather than merchandising one.
The Corporate Taste Test
Any large company could be evaluated through ten questions:
Product: Is the object itself beautiful and understandable?
Interface: Does the software respect human attention?
Typography: Is information presented with hierarchy and restraint?
Architecture: Does the company improve the places it occupies?
Advertising: Does communication inform, delight or merely interrupt?
Packaging: Would the object still look respectable without a giant logo?
Language: Does the company communicate intelligently?
Cultural originality: Is it creating an Indian design vocabulary or copying another one?
Longevity: Will today’s design still appear dignified twenty years from now?
Externalities: Does the company’s presence make public space more pleasant or more chaotic?
The framework should also recognize improvement.
Companies change. Leadership changes. Designers change. Buildings change. Brand systems change.
A taste assessment should therefore never become a permanent moral label.
Taste Is an Economic Asset
This discussion might sound superficial beside revenue, employment, engineering and industrial capacity.
It isn’t.
Consider what Italy extracted economically from fashion and industrial design.
Japan turned restraint and craftsmanship into global product identities.
Germany built reputations around precision.
Scandinavia transformed furniture and architecture into international cultural capital.
France monetized taste across luxury, hospitality, cuisine and fashion.
South Korea deliberately connected technology with entertainment, fashion, architecture and contemporary culture.
India possesses extraordinary raw material for doing something comparable.
Textiles.
Architecture.
Cinema.
Typography.
Craftsmanship.
Cuisine.
Music.
Mathematics.
Miniature painting.
Modernism.
Folk traditions.
Material science.
Regional cultures numbering in the hundreds.
Yet an Indian corporation cannot become culturally important merely by inserting a lotus, Sanskrit word or traditional pattern into its branding.
Civilizational confidence is not decoration.
It is the ability to create something new without needing somebody else’s definition of sophistication.
From Tasteless Companies to Taste-Making Companies
The purpose of identifying tastelessness should not be humiliation.
It should be transformation.
A company can move through four stages:
Functional → Attractive → Distinctive → Culture-making.
India already produces enormous numbers of functional companies.
Increasing numbers are attractive.
Far fewer are genuinely distinctive.
And only a tiny number become institutions whose aesthetic decisions influence society itself.
That final category should be the ambition.
The greatest Indian corporations of the twenty-first century should not merely ask:
How much can we sell?
They should also ask:
What kind of world appears after we have sold it?
Because corporations do more than allocate capital.
They manufacture environments.
They populate streets.
They shape screens.
They construct buildings.
They choose words.
They occupy attention.
They teach millions of people, quietly and repeatedly, what the future is supposed to look like.
And that makes taste a form of corporate responsibility.
