The product, not marketing, is the real moat: Scapia CEO

For consumer brands chasing scale, the temptation is to buy distribution first and build love later. At ET DigiPlus Fest 2026, Scapia founder and CEO Anil Goteti offered a different sequence: the product itself is the moat.

In a fireside chat with Prasad Sangameshwaran, editor of ETBrandEquity.com, Goteti laid out how Scapia turned the intersection of finance and travel into a daily-use brand—and what that means for marketers trying to build the next generation of Indian consumer brands.

01 · A card for every few days, not a few trips a year

Goteti’s starting point was an insight from his Flipkart years: rising disposable incomes would push consumers toward experiences, and travel would benefit. But travel is emotionally rich and commercially awkward—it happens only a few times a year, so a travel brand has to keep reminding customers it exists.

Scapia’s answer was to put the brand in the wallet, not just the itinerary. ‘In the quest to build a good product that is in the customer’s mind all the time, we built a card that is in the customer’s wallet all the time,’ Goteti said. The card is used every few days, and those everyday transactions feed travel rewards.

02 · Product marketing over brand marketing

When asked whether brand affinity or distribution is the stronger competitive advantage, Goteti was direct: it is the product. If customers use it day in and day out and love it, word of mouth happens, and distribution emerges as a result.

The clarification matters: he is not saying marketing spend is irrelevant. ‘That does not mean you should not invest in distribution or marketing to amplify the product, but at the heart of it, the moat has to be the product.’ Scapia’s internal vocabulary reflects this—he calls the approach product marketing rather than brand marketing.

03 · Differentiation that starts with a customer worry

A product moat needs a sharp edge. For Scapia, one edge was zero forex markup. Goteti’s early research found that international card users were anxious about opaque exchange rates: a charge in dollars might look different by the time the statement arrived, leaving customers feeling overcharged.

The fix was transparency at the point of purchase. Scapia shows the charge in rupees and the local currency in real time before the tap, then presents the full trip spending when the customer returns. Because the card is used within India 85 to 95 per cent of the time, the same plain-English logic extends to domestic charges and EMI conversion costs.

04 · Loyalty without leaning on freebies

Goteti also cautioned against competing on benefits that have become commodities. Airport lounge access, he noted, is now offered by most cards, and the result is crowded lounges and long queues. Scapia reframed the benefit: ‘Let’s make the entire airport a lounge.’

Two years ago, the company launched Airport Privileges, which lets cardholders earn rewards at participating airport restaurants. The move created a benefit the brand could actually talk about, instead of another freebie that quietly erodes.

05 · What brand leaders can do

• Build for daily or frequent use so the product lives in the customer’s routine, not only at purchase moments.
• Find a specific customer anxiety—opaque pricing, crowded lounges, unclear charges—and fix it in the product before scaling distribution.
• Hold the experience end to end; Goteti says Scapia does not launch a business line unless partners can deliver the full experience.

The wider takeaway from DigiPlus Fest is that durable consumer brands are built from product-led differentiation. Marketing and distribution amplify that, but they cannot replace the reason a customer comes back.

Source: ETBrandEquity.com

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.