India, March 13 -- A few days before International Women's Day on March 8, Flipkart-owned online travel company Cleartrip shared insights on how Indian women are travelling today - independently, intentionally, and with greater control over their journeys. All-women international group travel has surged nearly 36% year-on-year, while solo women travellers display better planning and greater spend confidence, it said. Outbound departures from Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai have spiked, pointing to metro-based working professionals travelling more to popular international destinations like Dubai, Denpasar (Bali), London, Colombo, and Singapore. The data seemed heartening amid a glut of drifting social media posts, digital films and ponderous newspaper ads. In a print ad, jewellery brand Kisna said it had changed its name to "Radha" for the day, to honour the spirit of womanhood. Realty firm The House of Abhinandan Lodha offered special privileges to women on its housing deals with a double spread newspaper ad asking "Is Land a Woman?" given that land is referred to in the feminine - Motherland, Mother Earth - across cultures. Several food brands like Burger King, Haldiram's, Amul and delivery app Zomato too hitched their digital communication to celebrate the occasion. International Women's Day was officially adopted in 1977 to push the envelope on gender equality, pay party and to recognize women's contributions in different fields. But Alchemist Brand Consulting's managing partner Samit Sinha said that brands rarely feel a moral obligation to address social issues unless there is clear commercial value to it. "Ads released on International Women's Day often function less as advocacy and more as attempts to ingratiate brands with female consumers. And when the brand has little direct relevance to women, the motivation can simply be reputational-peer pressure, or the need to appear progressive," he said. Sanjay Sarma, who runs a brand advisory and works at the intersection of brand, communication, design and tech, agreed: "A jewellery brand has a natural, legitimate claim on Women's Day as women are the primary audience, but the question is whether it has anything interesting to say." A real estate brand, on the other hand, needs to work much harder to establish its relevance to a conversation on women and the 'Mother Earth' route is a bit of a stretch, Sarma said. For most brands, Women's Day is like any other occasion - like Diwali or Republic Day - which becomes just another box that must be ticked. "Brand teams experience FOMO and brands feel the pressure to respond in real time to every cultural moment. They feel if everyone else is talking about something and they don't, they're invisible. But visibility and relevance are not the same thing," Sarma said. Very few brands have a relationship with women's issues deep enough to say something meaningful and such brands have built that equity over time, he argued. Globally, brands like Dove and Ariel have moved the needle on gender and "they backed it with action, with women in leadership, with product decisions. An ad is the proof point of a position, not the position itself," Sarma said. Brands that genuinely advance women's empowerment tend to do so through concrete action rather than symbolic messaging, Alchemist's Sinha said. He cited the examples of Tata Motors' Women in Blue initiative that trains and employs women as skilled blue-collar workers in the automotive industry, and Wipro, which has invested in building a gender-responsive workplace, pay parity and safe and inclusive environments. If many International Women's Day advertisements feel uninspired, the issue is not a shortage of creative talent but of intent, Sinha said. "And intent, unlike copy, is something that even AI cannot manufacture." Indian society remains deeply patriarchal, and in many parts of India the imbalance is even more pronounced. Basic tokenism acknowledging the inequities are not useful unless there's meaningful action. "Pushing a conversation forward requires the brand to have skin in the game," Sarma said. In 2020, Nike's International Women's Day campaign, "One Day We Won't Need This Day," challenged the gender stereotypes in sports and captured the paradox of this one day celebrating women. "Its message is a lament that true gender equality would mean a world where women's achievements are recognised every day, making a special day unnecessary. The slogan itself implicitly acknowledges that such equality remains an aspiration rather than a lived reality," Sinha said....