One brand, many voices: The shift towards localised storytelling

A brand may have one name across India, but it does not necessarily have one meaning. The same product can be introduced as a smart choice in one market, a trusted family decision in another and a symbol of aspiration somewhere else, depending on the language, cultural references and social context through which consumers encounter it. This makes sustaining the old idea of a single national campaign increasingly difficult.

It is not simply about brands producing more content in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi or Telugu, or replacing a national celebrity with a regional influencer. The more fundamental change is that marketers are beginning to recognise that translation alone cannot carry a brand into a new market, because the same words can sound familiar in one place and artificial in another.

This is why brands are increasingly moving from one national voice to many local voices. The creator is becoming important in this shift not merely because they speak a regional language, but because they understand how that language is actually used. They know when a phrase sounds natural, when a joke feels forced, when a word belongs to a particular generation and when a brand is trying too hard to sound local. This distinction matters in India because language does not operate as a simple map of states.

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Hindi spoken in Delhi is not the same as Hindi spoken in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan or Bihar. Marathi changes in texture across urban and rural audiences. Bengali carries different cultural associations in Kolkata and other parts of West Bengal. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam each have their own internal variations, while dialects and code-switching add another layer to how people actually communicate.

For brands, therefore, the question is no longer only whether a consumer understands the language. The question is whether the consumer feels that the brand understands the way they speak.

A regional creator does not just translate the brand

Pankaj Rana, CEO, Hisense India, a consumer electronics and television brand, said: “At Hisense India, we see creators as an integral part of how we engage with today's audiences. We collaborate with both national and regional creators across languages such as Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil, using platforms like Instagram and YouTube for short-form and long-form content, from localised storytelling to in-depth product reviews.

“We have worked with personalities such as Jannat Zubair, Priyamani, Ravi Gupta, Born Creator, Tech Buddies and Telugu Tech Tuts, among others, to engage audiences across entertainment, technology and lifestyle. While traditional media helps us build scale and awareness, creators bring authenticity, spark real-time conversations and foster stronger community engagement.

“This approach extends to our FIFA initiatives, including the 3 AM Club, where we are partnering with creators and regional influencers to capture genuine fan moments and celebrate the excitement of the tournament. Their ability to create culturally relevant, real-time content makes our brand more relatable while extending the reach and impact of our campaigns.”

This is where influencer marketing is beginning to overlap with a much older advertising discipline: cultural planning. The creator is not simply distributing a brand message to a regional audience. 

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Jubin Rawal, Chief Marketing Officer, Cellecor, a consumer electronics and smart appliances brand, said: “We see the creator ecosystem as a powerful extension of our brand storytelling rather than just a media channel. Our approach is driven by audience relevance, category expertise and regional resonance, ensuring that every collaboration delivers value to both consumers and the brand.”

“We adopt a full-funnel creator strategy, where different creator tiers play distinct yet complementary roles. Mega and macro creators help amplify product launches and strengthen national brand visibility, while micro and regional creators enable authentic conversations, local language engagement and greater influence at the point of consideration, particularly across India's fast-growing Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 markets.

“For us, success is not measured solely by reach or engagement metrics. We focus on building credibility through genuine product demonstrations, practical use cases and relatable storytelling that help consumers make informed purchase decisions. As we expand across consumer electronics and home appliances, creator collaborations remain integral to driving brand awareness, fostering consumer confidence and supporting sustainable growth across digital and retail ecosystems.”

This reflects a broader shift in how brands are deploying creators across the purchase journey, with national influencers driving awareness and regional creators building trust and influencing buying decisions closer to the point of purchase.

Shashishekhar Mukherjee, Head of Digital Marketing, Dabur India Ltd, said the advantage of regional creators is not limited to their ability to speak a particular language.

“#AmarShoktiAmarGorbo for Dabur Babool in West Bengal. We worked with Bengali creators who celebrated regional pride and everyday moments. National influencers built awareness, but regional creators sparked stronger conversations, more organic local sharing, and higher-quality engagement because audiences saw themselves in the content. The lesson: match the right cultural voice to the right audience.”

A brand can translate a campaign into Bengali, but that does not automatically make the campaign culturally Bengali. The difference lies in the references, the humour, the situations chosen and the way the audience is addressed.

“They know local humour, festivals, family dynamics and everyday life in ways national creators often do not. For a heritage brand like Dabur, that cultural resonance creates authenticity and trust,” Mukherjee said.

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The same product can require a different route to consideration

This matters particularly for categories where purchase decisions are shaped by social context.

Mikhil Raj, Chief Product Officer, BlueStone, told e4m that regional creators are already generating stronger signals of consumer intent for the jewellery brand in specific markets. “We have seen regional creators drive deeper engagement and stronger intent signals in specific markets, including product enquiries, store-related queries, and online discovery. Their advantage lies in trust and relevance, not audience size. A recommendation expressed in a familiar language and cultural context can feel closer to advice from someone within the consumer's own circle. What this is really changing is how we measure success. Reach alone tells you very little about whether someone is closer to buying. The more useful signal is the quality of intent a creator generates—product discovery, enquiries, store visits, purchase—and that is where regional creators show their strength.”

Jewellery makes the point particularly clearly because the category is culturally coded. The meaning of everyday jewellery, gifting, self-purchase and occasion-led buying can vary across markets, and a creator who understands those codes can explain the same product through a context that feels more immediately relevant to the consumer.

“This matters more as jewellery expands beyond weddings into self-purchase, everyday styling and gifting. Everyday wear is fairly broad in its use cases, and while the aesthetic is increasingly national, regional preferences persist within it — which is exactly where a creator who knows the local context adds something a national voice cannot.”

Ekta Dutta, Head of Marketing, BIBA, women’s ethnic wear brand, said: “Regional creators are helping brands expand their reach, build relevance and connect with new consumer segments in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets. Their understanding of local language, culture, festive traditions and dressing preferences makes communication more relatable and helps brands participate in regional conversations more effectively.

“At BIBA, festivals are central to the brand because we are deeply rooted in Indian culture and occasion-led dressing. For Rakshabandhan and Ganesh Chaturthi, we curate collections for how women, young girls and families shop for these occasions. Rakshabandhan is also an important gifting moment, with many men visiting our stores to choose outfits for their sisters, making it a family shopping occasion.”

The approach highlights how regional creators are becoming increasingly important for brands operating in categories where cultural occasions and local traditions influence purchase decisions.

Dutta added, “Our creator strategy combines regional and hyperlocal creators with fashion influencers. They help us showcase festive collections, interpret trends for local audiences and demonstrate different ways of styling the looks. For Ganesh Chaturthi, the approach becomes more market-specific, particularly in Maharashtra and select southern markets, where local traditions and hyperlocal storytelling drive stronger relevance.

“The focus is not only on awareness but also on conversion. Creator content is supported by digital media, CRM, store communication and personalised outreach across online and offline channels. This helps BIBA stay present throughout the festive journey, from discovery and inspiration to store visits, gifting and purchase.”

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India is not one language market divided into states

As per the Indian School of Business (ISB) and Brand-Creator Network Platform  Hashfame, regional-language creators collectively account for 58% of India's creator base, compared with 42% for Hindi creators. Non-metro creators account for 66% of the country's 4.12 million creators, with the non-metro creator base growing 6.4 times between 2020 and 2025, compared with 2.6 times in metros.

The numbers are significant because they challenge the way brands have historically divided the Indian market.

Abhishek Chakraborty, Head of Brand Communication, Digital, Oriflame India, said: “Regional creators play a powerful role in building meaningful connections because people naturally relate to content that reflects their own language, culture and lived experiences. Our trust in a voice is shaped by whether it sounds like home, with the same language, references and culture. A regional creator taps into that instantly, and communication naturally resonates more deeply.”

Most marketers still plan campaigns through broad categories such as North, South, East and West. Consumers, however, do not experience culture in four zones.

They experience it through the language spoken at home, the humour they recognise, the festivals they celebrate, the people they trust and the way they make sense of a product in their everyday lives.

Chakraborty explains, “India is not one audience. It is a country of over 100 languages and more than 1,600 dialects. You cannot engage everyone with a one-size-fits-all approach. Personalisation is the foundation of meaningful communication, and the Northeast Yatra was built around that principle.”

“Over 5,000 kilometres and across 13 cities, from Shillong, Guwahati and Kohima to Itanagar, Dibrugarh and Kolkata, we collaborated with more than 300 regional creators while engaging thousands of young people and entrepreneurs across Northeast India and West Bengal. Our Brand Partners, who have been the face of Oriflame since the beginning, also played a central role as trusted voices within their regions.

“The initiative was rooted in local culture and experiences, and the response reinforced the power of storytelling shaped by people who understand their communities. In the end, it is not the scale of a creator's reach that matters most; it is whether they can make people feel seen, understood and connected.”

A metro versus non-metro framework is increasingly insufficient. Two consumers may live in cities of similar size and have similar purchasing power, but respond differently to the same campaign because their cultural references and language environments are different.

This is also why the rise of regional creators should not be understood simply as a shift from expensive celebrities to cheaper influencers.

Non-metro creators have shown a consistent engagement premium over metro creators, even as the creator base has expanded significantly. The value, therefore, may lie less in cost and more in the quality of the relationship between the creator and the audience.

From one national campaign to many local interpretations

Saibal Das Mahapatra, Content & Partnerships at Snap Inc., mentioned that the next wave of creators is increasingly emerging from smaller cities and is building audiences through everyday stories in local languages.

“The next wave of creator is coming from Hisar, Jalandhar, Jaipur and more towns like them, telling everyday stories in their own languages. Our partnership with Nykaa on the Snap Star Beauty Incubator is built around exactly this insight: instead of running a standard influencer campaign out of metro markets, Nykaa is growing its Gen Z beauty voice through creators from Tier 2 and Tier 3 India, backed by mentorship and ongoing brand collaborations rather than one-off posts. It's a long-term investment in regional creator ecosystems, not just a single campaign and that's where we think the durable value is for brands trying to earn Gen Z's trust rather than just their attention.”

If they build long-term relationships with creators who understand specific communities, they begin to build a local cultural understanding into the brand itself.

“For Gen Z, that specificity beats scale: a creator who sounds familiar earns more trust than one who sounds like everyone else's feed. That's the shift brands are chasing, that is, moving from one national campaign to many local voices.”

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The bigger challenge is helping brands identify which creator can explain a product, occasion or brand idea in a way that feels natural to a particular audience.

The data shows that this commercial ecosystem is still underdeveloped, with around 85% of non-metro creators completing no campaign in a year and only 2.1% completing five or more campaigns annually. In markets such as Bhojpuri and Kannada, creator supply is relatively high while campaign intensity remains lower, pointing towards a gap in commercial discovery and creator-brand matching.

The future is not local instead of national

The future of brand building is not local instead of national, but national ideas expressed through many local voices. A brand will still need a consistent identity, and national campaigns and creators will continue to play an important role in building mass awareness, aspiration and cultural visibility.

The change is happening in the layer between the brand and the consumer, where a national campaign may establish what the brand stands for, but a regional voice can determine what that idea actually means in a particular market. This distinction will become increasingly important as brands move beyond audiences that already know them, because awareness alone does not guarantee understanding, and a consumer cannot consider a product whose relevance has not been established in a language, tone and cultural context that feels familiar. 

The next phase of regional marketing, therefore, will not be about simply translating a national campaign into different languages, but about rebuilding the communication around the way a particular audience thinks, speaks and interprets the world around it. The difference may appear subtle, but for brand equity it is significant.

A national brand can have one identity, but it may need many voices to make that identity understood, because India's next phase of influencer marketing will be shaped by the realisation that the country is too linguistically and culturally complex to be addressed through one uniform tone, one national script or one singular idea of what it means to sound Indian.