From Chamko to Creators: Direct selling changed clothes

There is a scene from Chashme Buddoor that anyone who grew up in the 1980s is unlikely to forget. Deepti Naval goes from door to door selling Chamko detergent. She demonstrates the product, answers questions, reassures skeptical homemakers and, if she’s persuasive enough, walks away with a sale.

Back then, we called her a saleswoman.

Fast forward four decades and Unilever announces plans to work with 300,000 creators and influencers. It is the latest and perhaps the most visible example of a trend that has been gaining momentum for years. Across categories, large brands are rapidly expanding creator and influencer programmes. The industry celebrates this as the future of marketing, using familiar marketing buzzwords like community, authenticity, relevance, trust and the creator economy.

Watching the excitement unfold, one can’t help but think of Chamko.

What if  we have taken one of the oldest sales tactics in business, wrapped it in new technology and marketing vocabulary, and convinced ourselves that we have invented something entirely new?

Strip away the smartphone, the Instagram Reel and the affiliate link, and the mechanics look remarkably familiar.

Yesterday’s saleswoman demonstrated the product, answered objections, recommended it and sold it. Today’s creator demonstrates the product, answers questions in the comments, recommends it and directs consumers to buy. The front door has become the smartphone. The catalogue has become Instagram. Just the technology has changed. 

Then there is the number that made headlines.

Three hundred thousand.

If influence were truly the objective, would any brand need hundreds of thousands of influencers? Surely a few thousand trusted voices would be enough.

Three hundred thousand solves a different problem.

Coverage.

Sales organisations have always thought in terms of coverage of every territory, every neighbourhood, every outlet. Marketing organisations have traditionally thought in terms of audiences, reach and frequency. Seen through that lens, hundreds of thousands of creators begin to resemble a digitally distributed sales network more than an advertising plan. The plan may be influencer marketing, but the operating logic increasingly resembles territory planning.

This model makes perfect sense for a startup.

A young D2C brand has no awareness, no distribution, no shelf presence and little advertising budget. A creator introduces the product, demonstrates it, builds trust and converts the sale. In many ways, the creator becomes the company’s sales force.

But should the same logic automatically apply to mature FMCG companies?

A company like Unilever has already solved many of the problems that startups face. Its brands enjoy decades of advertising investment, large-scale retail distribution, enormous mental availability and unmatched buying power across media. The strategic question therefore changes.

The answer cannot simply be that creator marketing works.

Because that does not answer the real question.

Compared to what?

Compared to television?

Compared to retail activation?

Compared to in-store demonstrators?

Compared to sampling?

Compared to trade promotions?

Strategy is not about choosing what works. Almost every marketing tool works. Strategy is about choosing what works better than the alternatives for the business and lifestage you are in.

Every rupee invested in creators is a rupee not invested somewhere else.

Yet little of the discussion is framed that way. The debate usually stops at whether influencer marketing works. Without asking whether it performs its role better than the alternatives it is replacing. Instead, brands celebrate engagement, authenticity, relevance and community.

But if creators are increasingly demonstrating products, answering objections, recommending purchases and driving conversion, shouldn’t the primary questions be sales question?

What is the incremental volume?

What is the productivity of a creator network?

What return does it generate relative to the marketing and sales functions it is replacing at scale?

Which brings us to the heart of the issue.

Are brands asking marketing to own a sales function without asking it to own sales accountability?

Historically, marketing built brands while sales sold products. They worked together, but they were measured differently because they performed different functions. The creator economy appears to blur those boundaries. Yet the public conversation continues to describe this shift almost entirely in the language of marketing.

Perhaps those sales metrics exist internally. But they are conspicuously absent from the narrative. Maybe the biggest innovation here is linguistic.

Yesterday we called it direct selling. Today we call it influencer marketing.

Yesterday we had sales representatives. Today we have creators.

Yesterday we measured sales productivity. Today we celebrate engagement.

Perhaps the vocabulary and technology have evolved more than the function.

Before we celebrate creator marketing as the next great evolution in marketing, maybe we should pause to ask whether we’ve simply rediscovered one of selling’s oldest ideas and given it a new vocabulary.

Perhaps Chamko never disappeared. It just changed clothes.