Global brands are going desi. But what’s the marketing payoff?

You don't need a moodboard, a global campaign or a luxury logo to know what a Kolhapuri is!

Take a walk through Shahpur Jat in Delhi and Indian craftsmanship is right there in plain sight, being worn, sold and reinvented. Head to Jaipur's Bapu Bazaar and mirror work, block prints, juttis and embroidered textiles are hardly new discoveries. In Rajasthan and Gujarat, bandhani and other craft traditions have been part of the visual language of everyday dressing for generations. None of this needs an elaborate brand story or a marketing campaign. The craft speaks for itself.

Yet increasingly, some of these very cultural codes are travelling…

From India's streets and workshops to the moodboards of global brands, and back to consumers as highly marketed global products!

An auto-rickshaw becomes an inspiration for a Louis Vuitton handbag. The Kolhapuri finds its way into Prada. Navratri and Indian mirrorwork make an appearance on Fendi's Baguette. Adidas reworks its Samba through a jutti-inspired collaboration with VegNonVeg.

And here's where it gets interesting from a marketing lens: these aren't necessarily products created simply just to sell to Indians.

So what is the marketing value of going desi for a global brand?

Is it localisation? A shortcut to cultural relevance? Or is Indian-ness itself becoming a new source of marketing currency, one that can create conversation and differentiation well beyond the Indian market?

What’s in it for the global brand
According to Hamsini Shivakumar, Brand Consultant, global fashion and luxury brands have routinely looked towards different cultures for inspiration. “Other cultures are often a flavour of the season or two,” she said, adding that cultural sensitivity among European designers towards non-Western cultures, particularly while dealing with market pressures, remains debatable.

For Shivakumar, the commercial motivation can be fairly straightforward. “The borrowing from India is merely to add more variety to the product line,” she added.

But there is another way to look at what global brands are finding in India: not just inspiration, but a largely untapped reservoir of cultural and craft stories. Nisha Sampath, Founder, Bright Angles Consulting, described India as a “cultural code bank” with a rich legacy of craftsmanship that remains relatively untapped by international luxury brands constantly looking for new territory for storytelling.

The growing interest also sends a market signal, she said, by acknowledging the expanding local customer base.

But Sampath cautioned against equating cultural relevance with immediate commercial returns. “This will not unlock sales, as much as it will infuse new visual energy into storytelling around trending creations,” she added.

That could be an important distinction. The immediate payoff may not necessarily be a consumer walking into a store and buying the product because it carries an Indian reference. The value could lie in making an otherwise familiar global product more talked about, more culturally interesting and more distinctive.

Why Indian codes travel so well
Atit Mehta, who consults across media and marketing, sees two parallel opportunities. The first is local relevance. An Indian cultural reference can provide a global brand with a stronger local entry point and make it more relevant to consumers in India.

But the second opportunity is potentially bigger: taking something distinctly Indian and making it interesting to a global audience.

“That creates conversation, curiosity and differentiation, which are all valuable for a brand,” he said. That perhaps explains why an Indian cultural reference can work even when the target audience extends beyond India.

A Kolhapuri, a jutti or an auto-rickshaw does not need to be presented simply as an Indian product. Once incorporated into a global brand, it can become a conversation starter. The cultural code supplies familiarity for one audience and novelty for another.

For brands, that combination can be useful.

Syed Amjad Ali, Brand Consultant, sees the real opportunity in what happens when everyday Indian cultural objects are reframed through the lens of global luxury. “A Kolhapuri, an auto-rickshaw or an Indian ethnic motif can be ordinary and accessible in its original context, but when reinterpreted from the lens of a luxury brand, it can become a differentiated & aspirational product, sometimes obscenely expensive. The brands tap into cultural icons that already exist and convert them into desirability and eventually into a higher value.” 

But there’s a catch…
The challenge, however, is that cultural familiarity also makes audiences better equipped to spot when something does not quite add up.

“If you are simply taking an Indian visual because it looks exotic or fashionable, consumers will see through it,” Mehta cautioned. “If there is a genuine understanding of the culture, craft or story behind it, it becomes much more credible.”

Luxury brands have borrowed from Indian culture and craftsmanship for years. What has changed, according to Sampath, is that Indian audiences are now evaluating and decoding those efforts in real time. That makes the relationship between brand, culture and consumer harder to manage through aesthetics alone.

Sampath identified three factors that can determine whether such efforts have substance: creator centricity, including acknowledging and incentivising local creators; source authenticity, including localised sourcing and manufacturing; and, perhaps most importantly, building an enduring relationship rather than treating Indian culture as a single-season trend.

The last point could prove particularly important.

A one-off product inspired by an Indian cultural object can generate attention. But sustained collaborations with craftspeople, designers and local creative communities can create something beyond attention: an association between the brand and the culture it is drawing from.

For Shivakumar, however, that depth is precisely what is often missing. Without deeper cultural immersion, she argued, it can be difficult for designers to understand what a particular object means when viewed through an Indian lens versus a European one.

That creates a peculiar marketing paradox.

The more familiar the cultural code is to consumers, the more difficult it may be for a brand to pass off a surface-level interpretation as cultural understanding.

So, what does the brand owe the culture?
For years, the question for global brands entering India was how to make a global product relevant to an Indian audience. Increasingly, the opportunity seems to be moving in the other direction: how can something recognisably Indian make a global brand more interesting?

The answer, however, may not lie in how prominently a Kolhapuri, jutti or Navratri motif appears on a product.

It may lie in what the brand does with the cultural equity behind it.

Indian craftsmanship does not need a luxury logo to establish its value. But a global brand can potentially give that cultural code a new audience, new context and a new commercial life.

The marketing opportunity, therefore, is real. So is the risk.

For global brands, the question may no longer be whether Indian culture can generate attention. It clearly can. The harder question is whether they are building cultural relevance around India, or simply borrowing its cultural currency to make the next product worth talking about!