This Mother's Day, brands are selling hearts as much as hampers

Every May, the advertising industry performs a familiar ritual. Soft-focus films flood social feeds. Mothers cry. Daughters reconcile. Sons send flowers. And somewhere in the background, a brand logo fades up. Mother's Day has always been fertile ground for emotion-led creative, but in 2026, the scale, sophistication, and sheer volume of campaigns competing for the same heartstrings have reached a point where the industry itself is asking an uncomfortable question: Are brands genuinely celebrating mothers, or have they simply become more skilled at packaging sentiment as a sales strategy?

The numbers offer some context. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), US consumers alone were projected to spend over $35 billion on Mother's Day in 2024: the highest figure in the survey's history. In India, the occasion has steadily grown from a niche urban gifting moment into a full-scale retail event, with e-commerce platforms, quick commerce players, and direct-to-consumer brands all running dedicated Mother's Day tentpoles. 

The Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2025 notes that festive and occasion-led advertising continues to be among the fastest-growing segments in digital spends, with calendar moments like Mother's Day, Raksha Bandhan, and Valentine's Day increasingly treated as performance marketing opportunities as much as brand-building occasions.

Brand affinity vs. the discount carousel

Within this landscape, not all Mother's Day campaigns are cut from the same cloth, and the industry is increasingly aware of the distinction. Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, draws a clear line between campaigns built for brand equity and those engineered for immediate conversion. "I think there's a mix of brands in both cases,” she says. 

“There are some brands that are essentially looking to drive affinity towards their brand through such campaigns. For example, if you look at Catch's Mother's Day film or Unicharm's Mother's Day film, neither of them is directly telling you to buy a product from the brand. Brands like these are not necessarily trying to sell a product, but are instead trying to build a stronger association so that consumers like the brand more, especially since these are brands made for mothers."

The contrast, she notes, is visible the moment you scroll further. "At the same time, there are many festive campaigns that are clearly trying to push sales — offering discounts, deals, and purchase incentives. Those are essentially sales campaigns and have little to do with emotion. Even when emotion is present, it is often primarily performance-driven. With e-commerce and quick commerce growing rapidly, many brands are constantly shifting their budgets. For instance, at Flipkart, there's a constant conversation around running a brand campaign for a product for two to three years and then moving towards performance marketing, because a brand cannot continue to rely only on long-term branding; eventually, it has to start delivering tangible results."

It is a tension that sits at the heart of modern advertising: the pressure to balance long-term brand love with short-term revenue accountability. Mother's Day, perhaps more than any other calendar occasion, exposes that fault line most visibly because the emotional stakes are high and the creative bar is, at least in theory, expected to match them.

When the expression gets corrupted

For those working on the creative side of the business, the erosion is less about brand intent and more about cultural consequence. Sumit Chaurasia, Creative Director at Famous Innovations, the independent agency behind some of India's more provocative award-circuit work, is unambiguous about what he sees happening. "Of course, it's becoming commercialised,” he says. “Especially for this generation's audience — people in their late teens and twenties like you and me — the original feeling behind Mother's Day is fading. Earlier, the emotion and intent behind celebrating the day felt genuine. What has really been corrupted is the expression of that emotion, which is now increasingly being pushed towards spending money, as if buying something has become a shortcut for expressing feelings. That is where commercialisation has taken over the space."

It is a critique that lands harder when you consider the audience most exposed to this content. Gen Z and younger millennials (the cohort that both consumes and, increasingly, creates culture) are also the most sceptical of performative advertising. According to a 2024 Kantar report on brand trust in India, authenticity and relatability rank among the top two drivers of brand preference among consumers aged 18-34, outpacing both product quality and price for certain categories. Brands that lead with emotional storytelling but follow up with a discount coupon in the same Instagram carousel are, for this audience, not subtle.

A calendar occasion or a cultural moment?

The most measured take comes from Karthik Srinivasan, one of India's most-followed communications commentators and a self-employed consultant, formerly National Lead at Social@Ogilvy. Having observed brand behaviour across every major calendar moment for well over a decade, Srinivasan is neither surprised nor entirely dismissive. "I think brands are largely commercialising it,” he says. “For many, it has become just another calendar occasion to say or do something. But having said that, I wouldn't be entirely cynical about it either. If a brand can genuinely evoke a meaningful sentiment or emotion among people, readers, or consumers, then even a commercially-driven occasion can feel worthwhile. A few brands manage to do that authentically, but most do not. In many ways, it feels like every other year."

"A few brands" is the operative phrase here, and it points to the industry's real creative challenge: not whether to participate in Mother's Day advertising but how to do it in a way that earns more than a scroll-stop. The brands that tend to break through are those that resist the obvious emotional arc: the sacrificial mother, the tearful reunion, the surprise gift. They find something more specific, more uncomfortable, more honest about what motherhood actually looks like in 2026: exhausted, multitasking, complicated, and still somehow unconditional.

The industry, to its credit, occasionally delivers exactly that. But for every campaign that cuts through with genuine creative conviction, dozens settle for the emotional shorthand: the swelling background score, the slow-motion hug, the tagline about love being the greatest gift. As the volume of Mother's Day content grows each year, the signal-to-noise problem grows with it. Brands are unquestionably getting better at finding emotion. Whether they are getting better at earning it is a different question entirely, and this May, the jury is still out.