In April 2024, Zepto and Simpl ran a billboard campaign across Delhi-NCR built almost entirely on Bollywood dialogue and stand-up comedy one-liners with lines like “Aao kabhi haveli pe” repurposed for a quick-commerce ad. It wasn’t Hindi and it wasn’t English. It was the language people in Delhi speak to each other: English sentence structure carrying Hindi punchlines, switching mid-thought without anyone noticing the switch. That’s not translation. That’s how the audience already talks, and the ad simply matched it.
This is the real shift in Indian PR and marketing copy over the last few years. For a long time, “going regional” meant taking an English campaign and translating it, word for word, into Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali. What’s replaced that is writing directly in the blended language people use in real conversation, Hinglish in the north, Tanglish in Tamil Nadu, Benglish in Bengal, instead of treating English and the regional language as two separate boxes to tick.
Blinkit is probably the clearest example of a brand built almost entirely on this voice. Since the Grofers-to-Blinkit rebrand in 2021, its social media captions and even its official responses to customer complaints on X (formerly Twitter) read like a witty friend texting back, mixing English words with casual Hindi phrasing, dropping formal grammar entirely. A stockout apology doesn’t read like a corporate statement. It reads like something a friend would type. That tone became recognisable enough that other quick-commerce players started copying the cadence, if not the exact voice.
Durex India built its entire social media identity on the same blend years before quick-commerce existed, using Hinglish wordplay and cultural references that a straight English or straight Hindi execution would have flattened. The humour depends on the switch itself, a pun that only works because it sits between two languages, not fully in either.
CRED plays the same game from a more restrained angle. Its ad copy and app micro-copy mix in the odd Hindi word or Bombay-inflected phrase is a subtler version of Blinkit’s tweets, dropping just enough of the other language in to feel local without tipping into a full regional voice.
Swiggy Instamart’s product descriptions and Zomato’s order confirmation messages follow the same logic now. A delivery update might read partly in English with a Hindi phrase dropped in for emphasis, written in Roman script rather than Devanagari, because that’s how people actually type to each other on their phones. Formal Hindi translation would feel more foreign to the reader than the blend does.
What makes this tricky for PR teams is that it can’t be outsourced to a translation agency the way old-style localisation could. A campaign written in true Hinglish or Tanglish needs someone who thinks in that blend natively, not someone converting an English brief into Hindi words with English grammar bolted on. Get it slightly wrong and it reads like a corporate account trying too hard: the digital equivalent of a parent using slang to seem relatable. AI translation tools make this worse before they make it better: run a Hinglish tweet through a machine translator and it usually comes out as stiff, over-correct Hindi or over-correct English, stripping out exactly the mix that made it work.
The other risk is regional flattening. Hinglish spoken in Delhi doesn’t sound like Hinglish spoken in Lucknow, and Tanglish in Chennai carries different reference points than the English-Tamil mix used in Coimbatore. Brands running pan-India campaigns in a single “blended” voice risk sounding authentic in one city and off in another. The brands getting this right tend to write city-specific or platform-specific versions rather than one blended script stretched across the country, treating language mixing as a genuine craft rather than a shortcut around proper localisation.
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