A 24-year-old in Coimbatore might watch IPL commentary in Tamil, order from Zepto in English, forward a meme in Tanglish, and still light a lamp for Karthigai Deepam the way her grandmother did. She isn’t switching between an “urban” self and a “traditional” self. She’s all of it at once, all the time. Indian brands that still write campaigns for a single, tidy version of “the consumer” are talking to someone who doesn’t exist anymore.
Meesho understood this early. Its ad strategy openly targets what the company calls the “next 500 million”, shoppers in tier 2 and tier 3 towns who want the same trends as Mumbai and Bangalore but shop, browse, and pay in ways shaped by local habits and local languages. The brand doesn’t treat this as a lesser version of urban India needing simplified messaging. It treats it as its own audience with its own aspirations, running app interfaces and support in regional languages rather than translating a Delhi-first campaign after the fact.
JioHotstar’s IPL coverage shows the same instinct from a different angle. The same match streams with Hindi commentary, Tamil commentary, Telugu commentary, and English commentary simultaneously, and viewership data consistently shows huge audiences for regional-language streams even in cities where English commentary is easily available. A software engineer in Bengaluru watching the match in Kannada on his phone during a work call, then discussing it in English on Slack an hour later, is not an edge case. He’s most of the audience.
Netflix India has leaned into this by greenlighting more region-specific originals rather than treating Hindi content as the default and everything else as a regional add-on. Shows built around Tamil, Malayalam, and Punjabi audiences get dedicated marketing pushes, sometimes running alongside a Hindi-language campaign for the same platform, aimed at completely different identity anchors within the same subscriber base.
The retail festive calendar makes this even more visible. Ajio and Myntra don’t run one Diwali campaign nationally anymore. Onam gets its own creative in Kerala, Durga Puja gets its own in Bengal, and the core Diwali push still runs everywhere else, often overlapping in timing, sometimes overlapping in audience, because plenty of people in Mumbai or Delhi trace family roots to both. A single household can be the target of three separate festive campaigns from the same brand in the same month, and increasingly, that’s by design rather than an oversight.
Diaspora audiences add another layer. Tanishq and Malabar Gold run wedding-season campaigns timed to speak simultaneously to someone in Ahmedabad and their cousin in New Jersey, using festival cues that read as nostalgic to an NRI viewer and as every day to someone still living the tradition at home. The same film must work as a memory for one viewer and a lived reality for another, without either side feeling like an afterthought.
D2C brands like boAt and Mamaearth face a subtler version of the same challenge. Their core appeal is aspirational and global-facing: the packaging, the influencer casting, the English-first product naming all signal that. But their actual buyer is often price-conscious, someone who compares a boAt earphone against a local no-name brand on Flipkart before deciding. The brand has to hold both a global self-image and a middle-class Indian wallet in the same breath, without the messaging contradicting itself.
None of this works if a brand treats identity as a single slider between “traditional” and “modern,” or “regional” and “urban.” Indian consumers hold multiple identities at once, and the campaigns that land are the ones built to speak to several of those identities in the same message, rather than picking one and hoping it’s close enough.
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