When CRED rolled out its IPL ads in 2021, the ones with for Indian captain and World-Cup winning coach Rahul Dravid losing his temper over a parking spot, the brand’s own Instagram comments stayed thin. But WhatsApp groups across the country were flooded with the clip within hours. People had taken a liking to it. They were forwarding it to their office group, their college batch, their family chat. That gap between public engagement and actual reach is what PR teams in India are now calling the quiet consumer problem.
Zepto ran into the same thing a couple of years later, when it started sending Vir Das cheeky push notifications, lines like “Vir: I am thirsty” and “You’re like paneer.” Das called them out publicly, Zepto replied with a playful apology, and the exchange got covered by half a dozen marketing trade sites. But the real spread happened off-platform. People took screenshots of their own notifications and dropped them into group chats with captions like “Zepto is unhinged.” None of that shows up in an engagement report.
This is the pattern across categories now. Amul’s topical ads, the ones with the girl in the polka-dot dress commenting on the week’s news, rarely trend on Amul’s own handle the way they used to on Twitter. They circulate as saved images on Instagram, sent directly rather than reshared publicly. Swiggy Instamart’s product captions, full of local slang and one-liners, get the same treatment: people screenshot and send rather than tag the brand.
Marketers have a name for this now: dark social. It refers to any sharing that happens through private channels, WhatsApp, DMs, screenshots, that can’t be tracked by standard social listening tools. Estimates from Indian digital agencies suggest a large chunk, sometimes more than half, of all content sharing in India happens this way, simply because WhatsApp is where Indians talk to each other, not on public feeds. A brand chasing likes and comments is measuring the smallest, most visible slice of its actual audience.
What’s changed is that some Indian brands have started designing for this behaviour instead of ignoring it. Zomato’s billboard and packaging copy, written mostly by its in-house team, leans into lines built to be photographed and sent rather than commented on short, quotable, screenshot friendly. Bombay Shaving Company and Caresmith’s public sparring in mid-2024 worked the same way: the exchange got modest direct engagement but a lot of screen-grabbed forwarding across grooming and marketing circles. The content was built to travel privately, not to perform publicly.
The measurement side is catching up slowly. A few Indian D2C brands have started using unique, trackable links inside WhatsApp-shareable creatives, a coupon code that only shows up if someone typed “sent by a friend,” or a landing page tagged to a specific campaign asset, just to get a rough sense of dark social volume. It’s not precise, but it’s better than assuming silence means disinterest.
The uncomfortable part for PR teams used to reporting on likes, shares, and comments is that the quiet consumer is often the more valuable one. Someone who screenshots an ad and sends it to five friends with “you have to see this” is doing unpaid, trusted distribution that no influencer contract can buy. They just don’t show up in the dashboard. Brands that keep optimising purely for visible engagement are, in a real sense, optimising for the wrong audience, while the one who is driving the word of mouth stays invisible in every report they read.
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