Guest column | How brands can turn festive influencer buzz into buying decisions

MUMBAI: As brands step up influencer marketing during the festive season, the challenge is shifting from generating visibility to influencing consumer decisions. With shoppers relying on creators for everything from product discovery and inspiration to reviews and purchase recommendations, brands need to align their campaigns with audience needs, cultural contexts and measurable outcomes. In this guest column, Manoj Kumar, founder, Brandsadvert Media, examines how brands can make influencer marketing more effective this festive season by choosing the right creators, tailoring content to different stages of the purchase journey and measuring impact beyond views and engagement.

Every festive season, brands compete for attention with new launches, special offers, gifting campaigns and a steady stream of festive content. Influencers become an important part of this mix, helping brands appear in shopping recommendations, product demonstrations, festive looks and everyday conversations.

But there is a difference between making a brand visible during the festive season and helping consumers make a purchase decision.

As creator-led content becomes a regular part of the shopping journey, brands need to think more carefully about the role they expect influencers to play. The objective should not always be to generate the most views or create the most festive-looking Reel. It should be to understand what the audience needs at a particular stage of the purchase journey and how a creator can help.

Festive shopping is not one kind of behaviour

Google’s October 2026 report, Decoding India’s Two-Speed Festive Shopper, describes two distinct shopping behaviours. Some consumers spend considerable time researching products, comparing specifications and watching reviews before making a decision. Others discover something visually appealing and make a quicker purchase when the product, offer and delivery timing align.

The report, based on a Google-commissioned Ipsos study of Indian festive shoppers, found that 73% of surveyed shoppers who made spontaneous purchases agreed that they looked to online creators for inspiration. It also reported that shopping-related watch time on YouTube in India grew by more than 55% year-on-year.

These findings point to an important distinction. A consumer considering a television, wearable or electric two-wheeler may need detailed information and reassurance. Someone looking for festive fashion, home accessories or a last-minute gift may respond more readily to visual inspiration.

Expecting one type of creator content to serve both purposes can limit the effectiveness of a campaign.

Match the creator to the consumer’s need

Brands should begin by identifying what they want to achieve at each stage of the purchase journey.

At the stage of discovery, products can be introduced by the creators, through styling ideas, festive preparations, gifting recommendation. The content needs to capture attention, but it should also give the audience a reason to consider the product.

During consideration, the role changes. Demonstrations, comparisons, reviews and explanations of product benefits become more important. For consumer technology, for example, a creator who can explain useful features in an accessible way may contribute more than a purely entertainment-led integration.

Closer to purchase, availability, pricing, offers and clear calls to action may become more relevant. Even then, brands need to ensure that the offer is accurate and that consumers can act on it.

These roles can overlap, but defining them before selecting creators helps make the brief more purposeful.

Festive relevance goes past festive visuals

There is another opportunity that brands often miss, which surrounds the cultural context of the festival itself.

India’s festive calendar is diversified. The way people celebrate, decorate their homes, exchange gifts, dress shop varies across communities and regions. A campaign relying on the same visual script and cues across markets may often overlookl the details that imbue more meaning to a celebration, from the lens of the audience.

Regional creators can help brands bring those details into the content. A festive campaign for a home product, for instance, could focus on preparations for family gatherings, while a consumer electronics campaign could show how a product fits into celebrations with friends and family. The idea is not to insert a festival into every product story, but to show where the product has a natural place in the occasion.

This requires more than translating a national script. Creators should have enough room to communicate in their own style while retaining the brand’s core message and product information.

Measure the contribution, not just the views

The festive season is commercially important, and brands understandably want to see results. However, judging every influencer by the same engagement benchmark can obscure what a campaign has actually achieved.

A discovery-focused creator may contribute to reach and product awareness. A reviewer may help consumers understand the product. A creator using a trackable link or offer code may provide more direct evidence of action.

Measurement should reflect these differences. Brands can track reach, engagement quality, audience geography, video completion, clicks, enquiries and conversions where the relevant data is available. They should also compare performance against the campaign’s objective and previous activity, rather than assume that a single metric captures effectiveness.

It is equally important to recognise the limitations of attribution. A purchase may follow several interactions across creators, search, retail and recommendations. Not every sale can be credited to the last piece of influencer content a consumer saw.

The opportunity beyond the festive season

Festive campaigns often operate within tight timelines, but the learning should last longer. Brands should identify which content formats helped consumers understand a product, which creators reached the intended audience and which messages generated meaningful interest.

Those insights can provide more information on the future campaigns, helping brands in building stronger creator relationships over a period of time.

The festive season will always be a crowded period for marketing. The answer is not necessarily to publish more content or work with more influencers. It is to be clearer about the consumer need each collaboration is meant to address.

When creators are selected for the role they can play, given the right brief and measured against the right objective, influencer marketing can do more than add festive noise. It can help people discover, understand and make decisions about brands.