Why celebrity endorsements will never go out of fashion in India

MUMBAI: Every few years, the marketing industry predicts the decline of celebrity endorsements. The rise of digital platforms was supposed to change it. Then came social media. More recently, the creator economy has sparked another round of conversations suggesting that brands no longer need movie stars or cricketers to build relevance. Yet, if you look at where marketing budgets continue to flow, a different picture emerges.

Celebrity endorsements are not disappearing in India. If anything, their role has become clearer.

This isn’t to suggest that creators haven’t transformed marketing. They absolutely have. They have changed how brands build communities, participate in conversations and engage consumers with a level of authenticity that traditional advertising often struggled to achieve. One of the biggest misconceptions in our industry is that influence can be measured through a single lens. It cannot.

India is unlike almost any other market in the world.

We are not speaking to one audience. We are speaking to hundreds of millions of consumers across different languages, regions, cultures and income groups. Media consumption has become fragmented, but cultural icons still have an extraordinary ability to cut across those divides.

Walk into a metropolitan city, a Tier II town or a small village, and there is a very good chance that people may consume completely different content every day. Their favourite creators may be different. Their social media feeds may look nothing alike. Yet ask them who Virat Kohli is, or show them Shah Rukh Khan, Ranbir Kapoor or Deepika Padukone, and recognition is almost instant.

That kind of familiarity is incredibly difficult to build.

For brands, familiarity has real commercial value. Launching a new product is rarely just about driving engagement. It is about creating awareness quickly, building trust, reassuring retailers, attracting distributors and giving consumers confidence that the brand is here to stay. Celebrities continue to achieve that at a scale few others can.

This is one of the reasons why celebrity endorsements remain remarkably resilient despite the rapid growth of creator marketing. They solve a business problem that has not changed.

At the same time, the role of creators has become far more strategic than it was even five years ago. The best creators are no longer simply content publishers. They are community builders, storytellers and cultural interpreters. They understand niche audiences in ways that even the most sophisticated consumer research often cannot.

Increasingly, brands are turning to creators for depth and celebrities for breadth.

The strongest campaigns we see today rarely rely on one or the other. They begin with a recognisable face that creates national visibility and are strengthened by creators who carry the conversation into communities where trust and relevance are built over time.

That is a far more sophisticated marketing model than the industry had a decade ago.

People discover brands in many different ways today. They might first notice a celebrity campaign during a cricket match, hear about the product from a creator they trust, read reviews online, see friends discussing it on social media and finally make a purchase weeks later. Every touchpoint plays a different role, and successful marketing recognises that no single channel or personality can deliver every outcome.

What has changed is not the value of celebrities but rather the expectation from them.

Brands are no longer looking for endorsements that simply maximise visibility. They are looking for partnerships that feel authentic, align with the celebrity’s public persona and evolve over time. Consumers are far more discerning than they once were, and they can immediately recognise associations that exist purely for commercial reasons.

As someone who spends a great deal of time speaking with marketers across categories, I don’t see brands debating celebrities versus creators anymore. That conversation has largely moved on. The more interesting discussions today are about how the two can work together to achieve different business objectives.

Creators have expanded the marketing ecosystem, but they haven’t diminished celebrity influence. If anything, they have made marketers more intentional about where each fits within the consumer journey.

India remains one of the few markets where a single celebrity can still unite audiences across geography, language and demographics. That is an extraordinary asset in an age when attention is increasingly fragmented.

As long as India continues to celebrate shared cultural icons in the way it always has, celebrities and cricketers will remain among the most powerful brand-builders in the country.