Most brand strategy in India still gets built in English first, translated later if there’s budget left over for it. With close to 958 million active internet users in the country, and a widely cited KPMG-Google report projecting Indian-language users would eventually make up the large majority of the country’s online population, that approach is reaching a shrinking share of the audience it was originally designed for, and the gap between where the strategy is built and where the audience actually lives keeps widening every year.
The Gap Sitting in Plain Sight
English-first marketing was never a bad idea on its own terms, it simply reflected where the spending power used to be concentrated, urban, English-comfortable, and clustered in a handful of metros. That audience hasn’t disappeared, and it’s still worth serious attention. It has just stopped being most of the country. Everyone else is being spoken to in a second language, if they’re being spoken to with any real intent at all, while the platforms they actually spend their time on, regional short-video apps, vernacular news aggregators, voice-first assistants that let someone search and shop without typing a word of English, have quietly grown faster than almost anything built around English-first content.
A media plan that leads with English and treats regional language as a localisation afterthought, something handed to a translation vendor once the “real” campaign is locked, is effectively building its whole strategy around a shrinking minority of the country and hoping the rest follows along anyway.
Meesho is a useful example of a brand that noticed this early rather than late, and built around it rather than bolting it on. While much of Indian e-commerce built its playbook around metro, English-speaking shoppers first and expanded outward later, Meesho designed its platform for Tier 2 and Tier 3 India from the outset, in the languages and formats those users were already comfortable with, rather than porting over an English-first model and hoping it would translate downward. That decision wasn’t cosmetic or limited to marketing copy. It shaped product listings, seller onboarding, and customer support end to end, all built around regional accessibility as a foundation rather than layered on afterward as a translation exercise once the platform was already live.
Fit Matters More Than Reach
The advantage there wasn’t really about reach in the raw sense, plenty of brands can technically reach these markets with an English app, a regional-language ad campaign on top of it, and a hope that the gap doesn’t matter too much. What separated the brands that actually converted in these markets was fit. A regional-language experience tells a user something an advertisement alone can never fake, that the platform was actually built with them in mind from the start, not simply expanded to include them once the metro market had already saturated and growth needed a new lever to pull.
Reach
A brand can technically reach a regional market with an English-first product and a local-language campaign layered on top.
Fit
A regional-language experience signals that the platform was actually built around the user’s real life from the start.
In a country where trust is still largely relational rather than purely transactional, built through familiarity and repeated positive experience rather than a single persuasive ad, that distinction shows up in very concrete ways.
It shows up in how people convert on a first visit, in how often they come back without being retargeted into it, and in whether they recommend the platform to someone else in their own language, which is often where the real compounding growth actually comes from in these markets. A user who feels like an afterthought market being mopped up for growth behaves very differently from one who feels like the platform was built around their actual life.
What Actually Separates Vernacular Strategy From Translation
A lot of what gets labelled “vernacular marketing” internally is really just English content run through a translation layer at the end of the process, and audiences tend to notice, even when they can’t quite articulate why something feels slightly off. A line that lands cleanly in English rarely lands the same way word-for-word in Tamil or Bhojpuri, because the idea underneath the line has to be built separately for that language and that cultural context, not simply converted into it after the English version is already finished and approved.
The brands getting this right tend to do a few things differently, and consistently.
They lean on regional creators rather than national ones for local campaigns.
Because a creator whose audience is concentrated in one state or one language usually holds a tighter, higher-trust relationship with that audience than a pan-India celebrity ever will, even one with a far larger total following.
They favour cultural specificity over broad relatability.
Betting that a hyper-local reference, a regional festival, a dialect-specific joke, a very particular local food habit, will do more work within that one market than a polished, generic pan-India message that has been carefully sanded down to offend nobody and therefore genuinely resonate with nobody either.
They treat the language decision as a creative brief in its own right.
With its own strategy, its own references, its own sense of humour, rather than a checkbox to tick after the “main” campaign is done.
None of this holds up, though, if the product experience doesn’t match the marketing that got someone there in the first place. Meesho’s advantage lasted specifically because the vernacular experience didn’t stop at the advertisement, it carried all the way through checkout, delivery updates, and customer support in the same language the ad was in. A vernacular campaign sitting on top of an English-only product experience doesn’t just underdeliver, it actively breaks the trust the campaign just spent real money and creative energy building, because the user notices the mismatch the moment they try to actually use the thing they were sold.
Why This Isn’t Just a Reach Number
It’s tempting to treat vernacular strategy as purely a distribution decision, a way to add a few more markets to the reach numbers in a quarterly deck. That undersells what’s actually happening. Speaking to someone in their own language signals something an advertisement alone can’t fake, that a brand has genuinely bothered to understand who it’s talking to rather than simply expanding its distribution list and assuming the message will land regardless of the language it arrives in.
In a market where relationships still do most of the heavy lifting that trust depends on, that signal compounds over time into loyalty and referral in ways a larger media budget, spent in the same old language, simply cannot replicate on its own, no matter how much gets poured into it.
