D2C x India

Hey readers,

Welcome to the Twenty-ninth edition of D2C Cents!

Every few years, someone reminds Indian brands that India isn’t one market.

We have 20+ states, different languages, festivals, jokes, references, and ways of talking.

But most brands are back to running the same English-Hindi campaign for everyone. 

We’ve been talking about this for years. 

But ignoring regional audiences is getting more expensive now.

Regional content can directly affect how far your campaign reaches and how much you spend to acquire a customer.

The point isn’t that you should auto-translate your content (you shouldn’t). The point is that the platform where most of your customers are already spending time is building for a multilingual India, because that’s where the engagement is.

Reach used to be something you accumulated. You built a follower base, and your content went to them.

That's over. 

Instagram has been moving in this direction for a while, and this year it made views the main metric. Your post also gets shown to people who don’t follow you. If they watch, Instagram keeps pushing it. If they scroll past, the reach drops.

YouTube Shorts works in a similar way.

So having a big follower count doesn’t mean much if new people aren’t stopping to watch.

And language matters a lot here.

A Malayali in Kochi might scroll past a polished Hindi-English reel. But if the next video sounds like something they’d actually hear at home, they might stop and watch.

That watch time tells the algorithm to show it to more people.

Tier-2+ cities contributed around 65% of incremental online shoppers in 2025. And about two-thirds of new D2C orders come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

Think Muzaffarpur, Udupi, Rohtak. Places a lot of brand teams probably couldn’t point to on a map.

Then there’s language.

73% of India’s internet users consume content in regional languages. A Kantar study found that 75% of Indian consumers are more likely to trust a brand when it speaks to them in their own language, especially during festivals.

There’s another reason to take regional content seriously. It can be cheaper.

Regional-language campaigns can have 20–36% lower CAC, partly because fewer brands are fighting for the same attention.

Everyone is worried about rising CAC right now. Regional content is one of the few places where brands can still find cheaper attention.

Onam is happening right now (August 2026), and it's probably the best example of how brands are finally getting regional marketing right.

And this isn't a small market either. Kerala's festive ad market is worth over ₹1,100 crore, with consumption going up by around 20–30% during Onam. Brands are even shooting Onam campaigns in metro cities where large Malayali communities live. 

None of these are Hindi ads with subtitles. They were built, from the first brief, for one state.

This is where a lot of brands get it wrong.

They take a Hindi script, translate it into Malayalam, Gujarati, or Dogri and call it regional marketing.

But it doesn’t work like that. The jokes change; the references change. Even what feels emotional can change from one place to another.

They built the campaign around the culture first, and language came after.

There’s a newer version of the same mistake happening now.

A brand takes content from a big metro creator, adds a regional voiceover, and calls it a regional campaign.

That misses the point.

Sometimes the better choice is a smaller creator who already speaks the local dialect and has an audience that actually trusts them.

In Bharat, familiarity can matter more than follower count.

If the strategy is “speak in the language people actually use,” then the channels have to change too.

1. WhatsApp is a big one. Open rates can be around 98%, with conversion rates of 45–60%, and messages in the local language tend to work better. Replacing the old COD confirmation call with an automated WhatsApp message in the regional language has helped brands cut RTO by 18–22%, because a customer understands and trusts a message in their own language faster than a call from an unknown number.

2. Regional micro and nano-creators are also becoming more useful than big metro celebrities for many D2C brands. Plum, Dabur, and others are already using them. Vernacular video commerce can also convert 20–30% better than static product catalogues.

3. Regional Reels can get around 30% higher completion rates, while more than 95% of YouTube India is regional. And when the algorithm cares about whether people finish your video, that matters a lot.

For categories like jewellery and ethnic wear, this gets even more interesting.

Tamil Nadu is India's biggest gold market, followed by Kerala. So for these brands, campaigns in Tamil, Malayalam, or Telugu can be some of the highest-return campaigns they run.

So what do you actually do with all this? A few things are still wide open.

1. Start looking at regional search.

People don't search the way brands write SEO content.

Most brands are still fighting over English keywords. There’s a lot less competition in regional search.

Start building FAQs and content around the way people actually ask these questions. This will matter even more as voice search and AI search become bigger.

2. Don't use textbook language.

Tier-2 India doesn’t always speak pure Hindi or formal Punjabi. 57% of urban conversations mix Hindi and English in the same sentence. That’s how people actually talk.

So when a brand uses very formal, “correct” Hindi, it can sound strange and forced.

Your content should sound like real conversations, including the way people naturally switch between languages. That’s something auto-translation still gets wrong.

3. Use AI to make localisation cheaper, but get a local person to check it.

A mid-tier influencer reel can cost ₹2–7 lakh. AI video and voice tools like Sarvam, TrueFan and Bhashini’s 22-language stack can turn one 5-minute shoot into multiple language versions for much less.

But don’t just publish the AI version.

AI can make localisation cheaper. It can’t replace someone who actually knows the language.

4. Don't treat all Tier 2 cities as one market.

“Tier 2” is way too broad.

Coimbatore, for example, is a high-income Tamil market with a strong gold and textile economy, so Tamil-first content can work especially well there. Indore, Jaipur, and Bhubaneswar are different again.

Pick 3–4 city clusters, understand what works in each one, and build for them properly before trying to reach 50 cities.

5. Use ONDC to keep your acquisition costs under control.

Quick-commerce and marketplace platforms can take 15–35% of revenue, while ONDC’s take rate is closer to 3%.

If you’re trying to acquire price-sensitive customers in smaller cities, those fees matter. A cheaper acquisition cost doesn’t help much if you give a big chunk of the sale back in platform fees.

The takeaway

Regional marketing used to be about “respecting the culture.”

Now there’s a real business reason to do it.

Instagram’s audition feed now tests almost every post with strangers first. So a viewer in Salem or Siliguri can decide in two seconds whether your content gets more reach, and language is part of that decision.

That’s the reach shift.

The CAC shift happened at the same time. Regional creative faces far fewer advertisers, so it can acquire the same customer for up to a third less.

You can no longer rely on follower count for reach. But you can potentially lower CAC by speaking to people in their first language.

And this matters even more when two-thirds of your buyers are now outside the metros.

Most brands haven’t factored this in yet.

That gap is the opportunity.

See you next edition - same time, deeper insights.

Until then, keep building strategically.
Abhishek