India's Visual Language Crisis

What happens when brands confuse recognisability with authenticity.

Image: Vogue India

There’s something strange happening when you scroll through Instagram.

Open any major Indian brand’s feed—automotive, luxury, FMCG, fashion—and you’ll see the same India on repeat: weddings draped in marigolds, palace courtyards at sunset, artisans weaving traditional textiles by hand, families gathered around elaborate feasts. The production values are impeccable. The budgets are in crores. The reach is in millions.

Now open a creator’s feed—someone with 150,000 followers from Visakhapatnam, Coimbatore, or Pune. You’ll see a completely different country. Fisherfolk’s daughters learning to surf at dawn on the Bay of Bengal. Makeshift skateparks in rural Andhra Pradesh hosting national competitions. Tamil food vloggers documenting street food evolution in tier-2 cities. Regional comedy creators racking up millions of views in languages most brand managers don’t speak.

Two Indias. Same screen. Same year.

One exists in brand imagination. The other exists in reality.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: the creator with the smartphone and zero budget is getting 22% engagement rates. The brand that spent ₹3.2 crores on palace courtyards is getting 0.8%. The gap isn’t production quality. It’s not reach. It’s something more fundamental brands are speaking a language nobody uses anymore, while targeting everyone and resonating with no one.

This is India’s Visual Language Crisis. Not a creative problem. A brand strategy problem. And it’s costing brands access to the fastest-growing consumer segments in the country while 2.5 million creators build cultural capital with the exact subcultures brands should be targeting.

The Mass Appeal Trap

Let me show you what I mean with a real example.

In late 2024, a luxury automotive brand launched a campaign celebrating “Contemporary Indian Life.” The brief explicitly called for modern, urban India. The result? Palace courtyards (repurposed as event spaces, but still palaces). Women in silk sarees examining jewelry. Artisans hand-painting pottery. Families at elaborate wedding feasts. Budget: ₹3.2 crores. Instagram impressions: 12 million. Engagement rate: 0.8%. Comments overwhelmingly from 45+ demographic.

Same week, a 22-year-old creator from Visakhapatnam posted a series documenting her city’s emerging surf culture. Fisherfolk’s daughters catching waves before dawn. Makeshift surfboard repair workshops in fishing villages. Early morning sessions on the Bay of Bengal, shot entirely on her phone. Budget: ₹0. Reach: 180,000 views. Engagement rate: 22%. Demographics: 78% between 18-34. Tangible impact: three local surf schools reported 300% increases in inquiries.

The brand deployed what I call “recognizable India” —aesthetic shorthand designed to resonate with everyone. The creator captured “authentic India” a specific subculture—lived reality for a niche community. One aimed for mass recognition. The other achieved deep cultural resonance with exactly the demographic that influences broader trends. One talks to India. The other speaks as India.

Indian consumers—especially younger ones—can tell the difference

Here’s what every brand strategist knows but somehow forgets when executing in India: when you design for everyone, you design for no one.

Aspirational brands don’t start by appealing to the masses. They start by becoming essential to specific elite communities or subcultures, then cultural influence flows outward. Supreme didn’t become a global brand by targeting all skateboarders. It targeted a specific New York skate scene, became authoritative there, and cultural capital radiated outward.

Palace courtyards are designed for “all of India.” Visakhapatnam surf culture is designed for Kerala coastal youth. Guess which one has cultural velocity?

In brand strategy terms, one is playing defense (don’t alienate anyone). The other is playing offense (become essential to someone). And in 2026, offense is winning.

The Strategic Cost Of Mass Thinking

The Economic Blindspot

The Boston Consulting Group’s 2025 report: 2-2.5 million monetized content creators currently influence $350-400 billion in consumer spending in India. By 2030, that crosses $1 trillion. Here’s the critical part—80% of these creators operate from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The subcultures brands aren’t seeing. The places where most brand creative teams have never spent meaningful time.

These creators achieve 20-30% higher engagement rates than English-language metropolitan creators. Regional-language content now comprises over 60% of YouTube India’s total watch time. Not 60% of regional content. Sixty percent of all consumption. This isn’t a trend. This is a complete restructuring of what counts as Indian content.

This is evidence that cultural capital has relocated and brands are still mining it in the wrong places.

Brands spend ₹2-3 crores on campaigns generating 1-2% engagement while creators spend approximately nothing generating 15-25% engagement targeting specific subcultures. The differential isn’t production quality. It’s strategic positioning—creators understand that cultural influence flows from the specific to the general, not the other way around. The differential is linguistic accuracy.

Yet most major brands continue commissioning creative from the same five metropolitan agencies, who shoot in the same pool of heritage locations, who produce campaigns that get incrementally worse engagement every quarter while executives scratch their heads about “digital fatigue.”

The Market Segmentation Failure

UNICEF’s 2023 study: 87% of Indians report media stereotypes them in exclusively traditional roles. Only 13% agreed media reflects their lived experience.

Thirteen percent.

From a brand strategy perspective, this isn’t just a representation problem. It’s a market segmentation failure. When 87% of your potential audience doesn’t see themselves in your visual language, you haven’t created “universal appeal.” You’ve created universal irrelevance.

Heritage aesthetics might be recognizable to “all Indians” in recall testing, but they’re not culturally meaningful to any specific Indian community trying to define their contemporary identity. That's not a creative failure. That's a systemic disconnect between how brands see India and how India sees itself. And it's widening.

The Future-Proofing Failure

The advertising industry remains geographically concentrated. The talent pipelines feed from design schools teaching classical aesthetics over street culture. Client briefs pre-load “authentically Indian” with established visual vocabulary. Multi-stakeholder approval processes kill innovative approaches early. Here’s what happens when you optimize for mass appeal instead of subcultural relevance:

• Demographic aging: Every quarter, your demographic skews older. Younger consumers who define trends don’t see you as culturally relevant. You become your parents’ brand.

• Engagement collapse: Even with increased ad spend, engagement rates continue declining

• Market share erosion: Contemporary brands with modern visual vocabulary capture younger segments. Trends flow from subcultures to mainstream. By targeting the mass market directly, you miss the subcultures where trends originate.

• Cultural irrelevance: You become the visual equivalent of a brand still optimizing for print ads in a digital world

The Structural Blindness

The frustrating part is that this isn't malice. Nobody's intentionally misrepresenting India. The problem is structural, which makes it harder to fix but also more predictable.

You can’t build subcultural authority if you’ve never spent time in the subculture. A Delhi agency visiting Kerala’s surf community for a week can extract imagery. They can’t build subcultural credibility. They don’t know the internal status hierarchies, the aesthetic codes, the language patterns that signal insider versus outsider.

This creates strategic blindness. When your only reference points are metropolitan, you default to creating for “all of India” because you don’t have intimate knowledge of any specific India. Mass appeal becomes the path of least resistance—not because it’s strategically sound, but because it’s all you can authentically execute.

Approval Processes Kill Specificity

A heritage campaign designed for “pan-Indian appeal” triggers no objections. A campaign deeply embedded in Kerala surf culture or Pune skate scene triggers nervous questions: Will this alienate other regions? Aren’t we going too niche?

The structural incentive: propose mass-appeal imagery, get approval quickly. Propose subculturally-specific imagery, defend why you’re “limiting” the audience.

But this inverts sound brand strategy. Brands gain influence by being essential to specific subcultures, then letting that cultural capital spread. Mass brands lose influence by being vaguely relevant to everyone and essential to no one.

How To Build Subcultural Authority

While brands optimize for mass recognition, specific Indian subcultures are building cultural capital at accelerating rates. These aren’t “trends to watch.” These are the influence networks where mainstream taste gets formed. And right now, they’re unsponsored territory.

India's surf communities are thriving across Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, and Visakhapatnam—the Varkala International Festival drew 65 competitors in 2024. Skateboarding evolved from Olympic prep into underground basement scenes in Delhi and international-standard DIY parks in rural Andhra Pradesh. Polo is being reimagined by younger players in Manipur and Ladakh. Regional hip-hop scenes are exploding in Gully Boy's wake—from Dharavi to Shillong. Gaming communities are organizing esports tournaments in tier-2 cities. Fitness subcultures around CrossFit, calisthenics, and functional training are creating new aspirational identities. Each represents the same pattern: young (18-34), digitally native communities mixing traditional knowledge with global forms, creating hybrid aesthetic vocabularies, building full ecosystems around specific identities—and completely ignored by major brands still showing these same communities frozen as pastoral villages.

The solution isn’t “put skateboarders in your next campaign.” That’s just swapping tropes. The solution is embedded presence where cultural capital is forming.

1. Map Your Entry Points: First, identify where trends form in your category before going mainstream. Then diagnose your current positioning: Are your campaigns designed for “everyone” or “someone specific”? If your creative is recognizable to all of India, you have no subcultural authority anywhere.

2. Build Embedded Presence: Stop researching. Start embedding. Don’t send metro agency teams to “research” subcultures for a week—that produces tourism, not authority. Instead: Identify people already embedded—regional creators, community organizers, subcultural documentarians. Compensate them fairly for cultural knowledge transfer. Learn the aesthetic codes, status hierarchies, language patterns. Build from subcultural knowledge, not about subcultures from outside. Example: Don’t research Kerala surf culture to extract imagery. Partner with Kovalam surf instructors for 6-12 months. Understand what problems they actually face. Design solutions that meet real needs. Earn cultural authority by being useful first.

3. Track subcultural signals: Monitor micro-networks where subcultures congregate (Discord, WhatsApp groups, regional platforms). Track what specific communities create, not what algorithms promote. Identify emerging aesthetic codes before they hit mainstream.

4. Build long-term partnerships: Don’t hire influencers to hold your product. Partner with community organizers to solve real problems. Co-develop products that meet subcultural needs. Support infrastructure (skateparks, surf schools, creator equipment). Amplify subcultural content without requiring brand mentions. Authority comes from being useful over time, not from paid posts.

5. Organize for Depth Over Breadth: Abandon pan-Indian optimization. Build regional campaigns with deep subcultural specificity. Accept that depth of subcultural connection in one region beats breadth of recognition nationally.

6. Measure subcultural authority differently: Are specific subcultures sharing your content organically? Do subcultural tastemakers reference you? If not, you have zero cultural capital where it matters.

7. Protect this work structurally: Allocate fixed budget (20-30%) to subcultural strategies with different ROI timelines. Create parallel approval tracks streamlined for experiments. Measure on cultural authority over 12-24 months, not quarterly reach. Without structural protection, subcultural strategy gets killed by quarterly metrics optimized for mass reach.

Which India Will You Design For?

India’s Visual Language Crisis is actually a brand strategy crisis, brands are optimizing for mass appeal, they are playing safe in an era where influence flows from subcultures, not to them.

Indian brands face two paths:

Path One: Continue optimizing for mass appeal. Keep spending crores on heritage aesthetics everyone recognizes. Watch engagement rates decline. Watch your customer base age out. Compete on price because you have no cultural premium. Eventually get disrupted by brands that understood subcultural strategy.

Path Two: Build subcultural authority. Identify the specific subcultures where taste forms in your category. Embed there. Become useful there. Earn authority there. Let cultural influence radiate outward. Charge premium because you’re essential to tastemakers. Future-proof by staying embedded where trends form.

One path optimizes for everyone and wins no one. The other targets someone specific and eventually wins everyone who aspires to be them.

Your current mass-market strategy is not just culturally disconnected. It’s strategically obsolete.

The good news? The subcultures where you should be building authority are accessible, active, and currently unsponsored. 2.5 million creators are embedded in exactly the communities where your brand should have authority. The barrier isn’t access—it’s willingness to abandon mass-appeal thinking for subcultural depth.

As India’s creator economy approaches $1 trillion in influenced spending by 2030, the brands that win won’t be the ones everyone recognizes. They’ll be the ones specific subcultures consider essential.

When you design for everyone, you design for no one. The visual language is being written in subcultures brands don’t know exist. The choice is whether to join those conversations now, while cultural authority is still available or keep optimizing for mass recognition while India’s influential subcultures move on without you.