The many lives of branded content in India

New Delhi: You would not immediately think to compare Bellavita’s short film featuring Raghav Juyal with the emergent bait-and-switch branded content videos on Instagram. Placed side by side, they appear to sit on opposite ends of the branded communication spectrum. Yet that contrast is precisely what makes studying them together useful – it offers a fuller view of the narrative world of contemporary brand and marketing communication.

Bellavita’s two-minute film emerges within a men’s fragrance category long dominated by giants like Axe and Wild Stone, each with distinct stylistic approaches but united in a core promise: an effective fragrance can transform any man – whether hyperbolically nerdy or conventionally masculine – into a magnet for women, with little effort on his part.

For a relatively new entrant, this context presents a clear challenge. How does it persuade consumers to move beyond entrenched category messaging toward something that feels fresh and memorable? How does it sketch a masculinity that balances relatability with aspiration, while stepping away from earlier representations that, though desirable, often felt overtly fantastical?

Bellavita addresses this by foregrounding a masculinity that has become more visible in the Gen Z era – embodied in the slim build of the average young man whose charisma, rather than a sculpted physique, anchors his appeal, while his easy-going mindset comes to be represented by his fluid physical presence, carrying him out of a low moment with relative ease.

The narrative shifts away from physically enchanting women as the ultimate marker of masculine success. Instead, success lies in learning to recover from heartbreak and moving toward stronger and better possibilities. In doing so, Bellavita refrains from centring the product as a magical catalyst. The fragrance appears at key junctures in the protagonist’s journey, but the focus remains on the self-possessed Bellavita user.

Celebrity presence functions as more than a straightforward endorsement. By featuring Raghav Juyal, the film leans into a form of fourth-wall-break storytelling that has gained traction over the past decade, loosely mirroring Juyal’s own rise through talent and self-made visibility. The blurring of fiction and reality strengthens the narrative texture.

To reinforce this effect, the film’s colour palette shifts from black-and-white to colour and back again, allowing make-believe and reality to bleed into one another. The formal play supports the fourth-wall break while encouraging sustained engagement – even a rewatch – to track the transitions and nuances embedded within.

There are several other dimensions worth exploring, including the significance of “Yeh Dil Deewana” playing in the background, but beyond the scope of this piece. The key point is that the branded film builds layered meaning, inviting audiences to engage with it almost as they would a feature film or television series. It draws on category codes while borrowing narrative techniques from outside traditional brand communication to expand its storytelling potential.

In contrast, the bait-and-switch marketing videos discussed alongside Bellavita’s film respond to a markedly different context. Local brands such as Gora Tiles, Krishna Restaurant, and Himanshu Shadi Card do not operate with the sharply articulated brand identities typical of national players or new-age D2C brands. Whether due to budget limitations or a preference for a sales-led approach, their objective is more direct: capture attention repeatedly and embed recall so that, when a category need arises, the brand surfaces through familiarity.

In an environment marked by advertising fatigue, these brands must find ways to break into crowded content feeds just as much as the bigger brands do. However, without the production resources available to the latter, many local brands have turned to bait-and-switch marketing – an approach that stands in clear contrast to Bellavita’s polished storytelling.

Bait-and-switch content typically appears as short, low-cost videos that establish high emotional stakes within seconds. They hook viewers through pity or sympathy – for instance, showing a small child being beaten in a video titled “Gunga Bache Di Himmat” – or through aspiration, as in a narrative framed as “THE SON RETURNED IN A POLICE UNIFORM” while his father works as a labourer.

Attention is also secured through curiosity, suspense, or spectacle: explaining how to escape a submarine, narrating a mystical staircase that stretches into the sky, or presenting POV footage of a cliff dive into fog. In each instance, the emotional or sensory hook precedes any explanation or resolution.

Local brands piggyback on these formats, converting them into branded communication through a sudden pivot that introduces the brand and pushes a clear product proposition. The brand appears late – after attention has already been captured – inserting itself into an existing emotional arc rather than constructing one from the ground up.

Bait-and-switch marketing, in this sense, feels representative of a nativist creativity more commonly associated with tier 2 and tier 3 cities – marked by rawness, improvisation, and unpredictability. It responds to a cultural environment shaped by alertness and street-smartness, where attention is scarce, and competition is immediate.

To some viewers, the format can fairly appear emotionally manipulative in the way it structures its reveal. The video does not disclose at the outset that it is an advertisement – or even what it is truly about. It opens as something else: a social-issue narrative, a suspenseful scenario, an emotionally charged moment, or a curiosity-driven clip. The viewer is offered just enough information to become invested, yet not enough to recognise the underlying intent.

Yet, what may read as cunning from a distance often emerges as a pragmatic response to constraint. Himanshu of Himanshu Shadi Cards from Chawri Bazaar explains this approach, saying, “I do this in my videos so that people watch the video till the end. If I directly come in front of you with the product and say, ‘take this wedding card’, no one would take it.”

Placed together, these forms reveal something larger about branded content in India. They demonstrate plurality rather than hierarchy. One mode performs polish, cinematic layering, and aspirational masculinity. The other performs improvisation, urgency, and pragmatic survival. One assumes interpretive leisure; the other anticipates scroll-speed impatience. Both are culturally intelligible. 

Seen this way, branded content becomes a record of Indianness itself. The same media ecosystem sustains high-production reflexive storytelling and raw, opportunistic hooks. What counts as clever, manipulative, authentic, or entertaining varies across class positions, geographies, and digital fluency. Together, both kinds of marketing represent the characteristic of co-existence that often symbolises Indianness: cinematic self-awareness alongside jugaad immediacy, aspirational polish alongside tactical hustle.