Brands spend over Rs 700 crore on influencer marketing this festive season: Qoruz

New Delhi: As India enters the peak festive quarter, brands are set to significantly increase their reliance on influencer marketing, according to the Qoruz Festive Season Report 2025. The report highlights a marked rise in creator-led campaigns from Navratri through to Diwali, shaping consumer behaviour and purchase decisions across the country.

Influencer activity is expected to grow two to three times compared to an average month, with regional content projected to deliver 30% higher engagement than English-language content. The findings suggest that trust and relatability are increasingly tied to local creators, particularly during culturally significant occasions.

Qoruz, a creator intelligence and collaboration platform, said that brands are projected to spend over Rs 700 crore on influencer marketing during the festive period, with engagement anticipated to peak in the weeks leading up to Diwali. The report noted that the growth is being fuelled in part by stronger participation from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets.

Consumer Durables are expected to account for the highest expenditure this year, followed by Fashion and Beauty, FMCG, and E-commerce. These sectors are deepening their investments in creators to influence purchasing decisions, particularly among consumers outside metropolitan centres.

The report also found that 15% of active brands this season are engaging in influencer marketing for the first time. Many of these are emerging D2C firms and regional players using the festive window to scale visibility.

Aditya Gurwara, Co-Founder and Head of Brand Alliance at Qoruz, said, "Most influencer-driven purchases now start before the consumer even searches. That is the shift we are seeing this festive season. It is no longer about grabbing attention, it is about earning trust early. When a creator shows up in your language, during your rituals, with products that fit your reality, that is not advertising, that is belonging. From luxury watches to local sweet shops, from legacy brands to D2C startups, influencer marketing has quietly become the most human way to scale relevance during India’s biggest season. That shift in discovery is where the real creative advantage lies this year."

Priya Vivek, Co-Founder of Qoruz, added, "Last festive season, campaigns that rotated fresh creator content every 72 hours saw 1.6 times more engagement than those that went live all at once. That insight is shaping how brands are planning this year. It's less about how many creators you're working with, and more about how early you're involving them. We're seeing teams track trends in real time, align content with platform behaviour, and sequence creator drops more deliberately. The results are showing up in sharper execution."

Last year, Qoruz recorded more than 337,500 brand mention posts during the festive period, supported by 121,800 unique creators and generating 1.7 billion engagements. Around 28% of tracked product page visits were attributed directly to creator links, bypassing search engines and traditional discovery methods.