From mass media to micro trust, creators fuel commercial content: Tata Motors

New Delhi: When unfurling the umbrella of the creator economy, sectors like beauty, food, fintech are some of the typical and common sightings under it. But it happens only in India that the most creative-led innovations are quietly making a mark in sectors as industrial as commercial vehicles. 

In India’s rapidly digitising marketing ecosystem, storytelling is not just persuasive, but essential. To paint a picture of it, BuzzInContent.com spoke to Shubhranshu Singh, CMO - CVBU, Tata Motors, who shed light on influencers and creators becoming central to how brands seed trust, trigger discovery, and support business-led decisions. 

Laying out Tata Motors’ strategy around the creator economy, Singh said, “We are working with over 600 influencers, across micro, nano, mega and regional levels, in 11 Indian languages. We’ve produced over 3,500 videos and clocked around 30 crore views.” 

But this is not about scale alone. Singh explained that the true value of influencers, in the context of Tata Motors, lies in the contextual and cultural relevance, especially in a country where language, geography, profession, and its ilk, dramatically shape how people consume and engage with information. 

Knitting it with an example, Singh described, “If you’re a banana plantation owner in Karnataka, you don’t want vehicle insights from someone in Hyderabad’s construction business. You want content in Telugu, from someone like you, speaking your language and living your life.”

Singh elaborated that the purchase of a commercial vehicle is not an emotional impulse but a high-involvement, business-first decision. “Most of our customers buy finance before they buy the vehicle,” he explained, referring to how business viability - cost of ownership, mileage, resale value, and financing terms - shapes the buying journey.

This is where creators outperform traditional advertising. 

“Put all this into an ad, and it feels like a push. But the same thing, shared by an influencer or explained in a native video, suddenly becomes easier to understand and more believable,” Singh noted.

In other words, influencers are no longer an amplification layer. In categories like this, they are the core storytellers, translating utility into trust, complexity into clarity, and corporate messaging into real-life scenarios. 

For the record, in April 2025, Tata Motors Commercial Vehicles surpassed 1 million subscribers on its YouTube channel, earning YouTube's coveted Gold Play Button honour.

What Singh highlighted was a significant shift from mass visibility to micro-relevance, which was key to Tata Motors’ creator strategy. The automobile behemoth used influencers not just for visibility but to educate, simplify, and prime the user for the due diligence that comes before a high-ticket, business-enabling purchase.

“We’re not creating content just to be visible. We’re creating content that feels familiar. When someone sees a creator in their trade, from their city, speaking their dialect, it resonates,” Singh said. 

Another key insight that Singh shared was that consumers don’t separate their expectations by category. The fluid experience of browsing a shopping app, ordering dinner on Swiggy, or watching reels on Instagram becomes the benchmark for all digital interaction, even when researching a commercial vehicle.

According to Singh, consumers do not say, “This app can be clunky because it is for trucks.” They expect parity across the board. 

This puts added pressure on content strategy; not just to inform, but to match the platform-native, low-friction storytelling style people now expect across domains. Influencer content, designed for mobile, built for context, and delivered through trusted voices, fulfills that mandate more effectively than long-format brochures or brand-led films.  

Summing it up, Singh said that the auto industry, and advertising in general, must unlearn the idea that “the product sells itself.” 

We need to stop obsessing over the truck. People don’t just see the vehicle—they relate to the person driving it. The human story is far more powerful,” he said.

And those human stories are best told not by brands, but by real voices- peers, community figures, creators - who understand the nuances of business, geography, and aspiration that shape every purchase, Singh further said.