Why Every Brand Wants to Sound Like a Creator Now
The corporate voice is dying. Almost every brand in India now wants to sound like a person, a creator, a founder. Here is why, and where it goes wrong.
Read a brand's social feed from ten years ago and you can hear the boardroom in it. The measured sentences, the product benefits, the little exclamation mark bolted on to sound friendly. Read the feeds that actually get shared today and you hear something else entirely. You hear a person. Slightly unhinged, quick to joke, fluent in the same references as the people scrolling past. The corporate voice is quietly dying, and almost every brand in India now wants to sound like a creator instead.
Nobody opens Instagram to hear from a brand
The clearest statement of why comes from Zomato's marketing head, Sahibjeet Singh Sawhney, who put the whole shift into one blunt line. Nobody, he said, opens Instagram to hear from a brand. His conclusion is that the brand has to earn its place in the feed the way a creator does, by being genuinely worth watching, which is why Zomato now treats creators less as a media buy and more as content engines that carry both performance and brand building.
Zepto says the same thing in operational terms. Its chief business officer, Chandan Mendiratta, describes a marketing team that runs more like a creator's studio than an ad department, and says the brand applies content-creation principles to its marketing, starting every campaign with a single question: will it earn attention on its own, or does it need to be pushed. That is a creator's question, not an advertiser's.
When a brand borrows the internet's own voice
Duolingo India is the most-copied example. It localised the global "unhinged owl" persona into something specifically Indian, folding the mascot into K-pop, cricket and desi meme lore, and its India following jumped from around ten thousand to a hundred and forty thousand in a year. Its regional marketing lead, Karandeep Singh Kapany, has said the account's whole character is that it is deliberately unhinged, which is how it uses meme marketing without feeling like an ad.
Some brands have skipped imitation and simply hired the natives. When the airline GoAir wanted aviation content, it brought in the enthusiast behind a plane-spotting page to run it. Talent agencies and D2C brands have started posting job openings for "doomscrollers" and in-house meme-makers, roles that would have sounded like a joke five years ago. The newsroom logic is simple. If you want to sound like the internet, hire someone who already lives there.
The founder becomes the channel
The other engine of this shift is the founder. A generation of D2C bosses now runs a personal voice that does more work than the company handle ever could. Mamaearth's Ghazal Alagh built a first-person following on LinkedIn around the building of the brand. SUGAR's Vineeta Singh turned her own visibility into an owned content property, hosting a beauty-education podcast under her own name. The founder is no longer just the boss. The founder is media.
Singh is also the sharpest voice on why any of this works. In a world where young audiences have stopped believing polished advertising, she argues, a brand's credibility now comes from a real, personal voice. As she put it, "you have to have a voice because young people don't trust ads, they trust authenticity." That single sentence explains the entire migration from corporate tone to creator tone.
The industry has started to name the trend at the top. Ashwin Padmanabhan of WPP Media frames it as influence graduating from a marketing channel into a cultural force, which is a polite way of saying the audience now decides what it will listen to, and it will not listen to a press release.
The trap inside the trend
Here is where it gets uncomfortable, and where most brands will trip. Sounding like a creator is not a costume you put on for a quarter. The moment a brand performs a personality it does not actually have, the audience feels the seams.
Zomato itself offers the cautionary note. After years of pioneering the witty, first-person notification voice that everyone copied, it began pulling back, with its own founder calling parts of that approach borderline manipulative. The very voice that built the brand became a thing it had to dial down. And in the wider debate about founders performing on LinkedIn, the agency chief Abhik Santara has warned that the algorithm does not reward expertise, it rewards emotion, and that professionalism has quietly turned into content. That is the risk in one line. When every brand and every founder is performing a personality, performance itself stops being proof of anything.
So the goal was never to sound like a creator. It was to earn the right to be in the feed at all, which creators do by having a real point of view and showing up as themselves. A brand that copies the format without the substance has just built a more expensive way to be ignored.
The brands winning here are not the ones doing the best impression of a creator. They are the ones who found an actual voice, and were disciplined enough to keep it consistent long after the trend that made them try.