The New Physics of Influence: How consumer brands are built in 2026

In every consumer company’s internal budget, there is a line item that sits between what is colloquially known as CM2 and CM3, i.e. Contribution Margin 2 and Contribution Margin 3: “Brand Marketing”. “Brand” is one of the most intangible things the company has to fund. We prefer to think of it as the cost of building influence — the power a brand holds over people who interact with and purchase from it.

We have watched founders pour crores into it, frequently to no avail. On the flip side, a smaller set of founders treat it differently: as capex towards an asset, designed to compound in value. The result is stickiness with consumers through cycles of growth and longevity over peers that lose mindshare.

But why is this hard to get right?

Because where to spend and how to build real equity have both changed drastically over the past few years.

The Changing Landscape

Influence used to be something a brand could buy outright, such as a big media plan which dominates a news cycle, or a distributor relationship strong enough to guarantee shelf space. Today, the physics of influence has moved. Four massive shifts have taken place in the consumer landscape, and understanding them can help rethink how your brand reaches people to create lasting value.

The first major shift was the breaking of broadcast. Until the early 2000s, a television ad could simultaneously reach a whole family, gathered around one shared screen, watching the same show together. The shared screen is now largely gone, replaced by a smartphone where the default is one person watching something in isolation. What was once broadcast reach that could simply be bought, today, has to be won, piece by piece, across hundreds of hyper-niche audiences — a process that takes far more precision. For brand teams, this means one large broadcast bet now gives way to many small ones spread across multiple digital channels.

The second shift was the advent of D2C. Cheap mobile internet, exacerbated by Jio's 2016 entry, collapsed data prices, and a critical mass of Indians began browsing online. “D2C” became the first direct line to the customer. For much of retail history, a brand's real audience had been the distributor. In this world, a brand manager’s job was to make the customer aware of the brand’s existence and the company would solve for availability at stores. At the moment of purchase, if the brand was visible at the store, the customer’s recall would kick in. Winning the distributor's approval determined what was placed on the shelf, and celebrity endorsements existed at least partially to signal quality to the distributor rather than the end-shopper. Fast forward to the D2C world, where customers began to discover, consider, and transact with a brand without once touching the distributor’s shelf. For marketers, who could now reach the customer directly with no middleman, the end-consumer became the only audience worth investing in.

The third shift is the audience itself: Gen Z. Raised entirely in the internet era, Gen Z has become the most informed consumer cohort the country has produced, and this changes what brands can get away with. Our learning is that Gen Z prices authenticity into a purchase the same way earlier generations priced quality. So, anything that comes across as staged or inauthentic costs a brand more than it used to. For this audience, broadcast ATL content just resonates less. Instead, messaging anchored in honesty and specificity builds relatability and establishes trust between the brand and the customer.

The fourth shift is that the most affluent Indian customer has gone ad-dark. They pay, quite literally, to make ads disappear with ad-free subscriptions on streaming services, ad blockers on browsers, or inboxes that block promotional mail. Every one of those subscriptions closes off another channel a brand could previously buy its way into, and the list of places left to reach this customer gets shorter. Instagram now remains the one platform that survives the cut, since even a customer who pays to strip ads from everywhere else still likely scrolls a feed.

Earlier, buying reach was enough for brands to earn consumer mindshare. Due to these four shifts, it is not anymore.

A one-off celebrity shoot, sudden influencer burst, or random PR push are all expenses that don’t convert into long-term influence over consumers. On the other hand, strategies such as a founder's voice, an owned community, differentiated design language that becomes a category code, a creator relationship that turns into co-creation are all opportunities to build equity.

Just as this equity cannot be bought, it also cannot be brute-forced. In our experience, brand equity is built through consistent, hard-earned iteration and backed by active data measurement. At Elevation, we are all for founders taking the long-term, slow path to building brand resonance and believe that those who internalize the shifts in the consumer landscape do not necessarily spend less on visibility. They spend the same brand spend differently, which, within a couple of years, becomes an asset with meaningful yield.

Four common places where this shift shows up

The Celebrity

Celebrities remain the fastest way for a consumer brand to get attention. But the depth of that relationship has changed, with celebrities increasingly becoming co-founders of the brand themselves.

The distinction between being a co-founder and endorser matters because ownership on the cap table or genuine chemistry with the founding team are tangible for the end-consumer. The hyper-online customer cohorts have an instinctive understanding of online media, and this translates to a discerning eye for whether the endorser is genuinely on for the brand or there for a campaign shoot. A celebrity who co-founds a brand signals belief through that relationship, and consumers see this relationship as authenticity on their part during campaign placements too. Think of Shraddha Kapoor talking about Palmonas versus Bollywood superstars endorsing beauty products in a price range they are unlikely to use themselves.

For founders thinking of this route, the nuance now is in making sure that the brand feels independently relevant rather than borrowing equity from a celebrity. Here are three things we have seen work:

• Choose a celebrity whose personality genuinely fits the product and positioning, because that fit is what makes the association resonate.
• Pair a celebrity with a strong operator to hold the P&L and cap table together.
• Treat the celebrity as an amplification of the brand’s ethos, not the ethos itself.

An important consideration here is that no matter how well the celebrity fits the brand’s positioning, product quality remains the non-negotiable foundation. A celebrity can only amplify a differentiated product that customers love and would buy again, and no influence or strategy can create love or repeat purchases on a product with poor quality.

The Social Media Influencer Stack

In many ways, the role that celebrities traditionally played — creating credibility — has moved to social media influencers, whose online personas extend directly to the products they endorse (or critique!) This tracks the shift toward hyper-niche, single-screen audiences, making influencers one of the most readily deployed marketing channels a brand has, while also the most loosely structured. Getting lasting value from this channel starts with figuring out the exact impact each tier of influencer can create:

• Nano influencers build trust and conversion
• Micro influencers build niche authority
• Macro influencers scale a thesis
• Mega influencers broadcast when the brand is already understood

No tier is right by default. Nano and micro influencers usually bring higher engagement and lower CAC, but this tier can be less relevant to compounding influence at scale. Moreover, since each creator reaches fewer people, a mass premium brand working across hundreds of nano and micro influencers can have less say over how its product shows up in every single post, which can pose content quality control issues.

On the other end, macro and mega influencers bring reach, which makes them better suited to building brand awareness. Brands concerned about content control also tend to favour them. The trade-offs here are cost and conversion, since each post is priced far higher and the audiences generally engage less.

Our learning from the best companies, who evolve influencer marketing from experimentation to a program, is that they build internal tools to track which creators and posts actually produce orders and repeat customers. In practice, finding the right influencer mix depends on the brand’s goal and how well known it already is. With testing out different sets of influencers, each round of spend is judged on what it returned and with that data, the next round is better aimed. Clarity is the gift of measurement, and data enables brands to continue investing in influencer marketing long enough for it to actually pay off, versus run in bursts and then stall; the start-stop pattern that keeps anything from compounding.

A prevalent problem today is paying agencies for views and reach without paying for measurement (the same trap ATL spend set), focusing on eyeballs delivered rather than customers won. Wishlink, an Elevation portfolio company, is one of the platforms now giving brands clear attribution on creator-led sales.

For founders spending on influencer marketing, a starting question is: what job is each tier doing in my funnel? Do I need to go right to the top of the pyramid yet?

The Founder’s Own Influence

Unlike celebrities, who can exit, or influencers, who can churn, a founder's personal brand is human influence the company owns forever. Media plans can reset every quarter, but a founder's own voice, once built, is a permanent asset for the business.

There are three archetypes of founder content we see work most frequently:

• The scientist: builds credibility through expertise, most frequently seen in skincare, haircare, health, and finance (spaces where knowledge is the premium). Moxie Beauty’s Nikita Khanna is a great example of someone who does this by making educational content a core pillar of the brand.
• The storyteller: builds credibility through narrative and meaning; wins in lifestyle, food, and parenting (anything where the customer is buying belonging). Blissclub’s Minu Margeret built a community of Indian women through Instagram and WhatsApp, with yoga sessions and fitness challenges, and tells the brand’s story from her own frustration with activewear that didn’t fit. What that community said about fit went back into how the products at Blissclub were designed.
• The operator: builds credibility through transparency about how the business runs and is willing to build in public (this archetype can work across categories). Bombay Shaving Company’s Shantanu Deshpande has become the voice of his brand, hosting his own podcast and commenting publicly on what it’s like to build a consumer brand business in India.

Once a founder builds an engaged audience, reaching them again takes no media spend, and that audience becomes a customer base competitors cannot easily replicate. We think this is one of the lowest CAC channels in the Indian consumer market today. The cost here is the founder’s time, and how much of it should be dedicated to social media is frequently debated. We at Elevation believe this time to be well spent.

Design Language

In 2026, packaging, logo, typography, and aesthetic voice do the work ATL used to in setting up brand recognizability. They are the first thing the customer (especially Gen Z!) notices. Design is also the only part of the brand that does not need a media plan to be visible.

There are two interesting shifts happening within brand design. The first is that the brand’s logo is still a class signal, but consumers are buying into design that resonates with them across price points. Historically, a known logo signaled “I know what I’m buying.” Today, even in India’s top income cohorts (who historically preferred global brands) there is now a space carved out for Indian-made, one that thoughtfully-designed D2C brands are actively taking up.

Second, the brand aesthetic itself is seeing evolution. Minimalism has long dominated brand design and continues to be relevant in certain sectors, but, simultaneously, brands and design culture have started to lean towards a warmer, less polished approach (which is also more expensive to fake, especially with AI!). California Burrito’s Indiranagar outlet in Bengaluru has an eye-catching wall graphic façade which fits this shift.

Both shifts are opportunities to signal taste through design. For founders thinking through their brand’s design, a quick heuristic is checking if the design language matches the product and positioning, beyond simply looking beautiful.

Making Influence Last

Building a consumer brand is hard work, and most decisions about influence are made fast and under pressure. The decisions that hold up start by asking what job the customer is hiring the brand to do — solve a problem and win by being the trusted answer (such as Country Delight) or bring aspiration and win the emotion that purchasing brings the customer (such as Comet). Knowing which one you are determines your brand’s messaging and the way to build it out across each of the mediums of influence above.

A final thought is that every effort builds enduring value only when it is consistent. A one-off ATL push or a single influencer drop fades with the campaign. The work is in ensuring measurement of data from the very beginning. Without a hypothesis about where business impact will show, long-term brand building activities lose internal momentum within a few months. In our experience, stopping early costs more than it seems, because influence compounds consistently and takes years to build, especially in a stratified, digital-led, multi-brand world with no available shortcuts.

Brand equity is the only durable asset. It compounds slowly, should not be bought late and is irreplaceable. At Elevation, we are here for the long haul, and are always looking to partner with founders who are looking to build an enduring brand.