Nearly a decade into digital marketing, there is a critical gap in how brands engage with India’s emerging online audience: a billion people who may not be comfortable with English, who lack traditional credit infrastructure, and who are now online thanks to affordable connectivity like Jio.
The English Tax
The English Tax is the overhead that a user has to overcome to understand what is being said. I personally think in English after decades of education in the language. India2 users face genuine barriers. Many cannot read English letters and rely on voice input or regional language interfaces. Yet marketers largely ignore them.
Platform Responsibility
Will the major platforms — Google, Facebook, and others — take responsibility for serving India2 meaningfully? Content creators like BhaDiPa and TVF are producing regional language material. Search volumes in Hindi and Marathi suggest enormous untapped territory. The platforms have the infrastructure. The intent is less clear.
Going Regional
Successful regional marketing demands more than translation. Content needs authentic localisation that accounts for language-specific nuances, cultural models, and the memes that actually resonate. A direct translation of an English campaign almost always falls flat. The work has to start from scratch in the regional context.