Why most Indian brands sound the same on Instagram

Try this before reading further. Open Instagram, search your own category, and save ten posts from ten different brands. Cover the logos with your thumb. Now try to say which brand made which.

Most people get two or three. The rest blur: the same warm beige, the same trending audio, the same "we're so excited to announce", the same festival greeting with the same diya, the same hook in the first second of the reel, the same caption that opens with a question and closes with "tag a friend who needs this". The brands are different companies with different founders, different products and different customers, and on the platform where they spend most of their marketing money they are indistinguishable.

We wrote last month about why a brand needs a story rather than a content calendar. This is the sequel, and it is about the voice that story is told in, because most brands have a story somewhere in a deck and still sound like everyone else on the feed.

The short answer

Brands sound the same because they are made the same way: the same design tools and templates, the same audio trends, the same brief with five "key messages", the same AI drafting, and the same fear of a public comment section. A voice is not a list of adjectives. It is three decisions, kept: who you refuse to sound like, a recurring format that only you could run, and a point of view you would defend in the comments. Then four tests to check the decisions are holding.

Why it happens

Five causes, and most brands have all five.

The tools. There are 481 million Instagram users in India, according to DataReportal, and a very large share of the brands talking to them use the same two or three design tools, with the same template libraries, the same fonts and the same colour presets. The tools are good. That is the problem. A good template makes a competent post for anyone, and competent-for-anyone is the definition of generic.

The trends. Trending audio exists so that the platform can group content, and brands use it because it is said to help reach. Twenty brands in one category using the same audio in the same week have made twenty versions of one reel and spent twenty budgets on it.

The brief. Most agency briefs, including ones we have written, contain a section called key messages, and it contains five of them. Five messages per post is zero messages per post. The brand ends up saying everything and sounding like nothing, and the caption fills with the connective tissue that joins five points together, which is the beige.

The drafting. Captions are increasingly written by AI tools, and a language model writes whatever is most likely to come next. Most likely is another phrase for median. Left unsupervised, every brand's captions converge on the same centre, and the result reads like a very polite press release. ASCI's new guidelines on labelling AI-generated advertising content, issued in September 2026, will make some of this visible to the public. A label will not fix the sameness, but it may make brands notice how much of their voice they have delegated.

The fear. This is the big one. A comment section is public and a founder's reputation is on it, so every edge gets sanded. Legal removes the claim. The founder removes the joke. The account manager removes the opinion in case it offends a future client. What survives is a post that nobody could object to, which is also a post that nobody could remember.

What a voice is

Every brand deck has a slide on voice and it says something like "fun, quirky, premium yet approachable". Those words could sit on the deck of a watchmaker, a water park or a fertility hospital, and we have worked for all three. Adjectives do not make a voice, because adjectives do not make decisions. A voice is what the brand does when the decisions are hard, and it comes from three of them.

Decision one: who you refuse to sound like

Write down, in the brand's own words, the three voices it must never resemble. Make them specific. "We don't want to be boring" is a mood. "We will never open a post with a question, we will never use the word 'elevate', we will never post a greeting that a bank could have posted" is a rule. A refusal list is more useful than a personality slide because it is checkable. Every post either breaks a rule or it does not.

The refusals should cost something. If the list only bans things you were never going to do, it is a decoration. The useful list bans at least one thing that would be easy, popular and safe, because the easy, popular, safe thing is what everyone else is posting.

Decision two: a format only you could run

Amul has had one format since 1967: one character, one topical line, every week, on everything. You know an Amul hoarding from the shape before you read it. That is what an owned format does. It gives a brand a silhouette, and a silhouette is recognised before a word is read.

For Motherhood Hospitals we built The Fertility Trial, which puts fertility food myths in a courtroom and tries them, with a verdict, every episode. For Motherhood Fertility & IVF we built Meet Mitochondria, a recurring science series about the biology nobody explains to patients. Both are on our work page. Neither could be run by a competitor without looking like a copy, because each format grew out of a position: that patients deserve the evidence, and that the evidence can be entertaining. Between them the two series have been watched about 2.2 million times, and the format is what people came back for.

An ownable format has three parts: a structure that repeats, a tension inside it that the brand knows better than anyone, and a name. The courtroom is the structure, the myth versus the evidence is the tension, and "The Fertility Trial" is the name. Decide those three and the calendar fills itself for a year.

Decision three: a point of view you would defend

A brand with no opinion is a catalogue. The quickest test of whether yours has one is to ask what the brand disagrees with in its own category, and whether it would say so in public.

Ours is on the homepage: we think the like button has done more damage to marketing than any other feature, and we say so, and we built a whole argument around it. A hospital we have worked with believes fertility myths deserve a public trial, which is an opinion about how medicine should talk to patients. A mattress brand might believe that Indian bedrooms are built for guests and not for sleep. A café might believe that filter coffee is a craft and that the city is forgetting it. None of these is controversial in the way that gets a brand into trouble. All of them are a position, and a position is what a comment section responds to.

The opinion has to be one the founder would defend personally when the comments turn. If it is not, it is a tagline.

The four tests

Run these quarterly. They take an hour.

1. The logo swap. Take the month's ten best posts and put a competitor's logo on them. Any post that still works has failed. It was a template with your name on it.
2. The one sentence. This is the test from the first article: describe the brand behind the last thirty posts in one sentence, without naming the product. If the team cannot, the posts were not made by a brand.
3. The mute month. Answer truthfully whether anyone outside the company would notice if the account stopped posting for thirty days. If the answer is no, the account has reach without a relationship; more posts will not fix that, and the three decisions above will.
4. The comments. Read the last two hundred comments and sort them into "nice", "emoji", "question", "argument" and "story". A brand with a voice gets questions, arguments and stories. A brand without one gets nice and emoji, and a report that counts them as engagement.

Consistency is not sameness

The usual response to all this is the brand guideline, and most brand guidelines make the problem worse. They enforce sameness with the category (the same safe tone, the same approved vocabulary) while failing at consistency with the brand itself, because they describe adjectives rather than decisions. A brand can be loud at a festival and quiet at a funeral and still be the same brand, as long as the decisions hold.

Our own website has a tone dial on it. Turn it up and the headline shouts in Hindi-film capitals; turn it down and the same page talks plainly. It is the same company at both ends, with the same refusals and the same opinions, at a different volume. It is partly a joke and partly a point: a voice is the thing that stays the same when the volume changes.

The main character

Our homepage says we turn brands into main characters, and we chose that line because a main character is defined by exactly the things most brand accounts lack. A main character wants something specific. A main character has a way of talking that the audience can imitate. A main character has a flaw, which is to say an opinion that not everyone shares. Extras are the people in the background who look like everyone else so that nobody notices them, and most brand accounts are extras in their customers' feeds, by choice, out of fear.

The feed does not punish a brand for having a voice. It punishes brands for not being worth following, and the ten posts under your thumb are the proof. If you want to run the logo-swap test with someone who will tell you the truth about the results, the brief takes two minutes.

Gaurav Tidke is a co-founder of Social Saga.

Frequently asked questions

What is brand voice on social media?

Brand voice is the set of decisions that make a brand's content recognisable without its logo: who it refuses to sound like, the recurring formats it owns, and the point of view it is willing to defend in public. It is checkable post by post, unlike a list of adjectives such as "fun" or "premium", which describe almost every brand.

How do you make a brand stand out on Instagram?

Write a refusal list of specific things the brand will never do, build one recurring format with a structure, a tension and a name that only your brand could run, and take a position on something in your category that you would defend in the comments. Then test monthly: cover the logo on your best posts and see whether they still work with a competitor's name on them.

Should brands use trending audio on Instagram?

Sparingly, and only when the trend fits a format the brand already owns. Trending audio helps the platform group content and may lift reach briefly, but twenty brands in one category using the same audio produce twenty versions of one reel. A brand's own recurring format is a more durable source of recognition than a borrowed sound.

How do I define my brand's voice?

Start with three questions. Which three brands or tones must we never resemble, in specific and checkable terms? What recurring format could we run every week that a competitor could not copy without looking like a copy? What do we believe about our category that not everyone agrees with, and would the founder defend it publicly? The answers are the voice. The adjectives can come later, if at all.

Can AI write a brand's Instagram captions?

AI tools can draft to a schedule, but a language model writes the most likely next phrase, which pulls every brand towards the same median tone. Captions written this way need a human applying the brand's refusal list and opinions, or they will sound like every other brand's AI captions. ASCI's 2026 guidelines also require labelling for AI-generated content in advertising.

Why do brand guidelines fail on social media?

Most guidelines describe adjectives and approved vocabulary, which enforce sameness with the rest of the category rather than consistency with the brand. Guidelines built on decisions, such as what the brand refuses to do, which formats it owns and what it believes, let a brand change volume between a festival post and a serious one while staying recognisably itself.