The New Frontier in Indian Influencer Marketing
In a significant shift within India's digital marketing landscape, major consumer brands are now deploying sophisticated surveillance tactics to decode their competitors' influencer strategies. This emerging trend sees companies hiring specialized agencies to conduct forensic examinations of rival campaigns, marking a dramatic evolution from traditional marketing approaches.
Forensic Analysis of Rival Campaigns
The practice involves comprehensive studies that dissect every aspect of competitor campaigns, including which influencers were selected, campaign budgets, engagement metrics, and most importantly, the actual return on investment achieved. This strategic pivot comes as brands voice increasing frustration over substantial marketing expenditures delivering disappointing results.
According to Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, co-founder of influencer marketing SaaS platform Qoruz, "The playbook for an optimal influencer campaign is in constant flux, driven by the ever-shifting social media algorithm. For a brand, navigating this churn by itself is painful, especially when huge sums are riding on creators as a massive bet with no standalone guarantee of ROI."
Growing Market for Competitive Intelligence
Qoruz has been providing competition analysis as an additional service to its influencer marketing data suite for over a year, with the strongest demand coming from multi-category 'house of brands' that operate multiple direct-to-consumer labels. Bhuvaneswar observes an interesting ecosystem dynamic where one brand typically discovers a winning campaign formula, prompting rivals to quickly adapt the successful approach until it loses effectiveness.
The pricing for these competitive analysis services varies significantly based on client size, number of competitors analyzed, duration of analysis, and content volume examined. Smaller brands can access basic services starting around ₹15,000, while comprehensive studies in competitive markets can cost up to ₹500,000.
New Players Enter the Arena
Qoruz isn't operating alone in this emerging market space. Astatine, another influencer marketing SaaS platform, began offering competitor analysis services just two weeks ago and has already secured deals with eight brands. The company aims to achieve a 50% sales increase by next year driven primarily by this new offering.
Dhruv Khurana, co-founder of Astatine, explained that "Competition analysis solves the key problem of low return on investment in the ecosystem. With data-backed strategies based on successful campaigns in the same category, brands are not just taking a shot in the dark but an educated guess directly impacting their ROI."
Astatine's analytical process examines minute details including whether campaigns were paid or organic, which specific influencers or user-generated content types drove results, granular key performance indicators like engagement rates and comments, and even the demographic profiles of responsive audiences. Unlike Qoruz, Astatine offers this as a standalone service separate from their software platform, operating on a credit-based system where users purchase credits to select their analysis parameters.
For ₹7,000, brands can analyze one competitor for an entire year, including comprehensive audience insights, according to Khurana's calculations based on the credit system breakdown.
Strategic Implementation by Brands
For companies actively using influencer marketing, these new analytical tools serve testing purposes rather than enabling blind imitation. Kriti Malhotra, influencer marketing manager at Kenvue (formerly Johnson & Johnson's consumer healthcare division), emphasized that "It's important to keep a close track of your competitor's strategy not just to copy-paste their mantra, but to understand what worked for them."
The company regularly uses SaaS platforms to benchmark competitors, then carefully experiments with new influencer categories before making strategic shifts. Malhotra explained their methodical approach: "If we identify that a certain category of influencers are helping a competitor get better engagement and traction, we don't change our strategy overnight. We run experiments with a small fraction of influencers in that category from our pool to see if that works out for us as well. This trial and experiment helps us find our perfect mix."
As influencer marketing expenditures continue rising across categories, adopting proven tactics from competitors is increasingly viewed less as imitation and more as prudent risk management. This strategic evolution represents a maturation of India's influencer marketing ecosystem, where data-driven decisions are replacing speculative investments in the quest for better returns.
