Brand Placement in Indian Cinema: A 42-Year Journey in Indian Cinema

Abstract

This work analyzes the way brand placements have evolved, how they are now used strategically and what the audience makes of them in Indian movies from the past 42 years. This research uses content analysis, statistical correlations and a look at sentiment to study how brands appear in films from multiple genres and through the decades. We studied data collected from 50 leading Indian films released between 1983 and 2025 using SPSS (v26) and NVivo for coding. People associated brands with movies more by watching blockbusters and the amount of things a character used was linked to the number of brands present (χ² = 21.87, p < 0.01). Of the 1,000 audience comments analyzed, 48% remain neutral, 32% are rated as positive and 20% are identified as negative. According to these findings, brand placement has become a regular part of a marketing strategy by balancing the needs for story and advertising. The study looks at the main pros and cons of using storytelling in branding.