There is a particular kind of Indian summer that lives in our memories. The summer that was brought to life through an advertisement. The sky turns white by noon, roads heating up and melting and somewhere above you is the sun sucking your energy from the body with a straw on your head, like a child draining a juice box. You reach out for the energy drink, drink it, and you survive.
The Glucon-D ad is still remembered as the summer advertisement, which means it worked. And not because it was subtle, but because it was accurately exaggerated. Summer in India is not a season. It is a physical event, and the brands that have understood this earliest have built their equity inside it.
Summer marketing for decades has been timed to moments when consumers are looking for relief from the heat. Unfortunately, the campaign is still relevant, and we feel the child in the film more and more. Not only a particular product, but beverages have been one of the dominating categories in the summer marketing chapters.
In April 2026, sea surface temperatures were recorded as the second-highest in history. Scientists attribute this not to a seasonal fluctuation but to the early signs of an El Niño event taking shape, and one that could turn into a Super El Niño.
The signs were clear when the summers arrived early, expected to stay longer, and are reshaping daily routines around them.
For most people, this translates into a longer stretch of discomfort. For brands, it translates into a longer selling window and a consumer who is not browsing casually but actively looking for relief.
As expected, the market has responded accordingly. The Indian soft drink industry is projected to reach Rs 1.4 trillion by 2026-27. Consumer spending on beverages rises by as much as 35% during peak summer months. In the March quarter of 2025 alone, carbonated drinks grew 20-25% in volume. These are not numbers driven solely by marketing. They are driven, in part, by a season that keeps getting harder to ignore.
What is India ordering this summer?
Swiggy Instamart’s Summer Trends 2026 report offers a close read of how consumer behaviour is shifting in real time.
The data released last month showed that the beverage category is moving away from standard carbonated drinks. Jeera masala soda grew 900% month-on-month in March.
Cold coffee surged nearly 700%. Coconut water, buttermilk, lassi, and milkshakes all saw significant jumps.
The pattern is flavour-first. The consumer reaching for a drink is less likely to default to a cola and more likely to reach for something that feels specific, a masala soda, a café-style cold coffee, or a regional cooler that carries some familiarity. Zero-sugar and functional drinks are also seeing growing demand.
Timing matters too. Like ice cream, beverages peak in the evening, between 6 pm and 9 pm. This is the window when the heat of the day is still in the body, but the sun is going down, and it is when brands have the most direct access to someone actively seeking relief.
City-level preferences add another layer. Ahmedabad and Rajkot lean into buttermilk and soft drinks, Chandigarh is dominated by lassi, while Delhi and Lucknow show buttermilk consumption.
Bengaluru and Mumbai tilt towards fruit-based drinks. These numbers represent how locally specific summer actually is, even within a single country.
From nostalgia to AI localisation: Summer marketing now
Against this backdrop, the campaigns running in summer 2026 reflect brands working harder to be specific.
Sprite opened the season with two distinct campaigns. The first, a digital-first campaign featuring comedian Samay Raina and creator Sahiba Bali, has been built around the idea of cooling down the right way, ‘Sahi se cool down kar‘. The format leans into short-form content, with scenarios that range from chaotic to unsettling, deliberately designed to feel native to the way younger audiences consume video on their phones.
The second Sprite campaign takes a different approach to the same problem. The brand uses AI to produce multiple versions of the same ad featuring brand ambassador Sharvari Wagh, each adapted to reflect how summer is experienced in different parts of the country.
In the films, Wagh asks an AI system for solutions to the heat, which responds with increasingly impractical suggestions, such as an ice bath in the middle of the road, sitting inside a refrigerator while waiting for a traffic signal. The point of the campaign is the gap between what an AI suggests and what actually works, with a cold Sprite framed as the practical answer.
Instead of one film speaking to a national audience in general terms, the campaign has versions that name specific kinds of heat, the ‘taptapi garmi’ of Patna, the ‘chipchipi garmi’ of Mumbai, the humidity of Kolkata.
Coca-Cola relaunched its RimZim Jeera through a 360-degree campaign across digital, outdoor, influencer, and in-store channels, positioning itself at the intersection of nostalgia and a growing preference for local, flavour-led alternatives. The product itself, a jeera-flavoured carbonated drink, fits into the broader trend the Instamart data captured: jeera masala soda growing 900% in a single month.
The campaign aims to reach consumers who remembered the product and consumers who had never encountered it, which are two different conversations to have simultaneously.
On the other hand, Tang’s approach to summer has focused on the school holiday window.
Last summer, the brand ran a campaign called ‘Tang Summer Break Bestie,’ built around the insight that children get bored when their friends travel during the break. The campaign let kids create personalised animated characters by scanning QR codes on Tang packaging, routing the engagement through the brand’s own website rather than a third-party platform. The mechanism tied product purchase to a week-long digital activity, extending the brand’s presence beyond the shelf and into the idle hours of summer vacation.
What connects these campaigns, across different brands, different formats, and different target audiences, is that none of them are treating summer as a generic demand spike. Each is working from a specific insight about who is hot, when they are hot, and what kind of relief they are looking for.
The Glucon-D ad from three decades ago was doing the same thing. It did not tell consumers that summer was pleasant. It acknowledged the physical reality of the season and offered a solution framed around that reality.
That instinct has not changed. What has changed is the precision with which brands can now act on it, for instance, through AI-enabled localisation.
The season keeps getting longer, and the campaign tools keep getting sharper. And the insight at the centre of all of it remains; in an Indian summer, relief is not optional, it is the necessity that brands aim to fulfil by their products.
