Coca-Cola’s Brand Legacy with Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana

Discover how Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana shaped Coca-Cola’s celebrity marketing over the years. Explore their campaigns, advertisements, brand associations, and the role of Bollywood in Coca-Cola’s Indian advertising strategy.

A soft drink brand faces an unusual branding problem. The product itself changes very little from decade to decade, yet the brand still needs to feel current to whichever generation is actually buying it. Coca-Cola's approach to this problem in India has, for more than two decades, leaned heavily on recognisable film personalities, and two names sit at very different points on that timeline: Aamir Khan, who became the brand's ambassador in the early 2000s and has remained associated with it since, and Ayushmann Khurrana, who fronted a festive Coca-Cola campaign in 2018 at a very different stage of his own career and the brand's communication.

What makes this pairing worth examining is not that two well-known actors appeared in Coca-Cola advertisements. It is that their involvement reflects two different jobs the brand needed done at two different points in its Indian history: one about making an imported product feel indigenous to a mass, small-town audience, the other about tying the brand to a specific, contemporary Indian moment. How did Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana each fit into that evolving communication, and what does comparing them actually reveal about Coca-Cola's celebrity strategy over time?

Coca-Cola and Celebrity Advertising in India

Coca-Cola's relationship with celebrity advertising in India goes back to its re-entry into the market in 1993, after a fifteen-year absence following its 1977 exit over foreign exchange regulations. On returning, the brand initially worked with younger Bollywood faces, including Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan, aiming its communication at an urban, café-going youth audience rather than the broader national market it would later pursue.

A soft drink brand has specific reasons to lean on celebrity familiarity rather than product-led advertising alone. The product itself, a carbonated beverage, offers little room for differentiated technical claims, and much of the purchase decision comes down to mood, habit, and cultural association rather than functional comparison. A recognisable film personality gives the brand a shortcut to relevance, letting it borrow an actor's existing connection with a particular audience segment rather than building that connection from scratch through product messaging. This logic explains why Coca-Cola's Indian advertising history reads less as a single continuous campaign and more as a series of distinct celebrity-led phases, each aimed at a specific audience shift the brand was trying to make at the time.

Coca-Cola and Aamir Khan: Building Personality Into the Brand

Aamir Khan's association with Coca-Cola began around 2000, after the brand's initial youth-focused campaigns with Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan, and became fully defined in 2002 with the launch of "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola," a campaign conceptualised by Prasoon Joshi, then National Creative Director at McCann Erickson India. The campaign's insight was specific and, at the time, quite unusual for a global soft drink brand to act on: in large parts of north and east India, the word "thanda," meaning cold, was used generically to refer to any cold beverage, often a local drink like lassi or nimbu pani rather than a carbonated soft drink. Coca-Cola's stated goal was to make its own name the default answer to that question.

What made this campaign distinctive was how it used Aamir Khan. Rather than appearing as himself endorsing the product, he took on a rotating series of regional characters, a Mumbai tapori, a Hyderabadi shopkeeper, a Nepali watchman, a Punjabi farmer, a Bengali babu, among others, each speaking in a regional idiom and asking for their "thanda" before the reveal that thanda meant Coca-Cola. This is a meaningfully different use of a celebrity than simply putting a famous face beside a product shot. Aamir Khan was being used as a kind of connective device across India's linguistic and regional diversity, letting the same actor represent dramatically different parts of the country within a single, ongoing campaign format.

The campaign also coincided with a specific commercial move, the introduction of a Rs 5 "chota bottle" aimed at small-town and rural consumers who might otherwise have found Coca-Cola's regular pricing prohibitive. Aamir Khan's regional characters and the smaller, cheaper bottle worked together as a single strategy: use a familiar face in unfamiliar local guises to make the brand feel indigenous, while making the product itself more accessible to a broader income range.

By 2005, Coca-Cola shifted the campaign's tone with "Piyo Sar Utha Kar," a more serious, values-driven message positioning the act of drinking Coca-Cola alongside acts of personal pride and optimism, though industry observers at the time noted this newer message lacked the same visibility and popularity as the "Thanda" campaigns. Aamir Khan's association with the brand continued through the 2009 "Open Happiness" campaign, in which he appeared in an animated form for the first time in an Indian television commercial, and his contract was reportedly renewed that year for a significant fee. According to his own more recent public comments, made decades after the original campaign launched, he continues to serve as Coca-Cola's brand ambassador, making his association with the brand one of the longest-running individual celebrity relationships in Indian advertising.

Coca-Cola and Ayushmann Khurrana: A More Contemporary Celebrity Connection

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Ayushmann Khurrana's association with Coca-Cola sits on a different footing entirely. Rather than a long-running, formally titled ambassador role comparable to Aamir Khan's, available reporting points specifically to his lead role in Coca-Cola's 2018 Diwali campaign, "Iss Diwali, Har Dil Bola Tere Naam Ki Coca-Cola," conceptualised by McCann Worldgroup and directed by Vivek Kakkad of Curious Films. He also fronted a separate 2020 campaign for Sprite, a Coca-Cola-owned brand, alongside Taapsee Pannu, built around four short films depicting the lighter frustrations of being confined at home. These appear to be specific campaign engagements tied to particular products and moments rather than a sustained, exclusive Coca-Cola ambassador title of the kind Aamir Khan has held.

That distinction matters for understanding what Ayushmann Khurrana actually contributed. By 2018, he had built a public image around versatility and a relatable, "aam aadmi" quality, a persona industry commentary has specifically linked to his appeal for brands targeting India's middle class, having endorsed dozens of consumer brands across categories by that point in his career. His involvement in Coca-Cola's Diwali campaign put a face associated with contemporary, everyday Indian life, rather than the regional character work Aamir Khan had done over a decade earlier, into a festive, emotionally driven narrative.

The specific concept of the 2018 Diwali film reflects this shift in tone. Rather than a comic, character-driven format, the advertisement told a quieter story: Ayushmann Khurrana playing a tenant living away from his hometown of Delhi during Diwali, whose landlord's family, overhearing his homesickness on a phone call, works to recreate a piece of that celebration for him, with a mild romantic undertone involving the landlord's daughter. This built on a broader pattern in Coca-Cola's festive advertising around that period, which had also included a "Sibling Love with Coca-Cola" theme the previous year, suggesting the brand's Diwali communication in this era was more focused on specific, small emotional stories than the large-scale cultural repositioning "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola" had attempted years earlier.

Coca-Cola Collaboration Ads Featuring Aamir Khan

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Placed side by side, the advertising built around these two actors reveals two distinct communication strategies rather than a simple continuation of the same approach with a new face.

Aamir Khan's "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola" campaigns relied on repetition and regional variation as their core mechanism. The same basic structure, a character asks for "thanda," is misunderstood or corrected, the punchline reveals Coca-Cola as the answer, played out across roughly eight major variations and numerous smaller ones over several years. The product was integrated into the narrative as the answer to a linguistic and cultural question the campaign itself had constructed, which let Coca-Cola claim ownership of everyday, colloquial language rather than positioning itself as an imported or foreign product. Humour here came from Aamir Khan's exaggerated but affectionate regional caricatures, a format that depended on broad, mass-audience recognition of those regional types.

Ayushmann Khurrana's 2018 Diwali advertisement worked through a single, continuous emotional narrative rather than repeated character variations. The product appears within a story about homesickness and unexpected community kindness, with Coca-Cola positioned as a small but meaningful gesture within that story rather than the subject of the film's central joke. This reflects a broader shift in Indian festive advertising generally toward warmer, more sentiment-driven storytelling by the late 2010s, and Ayushmann Khurrana's specific persona, built on relatable, middle-class authenticity rather than exaggerated character work, suited that tonal shift.

What both approaches share is a reliance on the chosen actor's existing public image to do communicative work the product alone could not. Aamir Khan's willingness and ability to disappear into a range of regional characters supported a campaign about linguistic ownership across India's diversity. Ayushmann Khurrana's grounded, relatable screen persona supported a campaign about ordinary, small-scale human connection during a festival. Neither actor was simply a recognisable face attached to a product shot; each was cast specifically because their existing public identity matched the particular story Coca-Cola wanted to tell at that moment.

Aamir Khan vs. Ayushmann Khurrana: Two Celebrity Approaches for One Brand

This comparison is not a ranking. Aamir Khan's campaigns operated on a scale and duration that Ayushmann Khurrana's specific Coca-Cola appearance did not attempt to match, but the two also served genuinely different communication goals at different points in the brand's Indian history, which makes a direct like-for-like comparison of effectiveness inappropriate without further evidence.

How Celebrity Marketing Supports Coca-Cola's Brand Legacy

A brand with as long a public history as Coca-Cola in India faces a specific tension: staying recognisable enough that its core identity remains intact, while staying current enough that new generations of consumers do not see it as dated. Celebrity partnerships offer one route through that tension, since a brand can refresh the specific personality fronting its advertising without necessarily changing its underlying visual identity, tagline structure, or product positioning.

Aamir Khan's decade-plus association gave Coca-Cola continuity through a single recognisable face across a period of significant market expansion, from an urban product into a genuinely national one. Ayushmann Khurrana's later, narrower involvement shows a different use of the same underlying principle, bringing in a face specifically associated with a more contemporary, relatable middle-class identity for a particular seasonal campaign, without displacing Aamir Khan's longer-standing association with the core brand. Read together, these two partnerships suggest that Coca-Cola's approach to brand legacy in India has depended less on a single unbroken celebrity relationship and more on layering different personalities onto different parts of its communication as needed, while keeping certain foundational elements, its jingles, its visual identity, its festive advertising traditions, consistent underneath.

Coca-Cola Brand Ambassador Strategy: What These Partnerships Show

Coca-Cola's broader ambassador strategy in India, visible across Aamir Khan, Ayushmann Khurrana, and other names associated with the company's various brands, including Shah Rukh Khan for Thums Up, Diljit Dosanjh for regional Punjab-focused campaigns, and MS Dhoni for Kinley, suggests a company that treats celebrity selection as tied to a specific communication need rather than a single company-wide ambassador policy. Each of these figures has been matched to a particular product, region, or campaign concept rather than functioning as an interchangeable spokesperson for the entire Coca-Cola portfolio.

This pattern reinforces a broader point about celebrity endorsement strategy in large FMCG companies: the strongest partnerships tend to emerge when a celebrity's public image, audience relevance, and personal style align closely with a specific campaign's concept and goal, rather than simply reflecting whoever happens to be most famous at a given moment. Aamir Khan's regional versatility suited a campaign about linguistic and cultural ownership.

Ayushmann Khurrana's relatable, contemporary persona suited a campaign about ordinary festive warmth. Neither would have necessarily worked as well in the other's specific creative context.

What Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana’s Ads Teach Us About Celebrity Marketing

Looking at both partnerships together, a few broader lessons about celebrity marketing become clear.

• Different celebrities can communicate the same underlying brand in genuinely different ways, as shown by the contrast between Aamir Khan's character-driven regional campaigns and Ayushmann Khurrana's single-narrative festive film.
• Celebrity selection can evolve as audience expectations and advertising conventions change. The shift from exaggerated regional comedy in the early 2000s to warmer, more intimate storytelling by the late 2010s reflects broader changes in Indian advertising, not just a change in which actor Coca-Cola chose to work with.
• A well-constructed advertisement gives the celebrity a specific narrative function, rather than using them purely as a recognisable face. Aamir Khan's regional characters and Ayushmann Khurrana's homesick tenant both served the story the campaign was trying to tell.
• Long-term brand identity can coexist with changing celebrity personalities, since Coca-Cola's core visual and tonal identity in India persisted across both the Aamir Khan-led "Thanda" era and the more recent festive campaigns featuring other actors.
• Celebrity marketing serves a cultural and tonal function beyond simple awareness. Aamir Khan's campaigns worked to make an international brand feel linguistically and culturally native; Ayushmann Khurrana's worked to place the brand within a specific, contemporary emotional register.
• Consistency in brand recognition does not require consistency in which celebrity represents it, since Coca-Cola has maintained a recognisable Indian identity while working with a range of different personalities across different products and campaigns over the decades.

Conclusion

Coca-Cola's associations with Aamir Khan and Ayushmann Khurrana illustrate two distinct moments in the brand's Indian advertising history rather than a single continuous celebrity strategy. Aamir Khan's decade-spanning role, beginning with "Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola" in 2002, used his versatility as a character actor to make an international soft drink brand feel linguistically and regionally native across a vast, diverse market. Ayushmann Khurrana's more specific involvement, particularly the 2018 Diwali campaign, used his contemporary, relatable persona to place the brand within a warmer, more intimate festive narrative suited to a different point in Coca-Cola's communication and to changing conventions in Indian advertising more broadly.

Neither partnership replaces the other, and neither should be read as more successful without further evidence. What their coexistence demonstrates is that Coca-Cola's brand legacy in India has been sustained not by relying on one celebrity type or personality indefinitely, but by matching different public personas to different campaign needs across a long advertising history, while keeping the brand's broader identity recognisable throughout.