Rashmika Mandanna and Pilgrim: A Gen-Z Beauty Strategy in Action

Discover how Rashmika Mandanna and Pilgrim created a Gen-Z beauty strategy through celebrity marketing, relatable campaigns, social media content, and beauty-focused brand communication.

Beauty brands chasing a younger Indian audience face a specific problem. Gen-Z consumers scroll past most advertising without registering it, are quick to spot a mismatched or purely transactional celebrity deal, and tend to trust a face they already follow more than a claim printed on packaging. Getting the right person to represent a beauty brand, then, is not just a visibility exercise. It is closer to picking the right translator between a product and an audience that has very little patience for anything that feels forced.

This is roughly the challenge Pilgrim was solving in August 2024 when it named Rashmika Mandanna as brand ambassador for its hair care range, and again in March 2026 when the two returned with a new campaign called Nani Ka Secret. The partnership is worth examining closely, not simply as another celebrity signing, but as a case study in what Gen-Z beauty marketing actually looks like when it is done with some care. Why did Pilgrim choose Rashmika specifically, and how has the collaboration been built to speak to a younger, more sceptical audience rather than just borrow her fame?

Rashmika Mandanna and Pilgrim: Why This Partnership Makes Sense

Pilgrim's own explanation for the signing was fairly direct. The brand described itself, in its official announcement, as a young and rapidly growing beauty company known for its appeal to Gen-Z, and said it found in Rashmika a match through her dynamic presence and popularity among younger audiences. Gagandeep Makker, Pilgrim's co-founder, called her the right person to represent the brand as it entered what he described as its next phase of growth.

A few specific points explain why this pairing holds together rather than reading as a generic celebrity booking:

• A genuinely pan-India audience. Rashmika Mandanna built her career across Telugu and Hindi cinema, which gives her a reach that spans regional lines in a way a single-industry star typically cannot match, useful for a brand selling nationally rather than in one linguistic market.
• An image that reads as current rather than aspirationally distant. Her public persona, built through recent, high-visibility films and constant social media presence, fits a beauty category where audiences increasingly want a face that feels like a peer with better access, not an untouchable icon.
• A brand already positioned around a younger buyer. Pilgrim describes itself as a clean beauty brand built on combining ingredients and traditions from around the world with modern formulation science, a positioning that depends on sounding current and slightly discovery-driven rather than traditional or clinical.
• Product credibility through personal framing. Rashmika's own comments at the time of signing focused on how ingredients are combined rather than simply naming the product, saying she believed effective hair care depends on how ingredients are brought together, a framing that echoed Pilgrim's own campaign language rather than reading as a disconnected celebrity quote.

None of this means the partnership works purely because Rashmika is well known. What stands out is that both her public image and Pilgrim's own positioning were already leaning toward the same idea, contemporary, ingredient-conscious, mass-appeal beauty, before the deal was even announced.

Why Rashmika Works for Pilgrim's Gen-Z Audience

Reaching Gen-Z consumers specifically requires more than general fame. This is an audience that has grown up alongside influencer marketing, is used to spotting a disconnected or purely transactional endorsement, and often engages with beauty content through short-form video and social platforms rather than traditional advertising formats.

Rashmika Mandanna's relevance to this audience rests on a few distinguishable factors rather than popularity alone:

• A social media presence that predates and runs alongside her film career. Her visibility on platforms Gen-Z actually spends time on gives Pilgrim's campaigns a distribution advantage beyond television or print, since her existing audience is already primed to see and share content featuring her.
• A persona built through relatable, high-frequency public appearances rather than a distant, rarely-seen star image, which suits a beauty category where audiences want to feel a product recommendation comes from someone whose taste they can relate to.
• Visual-first suitability. Beauty marketing today depends heavily on how a product looks and performs on camera, in short clips, tutorials, and campaign films. A screen-native actress whose image translates well to that format is a more practical fit than a celebrity known primarily for a different kind of media presence.
• A pan-India profile that matches Pilgrim's own national ambitions. Pilgrim has described itself as expanding rapidly, including into international markets, and a celebrity whose recognition already spans multiple language markets within India supports that broader reach rather than limiting the campaign to one region.

The point is not simply that Rashmika is popular with younger audiences in the abstract. It is that the specific channels through which she is popular, social platforms, pan-regional film exposure, a contemporary public image, line up closely with how Gen-Z actually discovers and evaluates beauty products.

Rashmika Mandanna and Pilgrim Collaboration Ads

Pilgrim's collaboration with Rashmika Mandanna has, so far, produced two distinct campaign phases, each built around different products but following a consistent underlying idea about how ingredients come together.

The Secret Is in the Mix (2024)

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The partnership launched in August 2024 with a campaign titled The Secret Is in the Mix, centred on Pilgrim's hair care range, specifically its Patuá and Keratin Smoothening Shampoo and its Redensyl and Anagain Advanced Hair Growth Serum. The brand film features Rashmika Mandanna leading a group of women who are shown following the latest viral beauty trend without necessarily understanding why it works, a scene the brand described as symbolising a herd mentality around trends. Against that backdrop, Rashmika is positioned as the one who understands that lasting results come not from chasing whatever ingredient is trending, but from how ingredients are combined and formulated.

This is a more specific creative concept than a simple product demonstration. Rather than presenting Rashmika as someone merely endorsing a shampoo, the campaign used her to voice a specific brand argument, that trend-following alone does not deliver results, and that Pilgrim's formulation approach does. That framing matters for a Gen-Z audience already fairly wary of beauty marketing that leans purely on hype, since it gives the campaign a point of view rather than a straightforward celebrity product shot.

Nani Ka Secret (2026)

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In March 2026, Pilgrim and Rashmika returned with a second campaign, Nani Ka Secret, this time built entirely around the brand's Advanced Hair Growth Serum, a product first launched in 2021 that had, by the brand's own account, become one of its best-selling items. The digital film-led campaign draws on the familiar Indian idea of a grandmother's trusted beauty secret, pairing that nostalgic framing with the product's actual hero ingredient, Korean black rice, a component with roots in Korean beauty traditions.

Pilgrim's Chief Marketing Officer, Konark Gaur, explained the thinking behind the concept directly, describing the idea of a "nani," a grandmother, as a stand-in for trusted wisdom passed down at home, deliberately paired with a modern, globally sourced ingredient to bridge nostalgia with newer beauty science. He also noted that bringing Rashmika into that specific narrative gave the campaign a more personal resonance, given her broad popularity across Indian audiences.

What makes this second campaign a meaningful progression rather than a repeat of the first is the shift in tone. The Secret Is in the Mix built its argument around scepticism toward trend-chasing. Nani Ka Secret instead leans on cultural nostalgia and inherited trust, a softer, more emotionally driven angle. Both campaigns, though, land on the same underlying claim about Pilgrim's products: that real effectiveness comes from a considered blend of ingredients and tradition, not from novelty alone. Using the same ambassador across both concepts let Pilgrim build that argument cumulatively rather than needing to reintroduce its philosophy from scratch with each new product launch.

Across both campaigns, the advertising leans more on relatability and brand philosophy than on pure aspiration. Rashmika is not shown as unreachably glamorous in either film. She is positioned closer to a knowledgeable, trusted presence explaining why a product works, a tone that suits Pilgrim's ingredient-led brand story better than a purely lifestyle-driven or status-driven campaign would.

How Pilgrim Uses Celebrity Branding to Connect With Younger Consumers

There is a meaningful difference between simply putting a celebrity in front of a camera and choosing one whose actual public image reinforces what the brand is trying to say. Pilgrim's approach with Rashmika leans toward the second category. Both campaigns discussed above use her not just to hold a product bottle, but to voice a specific idea, scepticism toward trend-chasing in the first, inherited trust and nostalgia in the second, that connects directly to how Pilgrim describes its own formulation philosophy.

This matters more for a Gen-Z audience than it might for an older demographic. Younger consumers researching beauty products are often exposed to dozens of competing brand claims in a single scrolling session, and a celebrity who appears to genuinely understand or believe in the specific product story tends to cut through that noise more effectively than one who reads as a paid face attached to an unrelated script. Pilgrim's decision to build each campaign's creative concept around a specific product claim, rather than a generic beauty tagline, reflects an understanding of that difference.

Rashmika Mandanna as a Beauty Brand Ambassador

It is worth being precise about the scope of this role. Rashmika Mandanna's brand ambassador title with Pilgrim was announced specifically for its hair care range in 2024, and the two subsequent campaigns, The Secret Is in the Mix and Nani Ka Secret, have both remained focused on hair care products rather than expanding across Pilgrim's full catalogue, which also includes skincare and colour cosmetics. This is a useful distinction, since a beauty brand ambassador role can sometimes cover an entire product portfolio and sometimes a single category, and Pilgrim's public communications consistently tie Rashmika's role specifically to hair care.

Within that scope, though, the continuity across two campaigns roughly a year and a half apart shows what a sustained ambassador relationship can offer that a single advertisement cannot. Returning to the same face for a second major campaign let Pilgrim build on an existing association rather than starting over, and let the brand introduce a new hero ingredient, Korean black rice, through a spokesperson audiences already connected to the category.

What This Partnership Says About Gen-Z Beauty Marketing

Looked at together, the two Pilgrim campaigns with Rashmika Mandanna point to a few broader patterns in how beauty brands are trying to reach younger Indian consumers.

• Familiarity works better than distance. Both campaigns present Rashmika as relatable and knowledgeable rather than aspirational in a distant, unreachable sense, which suits how Gen-Z tends to respond to beauty recommendations from people who feel accessible.
• Brand philosophy needs to show up in the creative concept, not just the tagline. Pilgrim's ingredient-led positioning appears directly in both campaigns' storylines, rather than being stated once in a press release and left out of the actual advertising.
• Visual, social-first storytelling matters more than a single television spot. Pilgrim's use of a digital film-led format for Nani Ka Secret, rather than a traditional broadcast-first campaign, reflects where a younger audience actually spends its attention.
• A celebrity can help a product argument travel further, but the argument still has to exist first. Both campaigns are built around a specific claim about Pilgrim's formulations, and Rashmika's role is to carry that claim persuasively, not to substitute for having one.
• Fit outweighs fame in this category. Rashmika's specific combination of pan-India reach, contemporary image, and social media presence matters more to this partnership's logic than her general level of celebrity, which is a more precise and more durable basis for a beauty ambassador relationship than star power alone.

Why the Rashmika Mandanna and Pilgrim Partnership Works

Pilgrim's collaboration with Rashmika Mandanna holds together because the brand did not simply attach a popular face to its hair care range and call it a Gen-Z strategy. Both The Secret Is in the Mix and Nani Ka Secret used her specifically to carry a distinct brand argument, first about the value of considered formulation over trend-chasing, later about blending inherited trust with modern ingredients, rather than treating her presence as sufficient on its own.

That is ultimately the more useful lesson buried in this partnership. A younger audience is not simply won over by a familiar face appearing in an advertisement. It responds when that face is used to say something the brand actually believes, delivered through channels and a tone that audience already trusts. Rashmika Mandanna's fit with Pilgrim works because her public image, pan-regional, socially present, and contemporary, gave the brand a genuine way to make that argument land, rather than functioning as decoration on top of a message that could have worked without her.