Sony India’s Premium Branding with Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan

Discover how Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan shaped Sony India’s premium brand image. Explore their advertisements, celebrity partnership, and role in Sony’s marketing campaigns.

Technology brands rarely win an audience on specifications alone. A processor speed or a camera sensor size means little to most buyers until it is translated into something they can feel: confidence, design, a certain idea of what kind of person uses this product. That translation work is often where a well-chosen celebrity comes in, especially for a brand trying to hold on to a premium identity in a market where cheaper alternatives are never far away.

Sony's Indian business has worked with several Bollywood names over the years to do exactly this, and two of the more notable examples are Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan. It is worth being precise about what these associations actually were before analysing them, because they were not the same partnership. Hrithik Roshan was signed by Sony Ericsson, a separate joint venture between Sony and Ericsson, as brand ambassador for India and the SAARC region in 2007. 

Katrina Kaif was signed by Sony India directly as brand ambassador for its Xperia smartphone range, in a deal that began in March 2013, roughly six years later and under a different corporate structure altogether. The two were never part of the same campaign. What connects them is not a shared advertisement but a shared question: why did a premium Sony product line, at two different points, reach for a Bollywood star with a polished, aspirational image, and what did that choice communicate about the brand?

Why Sony Turned to Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan

Set side by side, these two signings share a similar logic even though they happened years apart and through different Sony entities. Both Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan had, by the time of their respective deals, built public images defined by polish and mainstream aspirational appeal rather than edginess or niche subculture credibility. That mattered to a brand trying to sell mobile technology as a lifestyle choice rather than a purely functional purchase.

A few specific qualities explain why each made sense at the time:

• Strong recognition without needing further introduction. Both actors were established, widely known names in Indian cinema by the time Sony approached them, meaning the campaigns did not need to spend time building awareness of who the ambassador was.
• An image built around style and contemporary appeal. Sony Ericsson's own India General Manager, Sudhin Mathur, described Hrithik Roshan in 2007 as the "perfect synonym" for the brand's values of performance, lifestyle, and entertainment, explicitly citing his energetic, stylish, and selective public image as the reasoning behind the choice.
• Youth relevance for a brand chasing a younger audience. When Sony India signed Katrina Kaif for Xperia in 2013, its marketing head, Tadato Kimura, said the company was looking to capture more of the youth market and considered her an adept choice because of her standing as a youth icon whose charismatic personality matched Xperia's positioning as innovative, fun, and stylish.
• A personal, believable connection to the brand. Katrina Kaif's own comments at the time of her signing referenced growing up with Sony products, saying she had been connected to the brand as a consumer for years, from the time she owned her first Walkman, which gave her endorsement a note of authenticity rather than a purely transactional appearance.

Neither signing was simply about borrowing a famous face. Each was tied to a specific product push at a specific moment, Sony Ericsson's mobile handset ambitions in the mid-2000s and Sony India's Xperia expansion in the early 2010s, and the choice of ambassador in each case followed from what that specific product line needed to communicate.

What Premium Branding Means for a Technology Brand

Premium branding in consumer electronics rarely rests on specifications alone. Two phones can share similar processors, camera counts, and screen sizes, yet one will feel premium and the other will not, because premium perception is built from a combination of product design, brand history, retail experience, pricing strategy, and the overall story a brand tells about itself.

This is precisely where celebrity association becomes useful rather than incidental. A brand can describe its product as innovative and stylish in a press release, but those words carry more weight when they are delivered through a public figure whose own image already suggests those qualities. Sony's own language around both signings leaned directly on this idea. The Sony Ericsson campaign for Hrithik Roshan was framed around performance, lifestyle, and entertainment, while the Sony India campaign for Katrina Kaif was framed around innovation, fun, and style. In both cases, the celebrity was not simply appearing next to the product. Their public image was being used to stand in for qualities the brand wanted associated with it, since those qualities are harder to communicate through a spec sheet than through a recognisable face.

It would be inaccurate to suggest either celebrity's presence alone made these product lines premium, or that their involvement directly drove sales figures. What can be said, based on how Sony itself described these decisions, is that both signings were intended to support a broader brand image built around style and aspiration, alongside the products' own design and features.

Why Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan Fit Sony's Premium Image, Each in Their Own Moment

Looking more closely at each celebrity's public image at the time of their respective deals helps explain the specific fit Sony was aiming for.

Hrithik Roshan, by 2007, had built a screen persona around physical precision, dance ability, and a somewhat futuristic, high-performance quality, reinforced by his role in the science-fiction hit Koi... Mil Gaya and its sequel Krrish. Sony Ericsson's own framing of him as embodying "performance, lifestyle and entertainment" maps directly onto that persona. He was not being cast as a relatable everyman. He was being used to suggest that the phone itself carried a kind of technical sophistication and energy, values that a performance-driven screen image could credibly represent.

Katrina Kaif's image by 2013 had shifted toward something more contemporary and accessible to a younger, urban audience, without losing broad mainstream recognition. Sony's own description of her as a "youth icon" whose personality was "innovative, fun and stylish" suggests the brand wanted someone who felt current and energetic rather than purely glamorous or distant. That fit the Xperia range's positioning at the time, aimed at a smartphone market where younger buyers were increasingly making their own purchase decisions rather than following a parent's brand loyalty.

The key point is that both fits were specific to their moment rather than interchangeable. Sony was not simply looking for "a famous face." It was looking, in each case, for a public image that matched a particular product story it was trying to tell at that particular time.

Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan's Sony Ads: A Look at Their Collaborations with Sony

Hrithik Roshan and Sony Ericsson (2007)

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Sony Ericsson announced Hrithik Roshan as its brand ambassador for India and the SAARC region in early 2007, with Sudhin Mathur, the company's India General Manager, stating that Bollywood was one of the most effective routes to reach Indian audiences because of the instant identification and star power it offered. Roshan was signed to endorse the company's full range of products rather than a single handset, and to take part in its broader marketing initiatives in the region.

His first advertisement under the deal promoted the Sony Ericsson W200i, a Walkman-branded handset, through a campaign built around a song and dance sequence titled "The Thump," created by Saatchi & Saatchi. The Hindi version of the ad used the line "Duniya Ko Nachaoon," meaning "making the world dance," with Roshan performing a high-energy dance routine tied to the phone's music playback features. The creative director on the campaign, Nandu Narasimhan, described the underlying idea simply as positioning the device as "a Walkman phone at a fantastic price," which shows the ad was designed to connect Roshan's dance-driven screen persona directly to the product's core music feature rather than treating him as a generic celebrity presence.

This is a useful example of a celebrity being integrated into a specific product message rather than simply appearing beside it. The Thump campaign did not ask viewers to admire Roshan in the abstract. It used his established reputation for energetic, precise performance to dramatise what the phone's Walkman functionality was meant to feel like in daily use.

Katrina Kaif and Sony Xperia (2013 onward)

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Sony India announced Katrina Kaif as brand ambassador for its Xperia smartphone range in late February 2013, with her endorsement beginning that March under an initial two-year contract. The announcement came alongside a significant increase in marketing spend, with Sony stating it planned to triple its Xperia marketing investment to around Rs 300 crore for the 2013 to 2014 financial year, and that Kaif would serve as the central figure across print, electronic, and outdoor advertising, along with cinema and digital platforms.

One of the visible outputs of this partnership was a television commercial for the Xperia Z, which launched in the Indian market in March 2013 alongside Kaif's debut as the face of the range. Coverage of the advertisement at the time described it as presenting Kaif showcasing the phone's features in a polished, stylish visual style consistent with the flagship positioning of the Xperia Z at that point in Sony's lineup.

It is also worth noting that Katrina Kaif was not entirely new to Sony's orbit when this deal was signed. Kareena Kapoor had earlier served as Sony's brand ambassador in India, first when the Xperia and Vivaz phones launched under the Sony Ericsson brand in 2010, and continuing afterward with the Vaio notebook range. Sony's approach across these years suggests a consistent pattern of using a recognisable Bollywood actress as the face of specific product categories, rather than committing to one single celebrity across every part of its Indian portfolio.

How Celebrity Endorsements Can Signal Premium Value

There is an important difference between celebrity visibility and celebrity-brand fit. Visibility simply means a famous person appears in an advertisement, which can generate attention regardless of whether the pairing makes sense. Fit means the celebrity's own public image is doing communicative work, standing in for qualities like sophistication, confidence, or modernity that the brand wants an audience to associate with the product.

Sony's language around both the Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif deals points toward an attempt at fit rather than simple visibility. The Sony Ericsson team spoke specifically about performance and lifestyle when explaining Roshan's selection. The Sony India team spoke specifically about youth appeal and stylishness when explaining Kaif's selection. In both cases, the company was reaching for a celebrity whose existing reputation already carried the exact qualities it wanted the product to be associated with, rather than treating the endorsement as interchangeable marketing spend.

None of this means the celebrity association alone created a premium perception. The product itself, its design, pricing, and place within Sony's broader lineup, still had to carry that positioning. What the endorsement did was give the brand's advertising a more immediate, emotionally legible way to communicate qualities that a technical spec sheet struggles to express on its own.

Two Separate Stars, Two Moments in One Premium Identity

Because Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif were never part of the same campaign, it would be inaccurate to describe their endorsements as a coordinated dual-ambassador strategy. What can be said more accurately is that Sony's Indian business, across two different corporate structures and two different points in the 2000s and 2010s, repeatedly reached for a similar type of celebrity when it wanted to reinforce a premium, style-conscious image for its mobile products.

The specific choice differed with the moment. In 2007, Sony Ericsson wanted a dynamic, performance-associated persona for a music-focused handset market, and found it in Hrithik Roshan. In 2013, Sony India wanted a youthful, contemporary persona for a smartphone market increasingly driven by younger buyers, and found it in Katrina Kaif. Read this way, the two endorsements are less a single unified partnership and more two data points in a longer pattern, a Sony-affiliated business reaching for Bollywood star power whenever it needed to translate a product's technical identity into something an audience could immediately relate to.

Sony India and the Role of Celebrity Marketing in Technology

It is fair to ask why a technology company would need celebrity storytelling at all when its products can already be explained through features and specifications. The answer lies in how differently technical information and emotional association travel through an audience. A spec sheet reaches people who are already comparing products closely. A recognisable face reaches people scrolling past an advertisement with no intention of reading technical detail, and gives them a quick, legible impression of what the brand stands for.

For Sony's mobile business specifically, both the Sony Ericsson and Sony India phases of celebrity marketing served this same underlying purpose, even though they used different ambassadors for different product lines. Bollywood stars offered a shortcut to communicating lifestyle qualities, energy in Roshan's case, youthful style in Kaif's case, that would have taken far longer to establish through product messaging alone.

What Brands Can Learn from Sony's Use of Katrina Kaif and Hrithik Roshan

The clearest lesson from these two separate endorsements is that celebrity selection should follow from a specific product story rather than a general desire for star power. Sony did not simply pick whichever Bollywood name was most famous at the time. Each choice traced back to a stated brand or product need, performance and lifestyle for Sony Ericsson's handsets, youth appeal and style for Sony India's Xperia range.

A few considerations stand out for marketers examining this case:

• Match the celebrity to the specific product moment, not the brand in the abstract. Sony's two campaigns, seven years apart, used different ambassadors precisely because the product story had changed.
• Let the celebrity's existing image do communicative work. Roshan's dance-driven, high-performance persona was integrated directly into the Walkman phone's music feature, rather than treated as a separate element from the product message.
• Be precise about what kind of relationship it actually is. Distinguishing between a full brand ambassador role, a single campaign appearance, and a broader endorsement matters, both for accurate marketing history and for setting realistic expectations about what any single partnership can achieve.
• Recognise that premium perception is built collectively. Product design, pricing, retail experience, and celebrity association all worked together in Sony's case. No single element, including the celebrity, carried that positioning alone.
• A pattern across separate campaigns can still reveal a consistent brand instinct. Even though Roshan and Kaif were never part of the same campaign, Sony's repeated choice of polished, aspirational Bollywood stars across different product lines and different points in time points to a consistent underlying approach to premium positioning in the Indian market.

What These Two Sony Partnerships, Taken Together, Actually Show

Katrina Kaif's Xperia endorsement and Hrithik Roshan's Sony Ericsson endorsement were never the same campaign, and treating them as one continuous partnership would misrepresent both. What they share is an underlying pattern rather than a shared advertisement: at two different points, under two related but distinct corporate structures, Sony's mobile business in India reached for a Bollywood star whose existing public image already carried the specific quality the product needed to communicate, energy and performance in 2007, youthful style in 2013.

That pattern is the more useful takeaway for anyone studying celebrity marketing in the technology sector. A premium brand does not need one permanent celebrity face to build a premium identity. It needs, at each stage of its product story, a public figure whose own reputation genuinely overlaps with what that specific product is trying to say, and Sony's separate work with Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif shows how that kind of deliberate, moment-specific fit can support a broader premium image over time, even without the two campaigns ever sharing a single frame.