#CherryChart: The Brand Launch Where Competitors Did the Advertising
Kotak Cherry needed to enter one of India's most competitive categories on a frugal budget. Instead of buying attention, ibs Fulcro turned the brand's own unrevealed logo into a trending Instagram format, and got over 100 brands, including direct competitors, to promote it without realising what they were doing.
At a glance
Client: Kotak Cherry (Financial Services (Investment Advisory))
Problem: Kotak Cherry needed to launch into one of India's most competitive investment advisory categories on a genuinely frugal budget, with no room for a conventional paid-media blitz.
Solution: #CherryChart: turning the brand's own unrevealed logo into a trending Instagram format, getting 100+ real brands, including direct competitors, to promote it entirely unprompted.
Result: Impressions: 5M+
ibs Fulcro's role: Ambush Marketing
The Background
Kotak Cherry is a new brand from Kotak, entering the highly competitive personal investment advisory space, a category already crowded with established, well-funded players including ETMoney, Upstox, Groww, Paytm Money, Kuvera, Scripbox, smallcase, and Zerodha. As a late entrant, Kotak Cherry needed a disruptive strategy to capture mind share and market share rapidly, and on a frugal budget.
The Idea: Get the Internet to Advertise a Brand It Didn't Know Existed
ibs Fulcro chose the most audacious route available: launch Kotak Cherry through the reach and credibility of other iconic brands, including its own direct competitors. The goal was to get the internet promoting Kotak Cherry without ever realising it was promoting a brand at all. That idea became #CherryChart.
Instagram runs on trending formats, and both brands and content creators are constantly looking for the next one to jump on. ibs Fulcro used that appetite directly: the campaign created a #TrendingFormat built from the yet-to-be-revealed Kotak Cherry logo itself, before the brand had ever been publicly introduced.
The Execution
In collaboration with a host of independent designers and content creators, ibs Fulcro seeded posts on Instagram using the design of the Kotak Cherry logo, a pie-chart cherry, as a new visual template. Each creator made their own version of #CherryChart, filling the segments with their own content, without ever revealing whose logo it actually was.
To make the format as easy as possible for others to pick up, some creators were given an empty #CherryChart template to post directly, an open invitation for any brand or fellow creator to fill in and make their own version.
Real evidence the tactic worked exactly as designed: one real Instagram comment on a creator's post read, “Last slide template hain, khudd bhar lo” (“It's a template on the last slide, fill it in yourself”), while another user tagged a completely unrelated food-delivery brand's account, asking if they had seen the chart. Neither comment mentioned Kotak or investment advisory at all, direct, unscripted proof the format was spreading purely on its own visual appeal, with zero awareness of its actual origin.
What Followed Was Unprecedented
Brands and agencies picked up the new #TrendingFormat and began posting their own versions of #CherryChart. With zero media spend, the logo trended on Instagram for over a week, with brands large and small using it in their own social content.
More than 100 brands joined in, including Dell India, Sony Music Kids, Vi (Vodafone Idea), Fever FM, Nearbuy, and many more, alongside 50+ independent content creators. Even Kotak Cherry's own direct competitors in the investment advisory space, including Axis Direct, Sharekhan, and SBI, took the bait, participating in the trend and, in doing so, promoting Kotak Cherry's own logo to their audiences.
A Sample of the Brands That Used the CherryChart Format
| Category | Brands |
|---|---|
| Direct competitors (investment advisory) | Axis Direct, Sharekhan, SBI (YONO) |
| Large consumer brands | Dell India, Sony Music Kids, Vi (Vodafone Idea), Fever FM, Nearbuy |
| Independent creators and smaller brands | 50+ content creators, alongside brands spanning food, lifestyle, and other unrelated categories |
Source: campaign video, ibs Fulcro / Kotak Cherry.
The Results
#CherryChart broke the internet, garnering over 5 million impressions and reaching 2 million people organically within the brand's relevant target audience. The ambush marketing approach made the Kotak Cherry logo trend on Instagram for over a week, with more than 100 brands and 50+ content creators participating entirely on their own initiative, driving unprecedented reach and awareness for a logo that hadn't even been officially attached to a brand name yet.
Why this is the number that makes the campaign genuinely unusual. Most brand launches try to earn attention from an audience. This one got competing brands, and their own marketing teams, to spend their own creative effort promoting a rival's unreleased logo, entirely voluntarily. That's a fundamentally different kind of result than reach or impressions alone; it's evidence the format itself was compelling enough that even direct competitors couldn't resist using it.
Why This Matters Beyond One Launch
The pattern here is a genuinely repeatable one for a low-budget challenger entering a crowded category: rather than compete for attention against better-funded incumbents, build something so visually appealing and easy to replicate that other brands, including the incumbents themselves, choose to use it in their own content, entirely voluntarily. The brand's own promotion becomes something other people do for free, because they want to, not because they've been paid or asked to.
Frequently asked questions
An ambush marketing campaign that launched Kotak Cherry, a new personal investment advisory brand from Kotak, by turning its own unrevealed logo, a pie-chart cherry, into a trending Instagram visual format, before the brand was ever officially introduced.
Independent designers and content creators posted their own versions of the CherryChart format without revealing whose logo it was, including some empty templates anyone could fill in. Brands and creators picked up the trend organically, using the format in their own unrelated content, and in doing so, spread Kotak Cherry's logo without realising it.
Yes. Direct competitors in the investment advisory space, including Axis Direct, Sharekhan, and SBI, used the CherryChart format in their own social media content, effectively promoting Kotak Cherry's logo to their own audiences.
Over 100 brands participated, including Dell India, Sony Music Kids, Vi (Vodafone Idea), Fever FM, and Nearbuy, alongside more than 50 independent content creators.
The campaign generated over 5 million impressions, reached 2 million people organically, trended on Instagram for over a week, and was picked up by more than 100 brands and 50-plus content creators, all without media spend.
Because the campaign deliberately used the reach and credibility of other brands, including direct competitors, to promote Kotak Cherry without those brands' knowledge or consent, achieved by making the brand's logo a trending visual format before it was publicly attached to the Kotak Cherry name.