Vivo Has a New Phone. Someone Please Get it a New Idea

At vivo, the camera gets an upgrade. The family gets another reunion.

There are worse things to offer India at Diwali. Togetherness travels well, nostalgia needs little explanation, and a journey home supplies a smartphone with plenty to photograph. The trouble begins when the journey becomes so familiar that the audience can mentally unpack before the advertising has arrived.

In Vivo’s V80 film, Sidharth Malhotra and Kiara Advani travel home for the festive season, turning encounters along the way into content. The phone accompanies their discovery, capture and sharing of those moments. The proposition is cinematic. The emotional itinerary is considerably less adventurous.

New handset. Familiar destination.

This would be an unremarkable complaint about a seasonal commercial if vivo were an unremarkable player. It is India’s largest smartphone brand by shipments. IDC puts its share at 18.4 per cent in the April–June 2026 quarter, with iQOO counted separately. Counterpoint’s Monthly India Smartphone Tracker also places vivo first, excluding iQOO.

The company knows how to move phones. Its festive advertising could use some movement of its own.

HOME IS WHERE THE BRIEF IS

Consider the family album.

In the 2024 Diwali campaign, The Spirit of Homecoming, parents long for children who have moved away. The story turns on the pull of home and the emotional completion of a reunion. In the following year’s Joy of Homecoming, a father prepares for Diwali alone until a childhood letter reminds his daughter of her promise to help hang the lights. She returns.

The latest V80 film takes the camera out on the journey. There are celebrities, encounters and a stronger vocabulary of content creation. Yet the brand’s emotional address remains much the same: meaningful moments, loved ones, memories, home.

These are not identical films. They are different visits to a remarkably well-maintained comfort zone.

Vivo is quite open about the repetition. “Every year vivo celebrates the spirit of homecoming through our Diwali campaigns,” its executive Geetaj Channana reportedly said of the 2025 work. That is a legitimate brand choice. It also gives the criticism a precise target. The question is how much fresh observation each return brings.

Diwali comes every year. The creative department need not treat that as permission to do the same.

Nor would swapping the famous faces necessarily solve anything. The weakness being examined is deeper than casting. If the emotional machinery remains unchanged, a different celebrity merely brings a different suitcase.

A CAMERA WITH A COMFORT ZONE

There is an obvious commercial logic to Vivo’s approach. A camera phone belongs in the business of memory. Families supply the occasions, festivals concentrate them, and the product offers a way to preserve what people value.

But almost any camera phone can make that argument. A person missing home does not, by itself, establish a distinctive reason to choose vivo.

The hard creative work is making the relationship between product and feeling specific. What does this camera allow the story to do? What does this film notice that the previous one did not? If the answer is mainly a new feature label attached to a familiar emotional sequence, the hardware is doing more development work than the script.

Vivo has shown that it can find a more particular device. Its V40 film The Farewell, featuring Karan Wahi, has a family recreate childhood memories before its youngest member leaves for university abroad. The elaborate reconstructions give the sentiment an action. Affection becomes something the family makes, rather than merely something the film announces.

That example matters because the brand does not need to abandon its emotional territory. It needs to do more with the space.

Marketing and branding experts reckon that owning an emotional territory takes consistency. Keeping it interesting takes imagination. "The risk comes when a brand confuses repeating the sentiment with developing the idea,” says Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research.

The V80 campaign promises to make everyday moments cinematic. It is reasonable to ask the advertising to make a familiar moment surprising.

APPLE FINDS ANOTHER WAY INTO DIWALI

Apple is a useful irritant here.

Its Shot on iPhone platform is hardly an exercise in changing strategy every season. It returns to the same product promise: look at what this camera can produce. Yet that stable proposition leaves room for different interpretations of India.

For Diwali, The 9 Yard Enigma explored the sari through Gen Z’s approach to self-expression, with Vikas Maurya shooting on iPhone 16 Pro. Another festive execution transformed rangoli into movement through dancers, costumes and coloured props, shot on iPhone 17 Pro Max. Its making-of material connected the spectacle to the device’s camera capabilities.

The cultural ingredients were recognisable. The way of looking at them did some work.

A sari became a subject for contemporary expression. Rangoli became choreography. Neither required a family reunion to explain why the festival mattered.

The distinction is especially uncomfortable for vivo because Apple also knows how to turn familiar relationships into a product-led joke. In its Indian royal-court campaign, a king’s crowded family selfie gives Center Stage a problem to solve; his baking vlog gives Dual Capture a purpose.

Even the family photograph can acquire another plot.

These examples do not establish that Apple makes the better phone, or that every Indian buyer will prefer its advertising. They show something narrower and more useful: staying culturally recognisable does not oblige a brand to stay narratively predictable.

vivo keeps inviting us to recognise the feeling. Apple’s stronger examples give us something else to look at while we do.

THE SALES CHART IS NOT A SCRIPT REVIEW

Of course, vivo can point to the shipment table. First place is a fairly robust response to someone asking whether the business understands its customers.

It is a less complete response to a criticism of the advertising.

People buy phones for many reasons: price, availability, financing, features, service, habit. A market-leading position cannot tell us which film persuaded them. Equally, a critic’s impatience with another homecoming cannot establish that customers have stopped responding.

Apple also occupies a different commercial position. In the same IDC quarter, it accounted for 8.5 per cent of smartphone shipments but led the market by value, with 27 per cent. This is not a contest between interchangeable businesses with identical buyers.

The creative comparison nevertheless survives. Both sell cameras, both seek cultural relevance, and both want their devices to belong in people’s lives. Apple’s examples demonstrate possibilities, not a recipe vivo must copy.

For Aggarwal, the distinction lies in what the product contributes to the storytelling. When you promise a more capable camera, the advertising has an opportunity to demonstrate a more imaginative way of seeing. "If you can replace the handset with a competitor’s and the story works just as well, the brand needs to ask what viewers are actually taking away,” she adds.

There is also a sound defence of familiarity. Brands accumulate associations through repetition; abandoning an idea because advertising people have become restless can squander that investment. Homecoming is emotionally rich precisely because its importance does not expire with the festive offers.

But an enduring human truth is raw material. It is not a finished annual script.

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The most interesting thing vivo could do next is make homecoming less predictable without making it less recognisable. A fresh perspective, an unexpected relationship or a visual idea inseparable from the camera would give the territory another life.

The ambition should be larger than finding another attractive person to tell us that moments matter. We have understood. Several festive seasons ago.

A market leader has the reach to make an idea familiar and the opportunity to stretch it. It can ask more of the audience than recognition, and more of its advertising than another tasteful confirmation that family is important.

Vivo’s phones invite consumers to notice what has changed. Its festive advertising should not make them search this hard.