Liberty Shoes Just Showed Legacy Indian Brands How To Actually Spend On Influencers

Liberty Shoes Just Showed Legacy Indian Brands How To Actually Spend On Influencers

A 70-year-old footwear company isn't who you'd expect to hand marketers a masterclass in influencer strategy. But that's what happened this week when Liberty Shoes' Executive Director, Anupam Bansal, walked through exactly how the company rebuilt its media plan — and, more unusually, put real numbers next to it (BestMediaInfo). Founded in Karnal in 1954 as Pal Boot House, Liberty is now openly telling the market that "the biggest shift has obviously been the move to new-age/digital media... today we're leaning much more into influencers and digital," in Bansal's words. For an industry that usually only hears campaign numbers from brand-new D2C startups, a legacy player publishing its results is worth paying attention to.

The Media Mix Liberty Actually Built

What makes Liberty's approach interesting isn't that it hired influencers — every brand does that now. It's how deliberately the budget is split. Reach comes cheap and local: radio and Google Business Profile listings, because a shoe purchase usually comes down to which store nearby is open. Consideration is where the influencer spend concentrates, specifically "regional influencer activations across seven states," run alongside Meta and Google performance campaigns, so the messaging feels local instead of one national voice blasted everywhere. Retention is handled entirely through CRM — SMS, WhatsApp and RCS tied to a loyalty programme called Step Up Club, which Liberty explicitly uses to turn repeat customers into unpaid brand advocates who create their own content.

That three-layer split matters because it's an implicit answer to a question most brands fudge: where exactly does influencer spend sit in the funnel? Liberty's answer is unambiguous — it's a consideration-stage tool, run regionally, not a national awareness play and not a retention mechanic. The company's "Mera Joota Hindustani" campaign, a reimagining of the classic "Mera Joota Hai Japani" lyric featuring MC Square, Shilpa Rao and Riar Saab, layered a mix of creator content and brand-owned posts on top of that regional base to launch its Hindustani graphic sneaker line.

The Numbers Brands Rarely Share

Most influencer marketing case studies stop at vanity metrics. Liberty didn't. Bansal disclosed that a recent campaign delivered a reach of roughly 22.9 lakh people, generated more than 40 lakh impressions, hit a 3.32% click-through rate, and — the number that should matter most to any retail marketer — drove approximately a 2% increase in store footfall. For a company that still does the bulk of its business through physical retail (online is 15-20% of sales), footfall is the metric that closes the loop between a Reel view and an actual sale, and Liberty is treating it as the real deliverable rather than platform-reported engagement. As Bansal put it, "you look at the actual impact — on Instagram, on your website, in your stores — and treat those as your real deliverables, rather than just content virality on its own."

This Isn't Just Liberty's Story

Zoom out and the pattern repeats elsewhere. In separate remarks published this month, IKEA India's Marketing and Communication Manager Huzefa Chhitalwala described an almost identical logic: the brand repeatedly works with the same creators, like Sakshi Sindwani, because they're "genuine users and consumers of the IKEA brand," rather than commissioning one-off promotional posts (Exchange4Media). MMTC-PAMP's Head of Marketing, Gaurav Nijhawan, goes further, buying usage rights on creator content for 45 days to three months specifically so it can run performance ads off assets that already carry earned trust. Neither company is a scrappy startup; both are established brands making the same bet Liberty is — that regional, recurring, measurable creator relationships beat one-off celebrity endorsements. That trend lines up with broader industry data too: Kofluence's 2026 creator economy report found that over 62% of creators are now seeing an increase in regional and vernacular-language briefs from brands, with Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities becoming the operational center of gravity for the entire sector.

The Takeaway

The headline here isn't that a shoe brand ran an influencer campaign — it's that legacy Indian brands are now willing to publish the unglamorous middle of the funnel: reach, CTR, and footfall, not just follower counts. If you're briefing regional creators, Liberty's structure is worth copying directly — treat influencer spend as a consideration-stage, geography-specific budget line, keep a loyalty programme feeding organic advocate content underneath it, and measure success in-store, not just in-feed. Brands still reporting "impressions" as their only influencer metric are a full step behind where Liberty, IKEA and MMTC-PAMP have already moved.