Open almost any media plan in this country and you will find the same audience sitting at the top of it: 25–34, urban, SEC A, English-speaking, “aspirational.” It is the audience everyone targets, which is another way of saying it is the audience nobody actually understands.
A demographic tells you what someone is. It tells you nothing about what they love, what they laugh at, what they trust, or what they would defend in an argument. Two 29-year-old women in Gurgaon can share a pincode, an income band and a phone model and have absolutely nothing in common. One spends her weekends at run clubs and reads three newsletters about longevity. The other is deep in a niche skincare community and can name the actives in her serum faster than you can. The demographic sees one person. There are two. There are always two.
"Demographics group people who will never behave alike. Subcultures group people who already do."
Taste is the real targeting
A subculture is a group organised around a shared taste rather than a shared statistic. Filter coffee obsessives. Sneakerheads. The Malayali-food-Instagram universe. Hyperlocal running crews. Regional meme pages with a million followers and a sense of humour no brand has cracked. These groups have their own language, their own heroes, their own inside jokes and their own gatekeepers. And crucially — they already behave as a unit. You don’t have to manufacture the community. It’s there. It has been there for years.
When Biryani By Kilo made biryani a ritual rather than a fast-food category, it wasn’t targeting “25–44 food lovers.” It was speaking to people for whom dum biryani carries memory, occasion and a specific idea of authenticity. That’s a subculture. And it’s why the brand earned a repeat order rate most food brands would frame and put on a wall.
Why the demographic survives anyway
If subcultures work better, why does the age bracket refuse to die? Because it’s convenient. It’s buyable. Every ad platform sells you 25–34 in two clicks. Selling to a subculture takes something the age bracket never asks for: actual understanding. You have to know the references. You have to earn the right to speak. You have to make something the community would share without being paid to.
This is the uncomfortable part for a lot of marketing teams. You cannot brief a subculture campaign from a slide of population data. You have to go and live in the corners of the internet where these people actually are — the Reddit threads, the WhatsApp groups, the regional creator ecosystems — and understand what they care about before you show up with a message. Most brands aren’t willing to do that work. Which is exactly why the ones that do have so much room to win.
How to build to a subculture
- Find the taste, not the age. Ask what your best customers have in common that has nothing to do with the census. That shared thing is your real audience.
- Learn the language before you speak it. Every subculture has a vernacular. Get it wrong and you’re the brand that tried too hard. Get it right and you’re one of them.
- Partner with the gatekeepers. Every community has voices it trusts. They are worth more than a celebrity with ten times the followers and none of the credibility.
- Make something worth belonging to. The strongest brands don’t target a subculture. They become part of one.
The Voxo take
The age bracket is a spreadsheet convenience masquerading as a strategy. The brands that will own the next decade aren’t targeting demographics — they’re joining subcultures, learning their codes, and earning a place inside them. That’s slower. It’s also the only thing that compounds."Stop buying an age bracket. Start earning a community."
The demographic will always be there in the media plan, sitting at the top, easy to buy and easy to ignore. Let it. The growth is happening one level down — in the subcultures that already know exactly who they are, and are quietly waiting for a brand that gets it.