Amazon Great Indian Festival: A Sane Prep Plan for Lean Teams

Every year, sometime in August, a small brand team looks at the Great Indian Festival calendar and quietly panics. The catalogue has forty SKUs. The festival is six weeks out. The team is four people, maybe three, and one of them also runs customer support. So they do the natural thing. They try to get everything ready. Every listing refreshed, every SKU discounted, ads spread thin across the whole range so nothing gets left out. And then the event arrives and the brand finishes the biggest sale window of the Indian year having done a mediocre job on everything and a great job on nothing.

That is the failure mode, and it is almost universal among lean teams. The Great Indian Festival rewards concentration, not coverage. A small team that backs three SKUs hard will beat a small team that backs thirty SKUs softly, every time. The whole prep plan below is built on that one decision, made early and held without flinching.

Pick your heroes before you do anything else

Before you touch a single listing, decide which SKUs you are actually going to fight for. Not which ones you would like to do well. Which ones get the budget, the deal slots, the inventory, and your limited attention. For most lean brands that number is between three and six. Everything else rides along on a baseline discount and gets no real push.

How do you choose? Look for the SKUs where you already have proof and room.

Existing rank and review depth. A SKU sitting on page one with a healthy review count converts during a sale. A SKU buried on page four does not magically surface because you discounted it. The festival amplifies position you already hold, it does not create it.
Margin that survives the discount. A hero SKU has to take a festive-grade discount and still leave you something. If a SKU only works at full price, it is not a hero, it is a trap.
Inventory you can actually hold. A hero you stock out of mid-event is worse than a SKU you never pushed, because the rank damage outlasts the sale.
A deal slot you can realistically win. Lightning deals and featured placements are rationed. Concentrate your asks on the SKUs most likely to get them.

A lean team’s edge is focus. The Great Indian Festival is a focus test disguised as a logistics test.

Lock inventory backwards from the event date

Inventory is where festival prep actually lives or dies, and it is the part lean teams under-plan most. Your hero SKUs need to be in the warehouse and live before deals go active, not arriving during. That means working backwards from the event date through your inbound lead time, and committing the shipment weeks ahead of the sale.

The hard part is that festive demand does not behave like your normal run rate. A SKU that idles at thirty units a day can do many multiples of that across a deal window, and a naive forecast off recent sales will leave you short. This is its own discipline, and we walk through it properly in our piece on forecasting inventory for marketplaces when demand is spiky. The short version for the festival: forecast the event separately from your baseline, anchor on last year’s same window adjusted for your current rank and budget, and then bias deliberately toward overstock on your heroes. The cost of overstocking a fast SKU is storage and a slow clearance. The cost of stocking out is the deal slot, the velocity, and weeks of rank you cannot buy back.

If you also sell on Flipkart, the same logic governs Big Billion Days, which usually runs in the same window, and we cover that planning cadence in planning inventory and ads for Big Billion Days months ahead. The two events often overlap, which makes the case for fewer heroes even stronger, because your inventory and your attention are now split across two platforms.

Set pricing so the discount means something

During the festival, shoppers comparison-hunt harder than at any other time of year. Your absolute discount matters less than your discount relative to the category. A flat ten percent off when the category is running thirty will read as no discount at all. So the pricing question for each hero is not what can I afford, it is what does this need to be to win the click against the listings next to it.

That tension between winning the sale and protecting the margin is the whole game, and it is easy to give away more than you needed to in the heat of the event. We lay out how to think about it in protecting margin when everyone discounts. The festival-specific point is this. Because you have only a few heroes, you can afford to price them aggressively and precisely, instead of spreading a thin, defensive discount across forty SKUs that fools nobody. Concentration buys you the room to be sharp where it counts.

Concentrate the ad budget, do not spread it

Here is where lean teams leak the most money. They take a modest festival ad budget and divide it evenly across the catalogue, so every SKU gets a trickle and none gets enough to actually move. During an event, that trickle is worse than useless, because everyone’s bids spike at once and a small per-SKU budget gets outbid before it does anything.

Pour the budget into the heroes. Let them dominate their search terms for the window, win the placements, and ride the velocity into better organic rank that outlasts the sale. A few SKUs funded properly will return far more than the whole catalogue funded thinly. If you are still calibrating how to read your spend during the event, our note on reading ACoS against total advertising cost of sale is a useful frame for the festival push, because the festival is the same problem under pressure: spend concentrated, measure honestly, do not spread yourself into irrelevance.

What to do in the days right before

Raise hero bids ahead of the spike, not during it, so you are not scrambling against the whole category at once.
Pause spend on non-heroes that cannot convert, and move that budget to the SKUs that can.
Pre-write and check your deal listings, so a typo or a missing image does not waste the slot you fought to get.
Confirm stock is live, not just inbound, on every hero before deals activate.

What to deliberately ignore

The discipline of a good festival plan is as much about what you refuse to do as what you do. For a lean team, the non-heroes get a baseline festive discount, no special ad spend, and no extra prep. That is not neglect. That is the plan. The energy you would have spent making forty mediocre pushes goes into making four excellent ones.

This feels uncomfortable the first time, because it means consciously letting most of your catalogue coast through the biggest event of the year. But the brands that try to be everywhere during the Great Indian Festival end up nowhere, and the ones that pick their ground and hold it walk away with rank gains that compound for the rest of the quarter. Fewer bets, backed harder, is not the cautious option. It is the aggressive one.

What changed recently

The 2025 festival made the case for concentration stronger, not weaker. Amazon reported a record 276 crore customer visits across the Great Indian Festival, with 70 percent of traffic coming from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, per Amazon India. The brands that won were not the ones spread thin. The category spikes were sharp and specific, with premium smartphones above thirty thousand rupees up around 30 percent and festive home decor up several multiples, which is exactly the pattern a hero strategy is built to catch.

The other shift worth planning around is the GST rate revision that landed just before the season. Redseer found the first eleven days of festive 2025 ecommerce clocked more than sixty thousand crore in GMV, up 20 to 22 percent year on year and nearly double the prior year’s pace, with smartphones and appliances driving most of that growth on the back of GST-led price cuts, per Redseer. If a tax change has moved your landed price, fold it into your hero pricing before the event, not after. Fashion, notably, showed only low single-digit growth because year-round discounting has spread that demand across the calendar, which is one more reason to put your heroes where the festive lift actually concentrates.

And do not assume the festive surge follows shoppers onto quick commerce. Redseer noted quick commerce held its usual growth trajectory of over 120 percent during the season but did not see a festive spike, because for large-ticket and considered purchases traditional ecommerce is still where people buy. If your category leans considered, the Great Indian Festival on Amazon and Flipkart remains the event to plan your heroes around, not your ten-minute listings.

The plan in one breath

Choose three to six heroes on proof and margin. Lock their inventory backwards from the event date with a forecast that respects the spike. Price them sharply against the category, not defensively across the catalogue. Pour the ad budget into them and starve everything else. Let the non-heroes coast on a baseline discount and do not feel bad about it.

None of this needs a big team. It needs an early decision and the nerve to hold it through the noise of the event. That concentration is exactly what our Performance Marketing & Ads work brings to a festival, and it sits alongside the Marketplace Management and Operations & Logistics teams, because the deal slots and the inbound shipment are what turn a chosen hero into an actual win. Pick your few. Back them hard. Ignore the rest on purpose.

Sponsored Products vs Sponsored Brands: Stop Splitting Budget Equally

Open the ad console of almost any new brand on Amazon India and you will find the same well-meaning mistake. The budget has been split down the middle. Half to Sponsored Products, half to Sponsored Brands, because both exist and both sound important. It feels balanced. It feels fair. It is also the fastest way to waste a launch budget, because the two ad types do completely different jobs and one of them is useless before you have earned the right to run it.

We have inherited dozens of accounts set up this way. The pattern is always the same. The Sponsored Brands campaigns are burning rupees on a brand nobody is searching for yet, while the Sponsored Products campaigns, the ones that could actually be winning sales, are starved of the budget they need to gather data. The fix is not clever. It is an order of operations. Get the order right and the same money works twice as hard.

The two ad types are not interchangeable

Sponsored Products place your individual listing into search results and on competitor product pages. They are bottom-of-funnel. The shopper is already searching for the thing you sell, and your ad puts your specific SKU in front of that intent. The click goes straight to the product page where the purchase happens. This is the workhorse. It is where the overwhelming majority of marketplace ad sales come from, for new brands and established ones alike.

Sponsored Brands are different animals. They are the banner at the top of search with your logo, a custom headline, and a row of products, or the video unit, or the unit that drives to your store. They are brand-led. They work when a shopper has some reason to care that it is you, or when your catalogue is wide enough that showing three products beats showing one. That is a real capability. It is just not a launch capability.

Sponsored Products answers “is this the product I want.” Sponsored Brands answers “is this the brand I want.” A shopper who has never heard of you is only ever asking the first question.

Why Sponsored Products should dominate early

When you launch, you have no brand equity. Nobody is typing your name into the search bar. Nobody clicks a banner because your logo reassures them, because your logo means nothing to them yet. Every rupee you put into Sponsored Brands in week one is paying to introduce a stranger, which is the most expensive job in advertising and the slowest to pay back.

Meanwhile Sponsored Products is doing the one thing a new brand desperately needs. It is buying you placement against high-intent search terms and, just as importantly, harvesting data. Every impression and click teaches you which keywords convert, which ones drain budget, what your real ACoS and TACoS picture looks like, and which SKUs the market actually wants. That keyword and conversion data is the foundation everything else is built on. You cannot scale a brand campaign intelligently until Sponsored Products has told you what works.

So the early split is not fifty-fifty. For most new brands it is closer to the large majority of budget into Sponsored Products, with Sponsored Brands either off entirely or running a single small defensive campaign. We lay out exactly how we stage this in the first thirty days in our first ninety days playbook, but the headline is simple. Win at the listing level before you spend a paisa selling the brand.

What Sponsored Products needs to actually work

A listing that converts. Ads send traffic. The product page closes it. Spending on traffic to a weak page is just a faster way to lose money.
Tight keyword segmentation, so converting terms get fed and wasteful ones get cut instead of being buried in a blended campaign average.
A bid strategy matched to the campaign’s job, fixed bids while you gather clean data, dynamic and rule-based later once you know what a keyword is worth.
Enough daily budget that campaigns do not cap out by noon and stop learning.
Patience to let the data accumulate before you start pruning. A week of spend is a hypothesis, not a verdict.

When Sponsored Brands finally earns its place

Sponsored Brands is not a launch tool. It is a scaling lever. It earns its budget once a few specific things are true, and not before. You have a catalogue wide enough that showing a curated row of products beats showing one. You have some branded search volume, meaning people are starting to look for you by name and you want to own that real estate before a competitor bids on it. And your Sponsored Products data has already told you which products and keywords convert, so the brand campaign is built on evidence rather than hope.

At that stage Sponsored Brands does things Sponsored Products simply cannot. It defends your branded terms so rivals cannot intercept shoppers already looking for you. It pushes a category-level message at the top of broad search where a single product would get lost. It drives to a store where a considered shopper can see the whole range. The video unit, in particular, can carry a product story that a static listing tile never could. These are real wins. They are scaling wins, layered on top of a working foundation, not a substitute for building one.

The mental model we use is a staircase. Sponsored Products is the ground floor and you cannot skip it. Sponsored Brands is the next floor up. Beyond that, for brands with the volume and margin to justify it, sits programmatic and retargeting, which we cover in our piece on when Amazon DSP is actually worth it for an Indian brand. Each floor assumes the one below it is solid. Try to build the top floor first and the whole thing wobbles.

The order of operations we run

Here is the sequence we apply across the accounts we manage, regardless of category.

Launch with Sponsored Products carrying the large majority of budget. Segment campaigns by intent, run clean data-gathering bids, and let conversions accumulate before cutting anything.
Read the data. Identify the converting keywords, the winning SKUs, the wasteful terms, and the real efficiency numbers. This is the asset the whole account is built on.
Once branded search appears and the catalogue justifies it, switch on Sponsored Brands deliberately. Start with defensive branded campaigns, then category-level units built on the keywords Sponsored Products already proved.
Rebalance continuously. The split is never fixed. It shifts as the brand earns equity, and it is set by the numbers, not by a fairness instinct.

Notice what is missing from that list. At no point do we decide the split by feel, and at no point do both ad types start on day one at equal weight. The budget follows the funnel. Early on the funnel is almost entirely bottom, so the budget is too.

What changed recently

The staircase logic matters more now because the surface a mature Indian account can buy on has widened, and the money flowing into it has too. Amazon India’s advertising income climbed 24 percent to roughly Rs 8,370 crore in FY25, ahead of Flipkart’s reported Rs 6,317 crore, according to Storyboard18. That is not a vanity number. It tells you the auction you are bidding into is getting more crowded and more expensive every quarter, which is exactly why wasting launch budget on a brand banner nobody searches for is a worse idea today than it was two years ago.

The format menu has grown at the top of the staircase, not the bottom. In March 2025 Amazon Ads introduced Sponsored TV in India, a self-service streaming video product that starts with Amazon MX Player and is open to brands selling on Amazon.in, as reported by Exchange4media. It is genuinely useful, but read it for what it is. It is an upper-funnel reach tool, another floor above Sponsored Brands, not a reason to skip the data-gathering work Sponsored Products still has to do first.

Amazon itself is framing 2026 around a full-funnel retail media story, with agentic AI tools that compress creative production from weeks into hours and connected TV viewership growing fast, per Amazon India. The temptation in that pitch is to spread across every funnel stage at once because the tooling finally makes it easy. Resist it on a new account. Cheaper creative and more ad surfaces do not change the order of operations. They just make it easier to spend at the top before the bottom is proven, which is the same launch mistake with a 2026 coat of paint.

The discipline is sequencing, not preference

None of this is a verdict that one ad type is better than the other. Both are essential to a mature account. The mistake is treating them as a pair of equals to be funded symmetrically from day one, when they are really two stages of the same journey. Sponsored Products earns the early rupees and builds the data foundation. Sponsored Brands spends that foundation to scale the brand once there is a brand worth scaling.

This is exactly the kind of sequencing our Performance Marketing & Ads work is built around, fed by the listing and creative discipline of our Marketplace Performance practice so the traffic we buy lands on pages that actually convert. The summary is short and a little uncomfortable for anyone who set their account up the tidy way. Stop splitting the budget equally. Put the money where the buying is happening now, prove what works, and only then pay to sell the brand. Balance is not the same as effectiveness. The even split looks responsible on a spreadsheet and quietly loses you the launch.