Is The 'Instagram Brand' Era Coming To An End?

Since the pandemic, D2C brands have struck gold online with Instagram ads. That playbook is changing.

- Soumya Gupta

Ganesh Sonawane wanted to make products to help people get mobile, and so he set up Frido, a company focused on ergonomic comfort. "We started with a niche of a niche—a self-propelled wheelchair—where the pain point was very large," recalls Sonawane. "This was an innovative commode and shower wheelchair and the goal was to serve 1,000 people."

Sonawane launched the wheelchair in 2015 with a website and a blog post explaining the product and the ideal customer: elderly or disabled folks who do not want to rely on a caretaker 24x7. "We were hoping to serve 1,000 customers but we ended up with more than 10,000."

A sharp, targeted pitch in a blog post gave Frido early success. Now, three years later, he continues to market Frido's existing and upcoming product line on X, formerly known as Twitter, through his own verified account. He has nearly 20,000 followers on the platform, while Frido has less than 5,000.

"My posts [on X] get roughly 2 million views a week," Sonawane says. "It has been a useful channel to get feedback as well, while promoting the brand. We get tens of new product requests every week packed with a lot of insights."

Sonawane isn't alone. Where once they would lean on social media giant Meta's Instagram platform, entrepreneurs running early-stage direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are now supplementing their digital marketing strategies by harnessing other social media platforms, including X and LinkedIn. They are asking for help with fundraising, announcing product launches, running flash sales personally, answering customer complaints, even fighting larger competitors.

Consequently, Instagram is slowly losing its status as the go-to channel for performance marketing—click-to-convert ads that push an online user to buy something right away. Instead, ads running on e-commerce and quick commerce platforms are rapidly displacing it. This is taking place at a time when advertising on Meta has become expensive.