10 September 2026, New Delhi: Over the past two years, a familiar cast of Bollywood stars and cricketers has quietly moved from soft drinks and smartphones into a far less glamorous business: crop protection, plant nutrition, and farm machinery. Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar now fronts Crystal Crop Protection’s campaign. Cricketer Rohit Sharma has signed on with Dharmaj Crop Guard. Rahul Dravid is the face of Paradeep Phosphates’ nano-DAP push. Sourav Ganguly has been named “Brand Champion” at Aries Agro, and Sachin Tendulkar has joined SML Limited. Ajay Devgn has fronted Insecticides India’s campaigns since 2022. In the adjacent farm-machinery space, MS Dhoni continues to anchor Swaraj Tractors, and Yuvraj Singh has taken up New Holland Tractors.
For an industry that has traditionally sold on technical efficacy, dealer relationships, and word-of-mouth trust, this is a striking shift. It raises an obvious question for anyone tracking the sector: does putting a familiar face on a pesticide bottle or a fertilizer bag actually move product? The honest answer, based on what the evidence actually shows, is more nuanced and arguably more interesting than a simple yes.
The evidence gap no one talks about
Search for a rigorous, sector-specific study quantifying how much a celebrity endorsement lifts agrochemical sales, and you will not find one. Not in India, not globally. None of the companies above has disclosed a campaign-attributable revenue number in an annual report or earnings call. Insecticides India’s filings describe Ajay Devgn’s role as improving “brand equity” and “reach”, not as a line item in its revenue bridge. Dharmaj Crop Guard’s management, on its FY26 earnings call, spoke of Rohit Sharma’s early response as “positive,” while attributing the branded business’s actual performance to monsoon conditions and expansion into new states.
The closest thing to a hard attribution in the sector dates back to 2014, when Dhanuka Agritech’s management credited “branding initiatives, including advertisements featuring Amitabh Bachchan” as one contributor to a roughly 30% nine-month revenue jump, a company-wide number shaped by many other factors, not an isolated campaign measurement.
This is not unique to agrochemicals, it reflects how celebrity marketing is measured (or not measured) almost everywhere. But it does mean that anyone citing a specific “X% sales lift” for an Indian agrochem brand’s celebrity campaign is likely repeating an unverified estimate, not a disclosed figure.
What the global evidence actually shows
Where rigorous numbers do exist, they come from entirely different categories and they are worth knowing, because they explain why marketers keep making this bet.
The most cited academic starting point is Agrawal and Kamakura’s 1995 event study, which looked at how the stock market reacted to 110 celebrity-endorsement contract announcements and found a small but statistically significant abnormal return on the announcement day itself. Anita Elberse and Jeroen Verleun’s 2012 follow-up study went further, tracking actual sales rather than share price: across 51 athlete endorsements, most produced measurable sales increases, both in absolute terms and relative to competitors, the “business-stealing” effect that matters most to a brand chasing market share in a fragmented category.
The single cleanest number in the literature comes from golf. A 2013 Marketing Science study by Chung, Derdenger and Srinivasan isolated Tiger Woods’ effect on Nike golf ball sales using a decade of monthly sales data and Woods’ own performance rankings as the identifying variable. The result: roughly 1.4 million additional Nike golf balls sold per month during his endorsement, and about $103 million in additional profit over ten years. The same research also captured the downside: in the six months after Woods’ 2009 personal scandal, Nike lost around 105,000 customers, losses the rest of the golf industry did not recover either, a reminder that a celebrity’s off-field behaviour becomes the brand’s problem too.
Global Agri-input Industry
Outside sport and consumer goods, the agri-input sector’s international cousins take a different approach entirely. Bayer’s decade-long “Here’s to the Farmer” campaign with country singer Luke Bryan is built around goodwill and food-bank donations, not product endorsement in the classic sense. In Brazil, a 2025 investigation found agribusiness companies sharply increasing spend on farm-community social media influencers rather than mainstream celebrities, more than double the number of sponsored influencer posts for major agri-input and livestock brands in a single year. The pattern outside India, in other words, leans toward authenticity and community reach rather than star wattage. India’s use of national cricketers and film stars in agrochemicals appears to be a distinctly local phenomenon, shaped by the outsized trust those figures command with rural audiences.
Reach, not ROI, is the actual pitch
This is where Rajesh Aggarwal, Managing Director of Insecticides India, offers the most candid rationale in the sector. He has described the purpose of signing a brand ambassador plainly: to increase “the penetration of our communication in our existing markets as well as newer markets.” That is a distribution and awareness objective, not a sales-conversion promise. In a country where farmers are served by tens of thousands of dealers across languages and regions no single sales force can canvas efficiently, a nationally trusted face is a shortcut to recall and credibility, particularly for newer, more technical products such as nano-fertilizers or biologicals, where farmers have no prior experience to fall back on.
Framed this way, a celebrity signing is closer to a communications investment than a growth lever with a calculable payback period. It buys attention and a halo of trust in markets where traditional advertising struggles to cut through and that is a legitimate, if unmeasured, objective in its own right.
The investor angle few are discussing
There is a second, less-discussed rationale worth putting on the table: for a sector as niche and capital-intensive as agrochemicals, a marquee celebrity signing also functions as a signal to investors. Several of the companies now running these campaigns, Crystal Crop Protection among them have been reported to be preparing for public listings or expanding investor visibility.
A recognisable face attached to the brand does something a technical product pitch cannot: it makes an unglamorous, rural business category legible to a retail investor base that has never bought a litre of pesticide but instantly recognises a national cricket captain or a Bollywood superstar. In that sense, the endorsement is aimed as much at Dalal Street as at the dealer network, a branding exercise that supports valuation narratives and IPO storytelling in a sector that otherwise struggles for mainstream media and investor attention.
The honest verdict
Celebrity endorsement in agrochemicals is a rational bet, well supported by evidence from other industries showing that endorsements can and do move sales and brand equity, but it is not, on the evidence available, a proven sales driver in this specific sector.
What is proven, in company after company’s own language, is intent: broader reach, faster recall, a shortcut to trust in a market where trust is hard-won, and a story worth telling to future shareholders. Whether it also moves volume off dealer shelves remains, for now, a question no Indian agrochemical company has publicly answered with a number.
Global Agriculture is an independent international media platform covering agri-business, policy, technology, and sustainability. For editorial collaborations, thought leadership, and strategic communications, write to pr@global-agriculture.com
