“Do you ever think that one day someone else’s name will replace yours?” Anupam Kher once asked Shah Rukh Khan on his chat show. Khan didn’t flinch. “I am the last of the stars,” he said—delivered less as a boast than as a working thesis, one he has repeated often enough for it to sound less like arrogance and more like an observation on an industry that no longer produces men like him.
At 60, with a filmography, a production house and a fortune estimated at USD1.4 billion behind him, that thesis holds up rather well in the one business where fame is famously short-lived: endorsements. Khan still fronts more than two dozen brands across categories as varied as automobiles, watches, banking and detergent. This year, one of those partnerships quietly reached a milestone few celebrity-brand pairings in India have managed—Hyundai Motor India’s thirty years with Shah Rukh Khan, a run old enough to have outlasted three generations of the company’s own cars.
The remarkable thing about Khan, argues Srijib Mallik, managing partner at McCann India, isn’t that he’s still famous at 60—plenty of people are famous. It’s that advertising still hasn’t quite found a category he can’t sell. But Mallik sees an interesting paradox sitting underneath Brand SRK. On screen, Khan has largely worked when he’s played the superstar—bigger than life, arms outstretched, a wind machine somewhere nearby—and audiences have been noticeably less convinced whenever filmmakers have tried to make him the ordinary man next door. Advertising, in Mallik’s reading, understood this instinct rather well: brands were never really asking audiences to believe Khan is the common man, only using the fact that the common man feels he already knows him—which, Mallik points out, is ‘a very different thing.’
Three-plus decades of films, television, cricket and advertising, Mallik says, have made Khan both enormous and strangely familiar at once—which is why an auto brand like Hyundai can sustain a decades-long relationship with him while an entirely different category can borrow his charisma tomorrow, and neither pairing feels particularly odd. The brand gets stature without distance, familiarity without ordinariness. That, in Mallik’s view, is also precisely what younger actors and creators can’t yet offer: youth, relevance and engagement, certainly, but not thirty years of accumulated memory. Reach can be built quickly today, he says, and so can fame. History cannot. ‘More stars. Fewer superstars’, is how he sums it up—India, in his telling, will keep producing famous people, just not, any time soon, someone quite this familiar for quite this long.
The newest name on Khan’s roster tests Mallik’s dilution question fairly directly. Foxtale, a four-year-old skincare brand with a stated community of more than 10 million consumers, signed Khan this month as ambassador for its serum, moisturiser, sunscreen and face mask range, alongside a new brand platform, ‘Let Your Glow Through’—built on the idea that skincare should work “from the source, through the surface” rather than treat surface symptoms alone. Founder and chief executive Romita Mazumdar has said Khan felt like a natural partner because what audiences have connected with across his career was never just what they saw, but who he is.
For Foxtale, the choice was never about a younger face versus an older one, says Ayush Agarwal, the brand’s chief business officer—it was about finding someone who genuinely embodied what Foxtale stands for at this stage of its journey. Khan represents confidence, authenticity and substance, qualities Agarwal sees as strengthening with time rather than being defined by age, which lines up naturally with the ‘Let Your Glow Through’ philosophy of drawing out what a person, or a product, already has rather than manufacturing a new version of it. Foxtale’s own approach, built around treating a skin concern at its source rather than its surface, isn’t so different, in Agarwal’s reading, from what Khan’s own career reflects—across decades, what audiences have connected with hasn’t been his stardom alone but the authenticity and self-built confidence underneath it. At a moment when the brand is heading into its next chapter, he says, that felt far more meaningful than signing someone simply for being young or culturally current.
That instinct is hardly new to Khan’s portfolio. Hyundai marked its own thirty-year milestone this year by reviving its most nostalgic asset, the Santro-era ‘Mr. Kim’ campaign, reworked for a contemporary audience with the Creta and the electric Ioniq 5 standing in for the hatchback that first introduced Khan to Hyundai showrooms. The film racked up around 25 million views within weeks of release. A second anniversary spot closed on an exchange between Khan and Hyundai India’s managing director and chief executive, Tarun Garg, with Garg promising that the next thirty years “will be epic.”
For Virat Khullar, Hyundai India’s head of marketing, the relationship’s staying power has never really been about a brand and a celebrity—it has been about two journeys evolving alongside India’s own. When Hyundai entered the country in 1996, it was a young, ambitious challenger; Khan, around the same time, was emerging as the face of a newly confident, aspirational India. Three decades on, both the brand and the actor have changed shape considerably, Khullar notes, but the underlying values underneath the association — trust, aspiration, confidence, the courage to keep moving forward — have stayed remarkably consistent, which is what he credits for the partnership’s continued relevance.
That relevance has meant Khan’s role has had to evolve in step with Hyundai’s own transformation. In the early years, his association was tied closely to individual product launches; as Hyundai’s portfolio and customer base widened, Khullar says, Khan’s role shifted from product ambassador to a fuller embodiment of the brand itself—someone whose resonance now stretches from the household’s primary decision-maker to the teenagers who quietly influence a family’s car purchase. A new face, he argues, can buy a brand instant visibility, but three decades with one man have compounded into a depth of trust that a launch campaign cannot replicate overnight — which is precisely why Hyundai’s latest film pairs Khan with Garg himself, folding thirty years of accumulated equity into the brand’s next chapter rather than retiring it.
The same three-decade playbook doesn’t hold everywhere Khan’s face appears, though, because not every brand is buying continuity—some are buying access to a very specific emotional register. When Joy Personal Care signed Khan, the brand’s thinking ran in a different direction entirely, says Poulomi Roy, chief marketing officer at Joy’s parent company, RSH Global. As a mass brand, she says, Joy’s consumers could never be understood through socio-economic strata alone; they had to be read through demographics, psychographics and the culture they actually lived in, because “people are far more interesting than a demographic box.”
What crystallised the decision, Roy says, was Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh—a research-driven study, rather than a fan biography, of the emotional space Khan occupies in the lives of Indian women across class lines. Bhattacharya’s women found in their fandom a measure of intimacy, independence, escape and fun that their own social structures rarely allowed; in Khan, Roy says, they saw a version of masculinity that felt empathetic rather than oppressive. That was the same emotional territory Joy was already trying to reach, which made Khan, in Roy’s framing, less a celebrity hire than a proxy for a consumer the brand already understood.
Visa’s own reasoning runs along similar lines, though it is pointed at a rather different audience. The card network’s newest campaign with Khan, Infinitely More with Visa Power, draws on the company’s own India’s Affluent Economy 2025–26 whitepaper, which found that India’s wealthier consumers are moving away from ownership and toward experience-led living—bespoke travel, dining and lifestyle moments chosen for how personal and purposeful they feel, says Gaurav Ramdev, Visa’s head of marketing for India and South Asia. Khan, in that context, wasn’t cast to sell a card so much as to embody the mindset the campaign is built around—an Indian consumer whose aspirations have shifted from what they own to what they get to experience.
The fit, in Ramdev’s telling, is less a marketing coincidence than a fairly direct overlap of what both already represent. Khan brings, as he puts it, “trust, access, exclusivity and global resonance,” qualities that map neatly onto a payments brand operating in a category where credibility and security aren’t negotiable. His cross-generational pull matters just as much: in a campaign meant to speak to affluent segments across age groups rather than one generation, Khan’s ability to resonate with a teenager and a retiree in the same household lets Visa reach across that spread without diluting the message. It is the same instinct Hyundai and Joy each acted on for different reasons—a category where trust has to be inherited rather than built from scratch tends to find it faster in a face audiences have already decided to believe.
Indian brands now spend upward of ₹2,500 crore a year on celebrity endorsements, in a market crowded enough that faces like MS Dhoni’s or Pankaj Tripathi’s stretch across thirty-odd brands apiece until few of them stick to any one in particular. Against that backdrop, Khan’s newer deals sit oddly close to his oldest ones—fewer in number, longer in duration, chosen less for a single season’s visibility than for what a brand’s consumer already feels about him. Whether that adds up to stronger recall than a rotating cast of newer faces is still being tested brand by brand. But thirty years into Hyundai, and with brands as different as Joy, Visa and Foxtale signing on for reasons that have little to do with box-office numbers, the case for staying power currently looks like the stronger bet. It’s Mallik’s blunter formulation, in the end: India will keep making stars. Superstars—and the thirty years of memory that come attached to one—are proving considerably harder to replace.
