This post was written two and a half years back. Shockingly, things are still the same and the post is as relevant

I find that quite strange ! Here’s why?

Exhibit A:

Source: https://www.newindianexpress.com/business/2023/mar/12/svb-executive-was-lehman-brothers-cfo-prior-to-2008-collapse-2555388.html

He definitely had relevant experience at a leadership role & we all can be quite confident that was a major factor in his recruitment

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Exhibit B:

How an outsider, not somone from the industry turned around Lego and made it one of the top brands in the world : https://hbr.org/2009/01/lego-ceo-jorgen-vig-knudstorp-on-leading-through-survival-and-growth

Exhibit C: (a recent experience)

Recently an executive search consultant called me for some CGO (chief growth officer/growth head ) referrals for edtech and his mandate was to hire only from the edtech industry for this new growth stage venture.

Yes hiring them can make for a great underdog story-aka a Chak De India for Edtech.

(I really want to hear the 60 minutes speech the edtech CGO gives his performance marketers and others ;-) )

But unless you want to spend millions in the hope of re-creating a bollywood underdo story why would you look to hire that person?

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Seriously,Why?

(ps-for creating memes using AI, use supermeme .For international readers you could watch the movie .)

Which newsletter will you get HR strategies,marketing analys and movie recommendations in the same line? -hard sell 😇

So here’s my takeaway:

1. In sectors or businesses which have struggled hire leaders with fresh perspectives even when experts are available for the top positions (Edtech,D2C,Ecommerce etc are common egs). Domain expertise makes sense for the mid rung but the top needs a new way to look at things

2. For small but high intellect industries like Management Consulting or more importantly Venture Capital the goal should be to always mix up -experts from different domains but who are inclined towards startups. And not ex startup founders whose companies never made a profit. That’s almost a sureshot way of repeating the cycle.

3. For industries or organizations which are not struggling a domain expert would normally make more sense but now we are living in a world which is rapidly changing, primarily thanks to tech. So the domain experience becomes less important than a way of thinking. In these situations sometimes someone who comes from a different market ,industry may just be the cherry on top for a great business.

   

Useful side effect of this hiring strategy go beyond business ROI. From a very narrow perspective you move to a wider hiring pool thus it becomes quicker.Also it’s more diverse

-Written by Saurabh Parmar

Who is Saurabh?

Ans : https://outstandingspeakersbureau.in/speakers/saurabh-parmar/

Why is he writing in 3rd person?

No idea, but he delivers ROI in 3 sessions. Guarantee ROI in 3 sessions, and can help you restructure your JDs in 2-4 sessions to hire better.

In fact if you think about it ,in terms of business success (ie profit) the order is almost reversed.

Croma would be the most profitable, followed by Kite (I'm guessing), and Zepto would be the least profitable.

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👉 So here's my solution:

➡️ It doesn't matter the frequency at which an app gets used. Once a basic level is crossed whether it be monthly or weekly,the metric isnt too relevant. Our importance to the metric comes from a more archaic understanding of digital consumer behaviour where we believed repeated visits converted to more revenue.

Zerodha or Smallcase can be used monthly, and Book My Show or MMT can be used quarterly, but all of them are profitable or near-profitable businesses, as opposed to Zepto, Paytm, and Byjus all of which are/were growing rapidly but aren't profitable.

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Marketing,Product & Business are tightly integrated.

✨✨ One doesn’t need to understand them all but the North Star metric has to be aligned.

On a different note…

And while Product Led Growth is different ,it’s foundation of starting from the product thus business & ignoring irrelevant metrics is the same principle I have shared above.

PLG is also not an innovation,its an eventuality.

And heres’s a link to the best PLG book I have read..I had to pay for it, but here it’s free and shared by the author himself : https://productled.com/book

PS-I would like to attribute the original creator of the video so just ping me (here) and I will link to the right video.

-Saurabh

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They even provide collectible bottles to courier your pee to the data center of your choice.

This is the beauty of branding.

• They connected: Culture-dislike for AI data centers.

• Their brand: Drinking Liquid Death.

• Creative execution: Pee and a song.

• Small details :Nice brand touch with the collectible bottle.

And that’s what makes a brand stand out: not pee, but consistent voice and storytelling.

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Flipkart: Attention Without Credibility

I really can’t believe this is an ad. I just can’t believe that there is an entire marketing team who approved it.

It’s a death to empathy, and it’s also a death to marketing—because this is what happens when marketing continues to see attention as the only metric.

Time and again, I’ve mentioned that attention is not the goal of marketing. We are not in the 1990s anymore. The goal of marketing is credibility.

In an attention economy, even the most popular campaign loses attention in a few days. You can’t fight on attention. Your goal is credibility. And Flipkart just lost that battle.

Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar

But here’s the real breakdown:

🟡 ~50 million = Zero taxable income

🟡 12.5–20 million earn ₹5–10L

🟡 7-9 million earn ₹10–20L

🟡 2–2.5 million earn ₹20–50L

🟡 0.6-1 million earn ₹50L-1 Cr

🟡 ~0.36 million earn ₹1 crore+

( the data is from different sources , formatting is with AI)

---
What this tells us:

1. Lack of disposable income for majority :around 65 million earn below 10 lakh.

2. Why India looks booming to some of us
If you know a lot of people earning ₹20L+, it’s easy to assume that’s what “India” looks like. It’s not. That’s just our bubble of 3 million people, most of them concentrated, but which also means when 30000 people get laid off its 1% of that population, which runs the economy.

for the rest, including D2C, Luxury and mass market opportunity,

click here

By - Saurabh, Fractional CMO

Who is Saurabh? https://outstandingspeakersbureau.in/speakers/saurabh-parmar/

Bad marketing team thinks in mediums and platforms. Good marketing thinks in terms of insights and ideas.

Netflix proved it. To market The Last House, they didn’t run posters. They built a fully furnished, air-conditioned living room 30 feet above the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Selma Avenue, with an actual human performer inside for three days.

That’s insight-first. That’s idea-first.

The old model, allocating budgets according to mediums and segments like performance and brand, is completely outdated. But most marketing teams in India still operate this way. Which means they hit the same wall every time: Which medium does this campaign live in? If it’s OOH, we stretch the OOH budget. If it bleeds into digital, we need permission to pull from digital. We have to take permission.

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The fundamental fix is structural. You don’t change the team. You change how the team thinks. Stop allocating by mediums. Stop asking which platform. Ask: What’s the insight? Where does this idea need to live to work?

Great marketing teams are already doing this.

If your organisation is still organised by medium, that’s an ROI problem.

And guess what? The the marketing teams which are succeeding across the world have CMOs who don’t think in mediums.

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A live example:

:Bistro ran this in India, and it’s basically an out-of-home delivery service that delivers tea. Good idea, smart.

I’m sure a bunch of marketers on LinkedIn will share it and say, “Oh, that’s nice.”

But on the same budget, could they have 2x or 5x the ROI?

Yes, they could.

I would channel real Bistro orders via digital so that people are surprised when this van comes to them to deliver tea. And if it was a problem to do that for existing because of app changes, then I would just run it as a Twitter campaign with a click to pay.

Instead of them paying in money, I would refund 2x the amount to whoever clicks a photo and uploads it on social media there-’pay with a photo. The problem with this can’t ever be done if the marketing team thinks that this is out of home, something is digital, et cetera. (And by the way, this is a top-of-the-head idea. Once one sits on it, you can integrate multiple. You can have the campaign flowing across, and the same idea can be 10x bigger with 0.3 x more spend)

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DM me if you want to fix it for your marketing team www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO

Amplification without empathy is not communication. It’s talking past people until they stop listening.

There is one strange, perhaps interesting thing about my work profile: over the years, without trying to, I have kind of been called for a lot of crisis communication issues. It’s not an area where I try to ever build my brand or something, but just pure word of mouth, right from Crisis Comm workshops for government bodies, including the National Disaster Relief Foundation, to corporates and PSUs. I have done these workshops.

Coincidentally, now with AI and GTM becoming more important, I try and focus more on these, but Crisis Comm has still remained an area of interest.

In that context of surprise, when one of the best marketing teams in the country and arguably also in the world -BJP, has messed up the recent strategy to this extent.

BJP has been great at identifying the ICP-catering to it, making sure that the marketing is much louder than the product. And clearly defining a brand and a narrative across platforms.

But this time they have got it very wrong. They’ve launched a full 360° campaign after the recent GenZ protest:

👉 Hoardings in cities promoting their position

👉 YouTube videos with characters lecturing Gen Z about “proper” language

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👉 Celebrities and influencers posting about linguistic correctness

It’s coordinated. It’s expensive.

It’s tone-deaf!

This isn’t complicated crisis management.

Social media doesn’t reward that anymore. You can’t outshout a two-way conversation. The harder you push your message without acknowledging the other side exists, the more the algorithm amplifies the pushback.

The spend context makes this worse.

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Government marketing expenditure is now running into thousands of crores annually — significantly higher than previous governments. So at the exact moment when people have just got back after ITR filing, this spend itself will become a public friction point. Why launch another visible, expensive, multiplatform campaign to defend a position- especially when some other tactics seem to have worked in silencing the critics?

For a smart PR-Media - Marketing team, this is quite surprising. I sincerely hope they get it right.

Meanwhile, smaller players —like this dental clinic playing this well.

This one is brilliant. Imagine a dentist going viral by just posting one piece of content. Very smart.

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-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

What’s your take? Join the conversation on my LinkedIn.

P.S. a lot of content online is talking about what makes this particularly frustrating: it’s happening at a moment when there are far bigger issues competing for government attention, from the big ones to little kids starving -click here. as you can see in the comments, it’s even upsetting die-hard BJP supporters

Take this Linkedin ad from IIT Kanpur. It presents ChatGPT, Claude, and others as siloed tools for different tasks. Nobody subscribes to all of them. Nobody should.

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But here’s what’s really missing:

1. Tools built on top of these

This doesn’t address the abstraction layer. If you’re slightly tech-inclined, you can use Claude Code and build a website. But most people don’t want to spend time learning that. They need simpler tools — no-code builders, AI-powered marketing platforms — that let you ship something fast by just typing what you want.

The issue isn’t which base model you choose. It’s that courses teach the tools themselves, not the ecosystem around them.

2. The workflow shift

AI isn’t about the tools. It’s about how you transform existing processes.

Large organizations today have excellent tech capabilities. They’re implementing AI everywhere. But they’re still struggling because they aren’t thinking in terms of workflows — how does this change approvals, review cycles, customer feedback loops, hiring? How do you integrate it with the team you already have?

That’s the conversation that matters. And it’s not in any of these courses.

3. What works for leaders

There’s a completely different skill set for founders, CMOs, and C-suite than what these programs teach.

A leader doesn’t need to know how to extract structured data from an LLM. They need to know which decisions move faster now, which meetings can shrink, and which skills become optional. That’s entirely different training.

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Two years back, I said: “Don’t waste time on prompt engineering. It’s useful only for a while unless you’re technical.” That prediction held.

If your team needs actual, practical AI training — covering workflows, not hype — at 20-25% of what these branded courses cost, let’s work on it.

Workshops Overview

-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO
www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

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I want to talk about that — Cannes, and Zepto’s IPO versus its marketing.

Singing on the Titanic

I found it a little strange that Cannes was happening at a time when the advertising industry is sinking. We’re behaving like the folks on the Titanic — busy singing and dancing, not paying attention to the iceberg in front of us. Not to complain, but to try and do something before we hit the iceberg.

I’m not averse to awards.

I think they’re a great way to recognise work — my own has won two, and I’ve been nominated for one.

One of the ones that won, I 100% didn’t deserve — I only got it because it was a big brand. But that was 12-14 years back, when awards still sometimes meant something and there was some ethics around the process. Now, awards can literally be bought or sold, or you just ping a buddy on the panel to give you one.

But importantly, beyond awards, there’s another thing worth questioning about what we celebrate in advertising: is it actually good for the business or the brand — or just good for the people running the marketing?

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The Zepto Test

Zepto is a textbook case.

Look at the IPO documents and you realise how badly the marketing has actually performed.

Over the last few years we celebrated its out-of-home stunts — the fake wedding campaign and the rest of it. I still don’t know what a fake wedding had to do with groceries, but sure, buzz is buzz. Wonder why all of that didn’t translate into a decreasing CAC and an increasing TAM%.

Or the string of random gimmicks that didn’t really inspire confidence in the business but got people talking — because Zepto optimised for getting people to talk, not for getting people to trust the business.

See, it’s one thing to fail in marketing. We all do that. It’s not a sure-sure science. But there’s another thing entirely — to never try to run marketing to get attention to marketing itself versus the product. In fact, David Ogilvy’s code explicitly warned against that.

That’s the fundamental problem with a lot of marketing awards: they tend to acknowledge the crazy over the simple and insightful. And it’s often the simple, insightful work that actually moves the needle — for the customer and for the business.

Crazy, With a Point

To be clear — I like crazy too. One of my own campaigns, Spreading Chi, was a crazy idea — but it had a very clear link to the business.

If there’s only buzz, with no one even understanding what the brand or business does, then what’s the point of the buzz?

Advertising’s downfall, and Zepto’s IPO document, should make us think: what are we really celebrating?

What’s the actual benchmark for marketing?

-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

Impressive. But frankly, to other Indians — shouldn’t this be tablestakes?

In the startup ecosystem and business in general, we talk about:

• Courage

• Thinking differently

• Being solution-oriented

• Grit — the ability to go through tough times

• Leadership and community building

• Women playing a key role

Beyond a few exceptions like Mama Earth and Blue Tokai, most of them have turned out to be spineless.

Meanwhile, the middle class complains the government needs to act on taxes.

Venture capital talks about highcapital gains.

But here’s the thing: government only acts when it knows it can be held accountable. That’s what democracy is. Right now, they believe they can do anything. They don’t need to listen to what people want.

Gen Z is doing this for the country. The least we can do is verbally support them — beyond saying “Oh, how tragic, this needs to stop.” Humans were given a spine for a reason.

—Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO
www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

PS — I just saw a video of a young girl standing in front of a police van, stopping it. It reminded me of the Tiananmen Square protest — the girl standing in front of the tank.

And I was genuinely surprised.

For a typical post of mine- Zero comments. Just 1,600 impressions.

Numbers that usually mean: skip this one, nothing to learn here.

But and that’s a huge BUT

…the video attached to that post was watched for close to 15 seconds — 822 times.

Majority of those viewers are Founders, marketers, senior operators. (From followers)

That number still understates the real reach.

Watching the video only makes sense if you’ve already read the post.

So the real count of people who noticed the brand message sitting inside a zero-comment post is closer to 900–1,000 — and the majority of them are CXOs.

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And it’s just not these people. See the message. The credibility of the person sharing it is also added, which CRM B2B partnership or event will really give you at this cost.

This changes my opinion on the efficacy of brand partnerships on LinkedIn. And this is a post which had zero comments and hardly any likes, etc.

But of course, there are key disclaimers:

1. LinkedIn It’s definitely not about the number of followers, but the quality of followers- or other relevance of followers.

2. For example, if If it was a brand like Scaler that wanted to target techies or college students who want to upskill, this profile won’t have worked.

3. Interestingly, if it was a tech brand which wanted to push a new fancy phone or some cool AI device, this profile would have been a great fit because that audience is hard to reach. And the founders and CXOs have a cascading impact of influencing others.

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I know this sounds a bit weird that I am talking about my profile like this :-) and no, I don’t identify myself as a creator but from just a pure technical viewpoint, and given that I can only see my analytics, this suddenly made sense.

-Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

What’s your take on this ?

Today it’s around $4,970, roughly 3800% higher.

The worst part about the Vietnam War was that it wasn’t just one conflict. It lasted for decades — then came the boat people, the war in Cambodia, the war with China. It continued for years.

Vietnam opened its own economy in 1986 under Đổi Mới. The US didn’t lift its trade embargo until February 1994 — nineteen years after the war ended, and eight years after Vietnam had already started reforming on its own, with no American market access, no aid, none of the tailwinds Japan or Korea got.

Everyone’s explanation for what happened next is manufacturing hub, second China option, Samsung moved in. Partially true. Living here, including time in small towns, the fuller story looks different.

The business takeaways:

1. Vietnam never had India’s capital to pour into capex-heavy infrastructure. What it built instead was systems and processes. During COVID, it didn’t have the health infrastructure, and it borders China across multiple land and sea crossings. But factories were given far clearer, practical guidelines, and most of them kept running through the period. That’s not a capital advantage. That’s an execution advantage.

2. Corruption exists, but it’s punished — visibly, without ceremony. The head of the small town I’m currently in is in prison over it.

3. Manufacturing takes into account people. Across the world there seems to be a bias against communism, live in Vietnam vs other countries and you will change your mind. In another town I lived in, there was a Sri Lankan factory and an Indian factory. Workers from both countries were happier to be there — safety, a decent place to live, and unglamorous last-mile access. Small, unfancy airports. Roads that get workers to the factory gate without losing half a day.

4. The bigger story is barely being told. The government keeps involving and giving permission for public-private infrastructure and experiences because it knows that’s what draws capital in. A fireworks World Cup in Da Nang, a hot air balloon competition in a small town, one of the world’s biggest coffee museums a few hours away from me — genuinely world-class.

   

5. Founders are building here, and capital hasn’t noticed. Venture capital largely hasn’t found Vietnam’s entrepreneurs yet, unlike India. So all of this is happening without a startup boom.But there are some good startups coming out of Vietnam.

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A country doing the hard part this well — systems, safety, substance — and still barely whispering about it. That’s the actual opportunity sitting unclaimed.

-Saurabh Parmar,

Fractional CMO www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

And the reason is simple — one feeds the other now.

A physical experience gets media attention. People visit, take pictures, post. That drives social. Social drives more media. It’s a loop — and it’s far cheaper and more credible than buying reach.

IKEA just executed this brilliantly.

Every summer, Swedes argue about where the sun actually shines brightest. Nobody had ever properly settled it.

So IKEA did.

They pulled 20 years of solar data from Sweden’s national weather institute. Found the sunniest patch of land in the country — Gotland, southwest of Burgsvik. 2,137 hours of sunshine a year.

Brought in an architect to read the slope, the shadows, the exposure — narrowed it to one exact square metre.

And placed two stone chairs there. Modelled on their SKARPÖ outdoor chair.

No ad budget. No media buy. No influencer.

That story gets picked up by press. People make the trip, photograph it, share it. And suddenly a chair — a chair — becomes a part of culture.

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This is what modern marketing looks like.

But how many brands are smart and brave enough to do it?

Any founders who are — DM me on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/ . I’ll help you build a brand.

PS — one of the few times I’m pitching my own services, but I genuinely want to work with founders with more spine and vision.

-Saurabh Parmar fractional CMO https://outstandingspeakersbureau.in/speakers/saurabh-parmar/

I put together a 14-slide practical guide covering:

— How ChatGPT ad units actually work

— Bidding models (CPM vs CPC) and current pricing benchmarks

— Context hints — the targeting logic that replaces keywords

— Creative specs and tone guidance

— Conversion tracking setup (Pixel + Conversions API)

— Who can run these and what categories are excluded

Free to access and download here: click

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-Saurabh Fractional CMO https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar/

By that logic, every country just needs to find their own Kunal Shah and they’ve got a billion-dollar chat business. Problem solved.

That’s not how super apps work.

A super app is not a feature set or a market size calculation. It’s a cultural outcome.

WeChat didn’t happen because Tencent had the right hire. It happened because small-town China — not Shanghai, not Beijing — was already waiting for something like it. The culture, the commerce behaviour, the absence of alternatives, the government architecture — all of it converged.

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Go live in a small town in Vietnam or Indonesia, outside Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City, for a few months. (I have.) You’ll understand immediately why those markets produced super app behaviour and India didn’t. It has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with how daily life is organised.

A super app is not built. It emerges — when culture, need, and infrastructure converge at the same moment. That moment hasn’t arrived in India. It may not.

India and the US are different. Neither will produce a super app — not because of regulation or competition, but because the cultural preconditions don’t exist. The only scenario that changes this is if AI disrupts the tech ecosystem enough to create entirely new players and new behaviours from scratch.

One of the brilliant posts on how Kunal Shah will transform WhatsApp into a super app - the question which this doesn’t ask is:

even if all the features are built, will people really use it to make it a super app ?

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Now, on the Meta side — this is being dramatically overcomplicated.

Meta had a role to fill. India is one of their most important markets — largest WhatsApp user base, growing AI infrastructure ambitions, a large English-speaking population, and significantly less political friction around data centres than the US right now.

Across the US, democratic socialists are winning, and most of them will respond to public pressure and push against data centres. India’s public awareness and will on this is considerably less. That matters for infrastructure decisions at Meta’s scale.

When you have a market that critical, you hire someone who knows it at the deepest level — someone with the deepest connections.

Kunal Shah is one of the most connected people in the Indian startup and business ecosystem. If he can also help monetise WhatsApp better in the process, that’s a bonus. But the starting point is simpler: important market, right person, position to fill — obvious decision.

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As for the $900M investment in CRED — we don’t actually know the deal terms.

We don’t know what Kunal Shah is being paid as head of WhatsApp globally, or how much of that is tied to the CRED deal. Nobody outside the room does.

What we do know: it’s a smart deal for Meta. It’s a smart deal for Kunal Shah.

Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar

PS — There is a concept called Occam’s razor. It’s useful.

Sounds obvious. But this is something even well-funded, fast-growing tech companies consistently get wrong — and it quietly determines everything that comes after.

The job post that made this concrete

Snabbit — a fast-growing app that connects users with quick home services — recently posted two senior marketing roles: Director of Digital Marketing and Director of Offline Marketing.

Two separate directors. Two separate mandates. Two separate worlds.

Now here’s what makes this worth examining: Snabbit is an online-offline business. A customer books via a mobile app for a service delivered at their home. The entire product crosses mediums in a single transaction. If any company should intuitively understand that the customer journey doesn’t live in mediums, it’s them.

And yet, the org chart says otherwise.

Consumers don’t think in mediums. Marketers still do.

As I write this, I’m also checking my phone. If someone walked into the room for a meeting, I’d switch to that. Later I’ll log onto Grab or Zomato to order food — depending on which country I’m in that week.

Online and offline isn’t a toggle. It’s fluid, constant, often simultaneous. The customer who sees a Snabbit van in their neighbourhood, gets retargeted on Instagram, and converts via app — that’s one journey. Three “channels.” Zero handoff points in their head.

The differentiation between mediums and platforms is only in our head as marketers. Customers don’t switch between mediums — they float between them. It happens in milliseconds and is subconscious.

But we’re still building org structures as if 2010 never ended.

Medium-based hiring: right at junior level, wrong at senior

To be fair — medium-based hiring makes sense at junior levels. Execution specialists, tighter scope, simpler briefs. Someone who owns performance campaigns. Someone who manages on-ground activations. That’s the right call.

At Director level, the mandate should be business outcomes. Revenue. Retention. ROI.

The moment two senior leaders own two separate mediums, each optimises for their medium. Digital reports ROAS and clicks. Offline reports footfall and activations. Nobody owns the number that actually matters.

And this is precisely how Indian marketing ended up producing more metrics than business growth.

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The startup graveyard is full of performance marketers

I’ve consulted with companies that were shut down despite significant funding. In almost every case, the fundamental problem was the same: over-reliance on performance marketing to drive growth, and an obsession with measuring marketing activity rather than business outcomes.

Every CMO talked about scale. But when it was time to deliver, the only tool in the bag was performance spend. Because from day one, the job description had defined scale as a performance metric — not a business strategy.

None of the best brands in the world have had CMOs who were over-reliant on metrics or performance marketing. Not one.

The job post doesn’t just define a role. It defines what the team will optimise for. Define it around mediums, and you’ll get medium-level results.

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The invisible cost

This is the hardest part to accept: you can’t A/B test a bad org structure.

By the time you realise that two medium-siloed directors produced medium-sized results, millions in budget have already been allocated the wrong way. Campaigns have run. Hires have been made. The machine has been running — just pointed in the wrong direction.

The missed opportunity is invisible. There’s no control group. No “what if we’d done it differently” report that lands on the founder’s desk.

The unfortunate reality of Indian business is that we’ve become very good at measuring marketing — and not nearly good enough at measuring what marketing actually delivers to the business. And it starts at the hiring stage.

A note on Snabbit specifically

This piece isn’t a criticism of Snabbit. They’re building something real and they’ll likely figure this out. The org design challenge I’m describing is industry-wide — Snabbit’s job post just made it visible.

Get the job description right. Everything downstream depends on it.

So what’s the solution if you need two people?

A few people asked after I posted about this. Some options worth considering:

1. Hire two people, one reporting to the other — but don’t build a structure that goes against consumer behaviour.

2. If you still need to segregate, segregate by business goals, not marketing mediums. One person whose goal is customer acquisition and trials. Another whose goal is LTV and basket size. When there’s conflict, the CMO decides — that’s literally the job.

The frame should always be: what does the business need, not which channel do we need to manage.

- Saurabh Parmar linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar is a Fractional CMO with 18+ years across business strategy, brand, digital, and AI.

I completely respect his thinking, and I know a lot of people believe in it. But over the years, I’ve lost friends who were working sincerely, making good money, saving up for that day when they could retire and live a good life.

First — that concept doesn’t agree with me, because I’ve realised there are no guarantees to life.

I don’t want my tomorrow to be better than my today. I have realized tomorrow comes with no guarantees, but today is guaranteed. I can do something amazing with it now.

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Second — there are things you can do in your 20s, 30s, 40s, even your 50s, that get harder and harder to do as you age. Physically, our body declines. Mentally, we get more mature, more experienced. The irony is we plan to “retire” mentally and get physically active — go do the things we actually want to enjoy — later in life. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Third — I semi-retired once. It got extremely boring.

So I respect everyone chasing FIRE with a retirement number in mind. I’d just encourage you to hold a few different perspectives alongside it, then choose what works for you.

As for me? I plan to work till my deathbed — laptop or pen in hand, till I die — enjoying the process the whole way. With mini-retirements whenever I want one, throughout.

Saurabh Parmar, Fractional CMO linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar

Kokam Cafe is a popular restaurant which opened in Lucknow a year back, and it has become quite popular.

And if you see the pricing, it's not cheap at all. The reason it does well is because it has taken good South Indian food (beyond dosa) and brought it to Lucknow, and it's completely new for the city. 🍽️

The same thing happened with rolls a while back. I remember loving rolls when I used to go to Calcutta as a kid. But now rolls are available everywhere. 🥙

Vietnamese coffee did it as well when folks brought it to India; unfortunately, the Vietnamese failed to capitalize on it and allowed other brands to come in. And seriously, the cà phê sữa đá or đen đá these brands sell not as good as the Vietnamese standard. ☕️

There’s a huge opportunity for Vietnam to launch its own version of Starbucks, or better, a range of packaged coffees.

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The most viral trend in Dubai in the restaurant scene right now is these burgers made from our version of Malabar parathas with a beef patty and cheese in the middle. So instead of buns, they have Malabar parathas. 🍔

These are just four examples of food which has travelled from one state or one country to another and, in its original form or as a simple fusion, has become a viral trend or a big business.

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👉 Countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam, which are known for their cuisine, are sitting on billion‑dollar opportunities that are unexplored because they are too focused on the local market, whether it be your city or state, whereas the big opportunity lies in building a high‑margin product, which can happen only in new areas. 💡

Remember: People pay a premium for new experience,not just for good quality.

from- Saurabh Parmar, Fractional Chief Growth Officer

This is a post I had written in 2023 'Can AI disrupt Venture Capital?'

In fact, I had spoken about it to two VCs earlier in that year and when it was met with indifference decided to document it on my substack.

A few months back thanks to this post by Puneet Suri I realised someone is doing it, but as usual outside India.

Quantum light is the name of the fund, and this is their approach:

On the latest episode of the 20VC Podcast, Storonsky talked about how a lot of investors are just "following the crowd" or making choices based on their feelings. But Quantum Light is different; it’s made up of data scientists and engineers who take a more "scientific approach."

And it looks like that approach is working out well—Storonsky said the fund is now doing better than "95% of VCs out there on back test."

Source: efinancialcareers

This begs the question “Why Not India?”

What unique business models have we created in the last 15 years of heavy venture funding?

And worse, how many have we refused to support?

Obviously, this model, QuantumLight, isn't perfect, and it will take a few iterations and different players, but AI will play a huge role in the future of venture capital.

By - Saurabh https://outstandingspeakersbureau.in/speakers/saurabh-parmar/

Book a consult, to get ROI or just to have ‘chai pe charcha’ #notonlyPM https://topmate.io/saurabh_parmar

Read the popular substacks:

1. Why great packaging is a revenue driver. Read here

2. The Dark Side of Marketing in India - Read here

If you've been following me here or Linkedin, you know that I explored podcast editing way back via AI in 2021 , way before ChatGPT became famous. It was comparatively slow and tedious then until Sam Altman came along

From edits to key segments, a lot was done with AI then

Check the episodes here: https://li.sten.to/altstrategy-podcasts

Then, even in video form , I explored AI using tools from Descript, Minvo, another Indian one before that whose name started with P (forgetting it now), Jupiter, etc.

And it did help -the only thing is I lacked the patience/ incentive to keep producing video content.

But @opus agents seem a game-changer . Here’s the launch video

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Click here for access:

https://www.opus.pro/agent?ref_id=O62MKDDGF

What does it claim to do:
➡ Perform topic research on your behalf
➡ Script videos
➡ Write hooks for short form and long form video
➡ Voiceovers
➡ Provide assets/broll for your video
➡ Even create motion graphics for your video

This also symbolises the difference between AI companies in India vs China and the US.
Interestingly, I had a conversation with the AI video company in India recently. (Didn’t get the job:/)

If everyone can tell their story via video (eg I have often been asked to do so, but it’s been too cumbersome), then it will be a game-changer.

What’s your take?

-Saurabh,Fractional CMO

So we got a bunch of subscribers suddenly, and they wanted to know my background. I don’t have a website, etc., but I have LinkedIn, and this is an easy reference.

Click here: https://outstandingspeakersbureau.in/speakers/saurabh-parmar/

In two days, I have watched Indians dance on the airport tarmac in Ho Chi Minh City, take over Train Street in Hanoi for Chaiyya Chaiyya videos, do garba in Danang — at a theme park — and blast religious slogans from luxury tour buses while people from other countries sit beside them, saying nothing.

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Propaganda Works. Here’s the Proof.

If anyone needed evidence that branding and media messaging actually work — not theoretically, but behaviorally — this is it.

We have spent years building a cultural narrative in India: that we are superior, that we have arrived, that our culture is worth asserting everywhere. The constant media reinforcement, the religious symbolism in public life, the othering of communities — it has worked. Not in a good way. It has produced a traveling class that feels entitled to bring their domestic posturing into other countries’ airports, beaches, and streets.

The lack of civic sense was always there. The jugaad, the rule-breaking, the noise — none of that is new.

What’s new is the pride attached to it.

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This Is Not a Class Problem

The instinct is to assume this behaviour comes from a lack of exposure. First-time travelers. Tier-3 towns. People who don’t know better.

Wrong.

The dance video on the HCMC tarmac? Shot by the founder of a Bombay-based jewellery brand. And a travel company founder was involved too. Who then defended it after the video went viral.

A few months ago in Phu Quoc, a luxury wedding blasted music across an entire beach. Hotels nearby were complaining. This was not a budget group. These were people who could afford to fly to a Vietnamese island and rent out a beach celebration.

The tour buses shouting religious chants while international tourists sit alongside — those are not backpacker buses. Those are premium, curated tour packages.

The arrogance isn’t coming from people without exposure. It often lives at the top.

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from okslop

We Are Increasing the Volume of Stupidity

As an Indian, it is saddening to watch.

Not because Indians are uniquely bad travelers — every nationality has its version of this. But because we’ve added something specific: the smugness. The sense that asserting Indian identity loudly, in someone else’s country, is somehow an act of pride rather than imposition.

We have convinced ourselves we have arrived. And the world is beginning to agree — just not in the way we imagined.

- Saurabh Parmar https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurabhparmar is a Fractional CMO who connects business with brand and culture to identify trends and opportunities