What you owe yourself at work, regardless of who is leading you.

Most conversations about workplace integrity start with leadership. The assumption is that culture comes from the top, values are modelled by the people in charge, and the rest of the team takes its cues from what is shown.

This is true, but it is also incomplete. It quietly removes the responsibility from the person doing the work and places it entirely on the person managing them. And it leaves you with no framework for the days when the leadership is absent, distracted, or themselves still figuring it out.

The work you do is not only a reflection of what you have been taught, or what someone above you has told you to do. It is a reflection of your own judgement, your own values, and your own ability to apply empathy alongside cleverness when you execute. Corporate politics is unavoidable. Your delivery, however, is entirely your own, because you are the one taking information, synthesising it, and acting on it.

There is a version of professionalism that is not inherited from above. It is held by you, for you, regardless of who is in the room.

A few things I think this version asks of a person.

1. Be a human first.

Before you are an employee, a teammate, a manager, a direct report, you are a person with a value set. The job is not the source of those values. It is a place where those values are tested.

One value I have chosen to hold, over the years, is to never be derogatory about the people I work with. Not in conversation, not in inference, not in the small ways that creep into how you describe someone when they are not in the room. When a colleague drops the ball, my default is to assume they have forgotten, or misjudged the situation, or had something else competing for their attention. Not that they are out to get me, and not that they are bad at their job. Generosity of interpretation is the first thing I extend, before anything else.

This is not naivety. It is just that the alternative, assuming bad intent from the start, has never been a useful place to think from. It poisons the next conversation before it begins.

2. Empathy is part of execution, not separate from it.

The default story about competence at work treats it as a function of intelligence, speed, and cleverness. These matter. But empathy is what allows cleverness to land in a team rather than just in a deck.

A manager of mine spent years teaching me to pause, reflect on what was actually being said, and then respond. It took longer than I would like to admit to internalise it, and now it feels strange to do anything else. The pause is the whole game. It is also where empathy lives in practice, not in principle.

The harder version of this is detaching from a heated situation while you are still inside it. Stepping back enough to see the people in the room for who they are, including their strengths and their limits, and still doing your best work for them. Not just for the colleagues you like. For the wider room. People who report to you, people who report alongside you, people in other teams who look to you because you happen to be visible to them.

Empathy at work is not a soft skill. It is part of how delivery actually happens.

3. Your work is your record, not your manager’s.

The instinct to do work because someone is watching is a natural one. The instinct to do work because it is the work is rarer and more durable.

I am mindful of how I am perceived at work, because I have seen how people are described in their absence and I have been on the receiving end of perceptions that did not match my record. So my own conduct is something I lead from regardless of who is in the room. I do not bully. I do not refuse instructions. I do not make people feel small in a meeting, whatever their title.

I also tend, in rooms with too many people, to absorb the blame for not being smart enough in a moment, just to keep the room clear. This sometimes irritates my manager. I do it anyway, because at least one person in the team is then someone the room can depend on, and that is the part of myself I have decided to protect. Dependability is my core. I would do this whether anyone was watching or not.

4. Information is not currency.

Holding context close, becoming the only person who knows the brief or the client preference or the workaround, these things feel like power. They are actually fragility.

Some people sit on information because they think it makes them important, or indispensable. It does neither. Information inside an organisation is never created by a single person. It will come out. Sitting on it is just insecurity or narrowness of vision dressed up as leverage, and it tends to be visible to everyone except the person doing it.

The strongest people I have worked with could be replaced tomorrow because they have shared everything they know, and are valuable anyway, because of how they think rather than what they hoard.

5. Withholding information in time is a failure on you, not a strategy.

This is worth separating from the point above, because it is a different problem. Not sharing what you know, when you know it, with the people who need it, is one of the more common ways people misread their own role. It is often dressed up as discretion, or judgement, or knowing how to handle things. Most of the time it is none of those.

My default is to communicate early and in writing. Email, message, voice note, whatever the channel needs to be, but always in a form that leaves a trace. I learned this from a manager who sat across many forums, gathering the small instances of what was happening around the office, and weaving them into her view of teams as much as her view of campaigns. Watching her work showed me how much of the larger picture is invisible to any single person, and how much of it depends on people choosing to share before they were asked.

Written threads do another piece of work too. They protect everyone when things go wrong, because they remove the option of someone later claiming they were not informed. The instinct to blame, when failure happens, is unfortunately common. A written record makes that conversation a shorter one.

A version of the same point shows up when people mistake politeness for authority. A manager who entertains your input, who hears you out, who lets the conversation breathe, is being courteous. They are not handing you the decision. Reading that courtesy as a seat at the table, and then acting as though you have one, is a misread that becomes visible quickly to everyone except the person making it.

The cleaner way to locate yourself is to look at the responsibilities you have been given, and the people you have been given them alongside. Your role is described there, plainly. Not in how warmly a senior person speaks to you, not in the meetings you have been included in to observe, not in the conversations you have been invited to listen in on. Nobody should have to clarify this to you more than once.

Your primary job, in almost every role, is to inform the right people at the right time. Deflecting that, or routing it through your own preferences first, is not seniority. It is the opposite of it.

6. Clarity about your role is a contribution, not a limitation.

A good employee is openly clear about what is theirs to do and what belongs to someone else on the team. Not as a way of drawing lines, but as a way of making sure the work gets done by the right person, in the right order, with the right inputs.

I cannot start a project, now, without putting this in place first. I assign by capability, I document what I expect from each person, I share the document with the team, and I treat the document as part of the foundation, not as paperwork. It is the thing I build everything else on.

The failure mode on the other side is when someone reaches above and beyond their scope, into work that is not theirs, or over the head of the person they should be working through. That is not ambition. It is a misread of the structure, and it is a shortcoming the person making it usually cannot see clearly until much later.

The work happens because of the collective. The campaign, the launch, the quarter, the recovery, none of it is a single person’s contribution, even when one person stands at the front of it. People who understand this early are easier to work with, easier to promote, and more likely to be remembered well by the people they worked alongside.

7. Having information is not the same as having permission to share it.

There is a separate discipline from sharing information in time, and it is knowing who you can share it with. People make this mistake often. They confuse being told something with being entrusted to pass it on.

When a manager raises something with you in confidence, even something that seems small, like timekeeping or attendance or how a colleague has been showing up lately, the confidence is part of the instruction. The conversation was had with you because it needed to be had with you. It was not a briefing for you to take horizontally to your peers.

The test I tend to apply is simple. Who was this said to, and was that on purpose. If the answer is “to me, on purpose”, then it stays with me.

The cost of getting this wrong is rarely loud. People do not usually confront you for over-sharing. They just stop including you. The first sign that you have misjudged this is not a conversation. It is a meeting you used to be in, that you are no longer in, with no explanation given.

8. Hierarchy exists even in flat structures, and reading it is part of the job.

A lot of modern organisations describe themselves as flat. The intention behind it is good. The misreading of it is that hierarchy has disappeared, when what has actually happened is that it has become quieter.

I recently set up a RACI inside my part of the organisation, because chaos was emerging from people confusing what input meant. Input does not mean the whole plan gets reworked. Sometimes input is a note. Sometimes it is something held for the record. Sometimes it is a perspective that will shape the next version but not this one. Conflating these is a hierarchy-reading failure dressed up as a process problem.

I also adjust how I work to the room. When senior leadership is in a meeting, I keep the language tight, because their time is short and the conversation should respect that. When I am with my team, I ask for full detail, because the failure mode at that level is sitting on things people think they are managing on their own. This is something I have learnt distinctly from how my current manager behaves himself.

A version of this point that is worth naming separately is what team member's often misread about managers. The manager is there to help them navigate the project, not to inspect the deliverable. Help can mean more resources, or a different room, or a different forum, or escalating something, or pre-empting a problem before it becomes one. When team members or juniors do not surface things to the person managing them, they remove the very help they were given a manager to receive. Most avoidable problems at work are problems where this happened.

9. Do not use other people’s mistakes as a shield for your own.

When a manager raises a concern with you about your conduct, the only useful response is to look at your conduct. Not at someone else’s. The instinct to deflect, to point at a colleague who did the same thing, to redirect the conversation toward a peer who was worse, is one of the most damaging habits a person can build at work.

Deflection tells the person above you two things at once. That you have not absorbed the feedback, which makes you harder to promote into more responsibility. And that you have misread where you sit in the structure, because you have started taking decisions on behalf of your manager, or escalating sideways and upwards in ways that were not yours to escalate.

I work in an organisation with an open-door culture, and I value it. But an open door is not an instruction to bombard the most senior leadership with every conversation. The middle layer exists for a reason. The middle is where the preempted action lives, where the way of working is held, where teams get aligned back when things start drifting. Bypassing the middle is not exercising the open door. It is misreading what the door is for.

The cleaner move is older and harder. To hear the feedback, sit with it, and address what is yours to address. Whatever someone else did or did not do is a separate conversation, between them and the person who manages them. It is not your inheritance to wield.

10. The exit is part of the job.

How you leave a role is the final piece of work you do in it. Not a footnote to the work, part of it. The handover, the last conversations, the leave you do or do not take, the version of the story you tell on the way out. All of it is observed and remembered, often more clearly than the months that came before.

I have always done full handovers, every time I have exited a role. Not because I had to. Because the discipline of leaving a role well has actually worked in my favour over time. It removed any perception that what kept me in my position was the information I was holding close. It made visible the part underneath, which was the version of me that operated regardless of the information. The handover became proof of what I was, not a cost I paid on the way out.

There is something quieter behind this too. The way you leave a role is one of the few moments in a career where the incentive to perform is gone. Whatever you choose to do in those last weeks tends to be closer to who you actually are than what you did when you were being watched.

11. Your standards are yours.

It is not about carrying a rulebook of standards from job to job and trying to install it wherever you go. It is also not about killing yourself, metaphorically, in service of perfection either. You can be easy about most things and that is healthy.

It is about something simpler, the standards that matter are the ones that come from your own reflection on who you are and what you actually stand for. Not the ones you have adopted from a culture, or a manager, or a peer group. The ones you have spent time with.

Where this matters most is in the moments when politics, hearsay, and noise are pulling at you. If you have not done the work of knowing your own value set, you have no place to stand when the noise gets loud. If you have, you can detach. You can let the work be the work, and the gossip be someone else’s project to carry.

Where standards do still apply, plainly, is in the work itself. Processes exist for reasons. A junior person cannot quietly decide to skip a step, or change a workflow, or stop informing people, just because they have decided their judgement supersedes it. Even the most senior people in companies do not do this without communicating why. If a CMO would not, a copywriter or a social media manager should not assume they can either. That is not standard-setting. That is process discipline.

The deeper standard, the one that travels with you, is different. Someone else will always come along and do your job better than you. What people remember is not the deliverable. It is the cohesiveness of who you were while you did it. The way you thought, the way you worked, the way you treated the people around you, the way you held yourself when nobody was forcing you to. That standard is yours. It is built on your self-esteem, your values, and your ability to assess what you are doing without needing the assessment of the people you happen to be associated with at the time.

The work you produce is not only the sum of what you have been taught or instructed to do. It is the sum of your judgement, your values, and the empathy you bring to executing in harmony with everyone else around you.

You can align with your team in advance, by clarifying what is yours and what is theirs, by communicating openly and honestly and on time. Or you can choose not to, and then discover that the burden of your unclarity does not transfer to someone else simply because you have not done the work of communicating it. It stays with you. It always does.

And while corporate politics is unavoidable, spreading rumours is not. That part is a choice, made by individual people, in small moments, when nobody is forcing their hand. Worth being clear with yourself about which choice you are making, and why.

Managers come and go. Companies restructure. Cultures shift, sometimes overnight. The one thing that stays with you across all of it is the version of yourself you brought to the work.

That version is not built by the org chart. It is built by you, in small decisions, on ordinary days, when nobody is watching.

Worth being deliberate about! 

The Brief Was A Starting Point. Not A Contract.

There is a moment every social and content team knows intimately.

A festival is approaching. A meme is moving fast. Something has broken on the internet in the last six hours and the window to say something that actually lands is closing by the minute. The brief goes out. The idea comes back. Well written, carefully worded, tonally consistent, and almost entirely unusable.

Not because the craft is bad. Because the team stayed inside the brief when the moment needed them to move beyond it.

Good moment marketing is not about getting every detail right. It is about getting the feeling right.

In 2013, the lights went out at the Super Bowl. Oreo’s social team, sitting in a war room watching the game, posted a single image within minutes. A dimly lit Oreo. Four words: “You can still dunk in the dark.” No approval chain. No committee. Just a team that had been trusted, had planned for the unexpected, and moved the moment the moment arrived. That tweet became one of the most referenced pieces of moment marketing in history. It cost almost nothing. It earned everything.

Guinness did something similar when the world went into lockdown. Instead of going quiet, the brand pivoted toward community, toward the feeling of missing a pint with people you love, toward the culture of the pub as a shared human experience. They found the language for a moment nobody had a brief for. That is agility. Not abandoning the brand. Translating it into what the moment requires.

Heineken went further. When social media fatigue became a genuine cultural conversation, they leaned into it. The #SocialOffSocials campaign told people to put their phones down, go offline, be present with each other. A brand built on social engagement, actively encouraging people to step away from it. It worked because it was honest. And honest, when it is unexpected, is the most effective thing a brand can be.

Royal Enfield did something quieter but just as instructive. When the lockdown hit and every rider in their community of over 7.5 million was grounded at home, the brand faced the most uncomfortable situation a motorcycle company can face. Their product was completely irrelevant to the moment. Nobody was riding. Nobody could ride.

They chose not to go quiet. Instead they pivoted entirely toward the person behind the rider. #TripStory got 24,000 riders sharing journey memories with the community. #WhatYourAdventure drew 14,000 Himalayan owners into conversations about terrains they had conquered. Custom World Live brought builders from across the globe into live sessions that drew 100,000 views. AR filters, motorcycle bingo, maintenance tips, sound-guessing challenges on Stories, an entire ecosystem of content that had nothing to do with selling a motorcycle and everything to do with keeping a culture alive while it waited to ride again.

Facebook engagement went up 80%. Video views went up 370%. And according to a study by Unmetric, as reported in Brand Equity, Royal Enfield became the second most engaging brand on social media in India during that period, trailing only Netflix India.

A motorcycle brand. In a lockdown. With no rides, no events, no open roads. Outengaging every FMCG, every lifestyle brand, every entertainment platform in the country except one built entirely around content.

The product was absent. The brand was more present than ever.

None of these moments came from a creative team defending the original brief. They came from people who understood the brief was the starting point and the moment was the destination.

This works only when the social team is trusted enough to make the call. To know which moment is authentically theirs to own and which one to sit out. That judgement is not a small skill. It is the line between content that feels natural and content that feels opportunistic. And it requires the social team and its creative partners, whether writers, designers, content strategists or creative strategists, to work as genuine collaborators, not in sequence. Each brings something the other cannot replace. The cultural read and platform instinct on one side. The craft, the form, the visual language on the other. Neither works without the other. And none of it works without early, honest communication between all of them.

The most useful question any team can ask before a single word is written or a single frame is designed is a simple one. Is this a job that needs creative exploration or precise delivery? They are not the same ask, and confusing them is where large teams lose the most time. A campaign launch needs space to explore. A festival topical with a 24 hour window needs people who can move fast without getting precious about the form.

If the key message is landing and the brand is showing up authentically, there should be room to be quirky. To make something that causes a person to smile or stop or share, not because it explained the program perfectly but because it felt alive. That is not a compromise of the brief. That is the brief doing its best work.

The brand that only ever communicates correctly, in full sentences, with all the right details in all the right places, has built a notice board. People read notice boards when they have to. They follow brands because they want to.

Here is the behaviour that quietly limits creative teams and rarely gets said out loud.

Some creatives, whether they are writing the copy, designing the visual, or building the content strategy, find it genuinely difficult to receive feedback on their work. Not because they lack talent but because they have stopped separating the craft from their identity. The feedback loop that should sharpen the output becomes a negotiation about whose vision survives. That is not a creative process. That is a protection mechanism.

The work that leans too heavily on jargon, that dresses thin thinking in complicated language, that is heavy with words or overly elaborate in execution but hollow at the centre, often comes from the same place. A need to appear credible rather than actually connect. And a team that cannot reflect honestly on whether the work is landing, whether it is readable, whether it is doing the job it was made to do, eventually becomes something the broader team has to work around rather than with.

The best creative people, regardless of discipline, hold the work loosely. The idea lives underneath the execution, not inside any one version of it. The form is always negotiable. What the audience feels at the end of it is not.

Social content does not materialise at the speed of a change request. The Oreo tweet that felt spontaneous had a war room behind it. The Royal Enfield lockdown pivot had a team that already understood their community so deeply they knew exactly what to give them when the roads closed. The brands that move fast in the moment are the ones that did the thinking long before the moment arrived.

Think of it like a marriage. Communication is the whole job. Not the brief that arrives the evening before the post needs to go live, but the ongoing, early, generous sharing of information that lets your partners, across every creative discipline, do their best work.

Last minute briefs produce last minute thinking. Last minute thinking produces content that communicates correctness rather than excitement. And content that is merely correct gets scrolled past.

That is not a creative problem. That is a planning problem. And it belongs to everyone in the room.

One last distinction worth making clearly because it gets blurred constantly and the blurring costs everyone.

Copywriting, editorial writing, and social content are not the same discipline. Copywriting serves the message. Editorial writing builds an argument for a reader who chose to spend time with it. Social content exists in the two seconds before a thumb moves. It has to earn attention it was never given, hold it without asking for patience, and leave something behind, all in a format not designed for depth. And the design, the copy, the strategy all have to speak the same language at the same speed for any of it to land.

The creative team that brings the wrong instincts to a social brief produces work that is thoughtful and unread, or accurate and ignored. The team that knows when to pivot the form, loosen the brief, and chase the feeling over the fact, is the one whose work actually travels.

That combination of skills is rare. It deserves its own brief, its own timeline, and enough trust to move when the moment moves.

The brands people talk about did not get there by insisting on correctness. They got there by being alive to the moment, planned enough to act fast, and humble enough to know the brief is always just the beginning.

The rest is agility. And agility, like most things worth having, has to be built before you need it.

These are the tensions I sit with every time a moment moves faster than the content plan. The teams that navigate it best treat communication like infrastructure, not afterthought.

The Moment Already Passed. Were You Still Asking Permission?

When you move between categories in your career, you notice something quickly.

I have had the good fortune to pivot between three key ones:

Mobility, that teaches you how to build the pressure to sell something in a sea of products that are very similarly priced, designed and marketed to each other. 

FMCG, which gives you the rigour of a category where brands need to remain memorable, because despite the high rate of repurchase, when the customer enters the aisle and sees a discounted price on the competitor’s packet, he forgets everything. 

And then the automobile, currently led by motorcycling in my case, built on the premise of being a unique voice in a sea of products, staying ahead of the game by keeping the customer at the centre and never talking spec sheets. 

And what this exposure has taught me is that brand teams don’t all treat their audiences the same way. 

Some invest seriously in understanding the full person behind the purchase. Consumer research, live conversations, psychographic studies that go well beyond what someone buys and into why they buy it, what they believe, what they are quietly aspirational about. These are the brands that know their customer is a runner and a parent and someone who cares about where their food comes from, all at the same time. 

And then there are the brands that built their position on exactly that kind of instinct, got there, and stopped. Not out of arrogance. Out of protection. They have a cult following, films that perform, analytics that validate, and a community that reliably responds. So they shelter. They narrow the conversation to the things they know will land. And slowly, without anyone deciding it, the audience’s world keeps expanding while the brand’s world stays the same size. 

That is not safety. That is the beginning of a slow drift apart. And this is where aspiration starts to leak. The cult brand, so focused on protecting what it has built, stops reaching for what it has not yet earned. The younger brand, the lifestyle brand, the one with a fraction of the heritage and none of the history, steps into that gap. Not because it is better. But because it is willing. It shows up in moments the established brand left unclaimed, speaks to parts of the person the bigger brand stopped being curious about, and quietly begins to own the aspiration that the cult brand assumed was permanently theirs. Cult status does not transfer automatically to the next generation of customers. It has to be re-earned, in their language, in their moments, on their terms.

Cult status is not a destination. It is a pressure to keep earning. The same instinct that built the following is the same instinct that has to keep shaking the category, finding new ways in, new mediums, new angles of communication that make a person feel something about the brand in a context that has nothing to do with the moment of purchase. Your analytics will tell you what is working inside the world you have already built. They will not tell you about the world you have not entered yet. 

The brands that understood this did not wait for permission. Ariel’s Share The Load did not come from a detergent brief. It came from someone asking a completely different question: what does the person doing the laundry actually carry, beyond the laundry? The answer cracked the category open and made a washing powder brand part of a cultural conversation about gender that people are still talking about years later. 

Apple’s work around accessibility did not come from a product feature checklist. It came from a decision to show the world through the eyes of people the world usually ignores. One film. One day. An audience that felt genuinely seen, and a brand that earned something no campaign budget can manufacture directly. 

Neither of those moments came from community feedback. Neither of them came from watching what was trending and deciding it was safe to respond. They came from a brand deciding it had something to say, and saying it before anyone asked. 

That is the difference. Not budget. Not production value. The willingness to move first. Here is the part that nobody talks about enough. The brands losing ground right now are not losing it because they stopped caring. They are losing it because they started waiting. Waiting for the community to surface a moment. Waiting for a topic to gain enough traction that acting on it feels safe. Waiting for the very people they should be leading to tell them where to go. 

That is not community building. That is followership with a logo on it. The brands that built genuine cult status did not get there by reading the room. They built the room. Supreme did not ask its community whether a limited drop was a good idea. The Grateful Dead did not poll their audience on set-lists. These brands understood something that gets lost the moment a brand becomes successful enough to have a brand guardian: the job is not to reflect culture back at people. The job is to add something to it that was not there before. 

A brand that only speaks when the community has already spoken is not a cult. It is an echo. A good marketer is the one who observes multiple categories and challenges the norms of the system they are working inside. And a great one keeps asking the right questions, time and again, even when the resistance is loud, even when the answer is not yet yes. Because the marketer who gives up on the cause altogether is the reason the next generation on that brand stays in fear. Stays safe. Never builds on the cultural moments that could have taken the brand somewhere it had never been before. 

Some of that ownership sits specifically with the social and content teams. Not because they post the most, but because they are the ones closest to what is actually happening. And that job demands more than tracking trending formats, trending audios, hook steps and viral templates. It demands a depth of observation that most people underestimate. What is the customer feeling right now? What are they pivoting towards? What fears are they expressing, not in surveys, but in the comments, in the content they share, in the creators they are suddenly following, in the silences between the things they used to engage with and no longer do? 

Social is not a broadcast tower. It is the most honest focus group that has ever existed. And the brands that treat it that way, using it to listen as seriously as they use it to speak, are the ones that find the adjacent moment, the unexpected conversation, the cultural shift worth owning before anyone else has claimed it. 

That is where restraint becomes the enemy. Because the easiest thing a brand team can do is show up on Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, every year, in the same format every other brand is also showing up in. It is safe. It is expected. And it is exactly how a brand trains its audience to stop paying attention. 

The job of a great brand team is to keep people on their toes. To find the moment nobody else claimed. To take the brand’s values and express them through a conversation that surprises, that feels instinctive rather than scheduled, that makes someone stop and think about the brand in a context they were not expecting. Not because it is provocative for its own sake. But because that is how you reach the person who is not thinking about your product category at all right now. The person who is thinking about something they noticed in culture, in human behaviour, in the world around them, and suddenly your brand becomes the thing that articulates it for them. 

That is the adjacency. Not a product extension. A moment of recognition. And sometimes that recognition comes from the outside in. A collaborator, a creator, a community that exists adjacent to your brand’s world, who sees a version of your brand that you have not yet allowed yourself to see. The brands that stay open to that are the ones that find new rooms to grow into. The ones that don’t, protect a universe that is quietly getting smaller every year, while calling it consistency. 

A well known brand, used well, becomes a sounding board for the cultural shifts its audience is already living through. That is a different ambition than selling a product. And it is a much harder brief to write. But it is the brief that separates the brands people talk about from the brands people simply buy. 

Social is where you test whether you have found that moment before you bet everything on it. Not to do what everybody else is doing on the same days in the same formats. But to try something that feels genuinely yours, watch what happens, and let that teach you where to go next. 

These are the questions I bring to work every day. Some of them still don’t have easy answers. That’s usually a sign they’re worth asking and pushing the envelope :) 

Fashion Magazines Aren’t Dying. They’re Just the Best Marketing Scam Ever Run

Confession to start. I grew up on the tabletop of my mother’s salon, surrounded by every fashion magazine in circulation, with a hair mask on my face and zero idea that I was watching my future profession being assembled in real time. My mother worked with the likes of Javed Habib, Blossom Kochhar, Shahnaz Hussain, Ambika Pillai. The covers changed every month. I flipped through them religiously, less interested in the celebrity interviews than in the fabrics, the cuts, the strange little editorial garnishing tucked around the edges of the page. I was eight, ten, fourteen. I was being conditioned. I just thought I was reading.

And then, in 2006, in the first year of my graduation, I saw The Devil Wears Prada on a big screen. I came out thinking Miranda Priestly was cold, terrifying, and probably just a thinly fictionalised Anna Wintour. I have rewatched the film an embarrassing number of times since then. I have now seen the second one too. And somewhere along the way I realised I had been rooting for the wrong woman the entire time.

Both films keep asking the same question. Are fashion magazines dying? The newsroom is shrinking, the parent company is restless, the editor-in-chief is fighting some scrappier, faster threat. The plot wants you to believe she might lose. The plot has wanted you to believe she might lose since 2006. She does not lose. She has not lost in twenty years. The films cannot quite say why, because the answer would dismantle the films themselves.

So let me say it.

A fashion magazine is not journalism. It is the single most beautifully constructed marketing engine the consumer economy has ever produced, and the reason it doesn’t die is that nothing else has been built that can do the same job.

Here is the job, in case you’ve been living under a thoughtfully sourced linen rock.

The job is to build a voice. Then sell that voice to literally everyone.

Not a writer’s voice. Not even an editor’s voice. A Voice. Capital V. A single, season-by-season, top-down ruling on what is in, what is out, what we are wearing in 2026, and what we shall pretend we never wore in 2019. The Voice is the entire product. The photography, the columns, the cover star, the perfume samples that fall out and stain the carpet. All of it is just packaging for the Voice.

And here is what the Voice does, in order of audacity:

1. It sells quiet luxury its quietness. A beige cashmere sweater with no logo costs $2,800 because the Voice has decided, on your behalf, that beige cashmere is what taste sounds like in this decade. Without the Voice, it is a sweater. With the Voice, it is a *signal*. Signals can be priced infinitely. This is also, by the way, why “quiet luxury” is the most expensive trend of the last twenty years. They literally removed the logo and charged you more for the absence of one. Take a moment.

2. It sells luxury brands the right to charge what they charge. A handbag that costs more than a small Honda costs that much because the Voice has spent fifty years building the cultural scaffolding that makes the price feel earned and not, you know, deranged. Strip the magazines and the editorials and the cover stories away, and Hermès is leather and hardware. The price isn’t in the bag. It’s in the apparatus around the bag.

3. It sells fast fashion its entire roadmap. Zara, H&M, Shein. None of them invent a single trend. They xerox the Voice at industrial speed. The magazine declares oversized blazers, and ninety days later there’s a Zara version in 2,200 stores at €49. The fast fashion shopper isn’t buying a blazer. She’s buying proximity to the Voice, at a price she can survive. I should know. I am the case study. I started life as a Sarojini Nagar thrift girl, and today over 70 per cent of my wardrobe is Zara, with the rest divided between Mango, Superdry, Nike and Onitsuka Tigers. Zara has become the dictator of what is trending and fashionable for me, but I started by first finding those silhouettes in magazines, paired with the key pieces of their times. The magazine taught me to see. Zara taught me to buy. There is no daylight between those two sentences.

4. It sells the fast fashion shopper a lifetime spending plan. This is the genius bit, and the bit nobody calls out. The Voice doesn’t just feed her cheap blazers. It teaches her, slowly, patiently, year by year, what she’s supposed to graduate to next. The contemporary brand. The accessible-luxury bag. The “investment piece.” The first real designer item. By forty-four, she’s in Loro Piana and doesn’t quite remember when that became normal. The magazine isn’t selling her a sweater. It’s selling her a trajectory. A lifetime ladder of spending, with the Voice gently steering her up it.

If you are a marketer reading this and you are not slightly aroused, you are not paying attention. This is the cleanest funnel ever built. It runs across forty years of a customer’s life. It works on income brackets that have nothing in common. It costs the brand essentially nothing because the magazine is doing the heavy lifting and getting paid for the privilege.

Full disclosure, the ladder did not work on me, and I think I know why. I come from an middle-class household where the cost of something was always equated to its value. My mother was not particularly fashionable. My grandmother was, beautifully so, in saris and Ray-Bans, but that was a grammar of style I could admire and not inherit. I just received my first Coach bag last month, and only because someone gifted it to me. I have never bought one for myself. My motorcycle riding gear is more expensive than several of my most expensive garments combined, and I take more pride in it than I ever have in any piece of clothing. I wear pyjamas to the office sometimes. The ladder is not built for women like me. The ladder is built for the rest of the funnel, which is everyone, which is the point.

There is one more thing the Voice does, and this is the part the obituary writers really, really miss.

5. The Voice operates across time. A fashion magazine writes the history of a brand while the brand is being built. Twenty years later, it archives that history into legacy. Twenty years after that, it celebrates the legacy as if the brand had simply existed forever, the way a mountain exists, with no author. By the third pass the seams are invisible. The brand appears to have always been The Standard, because someone wrote down, on heavy paper, in 1962 and 1989 and 2014, that it was.

No brand can do this for itself. Hermès cannot credibly publish Hermès Was Always The Standard. Vogue has to do it for them, decade after decade, before Hermès can quote it back at you in a 2026 campaign. The legacy isn’t invented by the house. It’s commissioned, gradually and expensively, from the only institution with enough cultural authority to grant it. The houses are the monarchy. The magazines are the church that crowns them. The crown does not legitimise itself.

I watched this mechanism work in real time and did not recognise it. I grew up in the era when Femina was bigger than Cosmopolitan in India, and then watched Cosmo outnumber Femina. I watched the heroines of our times slowly disappear from the covers and get replaced by influencers. From a salon tabletop. With a clay mask drying on my face. Truly nobody had a better seat than me, and I still managed to miss the trick. 

And none of this works without the editor.

I have been writing as if the Voice belongs to the publication. It does not. Vogue doesn’t have a Voice. Vogue under Anna Wintour had a Voice. Vogue India under Bandana Tewari had one. Elle India under Nandini Bhalla had one. The masthead is the building. The editor is the load-bearing wall. Take her out and the building doesn’t fall right away, but it starts to settle. Within five years it’s just paper.

This is the part the publishing industry has been the slowest to admit, because admitting it changes the math. If the Voice is portable, if it lives inside a person and not an institution, then the editor isn’t really an employee. She’s a piece of irreplaceable infrastructure being leased at, frankly, a discount. Anna Wintour is not famous because she is Vogue’s editor. Vogue is famous, in the form it currently takes, because she is. Read that sentence twice.

The mystique, by the way, is not vanity. It’s an operating requirement. The sunglasses, the short sentences, the refusal to over-explain. Explain the choice and you reveal the mechanism. Reveal the mechanism and the spell breaks. The mystique is what allows her to keep deciding without ever being audited. It’s the working condition of the role.

So when the next think-piece arrives announcing that the September issue is thinner this year, that print is dead, that Gen Z has moved on, read it the way I do. Politely. With a small smile. The way you’d read a weather report from a city you’ve already left.

The middle is dying. The mid-tier titles, the celebrity weeklies, the mall catalogues with serif fonts. Good. Most of them were never any good.

The titles that operate the Voice and the archive, the ones whose editors carry forty years of memory in their heads, those are not dying. They are consolidating. They are doing what every maturing oligopoly does, which is tighten the apex, drop the middle, and quietly raise their rates. Most of them have also moved to Instagram, which is the platform that was supposed to have killed them, and is now the platform they use to keep crowning the next generation of brands. The form is more elastic than the obituary writers think.

The fashion magazine is not a media business. It is the most profitable, most invisible, most elegantly disguised piece of marketing infrastructure the modern world has ever built.

The magazines aren’t dying. They were never really magazines.

And Miranda Priestly, twenty years and two films later, still has her job. Obviously. I have been watching her take it home for two decades. From a salon tabletop, with my face full of clay, learning the trade by accident.

​I was hired to launch a US cultural phenomenon in India. The category it belonged to didn’t exist here yet!

Everyone in consumer wellness will tell you that a US product launch in India needs eighteen to twenty-four months, a bloated media budget, and a small army. This one didn’t.

In April 2024, Tuhin Jain, who I had worked with once before, brought me into Aspeya (previously called Vectura Fertin Pharma) to set up the digital ecosystem and orchestrate the brand and product launch in India for Neuro, their US nootropic gum. 

A clean remit. 

A single product. 

A new market. 

Straightforward, or so I assumed! 

It took me a few months to figure out that I was playing a much larger game than the one on the brief.

The money I had wasn’t really a full launch budget. It was closer to a seed-level bet. And the product wasn’t really the point. The product was the instrument. What Aspeya was actually testing was whether the consumer wellness category itself could work in India, for Neuro and for other wellness brands they might bring in after. I wasn’t running a product launch. I was running a category diagnostic for a global consumer wellness company deciding how much of its future to bet on India.

Nobody framed it that way at the start. In hindsight, that was probably the best thing that could have happened, because I designed around discipline and learning rather than scale and spectacle.

What we were actually up against

It’s worth being plain about what Neuro is in the US, because it changes how you read everything that follows.

Neuro is not a small product. It’s a cultural phenomenon. The brand is the only company in Shark Tank history to return after rejecting a deal and secure investment on a second appearance. It was the number one product on TikTok Shop in 2025. It has crossed a hundred million pieces sold across more than ten thousand retail stores including Walmart, Target, CVS, and Whole Foods. Joe Rogan has mentioned it more than thirty times across his podcast! Kim Kardashian has mentioned it. Katy Perry has mentioned it. Steve Aoki came on first as an investor and then as a brand ambassador, with a co-created limited edition flavour. There is a real category around it in the US, a community around it, and a cultural conversation around it.

In India in early 2024, none of that existed in any meaningful way.

Nootropics wasn’t a category you could lean on. The term wasn’t recognised at the search volumes that matter for a launch, not by consumers, and honestly not even by the largest ecomm platforms as a catagory in the way you’d need them to correctly set up a product listing or to run a credible keyword-led strategy! 

You can’t SEO your way into a category that isn’t showing up in the data yet. You can’t run keyword campaigns against search volume that isn’t there. You have to build the category around the product at the same time as you’re selling the product, and you have to do that without the budgets of a brand that already owns the category somewhere else.

That is a very different job from “launch a popular American product in India.” The entry was high-risk. And it’s a job that keyword planners and media templates simply cannot do.

What I owned, and what I didn’t

The digital intelligence of the launch sat with me, end to end.

1. I built the strategy across our own D2C website, third-party ecomm marketplaces, and social, treating them not as three separate channels but as one connected system that had to compound on itself. 
2. I led partner selection for D2C and performance, and I built the audience profiling and persona work that the channel mix sat on top of. 
3. I directed creative for assets that had to work across media, the D2C site and the ecomm listings without reshoots (most even made using CGI product 3D rather than commissioning a full product shoot!). 
4. I set up ecomm, planned warehousing and inventory, and set the KPIs that the agencies were then held to down to even purchasing the right domain name! 
5. I owned the feedback loop back into operations for forecasting. Who to target, how, in which markets, and where our first sale would come from, all of it designed as one system rather than five handoffs.

I had trusted partners and agencies running creative execution and social media alongside me, and I’m genuinely grateful they did. None of this was a solo act on the execution side! 

The thesis: digital marketing isn’t a job, it’s a science

I didn’t come into Neuro green. At Tata Consumer Products, leading digital for an FMCG portfolio, I learned how category, pricing, distribution and digital actually work as one system, and how to make a media plan accountable to a P&L instead of to a deck. At Royal Enfield, leading social and content strategy, I learned how to build community and content for a brand with deep cultural equity, where the audience is the brand and you can’t fake your way past them.

I brought all of that together for Neuro.

And this is what crossing categories teaches you, and what I think too many founders and CMOs still miss.

The method of digital marketing is category-agnostic. The application changes but the science doesn’t. Persona sharpening, ritual-cuing, trust architecture, funnel sequencing, creative systems, first-party data design, these are transferable principles. 

What changes between FMCG and consumer wellness is the regulatory overlay, the claims you can make, and the consumer’s default posture toward the category. Everything else is the same physics.

That single reframe is what let me walk into a wellness launch with cross-category instincts and not waste three months relearning how humans behave online.

Four things the industry keeps getting wrong about launches:

First, they over-invest in awareness before they’ve earned the right to it.

I didn’t buy reach in the traditional launch-campaign sense. I went where intent already existed, at the edges of adjacent categories and competing brands. Productivity and energy buyers converted meaningfully better than broader lifestyle segments, even though the latter was a shinier target. Sales first. Awareness as a by-product.

Second, they treat creative as disposable.

One creative system, directed to work across launch comms, product education, performance media, social and CRM, without reshooting assets for every channel. When you can’t afford to waste money, campaigns give way to systems. A line like “Unlock Your Ritual” had to earn its keep on a reel, on a PDP, in a CRM email and in an influencer brief. If it couldn’t, it didn’t ship.

Third, they sequence the funnel wrong.

Most brands plug CRM in after the sale. We mapped the exact moment it would kick in, late enough not to feel intrusive, early enough not to lose the customer. PII capture, D2C education on a deliberately lean website, aggressive ecomm capture and retention were built as one loop rather than four departments handing off to each other. CRM ended up becoming the single most efficient channel in the mix by a wide margin, not because we spent more on it, but because we designed for it from day one.

Fourth, they confuse “digital marketing” with “running ads.”

The real work was ground up. How we’d land our first presence. How we’d collect first-party data without bribing for it. What would drive sales versus what would drive education. How we’d find new audiences without paying twice to discover them.

What the consumer actually taught us:

The data surfaced patterns no upfront deck could have predicted. The trust deficit in supplements is real, and the consumer, in India and frankly anywhere else, passes a new wellness product through what we started calling “the Google test” before trying it. That meant we had to populate the digital universe with discoverable, searchable content they could self-validate against.

Mobile-first was an understatement, with nearly all orders coming from mobile and heavily skewed toward iOS users. Peppermint gum buyers turned out to be the gateway SKU, later expanding into other flavours and formats, which changed how we thought about bundling and repeat journeys. Weekday mornings between 7 and 11 AM were the peak purchase window, not weekends.

These aren’t things you find out by guessing. You find them out by designing the launch to find them out. That’s the science.

The part I haven’t said out loud until now

This isn’t a hard job. It’s a trust problem.

Launches get expensive and slow when companies hedge. When they split the strategy across five agencies, second-guess the operator, and optimise for the comfort of the review deck instead of the outcome. When one person with the full stack in their head, strategy, media, creative, CRM, commerce and operations, is trusted to run it as one thing rather than five, the math changes.

On the person who made this possible

Tuhin Jain, who then ran new business expansion for Asia at Aspeya, is an ex-founder himself. He came into this with a founder’s instinct for the India opportunity and, just as importantly, a founder’s agenda to prove the market was worth the company’s belief. That combination is rarer than it sounds. Most corporate sponsors running a market-entry project are hedging, waiting for data to make the case for them. He wasn’t. He had the hunch going in and was looking for the right operator, the right agency and the right partners to deliver against it. I think a lot of what got built in this launch exists because he knew exactly what he was trying to prove, and he was willing to back the people who could help him prove it.

This wasn’t the first time Tuhin and I had worked together. A few years earlier, while I was the digital marketing lead at his startup, one of the leading early-stage consumer brands in India at the time and an early entrant into the country’s discovery of speciality coffee and Nespresso format home brewers when that format was still very nascent, he and I built something from the ground up. That chapter was where I really learned ecommerce. Looking back, that earlier run is probably why he came looking for me again. And looking back is also when I realised how intelligent that call was, both his to bring me back, and mine to say yes! :) 

What I am most grateful for is the faith. Tuhin gave me the kind of rope most operators never get. Key decisions, I got to drive on his behalf.

He understood, sometimes before I did, that the patience this kind of work demands is not the same as the patience a running business demands. Building a category from zero is slower than selling into an existing one. It asks you to hold your nerve when the dashboards look quieter than you’d like. He held his, and let me hold mine.

I will also say honestly that I found myself educating him and the wider network again and again. That tested my patience more than once. But looking back, that was the generous part. He was learning in public alongside me, and he kept backing the call even when the ground was still shifting. Most sponsors won’t do that. The good ones do. The rare ones understand that when you’re launching into a category that doesn’t exist, the operator is doing two jobs at once and needs air cover for both.

In retrospect

After I delivered the project, I moved on to other ventures. The foundational work continues to compound to date. The system was built to keep going whether I stayed or not, and that, more than anything else, is the part I’m proud of. You build systems properly, they keep working. The operator doesn’t always get to see the flowering of what they planted, and that’s okay. That’s the job.

For the founders and CMOs reading this

If your category already exists in the market you’re entering, a keyword plan and a media template can get you some distance. If it doesn’t, none of that will save you. What you need is someone who can build the category and sell the product at the same time, and a sponsor who understands that those two jobs take different kinds of patience.

I take on a small amount of consulting work alongside everything else, mostly because it keeps my mind sharp. So if any of this resonated, or if you just want to think out loud about a launch, a category, or a business you’re trying to build, I’m always happy to trade an hour for a good cup of coffee.

Content Is the Constant. Everything Else Is Just the Vehicle.

You’ve heard most of these before.

Brain rot. Doom-scrolling. Phone zombies. The kids can’t read anymore. They can’t focus. They can’t have real conversations. Social media is making them anxious, lonely, performative. AI is going to kill creativity. ChatGPT is going to kill writing. TikTok is going to kill thinking. Reels are turning audiences into goldfish.

The medium changes. The fear stays the same.

I say, Brain Rot Is the Wrong Conversation

Every generation has had a version of this panic. Television was going to rot the children. Radio was going to make them lazy. The novel was going to corrupt young women. The printing press was going to dilute genuine learning. Even writing itself, when it first appeared, was greeted by Plato as a threat to memory and real understanding. He wasn’t wrong about what would change. He was wrong about what would be lost.

What we’re actually watching, and have always been watching, is civilisation’s oldest impulse, the urge to tell, hear, share, connect, taking the next available shape.

I came up through advertising, brand management, PR, and copywriting. Disciplines that, for all their differences, share one inheritance: you are taught to think about the message before the medium. The form is rented. The substance is what travels. I don’t think I understood the weight of that lesson when I was first taught it. It is something I am only now coming to realise, after years of watching the mediums change around me while the substance underneath kept asking the same questions.

Look at the long arc and the pattern is hard to miss.

We started on cave walls, pressing handprints into rock so a story could outlive its teller. Then we became oral, building entire civilisations out of myth, song, and chant. Then writing meant the story no longer depended on memory. The printing press meant it no longer depended on access. Radio, film, and television gave it sound and movement at scale. The internet collapsed distance. Social and video collapsed time. AI is now beginning to shape the story itself in response to whoever is receiving it.

My generation occupies an unusual seat in this story. We are old enough to have used technology to learn the history of human communication, and young enough to have lived through the most rapid shift in its mediums any generation has ever witnessed. We have used the same tools to study cave paintings and to build chatbots. That is not a small inheritance. It is a vantage point earlier generations did not have, and it should leave us with more humility about what is changing, not less.

Every one of these shifts was met with the same fear. That something essentially human was being lost. That the previous form was nobler. That the next generation was being damaged by what was holding their attention.

The “kids today” never actually changed. The floor they were standing on did.

This is what I think most marketing conversations get wrong. They start from the platform and work backwards. TikTok strategy. Instagram strategy. AI strategy. Influencer strategy. As if the platform were the thing that mattered, rather than the message it was carrying. As if Gen Z is a different species from the people who once worried that comic books would warp their children.

Platforms are not the work. They are the floor a particular generation happens to be standing on. The work is, and has always been, figuring out what is worth saying, who needs to hear it, and how to make it land in their actual life.

The discomfort people feel about audiences becoming “too digital,” about kids being “addicted to their phones,” about AI “doing the thinking for us,” is the same discomfort that greeted every new medium before this one. It is not a sign that civilisation is decaying. It is a sign that civilisation is, once again, finding a new floor for the same old conversation.

I think we’ll keep building these floors. I think AI is the next one, not the last. And one day, who knows, we may even build the kind of content that lets us reach across whatever distance comes next. Including distances we don’t yet have a name for.

That is the part of the work that keeps me curious. 

Not the platforms. 

The pattern underneath them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Very soon the Google calendar app is going to enhance itself with this feature.

COVID-19 gave the rise to working around the world remotely, and today it has become the new normal. 

Companies were forced to trust their employees more, employees learnt to focus better, both benefited from this. Of course, everyone had to upgrade their homes to be more connected. To ensure the smooth running of not 'work', but other things, such as their Entertainment devices, Cable, Banking, Grocery Shopping, Workouts, Meditation apps. All from the comfort of their homes.

But of course, as important, it is to stay healthy, safe and alive, it is to be able to earn. Working remotely and with efficiency does exactly that. But, the foundation of progress is defined by our efficiency in communication and transport infrastructure.

And in the absence of transport, when we over-indexed on communication alone, it was all about time management. It ensured we have enough time to communicate as we have to work and deliver a project. Because talking or communicating doesn't alone deliver work. It's the time we spend processing it and applying our learnings and knowledge that does! 

This brings us to the highly efficient Google calendar app. Oh, boy have we all been grateful to it in the lockdown. From businesses to entrepreneurs, to creators alike. It was and still is one of the simplest solutions out there to manage your work, time and efficiency. 

But staying home and working remotely has also meant blocking more time for meetings to work as teams or to deliver projects. With the added hours of commute - that we've now learnt to dedicate to work as well, oftentimes people have started to complain that they have had too many meetings each day and almost no time to actually work.

So while the Google calendar app has helped us find time with others and block our calendars to do so, it has almost not accounted for hours we put aside everything and work. 

"Focus hours" is a concept that ensures you have time on your calendar that can be blocked each day post a meeting or as part of the day you dedicate each day of the week to actually do your work - during your work hours. Others can see this and they can see the agenda of your focus hours as well, but they won't be able to actually block your time in that period unless you allow them to do so exclusively.

The feature is simple, it shows your calendar as 'partially blocked', the reason for it being blocked. It gives better control to the person as it lets them decide who can block their time in these defined hours while ensuring a larger set of people do not actually intrude or break your focus. 

What next for payment apps, appointment booking apps and likes of Urban Company, Google business and Facebook marketplace?

A Covid-19 perspective: Thinking SMB growth and substance 

It's Jun 2021, we’re already in the middle of year 2 of lockdown. Life has not been easy, managing health and well-being has been difficult, keeping small businesses alive has been worse. 

India thrives on mom and pop shops. The jugaad country. The country of a billion-plus population, where everyone has learned to survive and dreams of growth by hard work. We’re conditioned from childhood how government jobs are safe, and how good grades, hard work and consistency will ensure you have a well-settled life and success in any endeavour we apply ourselves. That by saving enough, anyone with even small ideas can turn their dreams into big businesses - by working the grind with consistency of course. 

Covid-19 changed that. Not just for uber drivers and retail shop workers and food delivery agents or business owners, but more severely for the service industry. 

While payment and UPI apps were the next big thing in 2019 when everyone was out and about their one business and the worry of the hour was how to make payment fast, secure and convenient for fickle customers. And let's say an added layer of bookkeeping and making saving easier for everyone from a Kirana store owner to a local salon owner. Once covid hit, properties changed. 

Then with a sudden knee jerk reaction - like a flip switch even - literally overnight - we saw the rise of platforms like zoom, voice and video chats in 2020 and 2021. 

2020 - saw the rise of reels, live streaming and video lead workshops and teaching - Perfect for people who were at home, and were able to channel their energies and drive business growth and reach by using these mediums. We saw people start self-help reels, give workshops online and engage in live sessions. Everything they could do using a simple mobile device and internet from the comfort of their homes - just to ensure that their business stays relevant in the mind of customers. The one hope that remained - this phase was temporary and it was a business revenue hit everyone had to make way for. Nothing else needed to change. 

Come 2021 - We're still in lockdown. We’ve learned to live with ourselves and we're tired of waiting, losing patience. Small business owners are also humans after all. But they're growing sceptical, they can't step out and they can't take the risks they planned as optimistic SMB owners. The virus after all has evolved as well. But 'risk' is something Indian's specialise in taking. 

'Peth paalne ke liye karna padta hai babu' is the undertone of our 'jugaad' mindset after all. 'Calculated risk' is something one never really plans for like an extended vacation. Nor is it that much fun. So what now? 

We're slowly but surely getting vaccinated, and that instils a lot of misplaced encouragement and hope in the SMB owners who have mouths to feed and rents to pay and have waited it out patiently for a year. Once the government imposed lockdowns being to fade, people will risk et all, and open shop, period. 

But we can be smarter about this. There is a gap that wasn't really there actually, but a place that Paytm's of the world and Gpay's of the world (in coalition with their Google Business listing) can solve for - 'paid risk'. 

Two categories that have already perfected this is medical consultations and dining out - Practo and Zomat's of the world have set them up for success that it's not even occurring. as a problem to them. You can book find a slot in their calendar and book a time to visit a hospital to a restaurant and pay up for consultation for the time booked in case of medical tech - which is post covid ready and actually serves as category operational hygiene. 

If an SMB owner is told that today he can open shop and entertain customers, be it in a custom tailor store or a beauty parlour or a gym instructor for that matter - by ensuring that they book slots, and limit crowd in-store and get users to pay a fee as visitation charge redeemable against product or services in-store - then surely it makes sense for them to indulge in 'paid risk', right? 

If a service can be offered in the shop but with the guarantee of customer visit and purchase, who will not take this risk? 

Yes I know, one can critique that:

1. For paid order pickups from a grocery or Kirana shops  - one can set up an order on call and payment on UPI or Paytm. 

2. For selling clothes and taking custom measurements - one can set up a shop on Amazon or Instagram using Shopify or in some variation of that with a phone call. 

3. For selling home installation, maintenance and repair services, and home beauty and wellness services one can set up usage of urban clap. 

But these are very centric to individuals who sell services and not the business that sells services. Have you seen the verbal war salon aunties unleash in opposition to the usage of beauty services via Urban Company that comes home and do the same thing? 

The problem comes when we acknowledge that there are already existing businesses who need a selling solution right now, we're not planning for an audience that will come into existence to do this: 

Use case: Beauty salon

Step 1: The salon owner is able to list staff and their available timeslots as per various jobs that can be booked in the salon. 

Step 2: Payment against these services can be taken in advance. 

Step 3: Basis time and slot hold - the salon owner can define the working hours for the staff for each day. Keeping the business closed on days there is no business or having them wait for a walk-in customer. 

Step 4: Booking date and time changes can be made in-app, ensuring optimal safety of staff and customers as well as facility and resource management efficiencies. 

Step 5: Bonus if this can be done on their listing page in an app or better yet on their google business listing! (as we usually search for these things in the vicinity) 

Use case: Tailor shop or boutique

Step 1: Tailor shop is able to account for each tailers time and list out available time slots as per various jobs that can be booked in the shop. i.e.: Taking measurements for various new garments, fixing existing garments, rush jobs, elaborate dress planning and measurements, fabric shortlisting etc. 

Step 2: Payment against job type can be taken in advance for a fixed timeslot. 

Step 3: The boutique owner can align pick up dates for finished garments, for checking fittings and rework at time of the first visit and move same basis customer interaction. 

Step 4: Let a chat start between boutique and customer on progress thereon. Additional payment can also be made mid-conversation and job delivery.  

Step 5: Bonus if this can be done on their listing page in an app or better yet on their google business listing! (as we usually search for these things in the vicinity) and also helps travel to the same using google maps. 

Some context why this gap needs to be filled for consumers: 

So business competes with individuals who offer the same jobs. Businesses set benchmarks for hygiene and service quality, and as they do it in a secure vicinity, it is easier for them to sell the fact that their staff is not visiting homes for business that may have explored them to covid. 

Also, not everyone wants to get a Seema aunty at home who only uses Kasmara products to do facials and pedicures because Urban Company complies them to do so terming it as standardisation. 

Who can diversify or expand their existing universe into this space right away?

1. So either like of Urban Company can quickly add this to their portfolio. 
2. Or the likes of Paytm who already offer multiple other similar devices and brand store set-ups. 
3. But overall I think Google business listings or Facebook marketplace can do this pretty well, and to the advantage of SMB businesses - but we all know the larger the giant, the slower it walks.

But in a post covid world as well - this gap evolves SMB businesses to be more digital and eventually spend on digital to get sure shot business and should become a norm in these unregulated service industries in India as well. And if it works here, LATAM, APAC region is an easy implementation of this business case! 

What will serve as a paid risk forsaker for the Indian economy if the lockdown continues this year will surely become a use case for future business starters as hygiene. Who knows how long Covid-19 is here to stay. 

Who know's how long we can only believe people spend on advertising without being able to guarantee return via digital?