Article 01
The CDO who doesn't exist yet.
Why fractional digital leadership is the future — and why most businesses are waiting too long for the full-time version.
Most organisations that need a Chief Digital Officer can't afford to wait for the right one. The search takes six to twelve months. The onboarding takes another three. Meanwhile, digital decisions are being made — by committee, by default, or by the vendor with the most persistent sales team.
Fractional CDO engagement is not a compromise. For most organisations under ₹500 crore in revenue, it is the superior model. You get a practitioner who has built and led digital businesses — not someone learning your industry on your budget. You get accountability without the overhead. And you retain the flexibility to scale the engagement as your needs evolve.
The businesses that will win the next decade of digital competition are not the ones waiting for the perfect hire. They are the ones making deliberate decisions right now.
Article 02
Your MarTech stack is costing you more than it's earning.
The sustainability and financial case for rationalisation — and why most marketing teams are afraid to make it.
The average enterprise marketing team uses 47 tools. They have measurable ROI for perhaps twelve of them. The rest are contracts that survived a reorganisation, platforms nobody knows how to turn off, and dashboards that generate reports nobody reads.
This is a financial problem. It is also an environmental one. Every redundant platform running in the cloud is drawing power. Every unused data pipeline is generating cost and emissions with zero corresponding value. MarTech sprawl is not just inefficient — it is unsustainable.
When you can show that 60% of your stack generates 8% of your measurable outcomes, the conversation becomes easier.
The rationalisation conversation is difficult because it involves admitting past decisions were wrong. Our advice: start with the data. We have had it with some of India's largest marketing organisations. The results — financial and environmental — speak clearly.
Article 03
AI in CRM — what's real and what's hype.
A practitioner's guide to where AI genuinely moves the needle in customer relationship marketing — and where it doesn't.
AI will transform CRM. It already has, in the organisations that have approached it with discipline. It has also generated a remarkable volume of expenditure, confusion, and disappointment in the organisations that approached it with enthusiasm.
The implementations that work share three characteristics: a clean data foundation (you cannot personalise from bad data), a clearly defined business problem (not "use AI", but "predict which customers will churn in the next 90 days"), and a team that can maintain and iterate what was built. The implementations that fail typically lack all three.
We have deployed AI-powered marketing solutions at organisations including Algonomy clients (McDonald's, PizzaHut, RedTag) and Merkle's pharmaceutical and retail portfolio (Novartis, Amgen, Urban Outfitters). The pattern is consistent. AI is not a strategy. It is a capability — and it requires the same rigour to build as any other capability.
Article 04
Outcomes-based pricing — is Indian marketing services ready?
We pioneered it at Hansa Cequity. Here's what we learned about why most firms resist it — and why they shouldn't.
Outcomes-based pricing aligns what the client pays with what the client gets. This sounds obvious. In practice, it is rare — because it requires the agency to be confident enough in its delivery to take the risk, and the client to be sophisticated enough to define what "outcome" actually means.
We introduced outcomes-based pricing into the Indian CRM services market through our work at Hansa Cequity. The resistance was institutional — most firms prefer the certainty of time-and-materials. But the clients who engaged on outcomes terms consistently received better work. When we share the risk, we make better decisions.
Indian marketing services are ready. The question is whether agencies have the confidence to make the offer.