Making marketing matter at Motilal Oswal.

I joined in 2022 with a mandate and a blank page: build marketing from scratch and make it matter to the business. The first months were unlearning jargon and relearning finance. The bigger shift was structural — instead of hiring an agency, I built an in-house one: 35 people, not just designers and writers but thinkers curious enough to learn markets. Nimble, hands-on, built for speed. That choice — own the capability, don’t rent it — is the same instinct as everything before it.

What I’m proudest of isn’t the output; it’s that almost every piece of it started from the same question — what does this category assume about the customer that isn’t actually true? A few examples of the answer doing its work:

Repositioning The market saw us as a place to trade. But investors don’t aspire to trade — they aspire to the outcomes trading is meant to fund. So we moved a 37-year-old brokerage toward a wealth relationship, and modernised a 40-year-old identity to carry it: keep the trust, change the posture.

Media as environment People ignore advertising; they notice environments. So instead of buying spots we built places — a Malad metro station and a CNBC-TV18 studio turned into brand experiences, and research placed inside trusted publications, because credibility compounds when expertise earns attention instead of buying it.

Trust over fame In a category where endorsements are restricted, investors trust market voices over famous faces — so the industry’s first viral film was with veteran investor Vijay Kedia (2.6M views in 15 days), and ‘The Man from Motilal Oswal’ became a character people remember because people remember people, not products.

Research as product Research is most valuable when it becomes a product, not just a service — so we turned proprietary research into Research360, a subscription platform (45K+ users, ₹12–15 Cr), and built Research Assist, an AI companion, because investors don’t lack information; they lack the right information at the right moment.

AI scales a voice. It never invents one that isn’t accountable to a real person.

AI with a line We built a digital twin of brand leadership and ran regional social pages in five Indian languages on AI-generated content — making institutional expertise accessible beyond English India for the first time. The line I hold: AI scales a voice; it never invents one that isn’t accountable to a real person.

The honest version: none of these are ‘campaigns I ran.’ They’re the same idea — perception is a lever — applied at institutional scale, with a P&L to answer to. The ₹11 studio and the ₹5.5-lakh-crore brand are running the identical operating instinct. That’s the point of this whole section.