Services · Marketing Consultant · India
A marketing consultant should leave you with a number, not a deck.
If you’re searching for this, you probably have a growth problem nobody has named properly yet. Here’s what the role is supposed to do about it.
The useful ones do three things: work out what’s genuinely wrong (rarely what you were told), decide what the business should do about it, and make sure it survives contact with your team. Everything else — the audit, the framework, the deck — is packaging around those three.
If the recommendation could have been written before they met you, you bought a template.
Ask what they’d refuse to do. Ask which of their recommendations failed and why. Ask who does the work — if the senior person you’re talking to disappears after the pitch, you’re buying a bench. And ask what number they’d be judged on; if the answer is ‘deliverables’, keep looking.
I still run a marketing function. At Motilal Oswal I built one from a blank page — 35 people, in-house rather than on retainer — and moved gross-sales market share from 1.6% to 4.3% by changing what the brand was for, not by spending more.
Before that: a decade across Webchutney, Ogilvy, Isobar and The Glitch on Netflix, Visa, Surf Excel and CoinSwitch. So I’ve seen the problem from both chairs — the one that recommends and the one that has to live with it.
Common questions
What does a marketing consultant do?
Diagnoses what’s actually limiting growth, decides what to do about it, and makes the change stick inside a real organisation. The best ones spend most of their time on the diagnosis, because the recommendation is only as good as the problem it answers.
When should I hire one instead of an agency?
An agency is for making and running work. A consultant is for deciding what work should exist and how marketing should be structured to produce it. If you already know the answer and need hands, hire the agency.
How much does a marketing consultant cost in India?
It varies enormously with scope and seniority. A number quoted before anyone has diagnosed the problem is a negotiating position, not a price — the shape of the work has to come first.
What makes a practising operator different?
Advice ages. Someone still accountable for a live P&L is telling you what works this year, including what it cost and what took longer than planned.
Go deeper: how engagements actually run · the work, and what it moved.