Keynote · Marketing Leadership · 35–45 min
Marketing isn’t a cost centre. It’s the thing the P&L is waiting on.
For rooms of marketing leaders who are tired of defending their budget and want to talk about owning a number instead.
Most marketing functions are organised to produce output and measured on applause. Then they spend the rest of the year explaining their existence to a CFO. The problem isn’t the budget — it’s that brand has been allowed to stay a soft metric, so it gets treated like one.
The moment brand tracking sits on the same page as the P&L, the budget conversation ends.
At Motilal Oswal I joined with a blank page and built the function from zero — 35 people, in-house rather than on retainer, and a measurement architecture that put brand perception in front of the board next to market share. Perception then moved the business: gross-sales share from 1.6% to 4.3%, SIP share from 1.5% to 3.2%.
I’ll also cover the parts that were slow, expensive and unglamorous — because that’s the half most keynotes skip.
What the room leaves with
- Why ‘brand vs performance’ is a false fight, and what to measure instead.
- How to put brand perception in front of a board without hand-waving.
- When to build capability in-house rather than rent it from an agency.
- The first three things to change if marketing is treated as a service desk.
CMOs and marketing leaders, founder-led teams making their first senior marketing hire, and leadership offsites where marketing has to justify itself to finance.
The work behind it: broking to wealth repositioning · building the function · how I lead.