Strategy Commercial Leadership India & MENA

I read where Indian consumers are going, and help build what comes next.

Shray Agarwal — AVP & Business Head at a global consumer intelligence consultancy. Twelve years of engagements across telecom, FMCG, AlcoBev, automotive, and the development sector: read the market, run the machine, own the number. ₹40Cr+ P&L.

Read the white papers →Get in touch

Delhi NCR, India

₹40Cr+

P&L owned, India practice

₹14Cr+

New-business revenue · 47% NBD conversion

Promotions in 11 years, one firm

White papers that became mandates

GenAI platforms deployed firm-wide

Twelve years of building one practice, in five numbers.

SELECTED WORK

The work, the way it was scoped.

A representative slice of 400+ engagements — problem, approach, result. Client names withheld.

The problem

A mass-market carmaker needed its future design language to track aspirations shifting toward global standards faster than its product cycles could follow. Perception of premiumness was moving; the design brief hadn't.

How it was designed

Five-step immersive fieldwork rather than discussion groups
Owners of top variants brought their own cars, parked side by side with a controlled competitor set for direct comparison
Interiors, then exteriors, then a drive — each cue documented physically
In-home audits with the most articulate respondents, hunting out-of-category sources for the same quality and premiumness themes

What it produced

Ten premiumness themes and seven quality themes, rank-ordered, each anchored to specific physical cues on real vehicles rather than to adjectives. Fed directly into design language decisions across four segments.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

The problem

A financial services entrant was launching a digital-first banking proposition into a cash-dominant market. Capital was committed; what wasn't clear was which customer segments and merchant networks would produce durable adoption rather than a promotional surge.

How it was designed

Market sizing across urban, semi-urban, and rural demand pools, anchored in actual transaction behaviour rather than stated intent.
Field mapping of 250,000+ retail touchpoints to identify density corridors and partnership priorities.
Go-to-market architecture linking product features, channel economics, and a phased rollout plan.

What it produced

A segment-led go-to-market replaced a blanket national campaign. The approach became the template for the practice's financial-services entry work.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

The problem

International development organisations were commissioning research, but the insights rarely translated into programme priorities. The work was descriptive; the programmes needed causal clarity.

How it was designed

Ethnographic and qualitative immersions across nutrition, public health, and clean air programmes.
Culture-first framing that connected individual behaviours to household decision-making and community norms.
Programme-level workshops where findings were translated into intervention hypotheses rather than slide decks.

What it produced

Programme priorities were reset using this work. The methodology was later codified into firm-wide SOPs that outlasted the COVID period.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

Across categories — Telecom, FMCG & Foods, Oral & Personal Care, Automotive (2W & 4W), Pet Care, BFSI, Media & Social Platforms, AlcoBev, Beauty, Real Estate, Nutraceuticals & Health, Rural & Development

12 years. 200+ studies read, run or directed. No client named on this site.

BUILT IN-HOUSE

Three GenAI platforms, all in daily use.

All three deployed firm-wide; the product line reached commercial revenue within its first year.

Institutional Knowledge Hub

Turned a two-decade research archive into a queryable institutional memory.

Classified a ~200-study corpus into ten framework families.
Built so a new question retrieves prior evidence instead of restarting research.
Directly addresses the consultancy's oldest structural loss: knowledge that leaves when people do.

Framework Skill Architecture

A core-plus-router-plus-modules system that loads the right analytical lenses per study.

Eleven framework modules built from deep-reading representative studies, extracting method, projective kit, output structure and house voice.
A router, because a single study routinely spans four frameworks at once — one-skill-per-framework breaks immediately at real complexity.
Three modules validated against known outputs before scaling the rest.

Research Instrument Generator

Generates discussion guides and instruments grounded in prior study design rather than in generic templates.

Trained on the firm's own historical instruments so outputs carry the right structure, not just the right words.
Recruitment, discussion guide, and survey flows are generated from a brief and a single prompt.
Senior researchers review instead of draft, which reclaims days for analysis and counsel.

Zero to commercial revenue in 11 months.

CAPABILITY

What I bring.

Three levers, from evidence to outcome.

Measure it

The quantitative bench, run hands-on rather than briefed out.

Survey design — business question to hypothesis to instrument
Conjoint and max-diff, for trade-off and preference sizing
Significance testing: t-test, ANOVA, MANOVA
Regression for driver ranking and effect sizing
Sampling frame design and data-quality standards
Qualtrics-class platforms and UserTesting
Concept, prototype and usability testing
Power BI — built a 15+ KPI governance layer

Understand it

Ten framework families, each built from deep-reading the studies that used them — not from textbook summaries.

Brand equity — six-dimension diagnosis
Brand archetype — inventory and deconstruction
Triggers, barriers and conversion (Art of Woo)
Jobs-to-be-Done, as an innovation-brief converter
Behavioural science — System 1/2, COM-B, EAST, MINDSPACE
Anxiety and depth profiling — transactional analysis, life-script
Semiotics and communication codes
CX and journey — emotional arc, moments of truth
Culture and futures — tensions and emergent codes
Segmentation and pen-portrait personas

Field formats: extended consumer triads, in-home audits, expert panels across disciplines, digital intelligence, and craft–recycle–validate workshops that end in a decision.

Ship it

The part most insight leaders don't carry.

₹40Cr+ P&L, owned end to end
17-person team across consumer, brand, category and shopper
47% RFP win rate on ₹14Cr of new revenue
33% profit uplift; 23.5% average annual revenue growth
40+ enterprise accounts
Stood up a new-market entity from zero
GenAI product from hypothesis to revenue in 11 months
Insight risk and data governance ownership

WHITE PAPERS

Four white papers, each written to win a mandate.

Not published — written for a specific client, to open a specific conversation. Every one converted.

The Invisible Category

TELECOM / TMT

Telecom has stopped being a category consumers choose and become infrastructure they assume. The paper maps what operators must do when their product becomes invisible — and where the next visible layer of value will be contested.

Opened ₹1.8Cr in advisory mandates.

Request the paper

The Split

AUTOMOTIVE

Indian commute is dividing into two irreconcilable futures. The paper decodes the fault line and argues the category's next decade belongs to whoever stops selling vehicles and starts selling time.

Opened a ₹96L mandate.

Request the paper

The Floor

ALCOBEV

A commentary on the Indian AlcoBev landscape: why the real battle is not at the premium ceiling but at the cultural floor — the codes that decide what Indians permit themselves to drink, where, and with whom.

Led to a portfolio innovation commission.

Request the paper

The Trust They Already Own

F&B

Legacy Indian food brands sit on unpriced trust. The paper argues this trust is a market-entry asset most incumbents don't know they hold — and challengers can't buy.

₹2Cr committed in-year by the client it was written for.

Request the paper

APPROACH

The operating system.

Structure that lets client work scale without losing its edge.

One P&L, not five offices.

Consolidated five regional offices into a single ₹40Cr+ practice under one operating model. One planning cycle, one pricing logic, one delivery organisation.

Decisions in the room.

Workshop formats that replace the report rather than follow it — the client team commits while the evidence is still live.

Governance as infrastructure.

Built a Power BI decision layer across 15+ KPIs, giving leadership a single source of truth for pipeline, delivery, and margin.

Result: leadership decision velocity up ~21%.

Built the firm's Middle East entity from Delhi, without travelling. It now delivers across India and MENA.

Research Hero 2022, Market Research Society UK Future List Nominee 2022, GreenBook.

CONTACT

Get in touch.

If any of this connects with something you're working on, I'd like to hear from you.

shrayagarwal89@gmail.com

linkedin.com/in/shray-agarwal-b0883a24 →

I read where Indian consumers are going, and help build what comes next.

The work, the way it was scoped.

What should quality and premiumness physically look like on the next generation of mass-market Indian cars?

How do you build a go-to-market for a banking product aimed at people who don't use banks?

How do you move a development funder from awareness campaigns to measurable behaviour change?

Three GenAI platforms, all in daily use.

Institutional Knowledge Hub

Framework Skill Architecture

Research Instrument Generator

What I bring.

Measure it

Understand it

Ship it

Four white papers, each written to win a mandate.

The Invisible Category

The Split

The Floor

The Trust They Already Own

The operating system.

One P&L, not five offices.

Decisions in the room.

Governance as infrastructure.

Get in touch.