As brands scale, marketing complexity often expands faster than internal alignment can keep pace. What once functioned effectively through founder instinct or agency-led execution begins to show strain as customer segments broaden, channels multiply, and competitive positioning becomes more deliberate. In that environment, marketing activity increases and budgets become more defined, yet brand direction does not always evolve with the same discipline or cohesion. This is where many growth-stage companies encounter familiar tensions. Agencies can accelerate execution, but they operate within defined briefs. When the brief itself lacks cohesion, adding more output rarely resolves the underlying issue. The question then shifts from capability to ownership. When should a business continue expanding agency partnerships, and when is it time to introduce dedicated marketing leadership with clear ownership? Engaging a fractional brand marketing leader is not simply an alternativ...

A consumer’s decision to purchase a product or service is dictated by several rational factors like pricing, utility, affordability, reviews and comparisons. But beyond such tangibles there is one factor that every marketer needs to be aware of: EMOTIONS! Why would people otherwise choose expensive branded products over their exact generic equivalents selling at a fraction of their price? Emotions typically operate on a level of irrationality, that is both undefinable and undeniable. The author of Descartes Error Antonio Damasio argues in his book that emotions are an essential ingredient in almost all decisions. He says, whenever we have to take a decision our past related experiences come into play. These emotions create preferences depending on the options we are considering, leading to a decision.   That is why you hate going to a restaurant the second time when your first experience is not good or you prefer to buy a certain kind or brand of shoes, p...

Simplicity is the key in today’s brand world. Keeping it in mind along with collaborative consumption mindset, brand   OutsourcedCMO   has helped companies gain recognition within various markets and continue to do so.   And now, to protect our identity and exclusivity, we have registered our brand name ‘Outsourced CMO’ – Yes, Outsourced CMO is registered now ! This means we at Outsourced CMO hold exclusive rights to use this brand name and no person/firm can use it without our permission. The goodwill and trust we have built over the past years helps in differentiating and separating our services from other players in the industry and this step will protect it for us and companies who hired us. The registration process protects any infringement as per the Government of India and will bring on legal hassles for infringers. Since Outsourced CMO strongly believes in the concept of shared economy, we at Outsourced CMO strive towards lowering marketing costs, streng...

It is a very general business tendency that whenever any entrepreneurs starts making initial transactions they think more from the top line revenue , which is not bad at all Some of the top objectives are frequency of Some of the top objectives are frequency transactions repeat transactions, volume of transactions etc. Well this might just make your top line very healthy as the revenue starts flowing in All this may come at the expenses of loosing money at every transactions primarily due to some extraordinary incentives being offered to lure to customers to be the first users. The core thinking here is that customers who have not heard about will not buy your product unless given on discount. All this may come at the expenses of loosing money at every transactions primarily due to some extraordinary incentives being offered to lure to customers to be the first users. The core thinking here is that customers who have not heard about will not buy your product unless...

  No doubt it is the age of startups as more and more startups hit the market with their USPs at regular interval. But, it is not all smooth sailing for the startups in this ultra-competitive environment. According to an IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics study , 90% of startups in India fail within the first 5 years.   For example, Taskbob a hyperlocal, on-demand home service launched in India in 2015 announced its shutdown on the company's FB page on Jan 19, 2017 while the last minute hotel booking app Roomstonite launched in 2015 from Bengaluru, India seems to have shut down in just two years in 2107.  Moreover, startups by their very nature are always experimenting and do not have a predefined path on which to progress. As they work in uncharted territory they often have to change directions and or their products/services to suit market trends. Often-a-times their business model too changes. Not a bright idea In such a scenario...

One of the most precarious and overwhelming challenges faced by startups and small businesses is to remain cash positive. After all, you have set up the business with an aim to grow as quickly as possible. But the difficult balancing act between growth needs vs various recurring costs like salaries, infrastructure cost,   operational costs etc builds itself up into a vicious cycle with paucity of cash staring at you on every turn.           Breaking the vicious cycle Most businesses try to break this cycle by cutting down on expenditure on activities and areas that seems wasteful like marketing and advertising. But this course of action leads to even more pain for the companies as cutting down on marketing spend results in business growth getting stifled leading to less revenue and consequently more budget cuts. This scenario need not be repeated in your business as you can break this vicious cycle by doing a bit of judicious marketin...

Ben Stokes fetched Rs 12.5 cr from Rajasthan Royals, while Jaydev Unadkat, Manish Pandey and Lokesh Rahul had the teams go gaga over them in the latest edition of the IPL auction. Eight teams spent an awesome Rs 431.7 cr in the 2018 IPL auction, trading 187 players.   To a layman, this would seem to be an exorbitant splurging of money as the players are contracted just for the duration of IPL and are free to play anywhere in the world and for any team, they want to, for the rest of the year. But this has an important lesson for us as business people i.e. of not weighing the contribution of a resource towards the ultimate goal by the time spent but by its utility, expertise, ROI and fit with what we want to achieve. Businesses, especially Medium and Small Businesses must take a cue from the strategies adopted by teams at IPL teams, and work to maximize their marketing returns by investing in correct resources like Outsourced CMO , without bothering about the time ...

Ask any CEO the one thing he would kill for and he will say automatically: “fast growth on low cash and even lower risk.” Of course even as he says this he would realise that such stories belong exclusively to the realm of make-believe fiction. In real-world business ‘cash-burn’ is a bad but unavoidable word. The predicament for every business manager is that growth without large marketing spends, which includes a top-dollar business development team, is simply not possible—not thus far, anyway. “It’s a risk I must take or simply perish,” is what most CEOs will tell you. The problem is that as markets get increasingly crowded, competitive and disruptive the chances of such risks paying off are diminishing all the time, particularly for start-ups riding on a bubble of investor cash and valuations. In the new-age of business (regardless of its nature) CEOs need to constantly think out-of-the-box for gaining every square inch of mind and...