Reading the Indian consumer

An editorial interpretation of the conversation, distinguishing the guest’s arguments from verified business outcomes.

Advertising as a study of India

Santosh Desai traces his work in writing, consulting and venture building to advertising’s demand that he understand India. Entering the profession before liberalization, he found strategic planning meant interpreting India for international brands and those brands for Indian consumers. He describes that understanding as necessarily incomplete: consumption, identity and social structures are connected. His campaign recollections include an unsuccessful VIP luggage pitch about belonging wherever one travels and a Stayfree idea built around women supporting women, which he believes was executed without sufficient conviction and abandoned too soon.

The aspiration–affordability gap

Desai argues that aspiration remains powerful while affordability has failed to keep pace. He also suggests, explicitly as a small and counterintuitive effect, that digital participation can provide some of the identity and self-worth otherwise sought through consumption; he acknowledges technology also intensifies aspiration. He challenges metro-centric assumptions that smaller cities merely follow a fixed development timetable. In his account, regional brands benefit both from consumers seeking culturally rooted self-expression and from improved access to talent, distribution, capital and fragmented media. He remains unconvinced that Gen Z has broadly stopped adapting outside cultural influences to Indian sensibilities.

New purchase paths and the AI threat

He sees purchasing as fluid and simultaneous rather than reliably sequential, while allowing funnels some value as broad frameworks. AI, he argues, threatens ordinary advertising work, and agencies have constrained themselves through elaborate processes while creators developed short-form storytelling. Vishal counters that advertising welcomes new talent and can give brands scale; Desai acknowledges the profession’s strengths while maintaining that it missed a major opportunity. Drawing explicitly on experience from roughly two decades earlier, he argues that recognized cultural expertise can sustain strategic client relationships. He describes institutionalizing that expertise through shared observation, connecting patterns and continually challenging explanations. AI can widen a subjective problem, he says, without settling the final choice.

Advisory, ownership and the value of expertise

Desai outlines Futurebrands’ project advisory and longer-term execution partnerships, alongside Think9’s venture-building ecosystem and Foundry ambitions. He distinguishes small consultancies’ insight work from larger firms’ data and business integration. His criticism of awards concerns their primacy as validation rather than their existence. He calls for agency models that develop products or assets beyond selling time, and for anthropology in strategy education. Finally, he argues brands still need coherent expectations, but must evolve more fluidly while retaining recognizable meaning.