Learning to choose a market

My first job involved carrying a questionnaire into businesses whose owners were usually too busy to answer it. I joined Jenvurli Market Research in Coimbatore in June 1999 after completing my business-administration degree. We studied industrial buying and distribution for regional clients. I interviewed purchasing staff, proprietors and salespeople, then helped organise their answers. The most useful notes were often the ones that did not fit the form. A machine could be affordable and still unsuitable because nobody nearby could repair it. A supplier could be known and still excluded because its delivery schedule did not fit the factory's week.

In April 2005 I joined Tavreni Trade Finance as a market-intelligence analyst. The lender then had eight branches, and my work was to understand the business communities around them. I visited industrial estates and spoke with branch colleagues about enquiry patterns. I did not assess loan applications. My contribution was to distinguish the size of a local economy from the portion our business proposition could plausibly address. That distinction initially made my reports less exciting than a broad market-size estimate, but it gave distribution colleagues something they could actually use.

I became segment-marketing manager in April 2011. Six colleagues worked with me on propositions for manufacturers and trading firms. I learnt how a research finding changes when it becomes a campaign brief. A careful qualification can disappear from a headline; a narrow observation can become a general claim about an entire industry. I began asking branch and credit colleagues to review the proposed audience as well as the wording. Their participation did not transfer credit decisions into marketing. It helped us avoid attracting businesses for a service that we already knew did not fit their circumstances.

In April 2017 I became head of marketing. The role included sixteen colleagues, agency relationships and a ₹6.2 crore annual budget by the end of my tenure. I had to choose between competing requests from regions that each considered their opportunity urgent. I introduced a short investment note describing the customer, the reason to approach them, the branch capacity required and the evidence that would justify a second round. This did not eliminate disagreement. It made the disagreement more concrete and made it harder for the largest attendance number to settle every allocation.

I became CMO in April 2022. I report to chief executive Rohit Peruvanti and work with chief operating officer Eleanor Qelnavi on the practical consequences of demand. Our current marketing team has twenty-eight employees, compared with 560 across the company. The ₹1,250 crore loan portfolio and ₹226 crore annual income describe the lender, while my ₹14 crore marketing budget describes the expenditure I am accountable for. I present market-entry and campaign-investment papers to the board when invited. Those presentations do not make me a director or a member of its committees.

The manufacturing campaign described on this site began with too broad a view of an industrial cluster. The event decision began with an assumption that a prestigious venue was the right place to meet prospective customers. The introducer trial began with a regional result that looked healthy until we examined how dependent it was on three relationships. I was involved in the original plans as well as the corrections. I do not regard the revised choices as proof that the first ideas were foolish. They show why management needs a point at which evidence can change the plan without making every earlier advocate defend it indefinitely.

My leadership has become more selective over time. I used to answer a weak result with another research request or an additional campaign. I now ask whether we have made a clear choice about the market at all. Sometimes the useful answer is to stop, accept an incurred cost and explain why a different use of attention is justified. I also want managers below me to develop that judgement rather than wait for my approval of every brief. The next stage of my work is to build a marketing function whose commercial reasoning is visible enough to be challenged and strong enough to survive a change of leader. That requires curiosity about customers, discipline about money and a willingness to say that an attractive opportunity may belong to somebody else.

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