Chief Marketing Officer / India
What changed when the first proposal met its evidence
- Art-material retail estate
- 29 shops
- Includes six Prinzori Paper Rooms acquired in 2023
- Marketing team
- 24 employees
- Four reporting heads; eleven agency personnel are additional
- FY2026–27 marketing authority
- ₹14.6 crore
- Includes ₹8.4 crore media expense; company revenue is separate
Decisions & consequences
01Keeping the paper shops recognisable after their acquisition
The 2023 acquisition brought six Prinzori Paper Rooms into Zelquari. Our proposed replacement signage would make the enlarged estate look more consistent. In eighty-four selected conversations about the proposal, thirty-seven respondents interpreted the change as the closure of the shop they knew or a complete replacement of its business. The conversations were qualitative evidence for examining the design, not a representative forecast of customer behaviour. They nevertheless exposed a contradiction between the continuity we wanted and the change our first proposal appeared to announce.
The central design team preferred one name across the estate. A common identity would simplify production and make the acquisition more visible as growth for Zelquari. I recommended retaining Prinzori as an endorsed identity for the six stores, with clear explanation of the new ownership and the parts of the specialist-paper proposition that continued. CEO Anita Dorzhemi owned the acquisition and operating commitments. Marketing could communicate those commitments, but it could not invent continuity in range or service simply to make the brand recommendation easier.
The transition had a ₹1.2 crore budget. Actual communication, signage and associated work cost ₹78 lakh, including the coordination of two identities. I did not call the difference a realised saving or assign a sales benefit to retaining the name. We used an initial six-month period from October 2023 to March 2024 to examine the practical explanation with store colleagues. They needed language that made the relationship understandable without implying that Prinzori was unrelated to the company now responsible for it.
In sixty-one later selected conversations, forty-nine respondents recognised the intended continuity and twelve still needed clarification. The groups and circumstances differed, so the result was not a controlled before-and-after effect. It supported further refinement of the explanation, and the endorsed identity remained in use. I learned to ask what a new sign seems to say about the old relationship before treating a visually consistent estate as an uncomplicated benefit. The acquisition had bought a business with recognition worth understanding, not merely six blank spaces for our preferred name.
Funding an art prize without making a purchase the entrance condition
For the 2024 adult art prize, the first commercial proposal required entrants to have bought materials from Zelquari. The sponsor saw an understandable connection between funding a programme and inviting customers to participate. I wanted the retailer's cultural commitment to be clearer than that arrangement allowed. A purchase condition would make access to recognition depend on a commercial relationship, and it could encourage the mistaken idea that a larger basket improved an artist's standing in a programme we presented as a judgement of the work.
We approved ₹64 lakh for a purchase-independent programme, including ₹18 lakh in prizes. The invitation stated the adult eligibility rules, judging criteria and intended treatment of submissions. Appropriate advisers reviewed the arrangements, while the appointed judges retained their artistic assessment. We limited identifying and commercial information at the judging stage where practical, without claiming perfect anonymity: a judge might recognise an artist's style or an earlier work. Relevant conflicts still needed an accountable process rather than an assertion that hiding a name had removed them all.
The programme received 412 entries. Thirty-three did not meet the stated eligibility requirements, leaving 379 for review. Twelve finalists emerged through the judging process. Their voluntarily supplied customer-status information, kept outside the assessment, showed seven customers and five non-customers. I reported that aggregate only. It did not prove that the programme was free of every possible bias, and the status was not used to reinterpret the artistic result. Buying from the retailer remained outside the criteria.
The consequence was that marketing could not promise the programme would reward only current buyers or produce a specified number of new ones. I accepted that limit and kept the expenditure separate from a sales-return claim. The company was visibly funding an art prize, with the reputational benefit and responsibilities that entailed. Next time I would settle the relationship between participation and purchase before the creative name or invitation is developed. A programme becomes harder to explain when the commercial expectation is negotiated after people have already understood it as a cultural commitment.
Refusing to add overlapping campaign credit into a sales total
A 2025 campaign report added three platform-attributed order counts: 8,300, 6,200 and 3,900. The sum was 18,400, while the retailer had recorded 12,000 distinct online orders in the reviewed period. Each platform used its own attribution rules and could claim a relationship with an order also present in another report. The totals were not necessarily errors within those systems. The error was treating their sum as a set of separate transactions and then using it as evidence of incremental demand created by marketing.
The proposal accompanying the report sought another ₹1.6 crore of media spending. Agency colleagues argued that their platform measures were standard and useful for optimisation. I agreed that they could be useful within their stated meaning. I did not agree that adding them supplied a reliable investment justification. We funded ₹29 lakh of measurement review and reporting work with the appropriate data owners, keeping customer information within approved internal processes. The additional media proposal remained unapproved while we examined the basis of the claim.
The review identified 9,600 distinct orders with at least one of the reported attribution records. Another 2,400 of the period's 12,000 orders had none of those records. That reconciliation explained overlap; it did not establish that advertising caused 9,600 purchases or that the other 2,400 were unaffected by marketing. A customer can encounter several messages and still buy for reasons the reports do not isolate. We therefore retained platform views for their defined uses and put the distinct-order account alongside them, with incremental effect left as a separate question requiring suitable evidence.
The immediate decision was to continue within the existing media authority rather than approve the proposed increase on the inflated interpretation. The ₹1.6 crore was a proposal not taken up at that point, not cash saved or profit earned. No later experimental sales lift is asserted here. My lesson was to agree what each campaign number means before it appears in an investment request. The report should help management distinguish the transactions the business recorded from the credit different systems assign to their participation in those transactions.
Publishing the agreed artwork collection while negotiations remained open
The artwork programme launched in February 2026 with sixty proposed pieces and an ₹86 lakh budget. The creative idea was to show a range of artists' work in selected retail and campaign settings. Some material had been shared for discussion, and some required a new arrangement for the use we proposed. I did not want possession of an image or an artist's earlier participation to become an assumed permission for every later placement. The intended use needed to be understood and agreed through the appropriate process.
Creative head Rakesh Talvuri preferred to prepare the full sixty-piece collection together so its design would feel coherent. I supported planning the visual system but limited publication to pieces whose actual arrangements were complete. The artist, commercial colleagues and appropriate professional advisers addressed the relevant scope, payment, credit and other requirements. These were not interchangeable conditions. A prominent credit could not substitute for an unresolved use, and paying a fee needed a clear relationship with what the parties had agreed rather than a vague expectation of unlimited future access.
By the October 2026 review, twenty-two pieces had agreed uses and were published. Twenty-six remained in negotiation. Twelve had been declined and removed from the programme. Those categories accounted for the sixty proposals without treating an unfinished discussion as a completed asset. Spending was ₹68 lakh against the ₹86 lakh budget, including ₹41 lakh in artist fees and ₹27 lakh in production and programme work. The eighteen-lakh balance was unspent budget at that point, not a completed-programme saving or evidence that the remaining pieces could all be obtained within it.
The result was a smaller published collection and an honest account of an unfinished programme. We did not describe the published set as a blanket legal certification of every conceivable use, or the artists' participation as endorsement of every product sold in our shops. The actual arrangements continued to matter. I would bring the intended placements into the first artist conversation next time, before a creative layout makes each proposed piece feel indispensable. The discipline is to let the relationship shape the collection, rather than let the collection's completeness decide the relationship.