Chief Marketing Officer / India
What we chose to fund and what we declined
- Industrial commercial career
- 29 years
- First appointment July 1997
- Marketing employees
- 26
- Four managers; eight agency personnel counted separately
- Annual marketing authority
- ₹8.4 crore
- Distinct from company revenue and the wider commercial account
Decisions & consequences
01Declining a licence that would have extended recognition beyond responsibility
A prospective partner proposed using Vorzeli's name on unrelated industrial goods. The indicative commercial terms included a ₹2.4 crore annual minimum. Some colleagues saw a way to earn from recognition without committing manufacturing capacity. I understood the attraction: the business had spent years becoming familiar to industrial purchasers, and the proposal seemed to monetise an asset we already possessed.
I asked what a purchaser would think the familiar name meant after the first sale. Would the buyer expect our technical team to explain the product, our commercial staff to resolve a problem or our manufacturing history to support a claim? The proposed goods sat outside our established non-food conveyor-belting account. A contractual allocation could be necessary, but it would not by itself tell us how people would interpret the name in the buying conversation.
We spent ₹32 lakh reviewing the proposal with the relevant commercial and specialist colleagues. My recommendation was to decline, rather than proceed on the assumption that a separate explanation would correct every implied association. CEO Anju Belzhori owned the business decision. I contributed the category and customer-expectation assessment; legal and technical owners retained their advice and authority.
We gave up pursuit of the indicative minimum, not a signed receivable or recognised revenue. The review cost remained spent. The result was a narrower brand boundary and an explicit explanation of why recognition alone was insufficient to justify the extension. It did not establish that every future licence would be unsuitable. I would revisit a proposal whose category, service account and continuing responsibilities genuinely fit the business. The lesson was to examine the expectation attached to the name before treating a royalty estimate as evidence that the brand should travel.
Replacing an individual referral reward before it was launched
A campaign proposal would have paid an individual installer ₹1,500 for each referred lead. It had not been launched. The sponsor argued that installers often knew when a customer needed a conversation and that rewarding introductions would make activity easier to measure. I did not dismiss that practical knowledge. I questioned whether the proposed payment model described the relationship we wanted with the people and institutions involved.
I supported a different route: communication sessions agreed through the relevant organisations and internal review, with a stated educational purpose and approved product information. The funded programme cost ₹38 lakh. Forty-six of sixty planned sessions took place; fourteen were deferred. Technical colleagues retained approval of application content, and participation did not make any attendee a product approver or purchasing representative for us.
The alternative would have created a straightforward referred-lead count. Our chosen route required more coordination and left a visible gap between planned and delivered activity. We accepted that cost rather than launch the individual reward proposal and attempt to repair its meaning later. Appropriate advisers examined the actual arrangements; this case is not a claim that every referral payment is unlawful or that an approved session removes every possible concern.
I reported expenditure, completed sessions and deferrals separately from commercial outcomes. An attendee may understand the range better without recommending a purchase, and a conversation may never become an order. That limitation made the programme account more useful, because management could judge what we actually funded. Next time I would bring institutional participation and the purpose of payment into the first campaign brief. They should shape the design before a simple activity incentive becomes the default assumption around which everyone must negotiate.
Repairing the commercial brief behind sixty-two incomplete leads
Our review covered 184 recorded leads. Sixty-two lacked an identified application owner: someone on the prospective customer's side who could explain the intended use. Marketing could report the contact, but a salesperson or technical colleague still had to find the person able to make the next conversation useful. The campaign list looked more complete than the actual buying context.
I proposed a ₹64 lakh intake and handover programme. Commercial colleagues initially preferred to send every record onward immediately, arguing that additional questions could slow a response. I agreed that speed mattered. I did not agree that the receiving team should repeatedly discover the same missing context without a visible account of which records remained incomplete. We defined the commercial brief separately from technical qualification and kept a route for enquiries still awaiting an application owner.
Forty-six of the sixty-two records acquired the missing context through the programme; sixteen remained pending. Those numbers describe the reviewed group. They are not a conversion percentage, a technical acceptance result or proof that the programme caused new revenue. Faisal Zorqemi's technical team retained suitability decisions, and sales retained the wider commercial process.
The cost included staff attention that could have been directed towards new campaign activity. We chose to improve the usefulness of introductions already recorded, accepting a less impressive-looking open list where information was still absent. The result was a clearer starting point for the next responsible conversation. I learned to ask who can explain the application before treating a named contact as a finished marketing handover. In future programmes I would agree that distinction with the receiving teams before the first campaign launches, so the measure does not reward a form that colleagues must rebuild later.
Changing legacy names without erasing the reference history
Twenty-eight legacy product references had accumulated different patterns of naming and description. Some were familiar to experienced customers but difficult for a newer purchaser to interpret. Marketing proposed a cleaner family structure. Sales colleagues worried that a broad renaming would make older enquiries harder to understand and that customers might infer a product change where only the reference had changed.
We funded ₹42 lakh for the naming programme and its supporting explanation. Eighteen references received new names; ten retained their names with clearer descriptors. The route between old and new references remained visible. Technical colleagues reviewed the descriptions, while suitability, compatibility and availability stayed with their respective authorised teams. A simpler family name could not be allowed to answer those questions by implication.
In a later explanation exercise with forty-eight participants, thirty-nine identified the intended family and nine needed assistance. We did not have a matched earlier exercise, so I did not report a before-and-after improvement or attribute commercial growth to the renaming. The nine people needing help were a reason to continue refining explanation, not an inconvenient minority to omit from the result.
The alternative was to keep all twenty-eight names unchanged and add more guidance around them. We chose a partial revision because some references carried avoidable confusion while others retained useful recognition. That choice cost more coordination than a single clean replacement. It also kept continuity for customers whose records still used the older terms. I would now include the reference-history requirement at the start of a naming brief. A good new name should make the next question easier without making an older customer's question harder to recognise.