Chief Marketing Officer / India
The growth plan changed when the service facts did
- Service and commercial experience
- 28 years
- Career begins July 1998
- Marketing and enquiry colleagues
- 26
- Led through four leads
- Annual function expense
- ₹6.8 crore
- Marketing and enquiry remit; not company revenue
Decisions & consequences
01Writing off a campaign before its promise became a problem
The central phrase in a planned campaign was 'always there'. The creative team intended it to convey dependable support. Operations read it differently: a person could reasonably infer continuous availability or help in an emergency. Selqavi provides scheduled non-clinical services, so that inference would go beyond the work we offered. I asked the team to examine the likely expectation rather than defend only the meaning we had intended.
The campaign team wanted to retain the phrase and add a qualification because ₹31 lakh of preparation had already been spent. I chose withdrawal and a write-off instead. The replacement work stated the scheduled nature of the service and its boundaries more directly. That decision gave up sunk creative and production expenditure and required another round of work. I did not treat the cost as evidence that the original wording should survive.
The outcome was a campaign stopped before release and a clearer basis for the replacement. We did not claim to have prevented a specific incident or to have established that every future customer would understand every term. The review addressed a foreseeable mismatch between the central promise and our actual availability. Legal or regulatory questions still belonged with the appropriate advisers; marketing's responsibility was to make the offer understandable and consistent with delivery.
The lesson was that a reassurance can become a service commitment in the reader's mind. A qualification may not undo the impression created by the main phrase. I would ask directors to consider who would have to explain that gap when a person sought help outside the scheduled arrangement. Writing off preparation was uncomfortable, but it was a bounded commercial consequence we could own. Leaving the ambiguity would have transferred the explanation to staff and customers at a less suitable moment.
Reducing the launch map to seven staffed clusters
Our proposed locality campaign covered eleven clusters. Operations cleared seven for the stated service offer and said the other four did not yet have the staffing readiness required to accept work. The marketing plan had treated the full map as a single launch. I asked the team to separate commercial attractiveness from the operating authority to make the offer in each location.
The growth team wanted to run the wider campaign and build a waiting list while staffing caught up. Operations head Farid Tervoshi argued that the proposed advertising did not describe a waiting-list service and would create expectations we could not yet meet. I limited the campaign to the seven cleared clusters, allocating ₹86 lakh there. The revised plan deferred a modelled ₹1.9 crore of first-year revenue associated with the other four clusters. That figure was a forecast assumption, not money already booked or a measured loss.
The result was a launch whose promoted geography matched the readiness decision. The four deferred clusters remained outside that campaign until operations could reconsider them. We did not claim that limiting the map proved perfect delivery in the seven active areas. Staffing readiness was a condition for launch, not a universal service-quality assurance. Marketing still had to explain the offer accurately and monitor the enquiries it generated.
I learned to make the readiness decision visible before the campaign became expensive to change. A map is persuasive because it makes reach look tangible, but a coloured area does not create a team able to serve it. Directors should understand the tradeoff between prospective growth and the capacity supporting the promise. In this case we accepted a smaller immediate commercial plan so that an enquiry could lead to the service being advertised, rather than to a conversation about why the offer was not yet available.
Nineteen recipient conversations changed the sales account
We examined eighty-three onboarding conversations in which a home-support arrangement was being discussed. In nineteen, the intended recipient wanted a change or declined the proposed service. Some enquiries had begun with a relative who was willing to pay and expected the arrangement to proceed. That willingness was commercially relevant, but it did not settle what the person receiving support wanted.
The enquiry team was concerned that adding a recipient conversation before finalising arrangements would make the conversion process slower and complicate its performance measure. I supported the service team's view that the agreement needed to reflect the recipient's wishes, with appropriate advice where representation or consent required it. We retained the different outcomes in the commercial account rather than classifying every change as a lost sale to be recovered.
Fifteen arrangements were reconfigured after those conversations and four did not begin. The result concerned this reviewed group. It did not establish a universal consent process for every household or prove a broader wellbeing outcome. It showed that a suitable commercial process can produce a changed offer or a decision not to start. Those outcomes must remain available if the conversation is to mean anything.
The case sharpened my understanding of who the customer is in a family-funded service. There may be more than one legitimate perspective, and the company must understand the role each person plays. A payer's desire for reassurance cannot be treated as a complete specification of another person's daily routine. I would ask a board whether its commercial measures leave room for that distinction. If the only recognised success is a fast conversion, staff may feel pressure to bypass the very conversation that makes the arrangement appropriate. Our decision accepted slower handling and four non-starts in order to preserve a meaningful choice.
Leaving three channels that looked better before handling costs
A review of twelve referral channels examined contribution after the work required to handle and assess the enquiries. Three did not meet our agreed fully loaded contribution requirement. Those channels had generated ₹62 lakh of bookings during the preceding twelve months, so closing them would remove visible volume from the commercial report. The issue was whether that volume justified the resources it consumed.
Channel managers wanted to retain all three while negotiating lower referral charges. Finance and enquiry leaders showed that the cost problem also included handling time and unsuitable requests, which a lower headline charge would not necessarily resolve. I agreed to exit the three channels and redeploy ₹27 lakh of planned spending to two approved routes. The decision accepted the loss of the previous channels' booking stream rather than preserve it for the appearance of reach.
The measured historical figure was ₹62 lakh of bookings, not a forecast profit improvement from the exit. The redeployment was a spending decision whose later performance still needed review. We did not claim that every enquiry from the closed channels was unsuitable or that the remaining routes were permanently efficient. The review established a basis for a current decision using agreed costs and the observed work around the bookings.
I learned to examine where a marketing report ends its cost account. If it stops at the referral fee, it can make a channel look attractive while another team absorbs the effort of explaining, assessing and declining requests. A board needs a view of the business economics rather than a contest between departmental measures. I would ask management to state the contribution definition, the period and the uncertainty in future demand. Leaving a familiar channel can be a sensible choice even when it reduces the volume that marketing would otherwise be pleased to report.