Leadership review
Nalini Tezqemvi
Chief Marketing Officer · India
Highlights
42
Marketing employees
Four heads; eighteen agency colleagues counted separately
₹26.8 cr
Marketing authority
Annual remit excludes commissions and professional insurance expenditure
40 years
Communication career
Agency entry July 1986; CMO since January 2020
A letter from Nalini Tezqemvi
A message can be attractive, accurate in one setting and still too broad for the place we intend to use it. I ask what the audience will believe, which evidence supports that belief and what changes when the message travels beyond its original context.
I approved the phrase because it made our progress sound coherent: a paper-free insurer. In 2019, as brand director at Zeqvemti Assurance, I let a promising description of some service journeys become a claim about the whole enterprise. Reviewing thirty-six defined journeys found twenty-one without paper requirements and fifteen that still required paper under the reviewed conditions. The campaign had compressed a varied operating reality into a single attractive identity, and I had endorsed that compression.
Nalini Tezqemvi
Chief Marketing Officer
Strategic priorities
01
02
03
04
Performance
Priority outcome 01
In 2019 I approved a campaign proposal describing Zeqvemti as a paper-free insurer. Several journeys had made useful progress, and the phrase gave that progress a simple public identity. A review with service owners covered thirty-six defined customer journeys. Twenty-one had no paper requirement under the reviewed conditions; fifteen still did. The claim I had endorsed described the whole enterprise as though every relevant experience shared the same state. The creative lead proposed retaining the phrase with a qualification in supporting copy. I did not think a smaller explanation repaired the central promise. We withdrew the broad account and replaced it with statements about the particular journeys their owners could support. Marketing organised the communication; service and professional owners judged the underlying process and any conditions that had to remain visible. We did not ask those owners to remove a requirement merely so that the campaign line could become true. The total response cost ₹38 lakh. Twelve lakh had already been placed and could not be recovered; twenty-six lakh funded withdrawal, rewriting, review and replacement work. I retained both amounts in the account. The original expenditure was a consequence of my approval, not a cost that could disappear because the replacement material was more accurate. The new work also occupied agency and internal capacity that had been planned for other communication tasks. The review did not establish the legal necessity of every paper requirement or a financial loss suffered by customers. It examined whether the public claim matched the defined service journeys. Nor did twenty-one paper-free journeys prove that every person using them would have an identical experience under all circumstances. The scoped statements needed to preserve the relevant conditions and remain subject to their owners' review as the service changed. I learned to ask for the boundary of the evidence before approving the strongest line. A concise promise can be useful without borrowing the breadth of the whole organisation. Next time I would put the intended inference beside the service account during the creative review, when changing the proposition is still less costly than withdrawing a campaign that has already begun to travel.
Priority outcome 02
A 2022 campaign proposal sought to retarget 120,000 browser identifiers associated with service-query pages. The growth team saw an audience already interested in insurance and wanted to use that interest to support a ₹96 lakh sales campaign. The segment count was a count of identifiers, not verified people, policyholders or prospective buyers. More fundamentally, a visit made to understand a service question did not by itself explain why the same signal should become the basis of a later sales approach. I asked the team to separate technical availability from the purpose of the contact. Relevant specialists retained responsibility for the actual handling conditions and permissions. My marketing decision was to decline this proposed use of the service-query segment and choose contextual placements instead. We committed ₹72 lakh to that alternative and left ₹24 lakh of the proposal uncommitted. The uncommitted amount was not reported as a realised saving from a campaign that had already spent it. The media lead expected contextual placement to produce a less precisely addressable audience. That was a genuine commercial cost of the choice, not evidence that the alternative would necessarily perform better. We did not attach an invented conversion or premium result to the decision. The account describes the audience basis we chose and the expenditure authorised, while leaving subsequent performance to the evidence actually collected for the campaign. Declining sales use did not mean automatically deleting every record associated with service work. Those records could have legitimate purposes and handling obligations owned by the appropriate teams. Marketing neither extended those purposes unilaterally nor claimed to settle all data responsibilities by selecting a different media plan. Contextual advertising was not presented as a blanket privacy certification. The lesson was to discuss audience purpose before media efficiency becomes the dominant argument. A signal can be technically usable and commercially tempting while requiring a different conversation about the occasion on which it was supplied. I would want an agency brief to state that distinction from the start, so that the team is rewarded for finding a defensible audience rather than treating every available identifier as a resource already assigned to sales.
Priority outcome 03
In 2023 a study recruited 1,250 online volunteers and reported 54% brand recognition within that sample. Seven hundred and thirty participants came from metropolitan areas and 520 from other connected locations. The proposed campaign headline described the result as recognition across India. The research had not recruited offline audiences, and the volunteering process did not support treating the sample as a complete account of the market. The number was real within the study; the proposed inference was too broad. The research sponsor wanted to preserve the headline because the study had already cost ₹28 lakh. The agency suggested applying weights to the existing responses. I asked the team to retain the useful learning from the actual participants while withdrawing the wider claim. Reweighting observed responses could not by itself supply the views of people the recruitment process had not reached. We needed a research design matched to the question we wanted to answer, not a statistical presentation that made the original sample look more comprehensive than it was. I authorised ₹64 lakh for a separate mixed-mode inquiry, with qualified researchers responsible for its design, recruitment and interpretation. At the December 2023 review, that work was still in progress; this case does not report its later findings. No final recognition result, trust improvement or commercial return was attached to the new allocation. A different method could improve reach while still requiring scrutiny of selection, non-response and measurement. We did not claim that adding another mode automatically made every resulting inference representative. The original ₹28 lakh remained an expense for a narrower study, not wasted money erased from the account. Its participants could still tell us something about their responses to the material. The correction concerned the population to which we were entitled to generalise, and the distinction between recognition and trust. Recognising a name is not the same as trusting an insurer, choosing a policy or receiving a satisfactory claim outcome. I would agree the intended public use of a research finding before commissioning the study next time. That makes the audience definition, recruitment conditions and decision purpose part of the brief while choices remain open. The leadership responsibility was to resist giving a precise percentage an imprecise population, even when the narrower statement was less useful as an advertising headline and the better question required another funded stage of work.
Priority outcome 04
During a 2024 agency transition, we reviewed fifteen sets of creative assets expected to move into the new team's work. Nine had documented permissions covering the intended portable use. Six had incomplete accounts, including questions about the underlying materials and the conditions of their reuse. The outgoing agency had produced the work, but the payment record alone did not tell us everything the incoming team needed to know before adapting it in new formats. The transition lead proposed handing over all fifteen sets and resolving questions if a supplier raised them. That would have preserved the calendar but left the new agency relying on assumptions neither team had adequately examined. I supported a review with procurement and qualified legal colleagues. Marketing supplied the intended uses and production context; advisers retained interpretation of the actual terms. We did not treat an incomplete internal file as proof that the original work had infringed anyone's rights. Four of the six uncertain accounts were resolved for the intended use. Two asset sets were replaced. The response cost ₹52 lakh and extended the transition work over six weeks. The result was nine initially documented sets, four subsequently resolved and two replacements. We retained that composition rather than describe all fifteen as transferred under identical original permissions. Replacement production also needed its own account of the use being authorised. The decision required the team to distinguish possession of files from the conditions attached to them. A source file, photograph, illustration or other element could carry a different scope of permitted use from the campaign as a whole. The public leadership account does not expose confidential terms or supply a legal opinion about a real asset. It shows the practical work needed when a change in agency makes an earlier assumption consequential. I would make portability part of the production brief before the next supplier transition. That does not mean demanding unlimited rights without regard to cost or the creator's terms. It means understanding the future uses the business actually expects and making a conscious agreement about them. Creative continuity becomes more dependable when the next team receives both usable material and a defensible explanation of what it may do with it.
Priority outcome 05
In 2025 we reviewed forty-eight outdoor advertising installations after approved artwork had been placed. Thirty were readable under the observed conditions. Eighteen were difficult to read because glare or installation height changed the experience from the studio proof. The supplier had delivered the booked placements, but delivery alone did not establish that the message could be used by its intended audience in that setting. The artwork's approval and the installation's practical readability were different questions. The media buyer wanted to keep all sites live while discussing credits at the end of the campaign. I recommended correcting the field conditions immediately where feasible and withdrawing placements that still failed the agreed review. Twelve installations were repositioned and six received replacement material. The work cost ₹46 lakh. We coordinated with the appropriate site and production teams rather than ask marketing staff to improvise physical changes outside their responsibility. The field recheck found forty-three readable installations and five that remained unsuitable and were withdrawn. We did not report forty-eight successful placements because all the original bookings had been fulfilled. Nor did the forty-three passes prove that every viewer would understand the insurance message. The review concerned legibility under specified field conditions, not comprehension across a population, factual approval of every claim or measured conversion to sales. The withdrawn sites reduced the campaign's active footprint. Their absence was part of the outcome, not an omission to be hidden inside a total impression estimate. The response also required us to revisit how placement acceptance had been defined. A supplied photograph could show that a poster existed without showing the glare, distance or angle at which an audience encountered it. The next review needed evidence suited to the actual reading task. I would involve the field review earlier in the buying decision next time, while alternative sites and formats were still available. The lesson is that a message leaves the controlled conditions in which it was designed. Leadership must be willing to spend on correction or give up a placement when that change of setting undermines the communication, rather than treat fulfilment of the booking as the only result the marketing account needs to show.
Stakeholder voices
Nalini kept the research percentage attached to the people actually recruited. She did not let our wish for a national headline decide what the study had proved.
She withdrew a phrase she had approved when our journey review showed its scope was too broad, and retained the cost of that correction in her account.
Outlook
I approved a broad identity from a narrower service result. Correcting it required a smaller promise, real rework and a more disciplined relationship between creative language and operating evidence.
Read the essayAn online volunteer study offered useful evidence about its participants. A proposed national recognition claim asked that evidence to represent people the research had not reached.
Read the essayEighteen difficult outdoor installations exposed a gap between approved artwork and the conditions in which people encountered it. A placement count could not answer the reading question.
Read the essayAn invitation
A first outside board contribution after employer consent and qualified appointment review. My CMO responsibilities do not include a statutory directorship, and I own no equity in Zeqvemti. Registration and proficiency assessment were completed in May and September 2026 in this fictional account; eighteen possible annual days remain provisional.
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