Positioning, category intelligence, pricing and pack, channel strategy and the communication that carries it. For founders, for businesses moving from B2B to B2C, and for agencies who need a brand partner in the room. Five pieces of work, usually bought together.
Where the brand stands, who it is genuinely for, and the one thing it can own. Two or three routes argued properly, with a recommendation we will defend.
The category audited rather than described. Pricing ladders, pack architecture, claims, assortment and what the last two years of launches got right and wrong.
Price points, pack sizes and margin structure across every channel you sell in, built so the ladder still works when a platform changes its take rate.
Which channel to enter and in what order, a thirty sixty ninety plan with a review point that decides whether the work continues, and the brief the agency works to.
Brand communication, social content and AI generated film, produced to a standard and approved against the brand rather than against taste.
A stage can be light, but it is not skipped. You will know at every point what has been decided and what it rests on.
Where the brand actually stands, which beliefs the plan rests on, and the two or three things genuinely blocking growth, ranked.
Positioning routes, the pricing and pack ladder, and the business case. The sales ambition, what it costs to get there, what it returns.
Channels in sequence, the roadmap with its review point, and the creative brief. Written for the people who have to execute it.
A short list of measures you will actually track, what happens when something breaks, and a decision memo for every fork.
Skincare, personal care, consumer health, and foods and edible oils. Categories we have carried a number in, rather than read about.
Usually one hero SKU, a pricing decision that will be expensive to reverse, and no one internally who has launched before.
A manufacturing or trade business with real product strength and no brand. The category map comes before anything else.
Brought into the pitch or the mandate as the strategic half, so the agency keeps the execution and the client gets the thinking.
If you can answer all five, you probably do not need us. If two of them stop you, that is usually where the work is.
Brand Strata is led by Pratik Kapadia. For twelve years he built brands inside India's largest personal care and FMCG companies — HUL, Reckitt, Cipla, Reliance and Emami, most recently running the BoroPlus portfolio as Group Brand Manager. He carried the number, defended the plan to a sales team, and watched launches succeed and fail for reasons no case study prepares you for.
We are built to do that work for businesses that cannot hire it full time. Not a deck and a handover, but the thinking and enough of the execution to see whether the thinking was right. MMS in Marketing from the University of Mumbai, and a Google AI Professional Certificate, which is why AI film and content sit inside the offer rather than beside it.
The failure is almost never the proposition. It is the pack, the ladder, the listing or the conversation with the trade that nobody had.
Prices, packs and assortment, pulled from the shelf and the app with a date against them. Everything else is someone's recollection.
A plan a sales team cannot be briefed on is not a plan. We write for the people who have to execute it, not for the room it is presented in.
The reason we stay past the recommendation is that the recommendation is the easy part, and it is worth very little on its own.
Either a defined project with a fixed scope and fee, or a monthly retainer where we work as the brand lead alongside your team. Most relationships start as a project, because it is a smaller decision for both of us.
Projects are scoped and quoted against what the work actually involves, and the number is on a one or two page note in plain language before anything begins. There are no hourly rates and no surprises in an invoice.
A diagnostic is two to three weeks. A full positioning and go to market project is usually six to ten weeks, with a review point built in at the halfway mark that decides whether we continue.
Both, and the balance is set at the start. We own the brand and the thinking. Execution runs either through your team, your agency, or ours, with Brand Strata approving what goes live against the brand.
Yes, and increasingly. We come in as the strategic half of a pitch or a mandate. The agency keeps the client and the execution, the client gets a brand partner who has sat on their side of the table.
Because the work we are trusted with is not ours to publish. In a first conversation we will talk you through live work in detail, without naming anyone.
A twenty minute conversation, no deck, no pitch. If the problem is not one we are good at, we will say so and point you to someone better placed.
