Across two decades with global brands, what remains the most consistent truth about human behaviour that still drives effective brand strategy today?
Behaviour is downstream of belief. That’s the one thing that hasn’t changed in over twenty years. People don’t buy products; they buy into a belief about themselves and the world, and the product is just the proof of that belief. Categories keep obsessing over needs, features, price, all the rational stuff, but the real engine sits a layer below all of that. What does the consumer hold to be true. That’s the thing that moves markets.
Media changes, tech changes, the buzzwords change every eighteen months, but the belief layer is constant. It’s also where growth quietly dies. When a brand plateaus, the instinct is to blame the product or the media plan, but nine times out of ten, it’s a belief that hasn’t shifted. That’s exactly why we built BBOS, the Belief and Behaviour Operating System, as our diagnostic lens at WolfzHowl. It forces the conversation back to belief before anyone touches a campaign. Fix the belief, and the behaviour follows on its own.
How has the approach to decoding consumers evolved, from traditional research-led insights to behaviour-led strategy?
I came up in the research-led era. At Diageo, I kick-started the consumer planning and research function in India, and that was very much the classical model: ask people what they want, run the study, write the deck. The trouble is, people are terrible witnesses to their own behaviour. What they claim in a focus group and what they actually do at the shelf almost never match.
So over the years, the craft moved from claimed insight to observed behaviour, and then deeper again, to the belief sitting underneath the behaviour. That’s the real shift. At Wolfzhowl, we have a saying, data is not the destination. We read a brand’s own data and its earned data, then temper it with culture and human psychology before we call it an insight. Data tells you what happened. Culture tells you why it happened. Belief tells you what is going to happen next. Decoding consumers today is much less about surveys and far more about reading behaviour in its cultural context.
Among all campaigns led across categories and regions, what stands out as the most impactful, and what was the thinking and the challenge behind it?
The one I keep coming back to is Jal Jeevan Mission, with Tata Trusts and NITI Aayog. We built a social behaviour change program to deliver safe tap water to rural and tribal communities across ten states, around 250,000 households. People assume a project like that is an infrastructure story. It isn’t. The hard part is belief.
A community that has collected and stored water a certain way for generations does not change just because a tap shows up at the door. The behaviour is held in place by deep beliefs about water, about ownership, about the role of women, about what progress even means in that setting. So, we worked at the village belief level, not the poster level. We ran research, strategy, creative, and content as one connected effort instead of handing it down a relay of silos. The proof point that still means the most to me, six state governments adopted the program in the first phase itself. Behaviour at that scale only moves when belief moves first.
Strategy sits between creativity and business transformation. How is the gap bridged between behavioural insight and measurable business outcomes in real practice?
We don’t treat behavioural insight and business numbers as two separate worlds. Belief is the upstream lever, and the business metric is the downstream proof, and the whole job is connecting the two. A few examples. For Bikaji, we crafted the brand purpose, and it tracked to 13.85 per cent volume CAGR. For ICICI Bank, we ran persona-led performance marketing across their owned database and over 84,000 millennials, a famously resistant group, took fixed deposits off the back of it. For Abbott Thyronorm, we built a creative device, Thyroweight, and the brand grew 51 per cent.
None of those started life in a spreadsheet. Each began by diagnosing the belief that was blocking the behaviour, then engineering the shift, then letting the commercial numbers confirm it. That’s the order that matters. ROI is the result at the end, not the strategy at the start. Get the belief right, and the measurable outcome tends to take care of itself.
Having moved from leading large agency networks to building an independent strategy consultancy, what has changed the most?
I owe the network decade a great deal, and I don’t say that lightly. Leo Burnett Singapore, TBWA, Contract, Diageo, those rooms taught me to think at scale, across markets and categories, alongside some of the sharpest people in the business. None of Wolfzhowl exists without that grounding, so this was never about walking away from agencies. It was about going a layer deeper than an agency structure usually has room for.
What changed most is ownership. At Wolfzhowl, we build our own IP rather than rent someone else’s framework, which is how BBOS and the rest of our tools came to be. We sit directly with the C-suite, marketing, sales, and increasingly HR, and that closeness lets us follow a belief problem all the way to its root instead of stopping at the edge of a scope.
What’s genuinely interesting is how the relationship with the wider industry is shifting. More and more its agencies themselves, not only clients, who come to us for strategy at a close, problem-solving level. The lines have softened, and consulting is becoming a far more personal craft on both sides. That has quietly opened new doors, were being approached to help shape how AI learns to think strategically, and were increasingly asked to train strategists and lend our people to specific engagements. None of that would have made sense from inside a single network. From here, it feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of it.
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