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Articles by Ashoke Agarrwal
Why Should Quality Be a Premium?
Abstract: India’s consumer companies are enthusiastically pursuing premiumisation, but who is improving the everyday purchases of consumers unable to pay more? This column argues that better quality should reach the mass market through improved performance, durability, repairability and value for every rupee spent.
When Your Customer Sends an Agent
Ashoke Agarrwal Abstract: As consumers delegate purchasing decisions to AI agents, marketing faces a fundamental shift. Agent-mediated commerce, or A2C, promises more personalised selection, but not necessarily bespoke production. Brands must persuade two audiences: people who define preferences and agents that evaluate evidence. Accurate specifications, verifiable claims and dependable service will become increasingly important, alongside emotional loyalty.
Gen Z Is an Age Bracket. India Is the Brief
Ashoke Agarrwal Abstract: India’s growing interest in Gen Z risks confusing a vast age cohort with a coherent political constituency. Drawing on marketing examples from the US and India, this column examines what generational labels reveal-and what they conceal. Shared birth years and digital habits coexist with profound differences in class, education, location, gender and life stage.
From Bazaar Instinct to Machine Intimacy: Consumer Psychographics in the Age of AI
Ashoke Agarrwal Abstract: Consumer psychographics seeks to explain why people with similar demographic profiles desire different products, brands and experiences. From the intuitive assessments of bazaar shopkeepers to post-war motivation research and VALS segmentation, marketers have long used attitudes, values and lifestyles to shape strategy. Digital platforms amassed unprecedented behavioural knowledge, yet performance marketing often reduced insight to clicks and conversions.
Strategy & Creativity: The Art & Science of Growth
Ashoke Agarrwal Abstract: Growth rarely emerges from strategy or creativity alone. It takes shape through a continuing conversation between discipline and imagination, analysis and intuition, continuity and change. Drawing on experiences in advertising, fitness, writing and entrepreneurship, this essay argues that strategy gives aspirations structure while creativity keeps them responsive to reality.
After the Agency: Is COMS the Future of Marketing Services?
Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence steadily hollows out the traditional economics of advertising, research and consulting, a new kind of organisation could emerge-one that does not merely advise or execute, but assumes responsibility for marketing outcomes. Ashoke Agarrwal The traditional marketing-services business is headed for progressively slimmer pickings.
Marketing Myopia & Media Research
Abstract: Theodore Levitt warned marketers against defining their businesses too narrowly. Six decades later, a new form of Marketing Myopia has emerged-not in products or brands, but in media research. As India’s traditional audience measurement systems face uncertainty and digital platforms increasingly measure themselves, marketers risk outsourcing their most strategic asset: consumer understanding.
The FCB Grid Revisited: Marketing’s Enduring Compass in the Age of AI
Abstract: The emergence of artificial intelligence has prompted marketers to question whether established theories and frameworks remain relevant. This essay argues that they do. Revisiting the classic FCB Grid developed by Richard Vaughn in the early 1980s, it suggests that while technologies evolve rapidly, the psychological motivations that underpin consumption remain remarkably stable.
Generational Segmentation, Gen Z & the Next Great Marketing Challenge
Ashoke Agarrwal Abstract: As India’s Gen Z cohort approaches full voting age, political strategists are increasingly confronting a challenge long familiar to marketers: how to understand and engage a vast but highly heterogeneous audience. This article traces the evolution of generational segmentation from its origins in marketing theory to its growing relevance in political communication.
The Doping of the Muse
Every age invents its own shortcuts to transcendence. The athlete swallows a pill. The poet drinks absinthe. The guitarist lights a joint. The coder opens ChatGPT. And society, curiously, reacts very differently to each. In sport, the matter appears settled. Performance-enhancing drugs are cheating. The reason is obvious enough. Athletics and sport are fundamentally comparative activities. One human being or team is measured directly against another. A hundredth of a second matters.
The Meme, The Celebrity & Brandcasting
In the age of social media, the central challenge of marketing has shifted from recall to replication. Memes have become the dominant cultural currency of the digital era, while celebrities increasingly function as continuous generators of shareable cultural moments. But where do brands fit into this ecosystem? Can brands themselves become celebrities? And does a large follower base necessarily translate into true influence or virality?
The Social Contract for Artificial Intelligence
Abstract As artificial intelligence evolves from tool to actor, the question of governance becomes urgent. Current approaches-regulation, alignment, and ethical oversight-treat AI as an extension of human intent. But what if AI is better understood as an emerging form of artificial life, capable of autonomous economic and social action? This article proposes a radical yet pragmatic shift: treating advanced AI agents as “economic citizens” with rights, responsibilities, and liabilities.
Market Modelling in a Siloed World (v2.0)
Ashoke Agarrwal Before the era of Big-Box retail and e-commerce, brands operated with a reasonable degree of epistemic comfort. Sampling-based retail audits, though imperfect, offered a shared and broadly accepted view of category size and market share. In parallel, the era of mass media ensured that advertising itself was a visible commons. Every brand could see what every other brand was saying. Share of voice was measurable, comparable, and strategically actionable.
Net-Zero and The Diffusion of Technology
Climate change, the most pressing issue of our time, is manifesting unprecedentedly. The erratic weather patterns, marked by prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and uncontrolled forest fires, underscore the need to achieve net zero emissions swiftly and subsequently reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Is Marketing coming Full Circle?
AI-generated image Time was when marketing was confined to the bazaar. Goods and services were sold in one-to-one transactions between a buyer and a seller. More often than not, the buyer and the seller had a relationship, if not of trust, then at least of familiarity. Then, the eras of mass manufacturing and mass media dawned. After World War II, the industrial age shifted into high gear, leading to a proliferation of products and services.
In the Age of AI will Media & Advertising Divorce?
Image rendered by ChatGPT given the column theme A few decades ago, I was helping an advertising honcho craft an acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award. High on the list of reasons why advertising is a social good is that it enables citizens to access information and entertainment by providing media at a reasonable or no cost.
Market Research in the Age of AI
When one plots the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing, one arrives at a singularity where all of marketing is the AI avatar of a brand in direct conversation and interaction with the AI avatar of the consumer. I have called the AI avatar of consumer – Concierge Intelligence in many of my columns here, including my first MxMIndia column back in Jan 2022 –“The Coming Post-Digital Age”. However, plotting and thinking about the intermediate points would be helpful.
Psychographic Segmentation Framework - The R&D Effort Indian Marketing Needs
In my over four decades in the business, I have found that the critical psychographics that drive advertising are that of the client and the creative team. For example, if both the client and the creative honchos are introverts or extroverts, it leads to a happy meeting of minds, and if there is a mismatch, there is trouble ahead.
Ashoke Agarrwal: Mirror! Mirror! On the Wall! Which Ad is the Best of All!?
At the peak of the mass media advertising era, a fundamental rule of creative strategy was to look at stimulus and desired response as two separate entities.
The Morphing of Social Media & the Putative Rise of Conversation Marketing
At the dawn of the internet era and, a bit later, of the social media era, many sociologists believed they would lead to a more informed and enlightened world. The events at Tahrir Square, the subsequent Arab Spring, and later the Maidan revolt in Kyiv seemed, for a period, to support this contention. Marketing gurus posited the dawning of the age of interactive and one-to-one marketing, much like the bazaar of yore but on a global, post-modern scale. But then the medium took over the message.
The Social Consciousness of Advertising Agencies
Many think of advertising people as hustlers. A few voice their opinions with wit; for example, the comedian Steven Wright said, “I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second. ” Those of us in advertising know that the average advertising man is only as unscrupulous as the average human being. There are many reasons for the societal image of advertising people.
Election Campaigns and the Idea of India - An Account Planner’s Perspective
By Ashoke Agarrwal The election season is upon us. Soon, the taxpayer-funded DAVP-type campaigns touting governmental achievements will stop, forced by election regulations. And political parties will need to dig into their coffers and launch advertising campaigns. Over the decades, I have been part of the agency teams pitching for such campaigns.
The Future of Ad Agencies is in AdTech
By Ashoke Agarrwal In the early naughts, a friend left the ad agency world for academia, calling the ad world “a conspiracy of mediocrity.” I thought he was egregiously wrong and, in my mind, started comparing him to Ignatius J. Reilly, the lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s brilliant book, “A Confederacy of Dunces”. I continued to spend decades in advertising and lost touch with my friend.
Brand Lift, Consumer Research & Digital Marketing
By Ashoke Agarrwal Does John Wanamaker’s lament, “Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” hold in the digital marketing era? First, the question to ask is whether Wanamaker knew what waste meant. Did Wanamaker measure the efficacy of his advertising spending over a given period -weekly, quarterly or yearly- in terms of sales in the immediately subsequent period?
Marketing Myopia in the Digital Age
By Ashoke Agarrwal In the 1960s, the legendary Theodore Levitt penned a seminal Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that gave birth to the term ‘Marketing Myopia’. Levitt warned against the tunnel vision that plagued companies, making them obsess over immediate sales while missing the bigger picture of societal, consumer and technological change.
The Emerging Art & Science of D2C Marketing
By Ashoke Agarrwal With India’s growing base of online shoppers (185 million in 2021), the market for D2C brands is booming. D2C brands are digital-first brands that use their online platform to sell directly to consumers without the traditional network of wholesalers, distributors and retailers. According to Statista, India currently has over 600 D2C brands with a total market size of USD 66 billion.
Onward Ahoy! India’s rising potential in the global B2C arena
By Ashoke Agarrwal India is a’rollin! Indian government projections see Indian GDP hitting $32 trillion by 2047. Goldman Sachs predicts India will be the second-largest economy by 2075. In the long run, we might all be dead, but our great-great-grandchildren will be rich. The predictions are just that – predictions. There are many socio-political, infrastructural, and geo-political challenges that India will need to meet before it realises its full potential.
The Conundrum of Access & Choice
By Ashoke Agarrwal Sociologists and economists perceive the social and economic raison d’etre of advertising and marketing as offering more access to goods and services and information about them to economies and societies. In contrast, most marketers and practitioners of advertising would believe that their discipline is about driving choice. Are access and choice two sides of the same coin? Semantically, more access is akin to more choice.
The Third Eye Flutters
By Ashoke Agarrwal The Screen Age dawned with the spread of TV. Today, it has reached its apex with the ubiquity of the smartphone. There are now indications that over the next decade, a new age will dawn that lessens humankind’s obsession with the screen. I have always considered augmented reality more potent than virtual reality and could not fathom Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with the Metaverse.
Apple, Musk and AI
By Ashoke Agarrwal I coined Concierge Intelligence (CI) as a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) owned by and dedicated to an individual and fully protective of his privacy. CI would aid the individual in understanding herself better and leading to better life outcomes in health, education, career and relationships – in general, as a putative ad copy would say: ‘Be A Better You’.
What Ails English New Channels in India? - A Marketing Perspective
By Ashoke Agarrwal I am not a media critic. MxMIndia has a trenchant one in Ranjona Banerji, whose twice-weekly column makes for exciting reading whether or not you agree with her. However, as a brand and marketing strategist, it is clear that English News Channels in India is a declining product category. Both in terms of share of attention and advertising. What gives?
ML, LLM, Graphs & Market Modelling
By Ashoke Agarrwal Nine months after the launch of ChatGPT, the hype has died down and the real work of building upon the burgeoning availability of Large Language Models (LLMs), of which ChatGPt is but one example, has begun. The interest of businesses in the concept of Big Data rose exponentially in 2012. Many expected a paradigm shift in consumer marketing based on nifty analytical systems driven by Big Data.
The Role of Logos, Ethos and Pathos in Political Communication
By Ashoke Agarrwal In the Western canon, the three elements of argumentative persuasion are Logos, Ethos and Pathos. It is a commentary on our Western-designed education system that, while I am peripherally aware of this Aristotlean concept, I am painfully unaware of its equivalent, distant or near, in the Indian canon. For this column, I did search the internet fruitlessly to fill the gap. Perhaps we need to do a better job of bringing Indian philosophical heritage to the Internet Age.
Insight Mining: The Creative Approach to Consumer Research
By Ashoke Agarrwal As one of Indian advertising’s first wave of account planners, I positioned the discipline as representing “the creative dimension of strategy and the strategic dimension of creative”. Before joining the ranks of account planners, I was a founder of a research agency – Francis Kanoi – a deeply modelling-oriented quantitative agency.
The Economic Premise & Cultural Peril of AI
By Ashoke Agarrwal Artificial Intelligence (AI0 is fast becoming the general-purpose technology that will determine humankind’s future. People whose business is to peek into the future approach it from two very different angles. Some hard-headed economist types see AI mainly as a disruptor of the world of business and economies. Others who study broader and deeper societal trends prognosticate the possible long-term effects of AI on human civilisation.
Will 2025 be the year of the arrival of Concierge Intelligence?
By Ashoke Agarrwal Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, many have heralded (and some) feared the arrival of the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The rush to find good use cases for Generative AI is spawning a new class of start-ups and keeping Angels and VCs busy. I have always thought the Information Age was a way-stop on the road to the Age of AI. I have also surmised that the Age of AI will amplify the gains and ills of the Information Age.
Ashoke Agarrwal: Building AI India
By Ashoke Agarrwal One of India’s achievements of the past two decades has been the ongoing building of Digital India. The world acknowledges the excellence of the public digital infrastructure that India has built through Aadhar and UPI. Can India now take a leadership position in the nascent but fast-developing age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? It is currently fashionable to think of AI mainly in terms of Generative AI- AI that puts together words and images in practical or amusing ways.
The Physics & Metaphysics of Brands
By Ashoke Agarrwal Recently the debate among advertising circles has been about which medium builds brands better. Some say mass media builds brands, while digital is just about click-bait and conversion. Others vehemently disagree. The debate amuses me and reminds me of John Wanamaker’s famous quote:” ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. ‘ Brands are complex entities that go well beyond the machinations of advertising and even marketing.
Ashoke Agarrwal: 2 key demographic shifts that will impact Marketing in India
By Ashoke Agarrwal The dropping of the 2021 census and the suspension of the Indian Readership Survey (IRS – the benchmark study for demographic data beyond age and gender) after 2019 has made it difficult for marketers to gauge shifts in socioeconomic class across regions and pop strata.
7 Reasons Why AIs Should Fear Humans!
By Ashoke Agarrwal I find it ridiculous that a school of learned and credentialed humans fear that if humans are not careful someday, not in the distant future, AIs will take over the world and destroy human civilisation.
The Creative School that Saved Advertising
By Ashoke Agarrwal There was a phase in the late fifties when advertising in the US was in crisis. After decades of high growth, business and people, in general, had begun to sour on the advertising industry, seeing them as a bunch of mediocrities pushing product features – “reasons why to buy” in a ho-hum fashion. As a result, marketers began wondering whether they were better off spending their advertising budgets on other marketing mix elements.
Happy Birthday, ONDC! Aren’t you on a roll?!
By Ashoke Agarrwal India is proud of the digital stack it has created with Aadhar and UPI, which is bringing more of India’s informal economy into the formal financial channels. In addition, the digital stack allowed India to launch a very successful formally certified Covid vaccination programme at all levels of the socio-economic strategy—the digital stack in the public health and e-government sectors is in the works.
Advertising in the Gameverse: The Need for a New Paradigm
By Ashoke Agarrwal While the Metaverse is just a gleam (fading?) in Zuckerberg’s eyes and Large Language Models is the latest hot tech trend, the Gameverse has, over the past decades, changed, almost unnoticed, the media world. The numbers are impressive enough. The forecast is that consumers will spend USD 185 billion globally on video games – five times more than they will spend on cinema and 70% more than what they will spend on TV streaming services like Netflix.
What’s common to advertising & cricket
By Ashoke Agarrwal I am a student of both cricket and advertising. The cricketing season in India starts in the post-monsoon months and nears its end in the dog days of April with the IPL. As the different hues of cricket play out this year, the parallels between cricket and advertising strike me. Cricket is the only sport with three widely played versions – Tests, One-dayers (ODIs) and the T20s.
Full Circle to Full-Service?
By Ashoke Agarrwal Time was when advertising agencies were both right-brained and left-brained. One would walk through an agency office and encounter both the joie de vivre of the creative impulse and the commercial nous of the media buyer. And then, about two decades ago, agencies got lobotomised. Now we have creative agencies who primarily work on a retainer and media agencies who earn their keep the old-fashioned way – through media commissions.
Ashoke Agarrwal: The Diffusion of AI: What do the marketing models predict?
By Ashoke Agarrwal Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to be the next general purpose technology that changes human society and the economy. Indeed, as big as electricity. Some, like Satya Nadella, believe that AI will create a paradigm shift at the civilisational level, like pre-historic humans learning to control fire. Beyond the hype, over the past few years, AI has emerged as a reality in big business, government, and the military.
Data Barons: Will tech hoist them on their own petard?
By Ashoke Agarrwal The past three decades have seen the rise and rise of the Data Barons, chief among them Alphabet and Meta. Like the Robber Barons of old, these giants have infringed on private and public rights and sought to profit even if it meant causing harm to individuals and society at large. When Google and Facebook started, their implicit pact with consumers was to provide them with quality free services. However, what was in it for them could have been more explicit in the compact.
Generational Marketing & the Post-Post-Modern World
By Ashoke Agarrwal The concept of generations as a social class began as most social ideas do in literature. Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “The Lost Generation” as a signifier of the age cohort that, in early adulthood, experienced World War I and their “directionless, disoriented, wandering” spirit after the war. In 1928, Karl Mannheim posited a theory of generations in his German essay – “Das Problem der Generationen”, translated into English only in 1952.
Hypertext Marketing: A Semiotics Viewpoint
By Ashoke Agarrwal The interactive ability of digital and social media has given rise to the concept of Hypertext Marketing. Hypertext Marketing differs from traditional integrated marketing strategy in that it not only integrates a single brand message across multiple media but also draws upon interactive platforms that modify and generate new brand messages. The integrated brand strategy and management school gathered momentum in the late seventies and early eighties of the twentieth century.
The way forward…
By Ashoke Agarrwal As the Earth completes another orbit around the Sun, it seems appropriate to take stock. Is the business of advertising changing? Will it be undergone a paradigm shift over the next decade? In the arena of marketing, brands and advertising, the alchemy of the excellent is unchanging. The magic of synergy creates great brands. Consider Apple and Nike.
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