Strategy Commercial Leadership India & MENA

I work out what a category should sell, to whom, and at what price.And I build the AI that gets there faster.

Shray Agarwal — External Consultant, That Fig Tree. Previously AVP & Business Head at a global consumer intelligence consultancy, where I ran a ₹40Cr+ India practice. Twelve years across categories including automotive, FMCG, AlcoBev, telecom, beauty, pet care and financial services.

Read the papers →

Delhi NCR, India

Published category papers

Framework modules, designed and shipped

₹40Cr+

P&L run to 2026

12.7

Years on why people buy

WHAT I BUILD

Three production systems, designed and shipped inside a consultancy practice.

I designed the architecture. The deployments stayed with the firm. The systems run inside my own working environment, so there's no public link. I'll walk anyone through a controlled session on request.

A router over ten framework modules

The router reads a study objective and loads whichever combination of house frameworks that study actually needs — equity, archetype, triggers and barriers, jobs-to-be-done, behavioural science, depth profiling, comms semiotics, CX journey, culture and futures, segmentation.

One-skill-per-framework breaks immediately: a single study routinely spans four at once.
Each module carries documented method, projective kit and output structure, not a paragraph of prompt.

A corpus taxonomy, built before the modules

The firm's decade of qualitative debriefs, classified into framework buckets before a line of module code was written. The archive was theirs. The taxonomy is mine. This is the part that makes the stack credible rather than a wrapper.

Modules run on documented house method, not generic prompting.
Three modules validated against known outputs before the rest were scaled.

A discussion guide generator

Study objective in, fielded-quality guide out. Two to three days of manual work to roughly five minutes.

Packaged and handed over; colleagues ran it without me.

Request a walkthrough

A GenAI product line from idea to commercial revenue in eleven months.

PUBLISHED PAPERS

Four category papers. The argument from each is public; the full paper is on request.

Each written to change a decision, not to be filed.

The Invisible Category

TELECOM / TMT

Telecom has stopped being a category consumers choose and become infrastructure they assume. The paper maps what operators must do when their product becomes invisible — and where the next visible layer of value will be contested.

Opened ₹1.8Cr in advisory mandates.

Read the argument →Request the paper

The Split (2026)

AUTOMOTIVE

Indian commute is dividing into two irreconcilable futures. The paper decodes the fault line on a USD 28.84Bn market and argues that commute and identity are separating into two distinct purchase architectures, and that almost no manufacturer is organised for both.

Opened a ₹96L mandate.

Read the argument →Request the paper

The Floor

ALCOBEV

A commentary on the Indian AlcoBev landscape: why the real battle is not at the premium ceiling but at the cultural floor — the codes that decide what Indians permit themselves to drink, where, and with whom.

Led to a portfolio innovation commission.

Read the argument →Request the paper

The Trust They Already Own (2026)

F&B

Legacy Indian food brands sit on unpriced trust. The paper argues this trust is a market-entry asset most incumbents don't know they hold — and challengers can't buy.

₹2Cr committed in-year.

Read the argument →Request the paper

CATEGORY DECISIONS

The work, the way it was scoped.

The problem

A mass-market carmaker needed its future design language to track aspirations shifting toward global standards faster than its product cycles could follow. Perception of premiumness was moving; the design brief hadn't.

How it was designed

Five-step immersive fieldwork rather than discussion groups
Owners of top variants brought their own cars, parked side by side with a controlled competitor set for direct comparison
Interiors, then exteriors, then a drive — each cue documented physically
In-home audits with the most articulate respondents, hunting out-of-category sources for the same quality and premiumness themes

What it produced

Ten premiumness themes and seven quality themes, rank-ordered, each anchored to specific physical cues on real vehicles rather than to adjectives. Fed directly into design language decisions across four segments.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

The problem

A financial services entrant was launching a digital-first banking proposition into a cash-dominant market. Capital was committed; what wasn't clear was which customer segments and merchant networks would produce durable adoption rather than a promotional surge.

How it was designed

Market sizing across urban, semi-urban, and rural demand pools, anchored in actual transaction behaviour rather than stated intent.
Field mapping of 250,000+ retail touchpoints to identify density corridors and partnership priorities.
Go-to-market architecture linking product features, channel economics, and a phased rollout plan.

What it produced

A segment-led go-to-market replaced a blanket national campaign. The approach became the template for the practice's financial-services entry work.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

The problem

International development organisations were commissioning research, but the insights rarely translated into programme priorities. The work was descriptive; the programmes needed causal clarity.

How it was designed

Ethnographic and qualitative immersions across nutrition, public health, and clean air programmes.
Culture-first framing that connected individual behaviours to household decision-making and community norms.
Programme-level workshops where findings were translated into intervention hypotheses rather than slide decks.

What it produced

Programme priorities were reset using this work. The methodology was later codified into firm-wide SOPs that outlasted the COVID period.

Client anonymised. No confidential material reproduced.

Automotive and mobility · AlcoBev · FMCG · Consumer durables · Telecom · Beauty and personal care · Pet care · Education · Financial services

METHOD

Frameworks I built

Authored, then used on live commercial work.

Culture Pulse Model

Foundational Code × Modern Macro Force = Code Shift.

A way of reading which inherited cultural codes are actually shifting under a given macro pressure, and which only appear to be.

Hi-Lo Subversion

Cultural decoding of premium: how Indian consumers construct high status out of deliberately low-status materials, and where that breaks.

Discernment Pathways

Aspirational price laddering — how a consumer learns to tell tiers apart before they can afford the top one.

Generational Confidence Tiers

A four-tier system for rating any claim made about a generational cohort — defensible, weak inference, not claimable, unfalsifiable — applied claim by claim before anything reaches a brief. It exists because most published generational 'data' is vendor content: the largest Gen Alpha market-size figures trace back to the consultancy that named the category, and the 8-second attention span statistic is fabricated.

Frameworks I practised

House method I ran at depth for a decade. Not mine.

Brand Equity · Anxiety Model · Art of Woo · Archetype · Brand Sensex · What's Good · S1/S2 bridge · Sanctity/Sanction · Felt Risk · Gen-Z Conveyor Belt · spectrum typologies over averages · tension architecture

ABOUT

About.

12.7 years in consumer intelligence, 10.7 of them at one firm, seven promotions in. I left in July 2026, to work on the part of the problem that interests me more: what a category should sell, and how fast the answer can be found. Since August I've been consulting with That Fig Tree.

One P&L, not five offices.

Consolidated five regional offices into a single ₹40Cr+ practice under one operating model. One planning cycle, one pricing logic, one delivery organisation.

Decisions in the room.

Workshop formats replaced the report rather than followed it — the client team committed while the evidence was still live.

Governance as infrastructure.

Built a Power BI decision layer across 15+ KPIs that gave leadership a single source of truth for pipeline, delivery, and margin. The layer stayed with the firm.

Result: leadership decision velocity rose ~21%.

Built the firm's Middle East entity from Delhi, without travelling. It went on to deliver across India and MENA.

Research Hero 2022, Market Research Society UK Future List Nominee 2022, GreenBook.

CONTACT

Get in touch.

If any of this connects with something you're working on, I'd like to hear from you.

shrayagarwal89@gmail.com

linkedin.com/in/shray-agarwal-b0883a24 →

I work out what a category should sell, to whom, and at what price.And I build the AI that gets there faster.

Three production systems, designed and shipped inside a consultancy practice.

A router over ten framework modules

A corpus taxonomy, built before the modules

A discussion guide generator

Four category papers. The argument from each is public; the full paper is on request.

The Invisible Category

The Split (2026)

The Floor

The Trust They Already Own (2026)

The work, the way it was scoped.

What should quality and premiumness physically look like on the next generation of mass-market Indian cars?

How do you build a go-to-market for a banking product aimed at people who don't use banks?

How do you move a development funder from awareness campaigns to measurable behaviour change?

Frameworks I built

Culture Pulse Model

Hi-Lo Subversion

Discernment Pathways

Generational Confidence Tiers

Frameworks I practised

About.

One P&L, not five offices.

Decisions in the room.

Governance as infrastructure.

Get in touch.