Ashish Sharma
Marketing Leader|Brand & Go-To-Market Strategist|AI-Enabled Builder
20-year career · Smartphones · Electric Mobility · Gaming · Media & Editorial · Agency & Consulting · AI & Advisory
I build brands people want.
Then make them hard to resist.
From smartphones and electric motorcycles to gaming subscriptions and AI-powered audience intelligence, I work where consumer understanding, brand strategy and go-to-market meet — finding the proposition people care about, building the story around it, and designing the path from attention to action.
20 years across content, brand, product & go-to-market.
Different categories.
Same discipline.
Understand people. Shape the proposition. Build the brand. Take it to market.
“People won't pay for gaming when so much of it is free”
293,000 did.
The Task: Gaming audiences in India had endless free options. We had to build something worth paying for, and then give people reasons to stay.
The Execution: TV-guide-like daily and weekly tournaments, creator access, community scrims, gaming rewards and personalised nudges gave players a reason to come back — and keep paying.
Built marketing from zero · Shaped the product · Priced the proposition · Built the community · Grew paid subscribers
“Nobody buys a motorcycle they've never seen.”
Thousands did. From photographs.
The Task: Electric 2-wheelers in India were still nascent, and largely defined by scooters that had made electric synonymous with slow. We had two barriers to break: make an unknown brand desirable, and make an electric motorcycle feel exciting.
The Execution: We sold the future before we sold the motorcycle. Films imagined an all-electric world; The Revolt Times reported from a cleaner future as if it had already arrived; and #JoinTheRevolt and WTF (What The Fuel) turned moving beyond petrol into a cultural conversation. Then we removed barriers to action: Amazon made pre-booking familiar, subscription lowered the commitment to ownership, and Unlock Your City let demand determine where we launched next.
Built the brand · Shaped the proposition · Launched the category · Built subscription ownership · Took it national
“You can import a smartphone. You can’t import desire.”
We built that here.
The Task: Obi Worldphone came with serious pedigree — founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley and built around design-led smartphones. But pedigree doesn't create preference. We had to turn an unfamiliar global brand into something Indian consumers could understand, experience and want — then build the marketing engine to take it to market.
The Execution: We built marketing from zero and connected the brand story to every point of discovery — positioning, pricing, product storytelling, launch, digital, retail and on-ground experience. Obi reached 75+ Indian cities, while the India GTM became the learning ground for a playbook subsequently adopted across 10+ international markets.
Built marketing · Brought the brand to India · Built retail demand · Exported the playbook
A story is only useful if it travels all the way to advocacy.
SCALE is the operating lens I use to connect brand and commercial behaviour — from the first thing worth noticing to the reasons a customer stays and brings someone else.
Story
Give people something worth noticing, repeating and remembering.
Capture
Turn curiosity into identifiable intent across search, social, retail and community.
Activate
Move intent toward action with the right proposition, journey and trigger.
Loyalty
Use product experience and lifecycle communication to create reasons to stay.
Evangelise
Turn satisfaction into referral, reviews, community and earned growth.
I don't just use AI. I build with it.
I built Orbit to turn fragmented public conversations across Reddit, X, YouTube, search, forums and reviews into structured audience intelligence — clustering behaviours, identifying emotional and functional signals, and measuring brand fit.
Emotional
What does the audience feel — and which tensions, aspirations or anxieties shape choice?
Behavioural
Which triggers, habits and decision styles actually influence purchase?
Visibility
Where do real conversations happen, and where can a brand credibly participate?
Before I learned to sell products, I learned to sell stories.
My career started in editorial — writing about music, cars, culture and men's lifestyle — before moving into brand, product and marketing leadership. It taught me something I've carried across every category since: people rarely remember specifications. They remember what something made them feel.
That lesson has travelled across smartphones, electric mobility, gaming, subscriptions, digital businesses and advisory work — from launching products and entering markets to building marketing functions, shaping pricing and creating the AI tools I now use to understand consumers better.
Twenty years across industries later, the job is still recognisable: understand people, find the story, shape the proposition and build the way it reaches market.
Things I can’t stop thinking about.
Brand. Consumer behaviour. Technology. India. AI. And the commercial decisions hiding behind the marketing numbers — written from an operator's point of view.
The Seven-Minute Indian
One phone, one person, two consumer modes — and a better way to understand how India actually shops online.
Consumer behaviour↗ Featured thinking · 02India Didn't Reject Global Brands. It Just Moved On Without Them.
Why the winning move is not to localise a global playbook for India, but to build from Indian truth and scale outward.
Brand strategy↗ Featured thinking · 03The Future of Market Research Is in the Comment Section
Why customer conversations across communities can reveal the signals conventional research often misses.
Consumer intelligence↗Let’s talk.
For opportunities, collaborations or simply an interesting conversation.