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Working with brands and manufacturers across Asia and Europe
Senior marketing capability, without hiring an agency at home-market rates
I work with manufacturers and consumer brands in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and Korea who need a brand, a website, a launch or a marketing leader, and who would rather have one experienced person accountable than a large agency team.
Tell me what you are launching See the services
- Based
- Pune, India
- Working language
- English
- Live hours
- East Asia mornings, Europe afternoons
- Engagements
- Projects from six weeks, retainers from six months
Most companies find me at one of three moments. They are opening a market and have no marketing capability in it. They have outgrown a brand and a website built years ago for a smaller company. Or they have a good product, a sales team, and nothing that explains why anyone should buy it.
In every case the underlying need is the same. Somebody senior who will sit with your engineers or your product team, work out what the offer actually is, and then build the brand, the material and the demand programme around it. Not a deck. The actual assets, and the accountability for whether they work.
I am based in Pune and I work in English with clients across East Asia and Europe. The cost difference against a Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei or Berlin agency is real. It is not the reason to do this. It becomes the reason once the work is genuinely at the level you would have bought at home, which is the only standard worth measuring me against.
What I am hired to build
These are the things that get made. Retainers wrap around them when the work is continuous.
A brand, from positioning to guidelines
What you stand for, the identity that carries it, and a guideline document a distributor in another country can follow. Brand identity and guidelines.
A website that works in a market you do not live in
Structure, content and search built for the buyer there, not translated from the one you have. Website design and build.
A launch
Channel choice, pricing logic, listing content, campaign and the sales material behind it. Market launch programme.
A sales pipeline you can forecast from
Stages that match how your category is actually bought, including sample and design-win. Sales pipeline and CRM.
Demand
Search, technical content, paid media and account programmes, judged on qualified conversations. Lead generation and demand.
Localisation that is not translation
Proof, references and pricing logic rebuilt for the market. Translation only fixes the surface. Localisation and content.
A marketing leader, part time
Owning the plan, the budget, the agencies and the number without a local hire. Fractional CMO.
How working with someone in India actually goes
The practical objection is always distance. It is a smaller problem than it looks, because the overlap is generous in both directions.
Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hanoi and Bangkok get a live morning. Helsinki, Berlin, Paris and London get a live afternoon. Nobody waits a day for an answer.
What matters more than hours is cadence. A written weekly note, a monthly report against the plan, and a scheduled call at a time that suits your office rather than mine. Clients who extend past six months almost always cite the reporting rather than the strategy.
Where I am useful, and where I am not
Useful: manufacturers and industrial brands, consumer electronics, appliances, beauty and skincare, machinery, automotive and mobility, and B2B software with a technical sale. Established companies with a real product and marketing that has never caught up with it.
Less useful: pure performance media buying at scale, mass consumer advertising with a large media budget, and anything where the requirement is production volume rather than judgement. Those need an agency and I will say so on the first call rather than take the project.
Also not useful if you want somebody to execute a plan you have already written. That is a supplier relationship and you will get better value from a production team, including from my own agency Quiamo, which handles landing pages, ad operations, content and SEO at pace.
The cost question, answered directly
Everyone asks it eventually, usually late in the conversation, so it is easier to put it here.
Senior marketing leadership bought from India costs a fraction of the same seniority in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore or Western Europe. The bars above are relative rather than absolute and the shape is accurate.
The honest caveat is that price is a bad reason on its own. Plenty of cheap offshore marketing is genuinely cheap. What you should test is whether the thinking is at the level you would have paid home-market rates for, and the fastest way to test that is to give me a real problem on a first call and see what comes back.
Questions overseas teams ask
Do you speak Japanese, Mandarin, Korean or Vietnamese?
I don't, and it has never been the thing that made an engagement hard. We work in English, which is how your international division almost certainly already operates. Where headquarters wants something in the local language, colleagues on my team handle it. I read and write English, Hindi, Marathi, French, German and Spanish myself.
Can you work with our existing agency at home?
Frequently the best arrangement. They know the home market and the brand; I take the new market or the specific problem. It works when the division of responsibility is written down at the start rather than negotiated in month three.
How do we contract with someone in another country?
A straightforward services agreement with your entity, invoiced in your currency or in USD, with a standard tax residency certificate where your finance team needs one for withholding. It is a routine arrangement and your accounts team will have handled it before.
What if we need someone on the ground here?
Then you need someone on the ground, and I will tell you so. What I can do is design the role, write the brief, support the hire and hand over. Several engagements have ended exactly that way, which is the correct outcome.
How do we know the work will be good?
Give me a real problem on the first call rather than a briefing document. What comes back tells you more than any credentials deck. If it does not, you have lost thirty minutes.
What are you launching, and where?
One paragraph is enough. The product, the market you are entering, and what is currently in the way. I reply within one working day, in English, and the first conversation costs nothing.
Tell me what you are launching See case studies
Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021, India
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686 · English