Independent marketing consultant

I build brands that earn their place on the shelf, and in the feed.

Brand and packaging craft on one side. Meta, Google and quick-commerce performance on the other. One person holding both, so the ads never outrun the idea and the idea never stays a deck.

Start a project See the services

A one-person practice, not an agency. Sixteen disciplines under one name, working with founder-led brands across India and North America.

Shibiya Arora

Shibiya Arora

Independent marketing consultant

16 years across advertising, digital media, brand strategy and growth — agency side and client side, in categories from clean-food FMCG to beauty retail and financial services.

Most at home in the phase where nothing exists yet.

0 → 1 SPECIALIST

Brand architecturePackagingCampaignsCreativeMeta & GoogleQuick commerceInfluencerSEO & AI answersD2C & CRMPRAnalyticsGo-to-market Brand architecturePackagingCampaignsCreativeMeta & GoogleQuick commerceInfluencerSEO & AI answersD2C & CRMPRAnalyticsGo-to-market

What's inside

Sixteen services. One practice. No agency layers.
Brand strategy & architecturePositioning, claims, portfolio
Packaging & label designShelf, thumbnail, compliance
Communication & campaignsPlatforms, films, scripts
Content & creative productionIn-house engines, direction
Social media & communityChannels, formats, cadence
Performance marketingMeta, Google, 360°
Quick commerce & marketplaceBlinkit, Zepto, Instamart, Amazon
Trade & retail marketingGT, MT, activations, VM
D2C, CRM & retentionSite, loyalty, lifecycle
Influencer & creatorTiering, whitelisting, UGC
SEO & discoverySearch, marketplace, AI answers
PR & reputationStory bank, media, share of voice
Go-to-market & NPDLaunch playbooks, pricing
Insights & analyticsResearch, dashboards, attribution
AI workflows & opsCreative, ad ops, reporting
Team & agency leadershipHiring, structure, governance

Contains no account managers and no juniors learning on your budget. The person you meet writes the hooks, checks the pack proofs and reads the account data.

Most brands don't have a marketing problem. They have a sequence problem.

They buy ads before the proposition is sharp. They redesign the pack before they know what the shelf is arguing about. They hire a performance agency to fix what is really a creative brief, then a brand agency to fix what is really a landing page.

Every one of those is expensive, and none of them is the actual bottleneck.

My job is to find which problem you have, fix it in the right order, and leave behind a marketing engine your team can run without me.

Brand without performance is decoration. Performance without brand is rent.

How I solve it

The same three movements every time, whether the brand is six months old or six years in. What changes is where we start.

01

Diagnose · Weeks 1–3

Find the real constraint before spending against the wrong one

The answer usually sits in the gap between brand, pack, creative and account — a proposition that never made it onto the label, or media buying reach for a message that doesn't land.

  • Category and shelf audit — what nobody has claimed yet
  • Proposition and claim review against what the product can defend
  • Full account teardown: structure, creative, audiences, wasted spend
  • CAC, contribution, repeat rate and payback maths
02

Build · Months 1–3

Fix the foundation, then build the machine that runs on it

Positioning becomes a pack. The pack becomes a creative system. The system becomes a testing calendar. Each layer is built so the next one moves faster.

  • Brand architecture, claims and visual rules that hold across a portfolio
  • Packaging built for the shelf and the quick-commerce thumbnail at once
  • Campaign platform, hook banks, B-roll systems, content calendar
  • Account architecture, catalogue feeds, pixel and CAPI hygiene
03

Evolve · Ongoing

Scale what works, kill what doesn't, hand over the controls

Growth stops being about clever ideas and becomes cadence: how many variants you ship a month, how fast you read a result, how honestly you report it.

  • Creative volume with discipline — one variable moves at a time
  • Weekly dashboards on blended CAC and MER, not siloed ROAS
  • Budget reallocated across brand and performance, defensibly
  • Team, hiring, agency management and the operating rhythm

The services

Take one piece or take the whole engine. Most founders start with one and discover they needed two.

Brand strategy & architecture

What you stand for, written so it holds across a growing portfolio.

PositioningRTBsNamingGuidelinesGovernance

Packaging & label design

Works at 30 cm on a shelf and at 300 px in a Zepto tile.

Front-of-packVariant codingClaimsNI panelsPPA

Communication & campaigns

Big ideas that still work as a six-second bumper.

PlatformsBrand filmsStoryboardsATL

Content & creative production

In-house engines that cut agency cost without cutting standards.

Hook banksB-rollArt directionShoots

Social media & community

Platform-native, not one asset resized five ways.

InstagramYouTubeWhatsAppLinkedIn

Performance marketing

Full-funnel Meta and Google, built to be read and scaled.

Advantage+PMaxCPASCAPILift tests

Quick commerce & marketplace

Spend gated to live availability, not vanity visibility.

BlinkitZeptoInstamartAmazonShare of search

Trade & retail marketing

What happens in the store, where the decision is actually made.

GT & MTActivationsVisual merchSampling

D2C, CRM & retention

So acquisition isn't carrying the whole business alone.

Site & PDPLoyaltyLifecycleRFM cohorts

Influencer & creator

A media channel with a rate card and a payback, not a favour.

TieringWhitelistingUGC pipelinesASCI

SEO & discovery

Being findable when nobody is being sold to — including inside AI answers.

TechnicalClustersShare of searchAI Overviews

PR & reputation

Built as a function with a story bank, not a press-release habit.

Tier-I mediaShare of voiceFounder profile

Go-to-market & NPD

Launches run on a playbook instead of adrenaline.

Launch plansPricingChannel mixCategory entry

Insights & analytics

Dashboards that answer the question before the meeting.

GA4LookerBlended CACAttribution

AI workflows & ops

Used where it compounds, ignored where it's theatre.

Creative pipelinesAgentic ad opsAuto-reporting

Compliance & claims

Selling hard inside the rules, in categories that have plenty.

FSSAIASCIRBI & IRDAILabel sign-off

Performance marketing,
all 360 degrees of it

The service most people mean when they say "we need help with ads". Here is the whole surface — platform architecture, the creative that feeds it, and the measurement that tells you the truth about both.

360° ALWAYS ON 1 Audience 2 Creative 3 Structure 4 Signal 5 Read

Audience, creative, structure, signal, read — then round again. Most accounts break at signal and get blamed on creative.

Meta

Facebook & Instagram

  • Full-funnel architecture — prospecting, retargeting and retention separated so you can read them
  • Advantage+ and manual structures; CBO or ABO decided on evidence
  • Catalogue, CPAS and dynamic product ads — the backbone of quick-commerce selling
  • Creative testing matrices with one variable at a time
  • Hook-rate and hold-rate diagnostics driving the next round, not vanity CTR
  • Pixel and Conversions API, deduplication, event-match quality
  • Influencer whitelisting folded in as scalable inventory
  • Incrementality, geo holdouts and lift tests that are actually valid

Google

Search · Shopping · YouTube

  • Search built by intent tier — brand, category, competitor, problem-aware
  • Performance Max with asset-group discipline, brand exclusions, search-term visibility
  • Shopping and Merchant Center feed work: titles, attributes, disapprovals
  • YouTube for demand creation, sequenced and skippable-first
  • Demand Gen, display and remarketing across the surface
  • Affiliate and programmatic where they add reach rather than duplicate it
  • tROAS, tCPA and value rules — and when automation needs a manual floor
  • GA4, server-side tagging and offline conversion imports

Commerce & measurement

Where Indian growth happens

  • Blinkit, Zepto, Big Basket and Instamart — keyword buys, banners, share of search
  • Spend gated to live availability, so budget never funds an out-of-stock SKU
  • Amazon and marketplace ads tied to listing quality, not run in isolation
  • MER, blended CAC and contribution margin over siloed platform ROAS
  • Cohort LTV and payback windows setting how hard you can push
  • Attribution reconciled between platform, GA4 and your backend
  • Weekly dashboards in Looker, Power BI or Tableau
  • Brand-versus-performance budget splits you can defend to a board

Past a point, account structure stops being the lever — creative volume and quality are. Which is exactly why I don't sell performance separately from brand, packaging and content. The ads are only ever as good as what you gave them to say.

What this has produced

Numbers from live accounts across food, beauty retail and financial services. Detail available under NDA.

Clean-food FMCG

17.46M

Views on a festive campaign at 6.59% ER — made entirely in-house.

Quick commerce

356M

Meta impressions across four platforms, at ₹0.76 CPC and 2.77% CTR.

Creative operations

70% cheaper

In-house engine replacing agency output, at 330M+ social views.

Premium beauty retail

15% → 32%

Loyalty revenue contribution after a cohort-personalised relaunch.

D2C growth

+30%

Online sales, alongside a 15% lift in footfall and in-store conversion.

Financial services

−20% churn

With conversion up 15%, inside RBI and IRDAI constraints.

Categories I know from the inside

Different rules, different buying behaviour, different regulator. The pattern-matching between them is where most of the value sits.

Food & FMCG

Clean-label staples, fresh formats and snacking across D2C, quick commerce, modern and general trade.

Beauty & cosmetics

Launch cadence, shade and variant storytelling, counter merchandising and loyalty at retail scale.

Men's grooming

0-to-1 brand building — proposition, NPD direction and social launch for founder-led teams.

Fintech & insurance

Regulated acquisition at scale, compliance-safe creative, hard CAC accountability.

Luxury & premium retail

Restraint, scarcity and desire — categories where discounting destroys the asset.

B2B & industrial

Long cycles, committee buying, and commodity positioning where story is the only edge.

How we can work together

Three shapes, depending on the stage you're at and how much of me you need.

Diagnostic sprint

2 to 3 weeks

Brand, pack, creative and ad accounts audited together, ending in a prioritised plan with the sequence and the money attached. For when you suspect you're spending against the wrong problem. Ends with a decision, not a discovery call.

Project retainer

3 to 6 months

A defined build: a launch, a repositioning, a packaging system, a performance rebuild, a D2C replatform. I run it with your team or bring the specialists. You get the artefacts and the operating system, not a dependency.

Fractional CMO

Ongoing, part-time

Senior judgement in the room every week without a full-time CMO on payroll. I own the plan, hire and coach the team, manage agency partners, and sit in front of the board with the numbers.

I write the brief myself

No hand-off to a junior. The person you meet is the person doing the work.

I'll tell you not to spend

If the pack or the proposition is the bottleneck, more budget just buys the problem more impressions.

Numbers before opinions

Every recommendation comes with what it should move, by when, and what would prove me wrong.

Built to be handed over

Systems and rhythms your team can run without me. Good consulting has an exit built in.

Tell me what you're building.

A short note on the brand, the stage and what's stuck is enough to start. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you to someone who is.

Email me Connect on LinkedIn

Email

shibiya.arora@gmail.com

India

+91 93108 18251

Canada

+1 672 326 5060

Based

Mumbai & Burlington, ON