Harshita Tarsariya
Brand Strategy · Creative Direction · Content & Growth
Brand used to be the soft part of marketing. It’s the only thing left that can’t be automated out of existence.
Dubai, UAE
Price, features, and availability get matched by algorithms in real time. Brand is the only thing left that can’t be.
After a decade of decline, Interbrand’s 2026 research shows the brand’s share of the purchase decision growing again, for the second year running. And it’s not despite AI, it’s partly because of it: algorithms now optimise for the things a strong brand already delivers, satisfaction, loyalty, repeat behaviour, so building real brand equity and being algorithmically preferred have quietly become the same job. That’s the lens I like to keep in mind while working with any brand: understand what it actually stands for before touching how it shows up, because the fastest way to lose a brand is to keep executing work that technically follows the strategy while quietly not being it.
Oasis Ice Cream Cafe · In-house · UAE-wide
Joy, Scooped at Your Doorstep
A UAE-wide experience-first ice cream van brand operating across all seven emirates.
Brand Idea: Joy, scooped at your doorstep
The brand position
Oasis sits at the intersection of two archetypes rarely combined in ice cream: the Jester (fun, playful, joy) and the Neighbour (trusted, community-rooted, reliable). Most ice cream brands are purely Jester. Oasis has the warmth of a local institution embedded in UAE community life, a stronger position than any corporate chain can manufacture.
What I defined
- –The jingle, as an unclaimed audio trigger no UAE competitor owns
- –The van itself, as the experience rather than a limitation
- –Northern Emirates rootedness, against a landscape of generic pan-UAE brands
- –WhatsApp as an ordering channel that reads as personality, not just convenience
In transition
The strategy is defined and the brand idea is locked in. The brand is now in transition, moving from no prior positioning to owning this new identity across every touchpoint, online and offline. Hygiene, the baseline brand assets and consistency layer, is currently being built.
Currently on
Defining the visual system across packaging, menu, van wraparounds, and digital touchpoints including social media and the website. Also building the B2B partnership strategy, and a loyalty programme routed entirely through WhatsApp, kept frictionless for Emirati consumers.
My Role
Brand strategy and tone of voice, defined from research with real audience that ships across Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and even the van wraparounds.
Built to Outlive Its Own Name
Virat Kohli’s sportswear brand under Agilitas, positioned as a global challenger, not a celebrity label.
The challenge
ONE8 was Virat Kohli’s brand in association with Puma for years. The job was to ensure that when it became independent of Puma, it didn’t stay dependent on Virat or Puma either. Kohli’s own ambition was for ONE8 to outlive him as a sportswear brand, which meant building an identity that could stand on its own once the founder’s name stopped doing the heavy lifting.
The strategic move
Reposition ONE8 around a belief rather than a person: made for those with limitless ambition, the ones who break barriers and attempt what’s never been done. Kohli’s own story becomes proof of the belief, not the reason to buy in.
What shipped
A relaunch under Agilitas positioning ONE8 as a global sportswear challenger brand, not a celebrity merchandise line.
My Role
Client relationship and delivery management, begun January 2024.
From Humble Beginnings to Vibrant Bazaar
Meesho, India’s largest listed social commerce marketplace, connecting small sellers to millions of value-conscious shoppers.
The challenge
Meesho had scaled into one of India’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, but its brand identity hadn’t kept pace. It needed to shed early perceptions of being a female-centric brand, differentiate in a crowded market, and feel modern and exciting, without losing what made it distinctly Indian.
The strategic move
Rather than replace the wordmark, Landor tested it alongside new concepts and confirmed it was worth keeping. The M had strong brand recall with consumers and emerged as a sacred asset during research, so the identity was built outward from it instead of starting over. Every concept route, including the final “Jamuni & Aam” colour system, was tested with consumers before being locked, with particular attention to how the identity would read for Meesho’s core base across tier 2, 3, and 4 India, not just metro audiences. Purple was a deliberate departure from the red/yellow/blue crowd of Indian e-commerce, chosen because it tested as gender-neutral and aspirational at once. The typeface was chosen for multilingual support too, since the app runs in multiple regional languages depending on the audience, and the identity needed to hold up in all of them.
What shipped
“The Buzz,” a modular visual language built to stay consistent across 1,000+ pieces of outgoing communication a month, flexible enough to move between dense and expressive, still and motion, digital and print.
My Role
Client relationship and delivery management, keeping a multi-stakeholder, multi-workstream rebrand moving from creative territory through consumer testing to nationwide rollout.
43%→52%
gender-neutrality perception
+10pp
higher app adoption vs. any other past release
6 mo
engagement window, launched June 2024
Landor’s roster also includes
Translating “Joy of Everyday Sport” Into Commerce
Italian sportswear heritage brand, entering India through its first dedicated e-commerce platform.
The challenge
Lotto’s brand positioning, the joy of everyday sport, existed as a strategic idea. The job was translating that into a premium e-commerce experience for Lotto’s first entry into the Indian market, not just a functional storefront, but one that felt like the brand.
The strategic move
Design and build a digital platform where the joy-led positioning showed up in how the site looked and moved, not just what it said, from the homepage hero through the product journey.
My Role
Client relationship and delivery management, directing design, development, and vendor teams from brief to launch.
60%
above-industry conversion, first 90 days
4%
checkout rate vs. ~2.5% industry avg.
Culture, Content and Cricket
RPSG’s better-for-you snacking brand, built to compete with traditional chips and namkeen.
01 · Campaign: Too Yumm! x LSG Partnership
The challenge
LSG was a new team playing its first-ever IPL season, and expectations were high. Too Yumm! was already associated with RCB through Virat Kohli’s role as brand ambassador, so the challenge was making the LSG partnership feel distinct rather than diluted by that existing recall. The bigger opportunity was making the brand relatable to the audience actually watching these matches, since snacking is central to how people experience a match at home, with family or friends. Stadium attendance was also capped at 25 to 50 percent capacity during this period, so a large share of supporters couldn’t attend in person at all.
What we built
With stadium access limited, we built the Cheers for LSG campaign across multiple digital routes: a microsite where fans could write, record, and send cheers; AR filters to support the team live during matches; an on-ground Cheer Truck activation featuring a giant chips pack across Lucknow; and influencer activation across every touchpoint.
My Role
Briefed creative, digital, and influencer teams; managed shoots end to end including on-ground production in Lucknow; contracted and managed influencer collaborations; oversaw microsite, AR filter, and media plan delivery.
262M+
impressions
57.7%
higher views than forecast
13.5%
lift in product awareness
02 · Too Yumm! Masala Chips Launch
Too Yumm! was entering a category already dominated by players like Lay’s and Bingo. The goal was to differentiate the product around Indian palate preferences, and the big idea was built on intrigue: something is missing, and that something is masala. A pre-launch film brought this to life, built around the search for the missing masala.
We built pre-launch teasers to build anticipation ahead of the film, then launched the product on the reveal that the real masala was in the pack all along.
The teasers. Three creatives, one reveal.
The pre-launch film: the search for the missing masala.
Performance Marketing, Full Funnel
Oberoi Hotels & Resorts: India’s ultra-luxury hospitality group, known for its palace properties and five-star service standard.
Trident Hotels: Oberoi Group’s upscale hotel brand, positioned just below Oberoi’s ultra-luxury tier.
The mandate
Two hospitality accounts, run across the full performance stack: Google Search, Display, and YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn, and programmatic.
The work
Always-on performance campaigns ran alongside seasonal and property-specific pushes. Book Direct campaigns were built to shift revenue away from OTA dependency and toward higher-margin direct channels. On the loyalty side, the Oberoi Select and Trident Privilege membership programmes ran targeted acquisition and retention campaigns to grow membership and repeat bookings.
My Role
Client relationship and delivery management, and internal coordination across the performance, creative, and analytics teams keeping both accounts running always-on.
₹20 cr
combined annual mandate, two accounts
23.4X
revenue ROI in 90 days, Oberoi Select
+18%
CTR growth for Trident Privilege membership
10%
average CPC reduction across both hotel brands
What I Bring
Strategy That Survives Contact With the Market
I’m genuinely grateful for the leaders and brands I got to work with at each agency. Every agency had its own core strength, and I learned a different discipline from each: brand building at Landor, digital product at BombayDC, digital marketing at Kinnect.
Marketing has moved fast these last six years, and with AI now sitting between every brand and its customer, I think the job has changed. It’s not enough to define what a brand stands for. Someone has to understand why and how that idea survives every touchpoint it passes through, or it doesn’t survive at all.
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of sameness. Global benchmarks are flattening how brands speak, and in trying to reach everyone, a lot of brands quietly dilute the thing that made them worth choosing in the first place.
What I bring isn’t just positioning and voice. It’s building an experience cohesive enough that people recognise it without needing the logo, through service, behaviour, and community, across every medium. A strategy only works if it survives contact with delivery, online, offline, or algorithmic. And the way you make an algorithm favour your brand is the same way you make a person favour it: by actually delivering what you stand for, consistently, until repeat behaviour and authentic preference do the work logos used to do.
The instinct to move faster by diluting the brand is the wrong trade. Growth that doesn’t cost you the thing you stand for is slower, but it’s the only kind that lasts.
“If your brand has a point of view worth protecting, I’d like to talk about how.”
Harshita Tarsariya · Dubai, UAE