Battrix, a green energy batteries manufacturing brand for the mobility category has evolved into Green Energy On (GeOn), To enable brand transformation, WolfzHowl has been brought on board as a partner for brand, customer and consumer strategy. Wolfzhowl has been tasked with crafting the brand purpose and purpose-led positioning, embedding the brand into the sales engagement process and embedding the purpose into GeOn’s employees.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Kalyan Ram Challapalli is the Founder & Chief of Strategy WolfzHowl.
He has over 20 years of experience. Trusted by C-suite leaders across marketing, sales, business intelligence, and human resources, he has been instrumental in driving brand and behaviour change strategies for organisations worldwide.
Before founding WolfzHowl, which recently celebrated 12 years, he held leadership roles at agencies, including Commonwealth, Leo Burnett (Singapore), TBWA India, Contract (JWT-WPP), Diageo India, Ambience Publicis, Network, and DMA.
With a track record of working with 100+ brands across 30+ categories spanning India, Southeast Asia, and MENA+, he has pioneered a human behavior-led, data-first framework. This approach integrates owned and earned data, cultural insights, and human behavior analytics to shape persona identification, sales strategies, media planning, and communication roadmaps. Brands like ICICI Bank, MSD Pharma, Mercedes-Benz, and many more have leveraged this methodology for measurable success. Kalyan’s goal is to help brands drive growth across their business value chain via the right mix of the traditional and the new.
Q. What are WolfzHowl’s goals for 2025 in terms of revenue growth, profitability etc?
There are three main goals for Wolfzhowl this year:
(1) Our Work be Known: We have spent the first 10 to 12 years in earning our work credentials and saw magnitudes of success across MNC and start-up clients across India, South East Asia and MENA. Now we want to focus on letting prospective clients, collaborators and talent we want to attract, know all the work we have done. For the very first time we will be focussed on marketing what we have done and not just be focussed on doing more superb work.
(2) Depth And Diversity: Do more of the cutting edge work we have done like Data led personas, hyper personalised marketing and consumer engagement, Behaviour Change in Social Development communications, the D2C & Quick Commerce blend in rural ecommerce, brand and consumer marketing strategy. We want to focus on diversity with depth into AI and data led segmentation and insights, health tech and food tech categories and pursuing celebrity and professional personality brand building.
(3) Turning our services into products: In 2025 Wolfzhowl will embark on our journey towards becoming a behaviour change technology company which in the near future offers products & services, not just services.
These pillars will also drive our revenue. We want to maintain our revenues and are ok not growing it this year as we allot time for innovation. We also plan to drive out revenue via premium projects rather than volume of work.
Q. How has launching new verticals like WolfSIGHT and Wolf Effect helped the agency scale?
WolfSight is an essential consumer research and cultural research arm and is core to strategy. While it naturally expands our revenue streams and can increase project value, its true significance is in grounding our wolves as strategists and inboxes them from being AC cabin planners. We then design research keeping in mind outcomes for brands and business.es It also gives us a chance to constantly innovate.
Q. How important are cross learnings for the agency?
Cross learnings are the essential multiplier which makes Wolfzhowl what it is. Cross learnings across different consumer segments, categories and even cultures help us connect the unconnected dots. They are what gives us a beyond brand and category view of the consumer, shopper and socio-cultural influences.
Q. The company specialises in hyper-local marketing. What trends does the agency expect to see in this area in 2025?
We think hyper local is going to be a new norm. Coining a brand strategy at the national level and then deploying it will continue. But with AI+ it won’t be bereft of cultural nuances and won’t be Telugu person doing Voice Over in Tamil or a UP Voice Over artist doing Punjabi, etc. Brands will be adopting local cultural nuances more.
When it comes to marketing, go to market and activation strategies, hyper local will take lead. What to stick, how to stick, what to sell and when, will be even more important because of the increased competition. Whether MNC or national level brands across categories, including new categories like Fintech, Quick commerce, etc will have to fight for geographies and more share, harder than before and hence specific markets will become battle grounds. Like in the case of Zomato, Swiggy was doing well in Telugu states and they had a bit of a South friendly brand comms connect also. Zomato had some operational baggage from past and hence the consumers ignored them. Wolfzhowl had to solve for this.
First we had to connect in the Zomato way of big, bold, entertainment, Bollywood-celebrity, Punjabiyat of the brand. That was the tricky yet exciting part and we cracked the connect via cinema and Allu Arjun for an extremely successful campaign. Zomato failed to replicate the same in Hrithik Roshan and other campaigns – because they did not use geography-based-cultural insight. Using a formula of a movie star and exaggerated action as a creative device is hollow without the cultural connect.
This is not completely new also, great companies like Asian Paints have done cultural intimacy even via on-ground activities to crack West Bengal’s market decades ago. But I’m the post-digital and AI era – we can do so much more. Exciting hyper local times ahead.
However, I would warn brands not to get carried away with it at a product level. Just because habits and products usage are so specific to different geographies and also to fight D2C brands – one should not create over extended products. Feasibility, share of shelf and even how your sales team can sell and how many they can sell should be taken into account.
Q. As regional brands look to scale nationally what is going to be the big challenge and how will WolfzHowl help them here?
There is generational legacy and generational wealth in many local brands across Gujarat, Punjab, Andhra, Karnataka etc.
The appetitive is getting ignited by either the “grow or die” reality dawning or “next gen ambitions” of 2nd/3rd generation daughters and sons coming back from higher education and wanting to grow geographically and even expand beyond current businesses.
The challenges are:
(1) Generational clash of too much caution vs too much hurry amongst owners
(2) not understanding that going national means embracing new set of truths across culture of doing business and also consumer marketing.
(3) Staying married to what worked in my market will work elsewhere too
(4) Getting into categories and thinking aping another category will make us win. Like in the case of Schmitten. The mix across product, price, brand personality and even distribution was not thought through. Pumping big monies and naming and behaving like a foreign brand doesn’t work. Category by category and context by context you need to bespoke your national strategy, brand morphing and brand creation.
Depending on the strengths of the company their distribution, testing market entries and expansions via a D2C approach is also something that local brands can deploy to test and grow. D2C can be used far more innovatively than its being thought of now. Of in some cases one might have to do digital brand and product experience and sales also. How do you keep the core brand values and yet adopt is the super interesting challenge to solve.
Q. Which are the key markets that WolfzHowl will focus on for growth? Will the Southern markets be more important with the Telugu launch?
For Hyper local we will let the opportunity decide for us, with dropping anchor in Telugu states because of our obvious advantages. But most of Wolfzhowls existence has been national and global.
We have more experience in north, west and east and non-Telugu south India than in Telugu states. We have helped many brands across categories with hyper local, so opportunity is the focus and yes a bit of bias towards native language and native culture states.
Q. Could you talk about the plan to establish strategic partnerships with local advertising, digital, and PR agencies to build clients’ brands and business?
We can’t win alone; we don’t have to be a competitive mega large business. We can be a mid-sized collaborative business. This is what we realised and what we are drawn to.
Hence we are already meeting several local firms across Telugu states, West Bengal, Delhi NCR and forming collaborative partnerships. We plan less, take up a project and work and figure out values that match and the collaboration chemistry, we establish trust and plan how together we can find the best way to achieve our goals.
Q. Could you talk about work done with clients like ICICI, Abbott, MSD, Bikaji, TCPL, Hotstar that stands out?
For ICICI Bank we did data led persona creation to drive upselling and cross selling of their products. For Abbott we did strategy for Thyroid – to drive testing and for Influvac – vaccine consideration and adoption amongst other things. For MSD we created a reverse-hypnosis basis segmentation and vaccine adoption strategy for HPV vaccines as well as consumer and digital personas to create influence among consumers.
For Bikaji we did brand purpose and purpose led product innovation funnel. For Hotstar (before Disney’s acquisition) we did brand purpose and way forward for the brand purpose to go to market and be adopted amongst Internal Employees. For TCPL we consult with their entire teams for packaged foods division for brand equity growth, consumer marketing strategy and product innovation strategy.
Q. How has WolfzHowl integrated AI into its operations?
AI is primarily Integrated into research, structuring and re-structuring data and wisdom and insights. A bit for aided research and cross mapping data and contrasting findings to create conflicts amongst insights to squeeze out deeper insights.
We also use it to make visuals and videos to bring alive strategy. With Wolfzhowl’s service to product journey this year onwards – we see AI playing a core role.
Q. When clients try to strike a balance between brand building and performance marketing what advice does WolfzHowl give?
None – we clap for them and say amen. You are stringing a balance. Pls do more of that. We would aim to help them find the right mix and contexts for both and also create an inter relationship between both.
Q. How does WolfzHowl leverage data analytics to help clients drive better business results? Is making sense of large volumes of data often overwhelming?
After trying we have realised not to have any software’s of our own. See large companies which own large data have their own software and also have rightfully so data privacy rules in place. So we don’t aim to extract client data, we aim to analyse it with the client’s teams and software’s help. However, we are developing a addendum / an extension which can process data the way it is needed for insight and strategy without affecting data privacy regulations.
As an approach we think data is part of the journey and not the destination. A single source and type of data is very useful but not complete. We at Wolfzhowl aim to always marry data with social, cultural and behavioural insights to create WolfSights. More comprehensive insights. That’s why we are being courted by a few big data companies for acquisition.
Q. What benefits can brand strategists gain from blockchain and web3.0?
Honestly quite a bit, but right now both are being packaged superficially to be sold. It’s a bit of an illusions-based selling happening. So we would advice strategists to have a “why and what” approach for strategic objective for each client and basis that figure out deployment. You will be surprised how many firms engage with new developments for FOMO and Fad and then fail.
But this is an intense and in-depth topic which needs perhaps a column of its own.
