Interview: Navin Narayanan on Reinventing Brand Intelligence
Pipaltree co-founder Navin Narayanan explains why brand measurement is broken and how actionable brand intelligence helps CEOs drive brand coherence across every touchpoint.
Q: The brand research and insights industry is crowded — Nielsen, Kantar, Gartner, and countless boutique agencies. Where in this ecosystem does Pipaltree sit? Are you a replacement, a supplement, or something entirely new?
A: Pipaltree is something entirely new — and the distinction is not about features. It is about what a brand actually is. A brand is a net impression. It is the feeling created in the mind of a customer through every interaction they have with a business — across every touchpoint, every channel, every experience. That feeling is what drives their decisions. The prevailing approach to measuring brand breaks that impression into atomistic attributes and asks people to rate them on a scale. Trustworthiness: 4 out of 5. Quality: 3 out of 5. The problem is not the execution. The problem is the premise. You cannot reconstruct a net impression from fragments. The moment you atomise it, you have already lost the thing you were trying to measure. Pipaltree is built on a different premise that is drawn from clinical psychology adapted for brand management. We capture the net impression as a whole, through real conversations at scale, and synthesise that into intelligence a CEO can act on. Finance has systems. Supply chain has systems. Brand has never had one. Not because no one tried, but because no one started from the right definition of what a brand actually is. That is what we are building.
Q: Category creation is expensive and uncertain. You’re building “Actionable Brand Intelligence” as a new category. What evidence do you have that this category actually exists in the mind of a CEO, versus being a solution looking for a problem?
A: We don’t have a survey that proves CEOs want this. We have something more reliable which is what clients do after they start using Pipaltree. Once a team begins using Pipaltree and acting on what it surfaces, the story travels inside the organisation. Other divisions ask for it. Other countries want it. What started in one part of the business mushrooms across it, not because we pitched the expansion, but because the people already using it made the case internally. A significant part of our growth comes from existing clients expanding. That is the evidence.
Q: At what stage of a brand’s or organisation’s journey does actionable brand intelligence become relevant — and is there such a thing as too early or too late to adopt it?
A: Pipaltree is not for every brand. If a brand is still defining itself, like at a stage where it is still working out its values or still finding its voice, there is nothing coherent yet to measure. But when a business has multiple touchpoints like customers, employees, partners, channels, brand is the only thing that can hold all of it together. Every one of those touchpoints is forming an impression in someone’s mind. That impression, accumulated across millions of interactions, is what the brand actually is. And yet most businesses have no system to drive it. Finance has one. Supply chain has one. Brand gets a study, once a year, and a deck. Actionable brand intelligence is the system that was missing to help you drive the brand the way you drive every other part of the business, consistently, with real signals.
Q: How does this industry look at handling data sovereignty, privacy regulations (GDPR, India’s DPDP), and client concerns about sensitive brand data being processed by LLMs or technology?
A: We designed for privacy before it became a compliance requirement. When we use open-source models, they are deployed on our own servers. The data does not leave our environment. When we use external models like OpenAI, Anthropic, others, the system strips all personally identifiable information before anything leaves the platform. Names, phone numbers, anything that can link a response to a real person is redacted before the data moves. What the external model sees is clean, anonymised conversation. The client’s brand intelligence never touches a public model in a form that could identify anyone. We are watching the regulatory environment closely and building ahead of it.
Q: What is the future of actionable brand intelligence — and which businesses stand to lose the most by waiting?
A: The businesses that need this most right now are the ones already managing multiple touchpoints. These touchpoints include customers, employees, partners, channels, where brand coherence is an operational challenge, not just a communication one. But the more interesting shift is happening in categories that never had to think this way. CPG/FMCG brands built their identity through communication. A good campaign, a consistent message, and the net impression formed. That model is no longer holding. The same brands are now building platforms, creating communities, tweaking packaging more frequently, experimenting with variants. They are becoming multi-touchpoint businesses without necessarily planning to be. The world is moving toward multi-touchpoint brand building. The businesses that recognise this early and put a system behind it will have a significant advantage over the ones still treating brand as something you communicate rather than something you drive coherently and consistently across touchpoints.
