Guwahati,
October 2026: When Brand Imprint opened in Guwahati in 2017, a
digital marketing agency in the Northeast was expected to do one or two things.
Run some social media pages. Design a logo. Anything larger went to Mumbai or
Delhi.
Nine
years later the agency has a team of over 40, has worked with more than 1,000
brands, and has collected three national awards. Its client list now runs well
past the Northeast. It also does something most agencies its size do not
attempt. Alongside campaigns and creative, it builds websites, mobile
applications and custom software in-house.
That
range is the point. The founders argue that the gap between a campaign that
looks good and a campaign that earns money usually sits in the places a narrow
agency cannot reach.
Creative that is
built to work, not just to win approval
Creative
is where most client relationships start, and where most of them go wrong.
"Clients
are shown a beautiful campaign, they approve it, and then it does not
perform," said Prachi Agrawal, Co-Founder of Brand Imprint. "The
creative was never wrong exactly. It was just made to impress the client
sitting in the room instead of the customer scrolling past it at eleven at
night. Those are two completely different audiences and we are clear about
which one we are designing for."
The
agency's creative work covers brand identity, packaging, campaign design and
video production. Over the years it has handled launches and campaigns for
names including Hard Rock Cafe and Playboy Beer Garden in Guwahati, EBCO, ACKO
Insurance and NorthEast United FC.
What
the team insists on is that creative gets tested rather than admired. Multiple
versions go live, the weaker ones are cut quickly, and the reasons are
explained to the client in plain language.
The technical side
nobody puts in a pitch deck
A
large share of wasted ad spend has nothing to do with the advertising.
Forms
that break on a mid-range Android phone. Landing pages that take nine seconds
to load on a patchy connection. Tracking that was set up once and never
checked, so nobody can tell which campaign actually produced the enquiry. These
are the problems Brand Imprint says it finds most often when it takes over an
account.
Having
developers in the same office changes what can be fixed. The agency builds its
own landing pages and websites, sets up its own tracking, and has written
custom software for clients whose requirements went past marketing altogether,
including enterprise systems and mobile applications.
"We
do not have to raise a ticket with another vendor and wait two weeks to get a
form fixed," said Vishal More, Co-Founder of Brand Imprint. "That
sounds small. It is the difference between losing a month of a client's budget
and losing an afternoon."
Service quality,
measured the boring way
The
agency's view is that most clients leave not because results were poor but
because nobody picked up the phone.
Reporting
is deliberately plain. The team's position is that a client should be able to
read a monthly report without a translator, and that an agency hiding behind
impressions and reach numbers is usually hiding something. Where a campaign has
underperformed, the report says so.
Clients
come from real estate, construction materials, automobiles, education,
hospitality, manufacturing, retail and food and beverage. Each of those behaves
differently. A builder selling a two-crore apartment, a cement dealer chasing
trade enquiries and a car showroom working the festive season need three
separate playbooks, and the agency says the single biggest mistake in the
industry is running one playbook everywhere because it is easier to manage.
Built in the
Northeast, built for India
The
agency is open about the fact that its address used to be treated as a
disqualification.
"For
years the assumption was that a Guwahati agency could handle Guwahati work and
nothing beyond it," said More. "We were built here, and that is not a
limitation we have to apologise for. It is where we learned to make a rupee go
further than it does in a metro, because our clients could not afford for it to
go anywhere else. That discipline travels. We take on work anywhere in the
country now and the client does not care where our office is, only whether the
numbers move."
Agrawal
makes the same point about talent. Roughly nine in ten of the team are in their
twenties, hired locally and trained in-house, in a region that has historically
exported its young marketers to Bengaluru and Delhi.
"There
is no shortage of ability here," she said. "What was missing was
somewhere to use it without buying a one-way ticket out of the state."
Experience that is
hard to shortcut
Nine
years in one market produces a particular kind of knowledge.
Media
consumption across the eight Northeastern states does not follow national
patterns, so plans built on national benchmarks tend to misallocate spend from
the first week. Language and dialect shift over short distances. Festive
calendars differ. Trust is built through community credibility more than reach.
None
of this is available in a research report. It accumulates through campaigns
that worked, campaigns that did not, and over a thousand brands' worth of
pattern recognition.
Where AI has
actually helped
The
agency has moved on AI in two places, and is careful to separate them.
The
first is search. A growing number of customers now ask an AI assistant for a
recommendation instead of scrolling through search results, and a business
absent from those answers never learns about the enquiry it lost. Brand Imprint
has added answer engine and generative engine optimisation to its search
practice to get clients visible there early.
The
second is internal. AI has compressed the parts of agency work that used to eat
the most time. Campaign data that once took most of a day to read through is
now turned around in a fraction of that, and creative variations that took a
week can be produced in a day, which means more versions get tested instead of
the team betting everything on one idea.
"AI
has not replaced anyone here and it has not changed what we are selling,"
More said. "What it has done is remove the drudgery. The team spends its
time on judgement calls instead of pulling numbers into spreadsheets. That
shows up in the work, but it is a tool, not the pitch."
The
founders' broader claim is that the old trade-off has gone. A brand no longer
has to choose between an agency that understands the Northeast and one capable
of serious work, and a company headquartered in Guwahati no longer has to
confine itself to the Northeast to find either.
About Brand Imprint
Brand
Imprint is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Guwahati, Assam, working
with clients across Northeast India and nationally. Founded in 2017, the agency
has a team of over 40 and has served more than 1,000 brands, with three
national awards to date. Its services include creative and brand design, social
media marketing, SEO, AEO and GEO, performance marketing on Google and Meta,
website design and development, and mobile app and software development.
Clients span real estate, construction materials, automobiles, education,
hospitality, manufacturing, retail and food and beverage. More information is
available at brandimprint.in.