Role family
Consulting/Strategy
Turn a fuzzy business problem into a structured, defensible answer, mostly in slides.
9
roles on campus
9
companies
What this role actually is
On an Indian B-school campus, "consulting" is rarely MBB. It is Big 4 and boutique advisory (Deloitte, Alvarez & Marsal GCC, First Partners), the consulting arms of IT-services firms (Infosys, HCL), and in-house strategy or founder's-office roles (Kotak, Piccadily Agro, Propel). You join as an Analyst or Consultant on client projects, or as an internal strategy associate, doing the research, analysis and deck-building that feeds a partner's or CXO's recommendation. The common thread is simple: ambiguous problem in, structured and defensible answer out, usually in PowerPoint and backed by Excel.
Day to day
- Building the deck: turning a manager's storyline into 15 to 40 clean slides (market-sizing exhibits, benchmarking tables, option-evaluation matrices), often overnight before a client review.
- Excel work with real stakes: cleaning messy client data dumps, building cost and revenue models, and running scenario sensitivities that a partner will quote live in the steering-committee meeting.
- Secondary research sprints: pulling numbers from CRISIL, IBEF, annual reports and earnings calls to size a market or profile competitors in 48 hours, then defending every figure when it gets challenged.
- Client and stakeholder interviews: sitting in on, and later leading, discussions with the client's sales heads, plant managers or channel partners to diagnose why performance is off-plan.
- In GCC and offshore setups (A&M GCC, Infosys, HCL): supporting onshore US and EU teams on due-diligence data rooms, performance-improvement trackers and dashboards, usually on evening-shifted hours.
- In internal strategy or founder's-office roles (Kotak, Piccadily): tracking competitor moves, preparing board and MD review packs, and running one cross-functional project for leadership end to end.
Skills that matter
- Structured problem solving: MECE issue trees, hypothesis-first thinking, and top-down communication (the Pyramid Principle)
- Advanced Excel and financial fluency: P&L logic, unit economics, market sizing, and enough basic valuation to handle diligence-type work
- PowerPoint craft: a self-explanatory slide with a clear 'so-what' title as the headline is the core deliverable, not a decoration
- Cross-functional business judgment: enough finance, operations and go-to-market sense to not sound like a pure marketer in a mixed room
- Fast secondary research and source triangulation across annual reports, industry databases and expert notes
- Managing upward: absorbing manager and partner feedback loops and client pushback without ego, and turning comments around quickly
- Stamina and ownership: 60 to 70 hour weeks near deadlines are normal, and 'my part is done' is not a sentence consultants say
Who fits
The marketer who enjoyed the analysis behind the campaign more than the campaign itself. You like breaking a fuzzy question ("why is our rural volume flat?") into drivers, you are comfortable being the least knowledgeable person in the room and catching up in a week, and you would rather touch six industries in two years than own one brand. If you need visible, attributable outcomes ("my campaign, my numbers") or you resent redoing slides at 11pm because the storyline changed, this family will frustrate you: the client or CXO owns the outcome, and you own the thinking.
What interviewers ask
Guesstimate: estimate the number of whisky bottles sold in Delhi per month (or ACs sold in India, petrol pumps in Gurgaon, and so on).
How to answer: State your structure before touching any number, either a population and household route or a supply-side route, then walk it aloud with round Indian anchors (Delhi roughly 2 crore people, 55 to 60 per cent adults) and sanity-check the final figure. They grade the scaffolding, not the number: being off by 2x with clean logic beats a lucky guess with none.
Case: our FMCG client's market share is falling in one state, or a bank's credit-card activation rate is dropping. Diagnose it.
How to answer: Ask 2 or 3 clarifying questions first (since when, which segment, any competitor move), then lay out a driver tree. For share: category growth versus our growth, then distribution, pricing, product and promotion. As a marketing student, go deeper than the textbook framework on the 4P branches, because that is your edge. Close with one prioritised recommendation, not a laundry list.
Why consulting, and why not brand management or sales given your marketing specialisation?
How to answer: Do not trash marketing. Say you want breadth across industries and problem types before you commit to depth, and that your marketing lens (consumer, GTM, pricing) is an asset on commercial-strategy projects. Back it with one concrete project or competition where you clearly enjoyed the diagnosis more than the execution.
Why Deloitte, A&M or this firm specifically, and what do you know about our practice?
How to answer: Know the firm's India reality: Deloitte's consulting spans strategy, technology and operations; A&M GCC supports turnaround and PE performance-improvement work out of India; First Partners does strategic communications and public-affairs advisory. Name the practice you are targeting and tie it to something you have actually done. Generic 'great learning culture' lines get you cut.
Tell me about a time you worked with incomplete data, a difficult teammate, or a brutal deadline (behavioural, heavy at Big 4 and GCC rounds).
How to answer: Prepare 5 or 6 STAR stories from internships, live projects and committee work before placement week. Quantify the result, keep each under 90 seconds, and always land on what you would do differently: Big 4 partners probe the reflection more than the story itself.
Read this exhibit, or here is data on the client's SKUs, what do you see? (chart or table interpretation)
How to answer: Take 30 silent seconds, then lead with the headline insight ('premium SKUs are growing but dragging gross margin'), not a left-to-right narration of the chart. Tie it straight back to the case question and say what data you would want to see next.
For internal strategy or founder's-office roles (Kotak, Piccadily): what would you track in your first 90 days, or what do you make of our business?
How to answer: Research the actual company: Kotak's positioning through its leadership transition, or Piccadily's premiumisation bet with the Indri single malt. Walk in with 2 or 3 specific observations and one honest question. These conversations are less about frameworks and more about whether you genuinely care about their business.
How to prep
- 1. Do 15 to 20 live case practices with a partner before placement week: reading a casebook solo does not build the muscle of thinking aloud under pressure. Use IIM A, B, C or ISB casebooks, but rehearse Indian FMCG, BFSI and consumer contexts, because that is what campus interviewers actually pick.
- 2. Drill guesstimates daily for two weeks with memorised India anchors: population 140 crore, roughly 30 crore households, about 65 per cent rural, smartphone users around 75 crore, Gurgaon roughly 25 lakh. Big 4 campus rounds often open with these to filter fast.
- 3. Build one analysis artifact you can put on the table: a market-entry or pricing study from a competition, live project or SIP, structured as issue tree, then analysis, then recommendation. It converts 'why should a marketer be a consultant' from a claim into evidence.
- 4. Segment your prep by employer type. Deloitte and A&M: cases plus behavioural plus firm knowledge. Infosys and HCL consulting arms: domain plus technology-transformation awareness (know what a CRM or digital-transformation engagement actually involves). Kotak, Piccadily and Propel: deep company research and a genuine point of view on their strategy.
- 5. Fix your Excel and PowerPoint before interviews, not after offers: build one lightweight three-statement model and one 10-slide recommendation deck. Some shortlists include an Excel test or a slide-making exercise, and Day-1 usefulness is the fastest route to good staffing.
Where it leads
The typical ladder runs Analyst or Consultant, then Senior Consultant at 2 to 3 years, then Manager at 4 to 5 years. At Big 4, Manager means owning a workstream, a client relationship and 2 to 4 juniors, with CTC roughly doubling from campus levels. The bigger prize is exit optionality around the 3 to 5 year mark: corporate strategy or CEO's-office roles at large Indian companies, category and GTM strategy roles that lean on your marketing base, PE and VC portfolio-operations teams (an A&M-style profile travels well there), or a lateral experienced-hire jump to a higher-tier firm. Internal strategy and founder's-office roles compress this: 2 to 3 years of CXO proximity often converts into an early business-head or P&L role inside the same group, though you trade away the brand-name stamp that a Big 4 line gives your CV.