Righting a category bias inside the OYO brand.
OYO data was unambiguous: ninety percent of bookings were made by men. My team's research told a different story — women guests were the actual decision-makers behind the choice, and the duration, of the stay.
The mismatch pointed to something bigger than a marketing insight. It was a mirror held up to a category — and a country — that had long treated women travellers as an afterthought. Once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it in the language of hotel signage, in the assumptions baked into check-in scripts, in the casting of every hospitality ad.
What followed wasn't a campaign. It was a set of brand-wide interventions, most of them invisible from the outside.
The most consequential change happened in the least visible place. I led and facilitated workshops for call-centre teams on how they addressed women guests — the assumptions in their scripts, the tone shift when a female voice was on the line, the small deflections that added up to a woman feeling like she wasn't the customer being served.
Fixing the script was the easy part. Getting the team to hear how the old script sounded to a woman on the other end was the work.
OYO's social handles at the time were a magnet for trolls, and the standard playbook was to ignore or block. We tried something different — reaching out directly, in the brand voice, and asking commenters to subtly modify how they engaged with our posts.
Not policing. Not lecturing. Just consistent, calm, repeated modelling of what a serious brand expected from its community. The comment sections shifted, slowly, and then more visibly.
The casting rule became simple: women were protagonists, not bystanders. Not the person waiting in the lobby. Not the wife on the vacation. The traveller. The business guest. The friend group. The solo booker.
Whatever the story was, a woman was the person driving it.
Fixing the script was the easy part. Getting the team to hear how it sounded was the work.
Category-defining brand work in hospitality doesn't come from ad campaigns. It comes from the accumulation of thousands of small decisions about how the brand treats its guests before, during, and after their stay.
Getting the gender lens right on those decisions wasn't a moment. It was a multi-year discipline that, more than any single campaign, changed how a large section of the Indian traveller population experienced the brand.
It's also the case study I return to when I'm asked what "brand" actually means at scale. It doesn't mean the film. It means the call script, the signage, the casting, the comment reply, the training deck. All of it. Every day. For years.