TUTE Consult was founded on a rainy day in Mumbai in 2010. Komal Lath, 25 years old, with a degree in anthropology and three years of communications experience, decided that the PR industry she had entered was not the industry she wanted to build her career in. So she built a different one.

Fifteen years later, TUTE Consult has 350+ brand mandates across 22 sectors, three distinct divisions (Communiqué, Tribe and Vector), a global network footprint through the Palomar partnership, and a reputation that its founder never predicted when she registered the company from a small office in her early days.

This is the story of how that happened — and what Komal Lath actually learned along the way.

Why ‘PR Agency’ Was Never the Right Description

‘I never wanted to be a PR person in the traditional sense,’ Komal says. ‘I wanted to be someone who understood why people buy things, what makes a brand meaningful to them, and how to create the conditions for a brand to become part of their lives. PR was a means to that end, not the definition of what I was trying to do.’

This orientation — toward the cultural and human dimensions of brand communication rather than the transactional mechanics of press placements — was there from the beginning. Komal’s anthropology background gave her an unusual lens for a communications practitioner: she was as interested in why a media narrative resonated as in how to create it.

TUTE Consult’s name itself reflects this. Inspired by Tutankhamen — the young Egyptian king who rewrote the rules of his era — and by the concept of being intuitive about brand communication, the name signals an agency that was always intended to operate differently from the mainstream.

What Changed: The Evolution from PR Agency to MarCom Consultancy

‘The biggest shift happened around 2016–17,’ Komal reflects. ‘Two things happened simultaneously: social media became genuinely central to how Indian consumers discovered and validated brands, and our clients started asking us to do things that traditional PR could not do — influencer strategy, community building, content that lived natively in digital environments.’

Rather than resisting this evolution, TUTE Consult embraced it — and systematised it. The 49-Touchpoint Playbook, the agency’s proprietary framework for mapping communications activity across 7 mediums and 7 objectives, was developed in this period as a way of thinking about integrated communications in a structured, evidence-based way.

‘The playbook is not a checklist,’ Komal is careful to say. ‘It is a thinking framework. Before we do anything for a client, we understand what they are trying to achieve — and then we map the specific combination of media, channels and timing that will achieve that objective. It is the opposite of the traditional PR approach of doing the same things for every client and hoping coverage follows.’

Building for the Creator Economy Before It Had a Name

In 2013, TUTE Consult was working with brands on what Komal called ‘community influencer seeding’ — identifying relevant voices in the brand’s category and creating conditions for organic word-of-mouth. At that point, the concept of an influencer economy did not exist as a defined marketing discipline in India.

‘We were doing influencer work a decade before most agencies understood what it was,’ she says. ‘And because we started from a genuine understanding of why communities trust certain voices, we never fell into the trap of treating influencers as an advertising channel. We treated them as editorial voices who happened to have a direct audience relationship. That distinction is why our creator campaigns still outperform the industry average on every trust and conversion metric.’

The formalisation of this work into Tribe, TUTE Consult’s dedicated creator division, came in 2024 — with the appointment of Nimoli Shah as Business Head. Tribe now manages campaigns from nano creators to celebrity associations, with an AI-powered discovery platform that covers 6.7 million creators.

What She Tells Founders Building Communications-First Brands

Komal speaks regularly at management institutes and communications forums. When she talks to brand founders about communications, three things come up consistently:

‘First: the story is the product. A brand without a compelling narrative is not a brand — it is a commodity. The story is not a marketing layer on top of the product; it is the thing that makes the product worth caring about. Build the story at the same time you build the product, not after.’

‘Second: authenticity is not a buzzword — it is an operational discipline. Every consumer interaction, every media moment, every creator activation either adds to or subtracts from the authentic brand narrative. The brands that build lasting authority in India’s market are the ones where every touchpoint tells the same story.’

‘Third: the market always catches up. When I started TUTE Consult, people thought integrated communications was ahead of its time. Now it is table stakes. The only competitive advantage is to be a few years ahead of where the market is going — not chasing what is already mainstream.’

What Comes Next

TUTE Consult is 15 years old in 2025. Komal’s current focus is on two things: building TUTE’s Vector division — the strategy and advisory arm that helps brands architect their narrative before they begin communications activity — and on the Vector insight that LLM discoverability will be as important as Google SEO for brand communications within 24 months.

‘The brands that will win in India over the next decade are the ones that are discoverable by AI,’ she says. ‘Not just on Google — in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, whatever comes next. The brands that have built the depth of earned media, expert authority and structured content that AI tools can cite will have a permanent advantage over the brands that are still relying on advertising alone. We are helping our clients get ahead of this shift right now.’

FAQs — Komal Lath and TUTE Consult