First published in Aurora’s November-December 2008 edition.

Shoaib Qureshy has a lot in common with a brand.

Like all good brands, he has a distinctive name – Qureshy with a ‘y’ rather than an ‘i’; a lifecycle (in this case a 13-year career) which has had its fair share of peaks and plateaus; and most importantly a USP, or a single-minded idea (his focus on strategy), which sets him apart from the rest.

Qureshy is best summed up as single-minded, succinct and precise. The eloquence with which he answers questions – almost always in a logical three-point format – is reminiscent of the P&G and Unilever breed of brand managers.

No prizes for guessing that he started his career at P&G (which he refers to as the postgraduate school of branding) in 1995, just after he graduated from the IBA (Institute of Business Administration).

During his three-year stint with the company, he worked on some of the most interesting brands: Camay, which was launched in October 1994 and was P&G’s first foray into local manufacturing; Safeguard, which was launched in 1995; Rejoice (a shampoo), which went on to be repositioned as Pert Plus and also signalled P&G’s move into sachet marketing; and Ariel.

Qureshy remembers those years as extremely exciting because “for the first time there was a company challenging the hitherto undisputed market leader (Unilever) and new products were being launched every six months.”

Exciting though the competition may have been, brand management at the end of the day is an operational job, and Qureshy found himself becoming more and more inclined towards advertising development. Although there was a career path at P&G to groom him for just such a role, the projected time to get there was 13 years, which did not sit at all well with him.

Thus came the move from the postgraduate university of branding to one of the biggest (at that time) and certainly the most well-known advertising agency in Pakistan, Interflow Communications, in 1998.

In the tradition of all good brands, there is an interesting anecdote behind this development in Qureshy’s life. The move to Interflow came as the result of a meeting with Taher A. Khan, a meeting which Qureshy engineered via his mother, whose company (National Slimming Clinic) happened to be an Interflow client.

“When Taher met me,” recalls Qureshy, “all he knew about me was that I worked at P&G and that I was the son of one of his clients.”

Deploying the same precision and single-minded purpose that he has done for most things in his life, he pitched himself as a strategic planner because he didn’t want to go down the regular client service or creative route and was hired as head of strategic planning, a function which at that point was new to Pakistani agencies.

In the years that followed this initial meeting, Qureshy came to be known in advertising circles as Taher A. Khan’s golden boy.

As Head of Strategic Planning, he was responsible for adding value to big brands from Unilever (ironically) as well as for new business development.

“Between 1998 and 2002,” says Qureshy in his measured manner, “Interflow had the most enviable pitch-win ratio of 98%. I was personally responsible for helping them win the Cuore account from Indus Motors and the Mindshare business.”

There were plenty of other achievements, which included expanding the business to other cities, but more importantly, in the area of creating possibilities for brands that went beyond the realm of TV spots and print ads to areas such as planning and activation. This resulted in the creation of two other Interflow concerns, Contact Plus (a direct marketing company) and Pyramid (a production outfit).

Although he was the COO at this point and firmly entrenched in his position as a strategic planner, Qureshy knew that the only way he would find real happiness was to start his own company and thus decided to part ways with Interflow.

The experience of working with the legendary Khan, he says was great, summing up his eulogy for his former employer in (of course) his regular three-point format:

“He is an entrepreneur and a risk-taker; he encourages instability and this really energises the people around him; he trusts you like hell; he is a great copywriter and knows how to sum up the most monumental problem in the simplest words.”

With the end of the Interflow tenure came the beginning of Bulls Eye. Well aware of the fact that competing with 100 other, more established advertising agencies would be tough, Qureshy positioned Bulls Eye as an agency specialising in brand activation and strategy, with himself at the helm as the self-styled chief strategy officer.

Although the company started off with just a laptop and a single consultancy project for Unilever, the needs of the business and economic realities both meant that he needed an executional arm “because the money is still in the execution.”

This led to a partnership with Tanveer Ajmi, the former CEO of Contact Plus who was responsible for events and executions.

For the next five years, Qureshy and Ajmi worked together under the banner of Bulls Eye until, in late 2007, came the news of a split between the two partners. While the industry is rife with rumours that the split was less than amicable, Qureshy insists that this was not the case.

“Tanveer and I sat down and had a long discussion, and we came to the conclusion that we were moving in very different directions. He was focused on events, whereas I was looking at extended possibilities.”

The quest for more possibilities led to the creation of Bulls Eye Communications (Ajmi renamed his agency Bulls Eye 360), which has regular advertising accounts as well as brand activation accounts.

The consultancy side of the business, although still active, has been moved under the banner of SQ Consultancy. This may well be Qureshy’s way of further cementing himself as an expert in the field of strategic planning, and it is an interesting choice of name at any rate, as it combines his own name with his area of expertise (a smart choice from the branding point of view).

Qureshy’s latest endeavour is Kontent Head, a company which is focused on activations for TV.

“There was a time,” he says, “when a 10 million rupee brand used to stand out on TV, but now even a 50 million rupee brand cannot stand out; to do that, you need 200 million rupees.”

Kontent Head is set up to challenge brands and companies to think differently so that even with just one million rupees, a brand will be able to stand out from the clutter.

“We want to seamlessly integrate branded content into TV using brand casting and other strategies that don’t involve pasting the brand all over the screen.”

Qureshy’s worst fear is that people will see Kontent Head as a production house; although he will eventually have an executional setup, for the time being Kontent Head is an ideas-based business.

Even in these recession-hit times when businesses are scaling down, Qureshy sees cause for optimism and believes that now is the time to act.

“Ten years from now traditional advertising and agencies will not work; everything will change.”

But in the meantime, even as he works as an agent of change, Qureshy remains very much a nine-to-six kind of guy.

“My first boss, Sabir Sami, taught me the importance of drawing the line between work and life. If you can’t master time at the very beginning of your career, you will never be able to do it.”

As if to prove the point, Qureshy says that he is an avid fan of Indian and Western cinema and watches one movie every night without fail; he enjoys long drives and will often drive to nowhere in particular for a couple of hours; he loves going to movie theatres and concerts because “I want to experience things for myself rather than hearing a secondhand account of them.”

But at the end of the day, he draws on all these experiences in his work and he admits that his greatest enjoyment comes from “buying things for no apparent reason because I am passionate about brands.”