India’s quick commerce surge exposes a discipline gap for marketers

In India’s frenetic retail landscape, few sectors have captured cultural momentum and commercial attention as quickly as quick commerce. What began as a pandemic-era workaround has turned into a mainstream distribution engine—one that now competes not just for consumer time but for advertising budgets and supply-chain mindshare.

That shift was formalised in mid-October 2025 when Publicis Commerce India and MMA Global India released The Quick Commerce Playbook India 2025, a framework for marketers navigating the country’s fastest-expanding retail ecosystem. At the MMA Smarties, where the report was launched, Campaign India spoke with Lalatendu Das, CEO, Publicis Media South Asia. As one of the region’s senior media leaders and an early observer of q-commerce behaviour, Das offered a pointed, unsentimental view of an industry scaling at speed while exposing structural gaps in how brands plan, measure and execute commerce strategy.

Quick commerce, he said, is expanding at an “astonishing” pace—growing over 25% in 2024—and is gaining traction across cities, categories and consumer segments. Yet, beneath that headline momentum lies a story of missed opportunities and operational bottlenecks.

The 10% reality check

Despite its scale and hyper-visibility, q-commerce remains underleveraged. Das noted that most brands surveyed in the playbook generate only about 10% of their revenue through quick commerce.

“While q-commerce is growing at a breakneck speed. Not many brands have yet cracked or successfully scaled their business around it,” he said. The 10% figure surprised him. “10% is still a little bit surprising, since I was hoping for more, since I'm an optimist. But it is growing at 175% every year, so, we have high expectations on what quick commerce can do for the country.”

The tension is clear: brands acknowledge the channel’s potential but struggle to operationalise it. The growth curve is steep; the maturity curve is not.

This gap has large implications for marketers who must go beyond piloting tactical campaigns to building distribution, pricing, SKU and supply-chain strategies suited for a channel built on immediacy and localised demand.

Narrowing search intent raises stakes for brands

Unlike horizontal marketplaces—Amazon, Flipkart—that encourage browsing, q-commerce is built on decisiveness. Consumers arrive with intent, not curiosity. Das describes it plainly: “For example, people search for the SKU, not for the brand. For example, people searching for 5 kg atta.”

This shift forces brands to rethink their presence. It is no longer about awareness but about availability, relevance and precision. “For brands, it means thinking about the brand, the right SKU in their area, whether the stock is available,” he said.

Brand discovery, long the promise of digital retail, is narrowing. “People searching for a 250 ml shampoo are directly going to branded search like ‘Head & Shoulders’. They are not coming to q-commerce to explore the options, but have made up their mind.”

In this world, long-form storytelling loses its utility. “Long form storytelling doesn’t work when somebody is coming here for a half litre shampoo,” Das explained. Instead, the opportunity lies in micro-context: weather spikes, hyperlocal needs, seasonal shifts. A frizz problem in a humid week in Delhi is not just a concern—it is a conversion signal.

For marketers, this demands sharper creative systems, SKU-level thinking and tighter operational alignment. The room for generic content or broad targeting is shrinking as quickly as search behaviour is sharpening.

Contextuality and the new retail media play

As q-commerce morphs into a retail media avenue, contextual advertising is becoming its defining differentiator. The promise is straightforward: reaching a consumer at the exact moment a need emerges.

Das illustrated this through a scenario: “Imagine you’re using a quick commerce platform, be it Zepto, Swiggy or BigBasket, and are putting a contextual ad while searching for something else. Is this contextual advertising optimised for whether the site has the right content tagging a person in Delhi searching for cough syrup when the AQI is bad, as a preventive thing?”

The technology to enable this exists, via integrations with Meta, The Trade Desk and multiple publisher ecosystems that track purchase patterns, affluence markers and micro-behaviours. But the barrier, Das emphasised, is organisational. Marketers often demand personalisation but lack the supporting discipline: structured data, interoperable systems, or aligned internal metrics.

The result is an enthusiasm-execution mismatch: the desire for precision without the foundations that allow it.

This gap becomes relevant as budgets slowly shift into q-commerce. “We did find some evidence of that,” Das confirmed. “20% of our respondents said that quick commerce is net incremental sales for them rather than pure channel shift from horizontal marketplaces or Google or Meta. Few of the respondents indicated that this is a channel shift.”

Motivations differ from efficiency, novelty, or a strategic bet on a growing channel. But Das cautioned against reading this as fatigue with established platforms. “Instead of you going and giving your inventory to wholesalers, you are now putting it on quick commerce platform,” he said. For emerging brands, this direct-to-consumer supply chain is attractive, though it brings slimmer margins and no guaranteed sustainability.

Discovery remains limited. “Today, it is not a brand-building-first platform and no marketer would think about building a quick-commerce brand, but there is always a spillover effect.” Ratings, reviews and convenience-driven word of mouth provide secondary benefits, but q-commerce stays a conversion channel, not a branding vehicle.

Agencies confront drudgery, data gaps and an AI imperative

As quick commerce reshapes retail media, agency teams are retooling their internal models. Das laid out three essentials for agencies navigating this space.

First, agility. Q-commerce platforms are evolving fast, often fixing issues mid-cycle. “We are seeing a new ad format. Six months back ago, some quick-commerce platforms were not even sure that if you advertise in certain SKU and there is a stock out and the ad was still running. Now they have optimised that automatically.”

Second, strategic clarity. “Feature is a day parting, but strategy is the time of the day they can go at,” he said. The distinction is subtle but central, and agencies must build broader frameworks, not chase algorithmic features.

Third, operational resilience. “This is a very effort-intensive work and sometimes borderlines drudgery—people monitoring and changing three times a day.” Agentic AI is beginning to remove some of the manual load, but adoption varies across clients and categories.

Underlying all of this is the industry’s biggest challenge: data alignment. “Everybody knows the destination, but not the path,” Das said.

Basic hygiene issues persist. “Do you have a consolidated view on promotional spends to advertising spends? You'll be surprised. If you ask many brands, they would say, Okay, that's a different team. This a different team. I don't get a consolidated view.”

Das argues that progress requires a sequential approach: identify key KPIs, build a foundational data structure, capture a few critical data points with consistency, and only then layer proprietary AI. Without this, AI becomes a convenience slogan rather than a differentiator.

A long horizon, but foundations first

The conversation reveals a duality central to understanding India’s q-commerce transition: the channel is simple for consumers but complex for organisations. It offers instant gratification at the front end but demands structural shifts at the back.

Formats, algorithms, dark-store routing, inventory thresholds, SKU-level bidding rules—these are evolving faster than many brand and agency teams can adapt. The brands most likely to succeed will be those that combine speed with structural clarity, data discipline with contextual nuance, and experimentation with long-term planning.

As q-commerce deepens its role in India’s retail infrastructure, the next phase will be shaped not by delivery speed but by intelligence—predictive demand forecasting, hyperlocal segmentation, automated optimisation and commerce-ready generative AI.

Yet, as Das underscored repeatedly, the future begins with fundamentals: cleaner data, clearer KPIs, sharper contextual frameworks and aligned internal teams. Marketers, he suggested, do not need more dashboards but more direction. Agencies do not need more tools but more context. Platforms do not need more ad formats but more accurate signals connecting intent with inventory.

Quick commerce is still a young channel, but its impact is no longer speculative. What remains uncertain is how quickly brands can build the structures required to keep pace with it. For now, the advantage lies with those who recognise that speed is an outcome—not a substitute—for getting the foundations right.