When Legacy Brands Outsource D2C, Who Owns the Consumer?

Late last month, Colgate-Palmolive India did something that looks operational on the surface and philosophical underneath: it handed the direct-to-consumer and ecommerce business of its Palmolive brand to Bombay Shaving Company.

Under the arrangement, Bombay Shaving Company will run Palmolive’s consumer-facing advertising and customer relationships across D2C and ecommerce. Colgate-Palmolive keeps general and modern trade, plus product innovation, quality and supply-chain calls. The two aren’t strangers — Colgate-Palmolive Asia Pacific picked up a 14% stake in Bombay Shaving Company in 2018.

At the company’s investor day, MD and CEO Prabha Narasimhan was candid that the D2C “flywheel” works differently from classic brand building, and that Colgate’s own attempt hadn’t been best in class. That honesty is rarer than it should be. But it opens a question every legacy marketer should be sitting with: how much of the digital commerce engine can you outsource before you start outsourcing the consumer relationship itself?

Two layers of D2C — and only one is safely rentable

Swagat Sarangi, Co-Founder of Smytten, offers the cleanest mental model in the exchange4media report. Split digital commerce into two layers.

• Layer one — machinery. Warehousing, marketplace operations, catalogue management, performance marketing, returns. These are specialised operational muscles. Renting them is sensible.
• Layer two — signals. Why someone bought once and never came back. How a customer decodes your product. Which unexpected cohort has quietly adopted it. Sarangi calls this “research arriving disguised as a sales channel.”

His warning is the sentence to pin above your desk: if all that flows back to the brand is ROAS and GMV, the partnership can be commercially successful and strategically hollow.

Why this is a behavioural science problem, not a logistics one

Consumer psychology doesn’t live in a dashboard summary. It lives in friction points. Keyur Dhami, SVP – Customer Success and CoE at WebEngage, points to a shopper who repeatedly searches a specific variant and never buys it. That single behaviour could be a pricing objection, an availability gap, a positioning mismatch or a communication failure — four very different diagnoses, each with a different fix.

Strip that observation out of your organisation and you’ve lost your cheapest, fastest source of category insight. Sumeet Bhojani, Head – Brand & Strategic Insights at Godrej Enterprises Group, makes the pragmatic case for partners — “everyone doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel” — while noting that digital commerce is now consumer intelligence, not merely a transaction channel.

The numbers make the stakes bigger

India’s D2C landscape has outgrown its startup phase. Statista counts 800-plus D2C brands; D2CStory, updated September 2026, verifies 1,555 across 46 categories. Unicommerce’s 2026 D2C report draws on 6,000-plus brands and more than 410 million shipments — a sign of how far direct-commerce practice has spread beyond the venture-funded famous names.

A February 2026 McKinsey study puts current D2C channel sales in India at $10-12 billion, potentially $60 billion by 2030. More pointedly for FMCG: McKinsey estimates D2C adoption is growing at nearly three times the pace of traditional marketplaces, with 53% of the 1,049 Indian MSMEs surveyed preferring D2C routes over 47% on marketplaces.

When a channel grows that fast, control of the feedback loop stops being an ecommerce question and becomes a board-level one.

The hybrid model: rent the engine, keep the steering wheel

Ekta Dutta, Head of Marketing at BIBA, frames it neatly: “Specialists can accelerate execution, but the brand must continue to own the consumer, the data and the learning.” Vipin Yadav, VP and Head of Marketing at DriveX, adds the organisational risk — pushing digital commerce fully outside the company can recreate “a new version of the very silo” brands were trying to dismantle. Shaily Mehrotra, CEO and Co-Founder of Fixderma and FCL, notes that digital-natives judge themselves on repeat behaviour, CAC payback, contribution margins and lifetime value — and that consumer relationships and their learnings can’t be fully handed over.

What to write into the contract

If you’re a brand manager or founder evaluating a similar deal, the psychology of the partnership is decided in the scope document:

• Raw data access, not reports. Event-level behaviour, not a monthly deck of aggregates.
• A named internal owner. Someone inside the brand whose job is to translate signals into product and positioning decisions.
• Qualitative reporting mandates. Return reasons, review themes, support transcripts — not just conversion percentages.
• Insight-to-innovation rituals. A standing forum where D2C findings meet R&D and brand teams.
• Exit portability. If the partnership ends, the customer list, the learnings and the tooling logic stay with you.

The emerging model isn’t outsourcing D2C. It’s outsourcing parts of the engine while making absolutely sure you still know who’s in the passenger seat — and why they got in.

Source: Indian Advertising Media & Marketing News – exchange4media