Beyond the Noise: How Etienne Marques and Ruchi Nayak Are Building The Catalyst

In a world where almost every brand is trying to get noticed, attention has become easier to chase and harder to hold. A campaign can create a moment, a social post can travel quickly and a headline can put a brand in front of thousands of people. But what happens after that moment passes is often more important.

Does the brand stay relevant? Does it build trust? Does it become part of a cultural conversation? And, perhaps most importantly, does the attention contribute to something meaningful for the business?

These are some of the questions that sit at the heart of The Catalyst, the Mumbai-headquartered Brand Relations agency founded by Etienne Marques in 2020. Working alongside Partner Ruchi Nayak, Marques has been building an agency around the belief that modern communications should go beyond traditional publicity and become a more integrated part of how brands build their identities.

The story of The Catalyst is closely connected to the professional journeys of its two leaders. Etienne Marques brings more than two decades of experience in communications, having worked across beauty, fashion, luxury, hospitality and lifestyle. His career has included work with brands such as L'Oréal Luxe, Sephora, Bumble India, Kama Ayurveda, Chandon, Hidesign and HRX by Hrithik Roshan.

Over the years, that experience gave him an opportunity to see how the relationship between brands and audiences was changing. Communication was no longer confined to press releases, media coverage or traditional campaigns. Consumers were discovering brands through creators, communities, experiences, partnerships and conversations taking place across multiple platforms.

The idea for The Catalyst grew from that changing landscape.

When Marques launched the agency in August 2020, the intention was not to create another conventional PR company. The Catalyst was conceived as a Brand Relations agency, with the aim of working closely with brands and their leadership teams to understand not only what they wanted to say, but what they wanted to be known for.

That distinction has become an important part of the agency's identity.

For The Catalyst, communication is not simply about generating visibility. It is about finding the right story, understanding the audience and creating connections that can continue beyond an individual campaign. Media relations remain part of the work, but they sit alongside founder positioning, influencer and KOL engagement, partnerships, community building, experiential initiatives, market intelligence and crisis communication.

Ruchi Nayak brings another layer to that approach. With more than 16 years of experience in communications and brand building, her career has included work with names such as Montblanc, Sephora, H&M, Kama Ayurveda, Bumble and HRX by Hrithik Roshan. At The Catalyst, she works closely with Marques as Partner, bringing a combination of strategic thinking, creative direction and execution to the agency's growing portfolio.

Their partnership is built around complementary strengths. Marques' experience across two decades of communications has given him a broad understanding of how the industry has evolved, while Nayak's experience brings another perspective to the process of turning a brand's larger ambitions into communication that feels relevant and consistent.

That balance becomes particularly important when working with brands that operate in very different categories.

The Catalyst's portfolio spans beauty, fashion, luxury, retail, hospitality, technology and consumer businesses. Its work has included brands such as Lancôme, YSL Beauty, Kérastase, Aminu, Ajmal Perfumes, Superkicks, Comet, Gully Labs, PTAL and CAPSUL, among others.

The variety of these businesses also reflects how much the communications industry itself has changed. A beauty brand may need to speak to editors, creators and online communities at the same time. A founder may need to establish a personal point of view alongside the company's corporate identity. A new consumer brand may need cultural relevance just as much as traditional media attention.

There is no single formula that works across all of these situations.

That is where The Catalyst's approach appears to centre on understanding the individual brand before deciding how that brand should enter a conversation. Instead of treating communications as a collection of disconnected activities, the agency works across different touchpoints with the larger brand story in mind.

The shift is also visible in the way people discover brands today. Consumers can encounter a company through an editorial feature, a creator recommendation, an event, a founder's point of view, a community or a cultural moment. These interactions may look separate on the surface, but together they contribute to how a brand is perceived.

For Marques and Nayak, this has meant building The Catalyst around a broader understanding of brand relations.

The agency has grown to a team of approximately 30 professionals and a portfolio of nearly 45 brands, according to information shared by the company. That growth has happened while retaining an emphasis on senior involvement, something that can become increasingly difficult as independent agencies expand.

For an agency built around counsel and relationships, staying close to the work matters. Clients are not simply looking for execution; increasingly, they want people who understand their business, their category and the reputation they are trying to build.

That is particularly relevant when the client is a founder-led business. The founder and the company can often become inseparable in the public eye, which means positioning one can directly influence the other. The Catalyst's work in founder positioning reflects this broader understanding of how leadership voices have become part of modern brand building.

The same applies to crisis communication. In an environment where information moves quickly, brands cannot always control the conversation, but they can prepare for it. Reputation is built over time, and how an organisation responds when circumstances become difficult can be just as important as how it communicates when everything is going well.

This is why the communications industry has moved steadily away from the idea that PR is simply about securing coverage.

Today, the challenge is more complex. Brands need to know where they belong in culture, which communities matter to them, what their leadership should stand for and how their story should evolve as the business grows.

The Catalyst's journey has unfolded during precisely this period of change.

Launched in 2020, the agency entered an industry already undergoing a major transformation. The rise of digital platforms had changed the media landscape, while creators and online communities were becoming increasingly influential in shaping consumer conversations. Rather than treating these developments as separate from traditional communications, The Catalyst has built them into its wider approach.

For Marques and Nayak, the opportunity appears to lie in connecting these different worlds.

Media remains important. So do creators. So do experiences, partnerships and communities. The real challenge is making sure they work together rather than becoming isolated pieces of a campaign.

That philosophy also explains the name The Catalyst. A catalyst does not necessarily create the entire transformation itself. It helps something happen, accelerates a process and creates the conditions for change.

For a communications agency, that is an interesting way of looking at its role. The objective is not simply to speak louder than everyone else. It is to help a brand find the right conversation and give that conversation enough substance to continue.

As The Catalyst continues to grow, its journey also reflects the changing aspirations of India's independent communications industry. Agencies today have an opportunity to build businesses that are more specialised, more entrepreneurial and closer to their clients. At the same time, they have to demonstrate that independence does not have to come at the expense of scale or capability.

Marques and Nayak are navigating that space with a model that places senior counsel and long-term relationships at the centre of the business.

Their story is therefore not only about building an agency. It is about responding to a fundamental change in the way brands communicate.

The old question was often, "How do we get attention?"

The more complicated question today is, "What do we want that attention to mean?"

For The Catalyst, the answer appears to be found somewhere between reputation and relevance, between culture and commerce, and between the immediate demands of a campaign and the longer process of building a brand people remember.

That is the space Etienne Marques and Ruchi Nayak are continuing to explore as they build The Catalyst, one relationship, one story and one brand at a time.