Marketing Is Applied Psychology: How Indraa Kumar D Reads Why People Really Buy

Indraa Kumar D, founder of Apex Influence, a marketing and technology consultancy based in Bengaluru, approaches marketing from a perspective that goes beyond campaigns, clicks and conversion rates. For him, marketing is fundamentally about understanding people.

His core belief is simple: marketing is applied psychology.

Long before he entered the marketing industry, Indraa was interested in understanding how people think, behave and make decisions. That curiosity began during his school years, when he realised that the way he learned was different from the way many people expected him to learn.

Indraa describes himself as having a dyslexic mind. He could remember entire textbooks and retain what teachers said in class, but writing did not come as easily. What some people interpreted as being slow became, over time, a different kind of strength. Because he was observing rather than constantly writing, he developed a habit of watching closely — how things worked, how people behaved and, eventually, how his own mind worked.

That curiosity led him towards psychology. Even while studying engineering, Indraa continued learning about psychology independently. He explored books, conversations and programmes such as Heart Line by Dr Shyam, trying to understand the reasons behind human behaviour.

His professional journey initially took him into IT and later into digital marketing leadership. It was there that the connection became clear.

Marketing gave him a practical way to apply his interest in psychology.

Every purchase, in his view, is ultimately an attempt to solve something. Sometimes the problem is practical. Sometimes it is emotional. Often, it is a combination of both. A customer may say they are buying a product for one reason, while the deeper motivation may involve security, status, convenience, confidence, belonging or aspiration.

Understanding that difference became central to Indraa’s approach.

“In marketing you often have to understand the business, and the customer, better than the founder does.”

This belief also reflects one of the biggest challenges he has encountered professionally. Business owners naturally understand their products and services extremely well. They know how their offering works, what it costs and what makes it different. But understanding why a customer actually chooses that offering can require a different kind of investigation.

For Indraa, this means that marketing should not begin with an advertisement. It should begin with questions.

Who is the customer? What are they worried about? What are they trying to achieve? What does the purchase represent to them? What alternatives are they considering? And perhaps most importantly, what emotional problem are they really trying to solve?

That philosophy became the foundation for Apex Influence. The consultancy works with businesses across sectors including gold and jewellery, real estate, coworking, interiors and corporate fit-outs, developing marketing and growth systems around the specific realities of each business.

Indraa’s experience also comes with substantial exposure to performance marketing. He has managed more than Rs 5 crore in Google Ads spend in a year, with individual client accounts crossing Rs 1 crore annually. Before establishing Apex Influence, he spent years working in IT and digital marketing leadership, experiences that shaped his understanding of both technology and commercial growth.

Today, Apex Influence is evolving beyond the traditional agency model. Alongside marketing services, the company is building technology and internal systems, including a custom CRM, with the aim of helping businesses manage growth more systematically.

That evolution reflects where Indraa ultimately wants to take the company.

Performance marketing — generating leads and capturing demand at the bottom of the funnel — remains an important part of the business. But he does not see it as the final destination. His larger ambition is brand building: creating Indian brands that people do not simply recognise or purchase from, but genuinely value and cherish.

For him, technology is part of that ambition, not a replacement for human understanding. Systems, software, analytics and automation can make a business more efficient, but they become meaningful only when they are built around a clear understanding of the business and its customers.

Indraa Kumar D’s journey from engineering and IT into marketing therefore has a consistent thread running through it: curiosity about people. His approach to marketing is shaped less by the question of how to get someone to click and more by the question of why someone would want to buy in the first place.

That is also the philosophy behind Apex Influence — to understand the business, understand the customer and then build the marketing, technology and systems around that understanding.

His long-term goal is straightforward: to build Apex Influence into a firm remembered not merely for running campaigns, but for understanding businesses and the people who buy from them more deeply than anyone else.