Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Why Marketing Must Make People Believe, Not Just Buy | Akhil Almeida | Ep 015

Transcript

Why Marketing Must Make People Believe, Not Just Buy | Akhil Almeida | Ep 015 · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: If anybody who follow follows Formula One, think of the marketer or the CMO as being the driver, the one who sits in the car.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: But without the pit crew, you need creative teams, you need data scientists, you need people with financial acumen, you need CX strategists, you need product experts.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that's your pit crew, right?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Team boss, the CEO, the team principal.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: Without all of these things working in conjunction, the car goes nowhere.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Look at the most successful, one of the most successful drivers in Formula One is a gentleman by the name of Michael Schumacher.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: What made Michael Schumacher great was the fact wasn't just the fact that he was a great driver.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: He spent hours of his time before and after the race with his engineers, just refining every single element of the car.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: And good marketers need to be able to do that.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: The car is your brand.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's what people see going around the track, that's what people buy.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: This episode of the SopersMo show was made possible by the great folks at Moving Walls.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Moving Walls provides a global technology platform built by out-of-home advertising experts automating the process of planning, buying, executing, and measuring out-of-home campaigns.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Moving Walls helps leading brands and agencies to move to audience-based planning, improve turnaround times with automated proposals, and implement programmatic digital, out-of-home and verify campaign performances.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Moving Walls helps measure, reach and influence moving audiences across the world.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: For more information, log on to www.movingwalls.com.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think you started off very early with Virgin Records, which is really around what we now talk about content marketing, but I think you start very you started very early uh with content marketing, and then you were in HR for some time, and then you moved to market research, and then you moved to uh you know insurance marketing and BFSI or you know financial services marketing.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an interesting background.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: So when did this interest to build a career in marketing start?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And can you tell us a little bit about who are your heroes and what's the kind of inspiration that you got from them?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, so uh I think probably for someone who would like to kind of understand what I do.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, if I had to kind of describe my career or my world in a single sentence, I'd say it's been about decoding human behavior and using that understanding to kind of build brands that people actually care about.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: When I worked in the music business, emergent records, and this is you know a couple of decades ago, that was my first job.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, really, the product that you were selling was the artist and their music, right?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: And you had to get people to care about that enough that they would go out into a store and buy a CD or a cassette tape, right?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that became really the product that you sold.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and to understand that really you'd have to get a to be able to find an artist that was marketable, you had to know, you know, really what was it that you know what were the tastes and preferences that that consumers had, you know, what was trendy, what was you know uh what was the in-thing.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Music is one of music entertainment, these are fields which are very have to be very much on the pulse of the consumer, and that was probably my first sense review moving from someone who is just like a listener coming out of college uh into actually the marketing of a product, music as a product, and artists as a product, and then understanding that okay, fine, there is an entire industry that focuses a lot on understanding what is relevant to the consumer, what sounds, what trends, what music.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: How can you package an artist?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: How can you take someone who's got a lot of raw talent, right, and package them in such a way so that they can actually be, you know, um a very saleable product.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, uh, to me, really, that's where marketing kind of uh that can that was like kind of give me my first love or uh or pique my real my real interest in the field of in the field of marketing, the fact that it's not just about having a product, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's about understanding people at the end of the day, because people buy brands and brands are things that people care about.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're able to get people to care about something, then they're much more interested in having a relationship with you.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so really that's I think that's what the job job of all marketers are.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think over the course of that entire period, I would say I've worked across several jobs, uh, some big, some in some very well-known brands, others in you know very small startups.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I've had the opportunity to kind of work uh across the banking and financial services industry.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: I've worked with e-commerce, I've worked uh with FMCG, with OTT, some tech clients.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um and each of these kinds of experiences has kind of always reinforced what I believe is a fundamental truth.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's that marketing isn't about selling, right?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's about making people believe.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: And really that's where I feel that I have the most, I find the most passion, I have the most passion where I have the most joy, right?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: In kind of taking something and saying, okay, fine, how do I get people to believe in what it is that I'm which so when I look at your uh experience, uh I picked up three areas which I thought uh you know if you can uh really dig deep and understand and uh learn what you learned, uh that will be a good starting point.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to pick up uh three areas that I found uh very, very uh differentiated from many CMOs that I have seen.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the first one is the work you did in Cantor, okay, where uh you built something called uh predictive content intelligence.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where uh what you really uh did there was I think uh you started looking at different content, you started looking at which content works for what uh you know context, and there's a lot of work that you did around the predictive content uh you know uh intelligence.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: So can you talk a little bit about what was predictive content intelligence?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because today content marketing is at the core of uh what many marketers have to do, and uh that's something that probably uh you know you did.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: So is that something that uh uh you can talk about?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the idea was we will not so when we when we talk predictive, at least in today's language, really I think the implication is that this is what's going to be big, right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in the future.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: But I think content and the way that people consume content has the channels have changed, so the media has changed over time, but tastes and preferences are remain relatively fixed.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: I think by the time you if I take the music business, for example, we've saw we used to see that people would buy certain gen would tend to prefer certain genres of music.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: If you listen to a lot of classical music, that makes up the bulk of your library.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: You might have some jazz, you might have some rules, but classical music is your mainstay.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: If you buy pop and rock music, those most of your art of the artists that you follow really are you know around pop and rock, though you might have a little bit of uh other influences as well.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: So when it comes to content, really uh over time the the preferences generally tend to get fixed with a little bit of variation here and there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: What we were trying to do with content was really try to figure out that you have this entire medium called digital, it's allowing you to identify consumers of by different demographics, by location, uh you know, by what websites they visit.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: Could we anticipate what type of content would actually be relevant to them?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: Because on the internet you don't know who is on the other end, all right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have a person that you are speaking to.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: And really, what we were trying to do was trying to understand patterns, right?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: People who use certain apps, people who visit certain websites or read certain types of articles, what sort of content is do they gravitate towards, and how could that information be very useful to brands?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, let's say I work in the financial services industry.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, if I have a person who is, say, a type A person, right?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh that person needs to look at a lot of statistics, right?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: Likes to do a lot of in-depth research, uh, likes to do a lot of comparisons, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that kind of person will respond much better to information that is probably given to him in a tabulated format that shows very clear pros and cons.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, that has what we call a mystery, give get, you give this much, this is what you get, how much is how much you get in return, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one type of content for that kind of individual or consumer, right?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: But let's say I've got, you know, now a person is type B, this is a type B consumer.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Type B consumer is someone who doesn't really want to get into too much detail, they prefer their content to be shared with them maybe through a short shareable video.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: They they're not looking for depth of information, they're looking, but they are attracted to a lot of visual storytelling, right?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: So, for that kind of consumer, really, how do you identify that this is the kind of consumer that you're dealing with, and therefore figure out how to transit that same message right in such a way so that it actually brings out all of the relevant information that they want, right?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, type B person may want a real, they might want, they may respond to infographics, but the minute you give them an article, right, even if it's extremely well written, if it goes over 150 words, they're never going to touch it.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And as marketers today, really, we have all of these different types of content that we can use that are at our disposal, but but we really need to be able to understand what content to develop for whom and when to pitch it with them.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: So uh if I have to take a different category, say a category like uh shampoo, everybody uses shampoo, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um for you take two young women, let's say they're both in between the age range of 20 to 30, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh say let's say early 20s, their first jobbers, right?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and now they're going, they're just kind of starting off their career, uh, and they're looking for products that will help with hair care, right?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: And shampoo happens to be one of those things.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Now, when you're in college and when you're moving into the workplace, you're all of a sudden trying to, there's a shift in your you know, in the way that you the world perceives you and you perceive yourself, right?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: So all of a sudden, wardrobes change, personal habits, the ones that you want to project to the outside world, those change.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And uh especially for women and their hair, right?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh maybe I have short hair, so all I'm looking, so I'm just looking for you know something that has to kind of you know uh make the the make the hair look very formal.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: But if I have long hair, how do I kind of manage that in the workplace?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: Do I tie it up?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: If I have curly hair, if I have straight hair, really uh, you know, what kind of product is actually going to work best for me?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Now, in that sense, one person might be saying, Okay, fine, for me, I'm just looking for something that keeps my hair clean, you know, presentable, and that's it.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm looking for something fairly functional.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: But for another person, they may be like, hey, listen, my hair is really curly, right?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it tends to not get well into an easy environment, right?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: So then in that case, I need a special kind of product, I need a different kind of product.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: I need something that will work specifically for me.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: The content that she's looking for is very different, right?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, in that sense, it's both being the the idea of predictive content was simply coming back to the original point of understanding who that consumer was, understanding what was relevant to them, figuring out how they which format they preferred to view that content.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a video, is it infographic, is it a customer testimonial, is it an influencer?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then helping brands kind of double down on those pieces of content.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: So the content is able to work hard.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think what happens is today as marketers, we are very confused.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: We have so many, we have this plethora of information, we have so much data saying this content works, this content works, you know, uh, this content doesn't work, therefore, this is what we need to do.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's actually you need to figure out who your consumer is and choose the content that's right for them.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: So beautiful.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: So clearly uh uh it was like a matrix that you would say, here is a persona, this persona for this category uh consumes this kind of content, and therefore, if I am a marketer or a brand, what kind of content can I really uh you know build as a content engine?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is really what I think uh you are talking about in the predictive content intelligence work that you did, right?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, how did that learning help you when you became a CMO?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I think uh for me, really, it wasn't just that learning, uh it was more a reinforcement of uh you know things that we had kind of come across with over the course of my career.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think when you're building a marketing career, really it's about A, always having, if you want to be successful, you have to have you know, all it always first of all boils down with boils down to a deep understanding of the customer, having a good understanding of your business, and then really trying to figure out where that dissection is going to be.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: So we used to be yeah, uh we used to be known by another name, we've been known by another name since 2008 and in 2024 when Bandan Financial Holdings acquired us.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it came with the challenge of kind of repositioning what was a relatively well-established name into something that actually now fit within the you know uh larger financial services ecosystem of the Bandan group.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: So for us, this was a lot more than just a changing of a logo or the changing of a tagline, right?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was about building credibility, building trust, and building long-term equity in a sector like in life insurance where there is a bit of skepticism, right?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so in a way, the challenge really was how do you position yourself not just as another private insurer, right?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: Going back to Bandan's own roots, right?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: About access, about inclusion, about financial security, and saying, okay, fine, how do we position ourselves in light of this in a way that's still relevant to the end customer?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: And and that kind of helped having that understanding kind of helped us pull give us a positioning where we are today.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, today you see in Banan Life Communication where we're really all about making insurance more accessible.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Accessible for whom?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Accessible for the self-employed, accessible for middle class Indians, accessible for women, right?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the kind of focus areas that we're uh uh that we kind of double down on.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's because of the fact that yes, it has to be, like I said, an understanding of who you are as a business, where your customer is and where those two things can potentially interspel.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful, beautiful.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think uh I'm going to pick up the second strand of work that you did, uh to me, uh very early in your career, which is you probably ran one of the largest e-commerce panels, right?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh when e-commerce, I don't think, was even uh you know, uh I would say it was just at its infancy stage, and you are building an understanding of e-commerce audience.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so can you talk to us about uh setting up the panel, the learnings that you had, and some of the insights that actually surprised you because you seem to come across as somebody who wants to understand the human behavior, a very strong understanding of how uh you know uh you you buy things.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought this whole e-commerce panel was a very interesting play of understanding shopping moving offline to online, right?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And again, uh when I look at your uh LinkedIn profile, you know, I see a banner which says digital first, right?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's really what I see there, and therefore, some of the uh nuances probably picked up from there.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, therefore, what did those experiences teach you when you did those panels and what was interesting insight that you still remember?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I now that you mentioned, I think I I think I need to relook at that description because yes, it does say digital building digital first brands, but I think at the end of the day, for any brand to be successful, you need to be customer first or consumer first, really.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's those are the brands that are successful.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a good thing you pointed that out because I may have to go back and just review that.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but yeah, I think by the time uh we started working on e-commerce, actually, e-commerce had been so we're talking between the period of about 2015 to 2020.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: So e-commerce in India had already you know kind of been established.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it had it was not at the size that it is today, but it had definitely you know been around for a few years.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh probably the I think for uh what I think the lessons that led up to us setting up the panel really uh that were uh that were crucial for me was that you know when I first started uh you know post-Virgin uh you know uh I'd spent some time abroad, I came back to India.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this is around 2008, and that at that point I really kind of stumbled into you know uh this thing called digital marketing, right?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Which was very new for us at that point in time.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh things had just kind of begun to get interesting.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: Google had acquired YouTube at that point, the iPhone had just come out, you know, brands were still kind of debating uh whether social media was a passing fad.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, really, I was fortunate that I had worked at companies that had encouraged experimentation.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: When I'm talking about experimentation, I mean where can where can you combine behavioral science with business metrics to understand not just what custom consumers were doing but really why are they doing it?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: And for us, really, uh, when I moved to Kandar uh and we had this idea of setting up like a digital shopper planet, it was more an extension of that.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because one of the challenges that we saw and we identified is that there was a lack of information to brands that were trying to understand the e-commerce landscape, right?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: So when you think of how e-commerce in India started, you started with books, right?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then you moved into consumer electronics like mobile phones in apparel fashion, and those are categories that kind of really grew out.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and for the platforms, the online platforms like the Flipkards and the Amazons and the Mintras, which are really trailblazing in India, um they had access to a lot of data, right?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: But for brands that were actually selling on those platforms, right, their understanding was limited to the category that they were selling in.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: And for us, we really said at the end of the day, you are selling to an individual, or an individual is making that choice.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: How can we better help you understand this individual better?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that was basis, that was the idea that that we had.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you look at the way that traditional uh consumer research is done, especially around shopper panels, it's a very physical face to face sort of interaction.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you would it's not uncommon even today in India, some of the largest, most well established panels will require.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Person from you know the uh company that does the recording and the calculation visiting an individual's household, doing an inventory of all of the items that are there in their household, looking at the bills to figure out you know where they're purchased from, making a record of that in a diary, and then you know, recording that back.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I think that works well still for a lot of categories, uh, especially household consumption categories.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you don't often change your brand of rice, thal, ata, salt, you know, uh things like that.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: So staples pretty much remains fixed.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: It helps when you're trying to understand changes in market share from one region to another, uh, whether a new product is penetrating into a category.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: But we realize e-commerce was moving much, much faster than that.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: There was consumers were experimenting from one platform a new platform was at some point seemingly launched you know every other month.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and depending on where platforms, we know this to make the start in you know one particular area and then they kind of uh and then they kind of bloom out into the rest of the country.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: So platforms are very strong in one in some markets, but not so strong in others.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: And for a brand to kind of figure out really where do I focus my attention, really that's where information or data became became useful to them.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so the idea of the com shop up partner was that we knew everybody who was buying anything online, right, uh, would get an online receipt.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right, and what we did was we would recruit, we recruited like a large number of shoppers, I think about 60,000 people, uh, which when you think of the entire size of India's population, 60,000 might seem very small, uh, but 60,000 is very sizable if you're able to make sure your panel is representative, right?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right of the population, representative of that population that actually shops on.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we were able to recruit you know a fairly large uh number of people uh and get them to share all of their online receipts for us.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: And we worked with our tech teams to kind of do it and to automate the technology so it never became a physical transaction.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: So if Akil was buying something off of Amazon of Lipcart or any other platform, I didn't have to forward it right back to uh you know the partner that we were working with.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was simply done automatically.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it was never a question of, oh, I've forgotten one receipt and I've you know here's the other receipt.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: So we were what this helped us figure out is really how fast the category was growing, which markets it was growing in, how often people experimented, right?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because sometimes you will just a new category is launched and gets a lot, there's a lot of advertising or promotion around it, and you may want to experiment with it, but then it depends on what SKU is available, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: Say something like groceries, right?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: What kind of today we're we're in the age of a Zepto and a Plinkit with everything comes in 10 minutes and we're used to that, especially in the large cities, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: But at that point, the idea of uh you know of buying groceries online when I could go downstairs to the Karana store and do the same thing, okay, was it was a significant shift.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: So we would see customers kind of experimenting with that, and we would see when they would pick.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: We we were able to identify when habits became sticky, right?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: So we know that this person is more likely to be a repeat customer, and when habits would be not so sticky, so then they would you know say instead of they might still buy the category every month, but they might buy online only once in you know, once in a quarter.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: More of flippant shopping behavior, some will be a flippant shopping behavior for a certain category, some would be a sticky purchase behavior for a certain category.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, it was not so much of a stripping, it was more a question of convenience.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I'm trying to buy uh you know an SKU of uh let's say it's summer vacations, right?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's summer vacations.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: I've and you know a lot of families visit each other, cousins go and visit each other.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: So imagine in you know, you've got this, you've got this household, nuclear family, but all of a sudden during the summer vacations, you've got a whole bunch of cousins who are visiting, and they're all kids, right?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: And you have these ranging between the ages of six to twelve.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Each of them is coming in uh and they want cereal.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: One person wants chockovers, one person wants you know uh uh you know a different flavor, one person wants uh you know this regular cereal.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: All of a sudden, you will now if you go down to the local Kirana store, they might not stock everything that you want, right?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, how does the you know how does the person the household kind of make the decision?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, fine.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_02: I know people are coming in.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: I want to stock up before people before these kids come in.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: Kids are always hungry, it's some applications are gonna be playing around all the time, they might want a snack.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let me figure out where I can get all of uh you know all of the different things without having to scour the city.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Go online, do that shopping, uh do the shopping, and all of a sudden you've got all those different flavors of cereal sitting in your kitchen, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Ready for when the customer comes in.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And but that's something that's only required at that point, it's convenience, right?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing is when it's when it becomes more sticky, when it becomes habitual.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Say you consume steer on a regular basis.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now you have a separate cereal for the wife or the husband, maybe they consume special cake because it's working, it's you know more calorie conscious.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: But the child loves the cereal with fruits and berries and different flavors, and uh they don't always stick to the same cereal.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe on uh you know Monday to Friday they want a standard cereal, but Saturday, Sundays for chocos, right?
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's the weekend cereal that they get to have, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: So then you will find this consumption happening on both ends.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: So that's when you see that those sticky behaviors kind of tripping in.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we were able to kind of identify things like this, not just on cereal, but across all categories, because as people be kind of shocked more, we would kind of see where that shift was happening, and then it would help allow us to kind of figure out what habits were creating that stickiness and what habits were not.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you were able to build out personas, uh, you know, different cities behaving differently, different kinds of households, uh, you know, having different uh e-shopping patterns.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's almost like a shopper marketing equivalent, but you're doing it on an e-commerce audience, right?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's really the probably uh the early phases of uh how we went to this was really early days for us.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think today the kind of data that's available uh uh is very different.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like I said, we're talking about 10 years ago.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so the the landscape was different, but at that point, yeah, it was very interesting information to have.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: And really for us, it was about understanding what is driving that decision because data tells you one thing, data tells you why people are buying.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't necessarily tell you why they are buying it.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: And for us, it was about being able to marry both.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: How can I figure out not just what the consumption pattern is, but what's influencing that consumption pattern.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: So when I look at your experience, uh I see uh you know content, then the predictive content intelligence, then you're actually uh doing a bit of research around e-commerce and understanding the audience, and then you also did a mobile audience panel, right?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: Which is again something which is very interesting, which is to actually look at so you've got mobile, you've got e-commerce, you've got content.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly, your ability to uh look at data, to look at digital uh across multiple devices is something that you would have instinctively picked up.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe uh you know you you don't see it this way, but I think uh if you're able to bring in then uh bring in the nuances, right?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you're able to bring in the nuances, then you can start applying it in business, right?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So so is it do you think it's important for a marketing professional to have a fairly important view of all uh you know all of these uh capabilities, at least in some depth, so that when they start moving from one level to another, it gives them the perspective.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it's important?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: So if you think about what's important to marketers today, okay, and you compare it to what was say the past, I think marketing always has been about creativity and storytelling, right?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think good marketing or successful marketing will continue to be about creativity and storytelling, but it's also important for marketers to realize that you know what got you to this point today is not necessarily enough to get you to where you want to be.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: So, as marketers, really we need to kind of you know uh expand our own portfolio of understanding, right?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: A marketer today who doesn't understand analytics or behavioral science or even financial metrics, you know, uh is kind of setting themselves up for the relevance.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think today to be a successful marketer, there are a few things you need to be uh good at, and if you're not good at them, really start you know, start kind of building up your expertise in at least one of these areas so that you are you know uh you become a better marketer.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: First thing is uh pattern definition, right?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think the best marketers are the ones who are able to spot cultural shifts before they actually go mainstream.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh think about when the iPhone was first launched.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: When the iPhone was first launched, uh you know people say that the iPhone killed uh the iPhone killed Nokia or the iPhone killed you know BlackBerry.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: The iPhone actually killed four companies, right?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: There was Nokia, there was BlackBerry, there was Motorola, uh, and I believe there was Qualcomm.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: So there were four companies that kind of just eventually were killed by the fact that the iPhone was launched.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: But there was another company that was actually able to spot like a fundamental shift that would come because of the launch of the iPhone that wasn't even in the headset business, right?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: And they were able to do they were they were able to kind of be predictive about where it wanted to go, and then they were and today they're an incredibly successful company.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right, this company did not even have a mobile operating system, that company was Google, their business was search, right?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it still continues to be search and advertising.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: But in 2007, I think when the iPhone was launched, I think very soon after that, if you go back into the if you uh go back and read the case studies, it's really about how Google responded at that point in time.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: They realized very early on that there would be a switch from the World Wide Web to apps, especially mobile, and they were able to predict this shift.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what did they do as a result?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: They went out and identified someone who had a very strong mobile operating system, which was called Android, and they acquired.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: Think of this: Google doesn't make smartphones as not their core business, right?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, they have a pixel today, but what percentage of pixels is Google's entire business?
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's very small.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: But they were able to identify that this was a shift that consumers were going to, you know, uh undertake.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: They acquired a mobile operating system and they've built their entire business using Android today.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Android is given away for free, essentially, right?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: But why is it given away for free?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because it helps Google understand the customer better so they can serve better, more relevant ads.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: So at the end of the day, Android is you know just a means to an end to kind of make for Google to maintain their superiority in on digital advertising and search.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can't open a mobile phone device and not have not seen the Google search bar or the Google or the YouTube app, right?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: So pattern recognition becomes something that becomes very critical.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: The second thing I think that marketers need to be start getting comfortable with, if they're not already comfortable with, is just this mindset of agility.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think you know marketers love to work off of a playbook, right?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: But all playbooks, especially now, have an expiration date, right?
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to be able to test, to iterate, and to pivot quickly.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: You can't be stuck to a rigid 12-month plan or a 24-month plan and say this is what I'm going to do because this is what the plan says, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: You need that element of agility, right?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the third thing I think that all marketers should strive for is you know just an understanding of the business, the commercial acumen.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: If you can't articulate what is the cost of acquisition, what is the long-term value, what is the ROI, right?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: You're going to struggle as a marketer as you grow in your career to kind of justify marketing investments, especially when you're talking to leadership or to boards at some point.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: So these are kind of three things.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: You need to be able to kind of spot trend spot, look at patterns, be able to judge when the shift is going to happen.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: That comes from people watching and listening to consumers.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: You need to be agile, so that means being a little bit flexible in your mindset, not being too rigid, right?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's doesn't I don't mean throw the baby out of the bathroom every temperature you've had, look at it.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Really understand what is the implication you can have for your business, and then if you think it's going to be significant, work towards it, right?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: So build that agility in.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Three is understand your business, have that commercial acumen so that you can understand really what investments you're making within marketing, how it's potentially going to benefit the business, right?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think probably the one thing that marketers, like really good marketers or successful marketers, have been able to do that is very underrated, is what I call behavior shaping.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, if you think about it, really good marketers they don't just sell a product, they are actually able to shift a consumer's habits.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_02: A product like shampoo.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, shampoo was not a daily use product.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: If you go back in time, my mother's generation when she was very young, right?
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_02: Her mother's generation, shampoo was not a daily use product in India, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't until brands actually invested in habit formation through marketing that it became something that became much more delayed.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Today, you can't think of at least the the you know, in most modern households, you will see one, two, possibly more bottles of shampoo, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: Over there, maybe one for the gentleman in the house, one for the lady, one for the kids, whatever.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm saying it's it's considered pretty much an essential, you know, toiletry.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, in fact, uh, in fact, the behavior shaping when you talk about is moving from uh traditional blocks of soap to shower gels is a very interesting transporting and habit forming that I can see today.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I look at the supermarket shells, uh at least 10 years back I didn't see so much of shower gels, it was a premium category.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: But today uh I see a big shift in shower gels being there.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you are very right.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: The core capability of a marketer is how does one build habits and what are the things that you're going to do to build habits in the society and with the consumers that you are targeting?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really a very interesting thing.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you just say, I think a lot of people who would be watching this podcast are familiar with e-commerce, right?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: But e-commerce wasn't even mainstream in India until marketers kind of started introducing features like you know a cash on delivery or free returns.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, these were things that kind of removed friction that stopped people from experimenting with the category, and really that's how they were able to start creating those habits.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: So habit formation is not something that happens overnight, it takes a lot of time, patience, investment.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: But when it's done, right, you can really create entirely new categories.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the marketers, I believe, who can kind of shift that consumer behavior will be much more successful than the ones who don't.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Contraminds is a podcast dedicated to decoding people, minds, strategy, and culture.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: We interview and learn from high performers so that you can apply these lessons on your journey to becoming the knowledge worker athlete you are meant to be.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Contraminds Podcast is available on all leading podcast players, and if you are interested in revisiting past episodes or taking a look at our show notes from this episode, please visit us at www.contraminds.com.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And now back to the show.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: So you you've gone through uh transformation phase is something that you spoke about, which is moving from one brand to uh uh rebranding yourself into a another company.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: So when you really look at this kind of a transition, uh what are the uh what are the ways in which you approach the problem?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because the consumer has seen you as a brand which is earlier a very different brand, now it's a new uh brand that they're going to be dealing with.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: And for example, I saw your settlement ratios, it is at 99.66%.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, uh, so therefore, uh the transition of one brand to another, uh, how have you looked at that?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: So for us, I think the challenge really was that how can you kind of reposition yourself from a name that had kind of been around for some time uh you know into a completely different name.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think what helped for us in our case was the fact that you know uh bandan as the name had kind of you know was you know uh had uh had been established, has been around for some time, especially in the eastern part of India, which is very true, where it was very strong.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um but for us is uh I think the other way that we were trying to look for it is that you know you have 23, 24 life insurance in India.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what is the space that you want to occupy?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: At the core of it, really the product that we're selling is fundamentally the same.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so where is how do you make yourself more distinct?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: And for us, it was going back to our roots and figuring out okay how important that we stand for.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: Bandan as a brand stands for access, for inclusion, for financial security.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and in an industry where most brands are fighting for the same high-income salaried customer, we saw an opportunity at that point to do something different, right, to make insurance more accessible, especially for the for those who don't have easy access to insurance.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: Which is so when I say self-employed, I just want to maybe give people some context about why even self-employed.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you look at India's working population today, right, three out of five you know uh working class people today are self-employed.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_02: Another 20% are what we would call casual labor.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: That leaves only one out of five people today who are actually what we would call the salaried class, right?
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that means there's a huge chunk of the population today who is underserved, right?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: And they're underserved, why?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because they don't necessarily have, I mean, as private insurers, we have tended to prefer the salaried class simply because they have all of the paperwork that's necessary for us to kind of you know make it uh uh you know to make a decision about setting them a long-term product like life insurance, it's an easier pitch, and uh the company really understands much better you know the profile of the person that they are buying from.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and for us, we said we have 22 other players who are fighting for this market, right?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: Why would we look at really where the need is?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: India today has a protection gap of 95%, which means that you know 95% of the people in India who need insurance protection, uh, don't have any insurance protection or don't have adequate insurance protection.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a that's a very size, not just sizable in terms of a market, but that's a lot of families in India today who are just maybe one tragedy away from financial distress.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: So for us, really it was about how do we get uh you know, you know, how do we make how do we stay true to ourselves, our identity, and make it make ourselves more relatable and accessible for them.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: So one so when you so when you so so when you sorry yeah so when you wanted to do this you had several stakeholders where you had to build the brand right so normally when you think of marketing you only think of campaigns and uh logos and brands but you in this case you have the agents you've got the distributors you've got uh bank assurance partners so the way you would do branding uh would be very very different or rebranding would be very different.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what is the approach that you took?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think we were very fortunate, right, uh, in our transition, on the one hand, uh, as a fully digital business, which is what we were known as before when we were A1Li.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um we a lot of our distribution at that point was managed through our distribution partners.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't really have a very strong retail physical presence, right?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that made things like the transition, the number of touch points that we had really were mostly digital, and digital touch points are easy to kind of uh you know switch over.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but once we actually transitioned into Bangan life today, we've started to build out our retail presence all across the country.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: So today we are present in about more than 1700 branches of Bangan Bank, you know, spread all over the country, and you know that number will continue to grow up.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, in that sense, I would say as far as brand transitions go, this was you know, we were fortunate to do it from a digit.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of businesses go the other way, they want to shift from you know being brick and mortar to click and click and mortar.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: In our case, we said, okay, fine, the customer we're serving is really someone who needs a physical interaction, right?
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they lead an advisory cell.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do we ensure that we are present physically at that moment of truth when they're trying to make a decision and really the uh we've build we've been building out our presence on that?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, uh as you build this brand, uh, what are the differences that you're seeing in the marketing techniques for a financial services brand versus say what you what you would do for a consumer marketing brand?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see differences?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: Are there any learnings that you are able to see?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I think at least for the financial services sector as a category, I think we are witnessing, we've been witnessing a seismic shift, uh, and that shift has been driven by digital adoption and the fact that consumers' expectations are also evolving, right?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: Other categories have kind of evolved very rapidly, and now those same big those same expectations are being ported by the customer has those same expectations even for the you know for their existing categories, especially something like financial services.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, what we realized, for example, is that today customers don't want you know hard-cell insurance pitches, they want transparency, they want simplicity, and they want convenience.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, our marketing strategy is isn't just about pushing a product, it's about how can we remove friction from the buying process.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, I was talking earlier about you know the the fact that traditionally insurance has always required a lot of paperwork.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: So, how with the we what we were asking ourselves is that if I know one wants to deal with endless paperwork, can we make our onboarding you know consent-based using digital tools like KYC, right?
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: So that we can eliminate a lot of cumbersome documentation.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the other thing was that we know uh that for life insurance there is you know uh a fair degree of skepticism, right?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so people don't necessarily understand why they need it, if they need uh they're not very comfortable about the idea of putting money in you know into a financial product that doesn't give them something back in their own lifetime, right?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: While they're alive.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_02: So there is some amount of skepticism, uh, but the way to address that really is to kind of talk about the high claim settlement ratios, to use customer testimonials, you know, all of these things are kind of play a pivotal role in conversion.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the other thing is for a product category that is relatively complex, right, uh, for customers, they need to understand what they're buying, and you need to address the idea of you know potential misselling, right?
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_02: Which which can happen sometimes, you know, uh when it comes to financial services.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, how can you build trust now?
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_02: Whether you're using chatbots that are AI powered, right, because they allow you to scale depending on the number of customers you have, whether you use new media formats, like you know, short explainer videos, uh, whether you kind of invest in uh any content that helps build up financial literacy so that customers can make more informed decisions.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think really these are the these are the things that uh financial services players really need to do, right?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: So so really the future for me is is uh at least as far as marketing is more of this.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just about the fact that you know shifting budgets to digital mediums, because I think that's how some people kind of see it.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's more about fundamentally just rethinking, you know, how financial products are discovered, how they evaluated, and how they purchased.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, one question that I uh that I have as I hear what you're talking uh is uh the traditional view of insurance is you're selling to a salaried class, which means that every month I get a certain amount of salary, and therefore I know when I can pay my premiums.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but when you're talking to and uh targeting, say, the self-employed, the challenge that you have there is I'm not very sure about what I'm going to earn next month.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and and uh you know maybe last year my business was great, this year my business is not good.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: So this predictable premium payments may not appeal to uh you know to this class.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore, product innovation may be something that's key, and I don't see too much of product innovative innovation happening in the insurance industry.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something that you get involved discussing with your product folks, with your management?
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, because if you want to earn a seat on the table uh with the leadership, your ability to not just communicate but also develop products become very important in a category like this.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I think for any category, whether it's financial services or otherwise, for marketing to play a more instrumental role, it has to fundamentally understand who the consumer is and how the business operates.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, when we were talking about self-employed, we knew that you know their incomes can fluctuate.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: So they don't for them making rigid monthly premiums that can be a hurdle.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: So inspect in kind of instead of expecting them to fit into existing models, you just need to create slightly more flexible payment structures, right?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you have to allow things like okay, fine, you can do one-time payment or premium, right?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: Or you can pay once in six months or once a year, but you just need to add that flexibility in.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, when you looked at a category like homemakers, right?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: Today, if you think about it, the economic value that a homemaker has is immense.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_02: She runs the household, if it usually is a woman, so she runs a household, uh, you know, she takes care of the kids.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: Very often, they are also taking care of you know uh elderly dependents in the family.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_02: What happens if a homemaker is suddenly not there tomorrow?
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: Homemaker is actually doing several jobs, right, uh, and has several responsibilities, and that cannot be replaced so easily.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_02: So they have tremendous economic value to the household, right?
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: But they are almost never covered by insurance.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: So when we were looking at it, we said, you know, why should we just frame insurance the traditional way?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: We need to reframe life insurance as protection for the financial stability of the household, not just for the primary owner.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, really, it's about for us, it's about bringing that understanding, right?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, into the boardroom to say, okay, fine, these are where opportunities lie.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, you have to work with your product teams, right?
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_02: You have to work with the actual teams, with the finance teams to say, okay, fine, what is how addressable is this market?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: How how much you know, you know, how can how can we size it?
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: How can we uh how can we package it?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: How can we market?
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_02: How can we sell it?
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_02: So uh, you know, when do you know how much time does it take for us to kind of you know uh get our ROI from this investment?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: Those are conversations that you need to have, and you have to be comfortable getting those having those conversations before you before you that product even hits the market.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the other thing that I see also is uh typically uh you know marketing folks are in their own, uh they're comfortable within their own community, but in an in an organization, your ability to collaborate with functions, uh which could be customer service, which could be uh uh actuarial in your case.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh do you think marketing needs to expand its view on working with functions and collaborate unlike before?
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I have this theory that I you know that people when they try to look at uh when they consider marketing and what marketers do, right?
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_02: They look at we tend to focus a lot on individual brilliance, on individual brilliance within marketing, right?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: We say, okay, fine, this CNO is responsible for running this campaign, and this brand has great ads, great communication.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: But for me, really successful brand building and marketing is a team sport, right?
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: So think of it like you know, the anal the analogy that I that I like to use is you know Formula One.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: If anybody who follows follows Formula One, right?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Think of the marketer or the CMO as being the driver, right?
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: The one who sits in the car.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: But without the pit crew, you need creative teams, you need data scientists, you need uh people with financial acumen, you need CX strategists, you need product experts.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that's your that's your pit crew, right?
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: You need the team boss, the CEO, the team principal, right?
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh without all of these things working in conjunction, the car goes nowhere.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_02: Look at the most successful, one of the most successful drivers in Formula One was a gentleman by the name of Michael Schumacher, right?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: What made Michael Schumacher great was the fact wasn't just the fact that he was a great driver, he spent hours of his time before and after the race with his engineers, just refining every single element of the car, right?
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_02: And good marketers need to be able to do that.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_02: The car is your brand, that's what people see going around the track, that's what people buy, right?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: But in order for that car to go around and for that car to win, you need a team, not just of marketers, but it has to be cross-functional across the organization to be able to say that this is how we get our our brand to do really really well in a competitive environment.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: So for us, we knew uh we know, for example, that you know at Bandana, bank assurance is really a key channel for us.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: So our marketing today can drive awareness, but that awareness can only take you so far.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: You also at the same time need to make sure that your uh bank relationship managers are trained effectively, right?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because if they're not able to, if they are not trained, they will not be able to sell convincingly or conversion is gonna suffer.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_02: So when we think of marketing, we're also thinking not just on ads, we're thinking about okay, fine, how can we improve training collateral, right?
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, how can we ensure that we're looking at interactions beyond just say clicks and book-ins, but really what is the quality of the interaction that's happening?
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_02: If there is a drop-off, where is that drop-off happening?
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: Why is it happening?
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_02: Can we bring that understanding in?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: And there are some ways, there are some areas where marketing will take government seat, right?
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_02: But there are other areas where it's just going to be a partner providing insight and then letting the experts say, Okay, fine, here's the insight.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: Now, how can we kind of uh figure out a solution for this challenge?
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Very nice, beautiful analogy.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think it fits in so beautifully.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: Which brings me to my last question, uh, which is really are agencies prepared for this change?
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think honestly, uh, if I had to think if I had to say look at it from that lens, when we're looking at trends, brands today cannot exist in isolation, they need partners.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_02: Because you cannot have all expert if marketing branding is a very diverse field and is getting even more diverse.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: New technologies are being introduced, uh, new methodologies are being you know, frameworks are uh are being adopted, so nobody can be an expert in everything, so you do need partners.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think most brand and agency relationships, uh they really start strong, but they tend to fizzle out, right?
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that's because initially you've got like you know, you have this shared vision, you have a belief that this partnership is you know going to really do wonders, but you know, but give it about six months, eight months, you know, on that honeymoon phase tends to about tends to kind of fade.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a number of reasons for this, but the brand eventually begins to think that you know this agency just doesn't get us, doesn't get our customer, doesn't get our product.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_02: The agency feels that oh, this client is really rigid, they are unwilling to explore old ideas.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: So eventually what happens is instead of pushing for a 9 or a 10 out of 10, you know, everybody kind of settles for a six, right?
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: And a six out of ten.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so what you're left with is a lot of work that is very functional, right?
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: But it's uninspiring.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_02: I've actually had the opportunity to sit on both sides of that table, right, throughout my career.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think about half of my work has been on the brand side, the other half has been on the agency side, and I've seen where great partnerships thrive, and I've also seen where they break down.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, I think brands expect that their agencies are going to be fortune tellers.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: Marketing today is the kind of field that is evolving so fast, it's almost like a breakneck speed.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: Today, we're talking about we're in the age of generative ADI, so we're talking about AI-driven ads, we have new social platforms that are kind of much room mushrooming.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we see consumer behavior that's kind of changing as new platforms become available.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: And for brands, brands are kind of pressuring, they want their agencies to kind of master these things overnight, and they expect that often without providing you know very clear business context about why is this even important for my you know uh for my business, and so the agencies that actually do well, they're not just interpreting a trend.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_02: Agencies who do well here is are the ones who are able to get you know inside access to the company's insights, to the customers' pain points, and to that custom and to the company's like strategic priorities.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_02: Only when they are able to do that, when they have that partnership, can they create meaningful work?
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one aspect.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: This the other aspect is that agencies also feel that brands do not appreciate the chaos that they are dealing with.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you are an agency today, and you know, as someone who's worked in an agency, you you know, right, you're juggling multiple clients, you are constantly pivoting between one industry to another, you're juggling deadlines, you're juggling creative revisions, right?
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_02: And every client today who's sitting on the other side of the table thinks that their brand should be the priority, but so does every other brand that's on the agency's roster.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: And what you really need is a partnership mindset, something that where there is mutual respect for each other, the skills and expertise they bring to the table, and also for the working styles, because the way agencies work it's not the way their brands work, right?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think probably the third area is that on both sides, both brands and agencies, there is a fear of failure.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Brands will say that they want, you know, really bold innovation, but that only works if that success is going to be guaranteed.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, you know, agencies say that they want a lot of creative freedom, right?
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_02: But they're also at the same time fearful that they might lose an account if they push too hard.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: So this you know, this brings them sometimes at loggerheads, and it kind of results in a diluted, like a risk-averse, you know, approach to marketing, and that ultimately is going to fall flat with customers.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_02: And this is not something that impacts only a few or just the majority of their exceptions.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think even the greatest brands you know have deal with exactly the same things.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like um, I think one of the seminal stories for me, when you read the when you read uh Walter Isaacson's uh biography of Steve Jobs, right?
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they talk about you know, Apple has this commercial called 1984, which they published at the Super Bowl, and today it's touted as you know one of the most legendary ad films ever created.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: Some uh some publication have said it's the greatest single TV commercial ever created.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: What and everybody looks at that commercial as an example of you know a brand taking making bold bets and making bold choices.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_02: But what most people don't really know, and which what I didn't know before until I read the book, was that you know Apple almost killed that commercial before it actually went to air.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_02: The executives, when they saw it, many of the executives who saw it hated it.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_02: They hated it so much that they actually had bought a Super Bowl you know slot and they tried to sell it back.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_02: They're just like, hey, listen, cancel our slot.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_02: We cannot run this commercial, right?
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it really took a few people, right?
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, the agency at that point, I think Chai Tay was the agency, they kind of held their ground, yeah.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_02: They held their ground, they were asked to give the slot back, they didn't, right?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_02: They held on to it, and in in between, you had a few executives.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: Steve Wozniak, who was the co-founder with Steve Jobs, he loved the ad so much he said, you know what, I am going to fund it out of my own personal money if I have to.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: So only when they really kind of stood their ground were uh they were able to convince the board, and that time the board only let them run the ad twice.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: It ran once during the Super Bowl and it ran one other time just so that it could be eligible for an award.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_02: But this thing, the most iconic ad in television history has only been run once because the brand that ran the ad wasn't confident enough about the about the ad itself.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_02: Right, so this fear of failure is a very real thing.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think the best campaigns kind of come out when both sides kind of co-own the problem.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_02: In the case of 1984, really that's what happened, right?
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_02: You have the agency on the one hand who decides to take the risk and say, Listen, we're not gonna sell that slot back, right?
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: And you have on the other hand the founders, co-founders, or the all the executives who say, like, listen, we will take that risk, even if it's just one thing, but it's 68 million people are gonna see this ad.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_02: But we will take this risk, yeah, right?
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a calculated risk, and to fight at the end of the day for a business-driven creative, not just creative for its own sake, right?
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_02: It has to be business-driven creative, and when that happens, that's when you have great partnership, right?
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because great partnership is supposed to challenge and elevate the other person, not just yourself, right?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I think for agencies and brands to kind of go beyond the transactional, instead of just like settling for sixes and not trying to go for a nine and or a ten, we they need to start thinking of each other as strategic co-creators.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_02: You cannot have a vendor, agency vendor, and you know, buyer relationship.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_02: You have to invest in that relationship and say, Okay, fine, I'm gonna treat you as someone who you have to be willing to understand what's on the other side of the table.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: Brands need to brands need to understand what agencies go through.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_02: Agencies also need to spend time and invest time in what brands are going through.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_02: You can't be sitting back and look waiting for a brief.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_02: Get into the skin of your Of your client's customer, walk in their shoes and then come out with insight.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: I heard this really fascinating story of uh a couple of months ago from a CPG company talking about how they were trying to sell talcum powder.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_02: They had called their agencies for uh a creative briefing, but before they did, it was a very fancy hotel in South Bombay.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh before they did, uh I think the presentation was supposed to start at 2 o'clock in the afternoon or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, but everybody was called in by 12:30 or 1, and they had arranged this really nice horse-drawn carriage which would go down Marine Drive, okay, in Mumbai, uh, uh, which is like an accord, like an iconic uh uh balustrade across you know in South Mumbai, sea face here.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and they made them all sit in that horse-drop carriage, and they all all the creative partners kind of went on that, but it was you know the height of the afternoon.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_02: So you're sitting there and you're thinking, okay, fine, I've got this really lovely thing, but it's really bloody hot.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_02: And uh at that point everybody went through this thing, and it was maybe 20-30 minutes, I don't know exactly how long, but it was long enough that you know they all reach the hotel and they're all very uncomfortable.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: I've come for this I've come for this presentation, I'm meeting, you know, uh executives, very high-powered executors that are you know the very large, well-known, well-regarded brand.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm sweating now, you know, I'm wiping my forehead, I'm not feeling very comfortable, it's been a hot summer's day.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, really, the client said, Okay, the product that we are selling is talcum powder.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: The bulk of our customers who use this talcum powder, okay, have to deal with these conditions.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, now I want you to come up with how you think this product is gonna help my customer.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that point it was brand orchestrated.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea is that yes, you can't be sitting in an ivory tower and thinking about what the customer meant.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_02: You have to walk in their shoes in order to be able to understand, or as to in order to be able to, you know, maybe give feedback that the that the brand says, yeah, this resonates or rings of truth, because this agency understands what my customers face and what my customers go through.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's about fostering that part.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful, beautiful.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think the examples were very, very nice.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to end our conversation with a couple of rapid fire questions.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, what's one campaign that you really love and would like that you would have created it?
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are several, honestly.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you can you can uh it's not that you have to say one, but you can say the top three, top five, fine.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_02: I would say any campaign that Nike has done in the last 20 years, right?
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they have taken what is just a shoe and they've made it a brand about personal triumph.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_02: Just do it to me, is a phenomenal piece of communication, and you know, uh I would love to have them associated with it.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think in the Indian context, you take some take something like what Cred has done, right?
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they have made campaigns part of their ad campaigns are now part of you know uh the cultural lingua franca, like it's something people discuss.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, have you seen the cred ad?
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_02: People anticipate waiting on the next cred ad, wondering what they're gonna do.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_02: Other brands have tried to emulate them.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_02: So you will see brands that are now creating ads that look like cred ads, right?
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_02: So, in that sense, I think we uh internationally, yes, Nike.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh locally, I think cred does some fantastic work.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you were to advise an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old marketing student in a university or a college, what would your advice be?
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think if you are going to be looking, if they're considering marketing as a career, uh, I would say let's look at three things.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_02: One is start thinking from day one like a business owner.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Don't say that I'm gonna be in marketing, so I'm gonna think like a marketer.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Marketing is not just about ads and content.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_02: At the end of the day, it is about growth, it's about revenue, and it's about customer experience.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to do valid marketing, don't just focus on the creative side.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Learn about financial modeling, learn about pricing strategy, learn about consumer psychology.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think the best marketers today understand their business and the consumer inside out.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, think more like a business owner.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh second piece is that you there are so many specializations today.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: If you are starting out, you need to start thinking about how you're going to develop an unfair advantage.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_02: The marketing landscape is incredibly crowded.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody knows digital, everybody, everybody understands content, right?
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_02: What is it that's gonna set you apart?
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you can develop an expertise in I don't know, behavioral science.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you have maybe you're really good at tech, right?
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_02: So you can start thinking about integrating AI into your marketing workflows.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's your ability to work with people so you can manage teams better, so you can help teams execute that state.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_02: You need to find that niche, whatever that niche is, and you need to own it.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the third thing I would say is never stop experimenting.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think the biggest mistake marketers can make is sticking to what worked yesterday.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think every single major industry shift, whether it was social media, whether it is e-commerce, whether it's short form video, AI, all of this at some point was just dismissed as a fad.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think the best marketers they don't wait to be proven right.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: They test, they learn, they adapt, and they do this before the rest of the kind, you know, this before the rest of the market catches up.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to be really good in the field of marketing, really think beyond marketing, right?
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Understand the consumer, understand the business, and try to kind of figure out where the world is going next.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant answer, uh what are the one or two books in marketing that uh you've enjoyed reading and even now going back to them?
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I think two books uh that kind of stand out to me is one is uh on marketing and brand building, the author Byron Sharp.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I like it because he really understands, I mean, he's done a lot of academic research uh that's grounded in the practical world to understand really what is it that really drives penetration and market share.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_02: So that is, I think, essential reading for any marketer.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the other book, especially within the uh within the Indian context, it's on my bookshelf.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think everyone in India, if you're going to be a marketer in India, you should read Liliput Lang by Rabba Bhajapurpur.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, she is, for those who don't know who Ramabhija Purpur is, she is you know a stalwart in the market research or the consumer in size industry.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to understand how in you know uh how so much of real India lives, you need to look at that book.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_02: It is based on years of data.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think today with marketers, one of the things is that you know we think we love data, we want dashboards, we want visualizations, and we think you know uh that gives us a lot of uh you know a lot of information, a lot there's this illusion of knowledge.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I think a lot of marketers suffer from this illusion of knowledge, but a book like uh uh like Really Put Land will really kind of test your assumptions about who you think your customers, right?
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say I would say definitely look at that because that that will help you become a better marketer if you understand your customers better, that's a better that will really help you.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, what's one piece of advice you you may have got a lot, but what's one piece of advice that you cherish even today?
• 1:14:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think the one that has worked for me and I will say works for most people is that always stay curious.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Understand that you may know initially you know you don't know a lot, and so it's fine, and you know curiosity isn't is a natural uh you know it's a natural part of us wanting to learn, but as we kind of grow in our careers, um we think we know, right?
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Experience helps, you know, uh, but at the same point understand that there is a lot more that you don't know, and especially in a field like ours, like marketing, which is evolving the way that it is, um uh you have to realize that there is a lot more stuff that you don't know than it is anymore.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: So always be curious, be open-minded.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's the only way you'll be able to, otherwise, you will not be able to spot patterns, uh, you know, uh work well with other teams if you're only limited to your own individual silo or function.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I think always be curious.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And my last question really is what's one thing you believe in that people whom you work with really don't believe the same perspective that you have, and you find it hard to drill it into them.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_02: I spent uh three days last week at uh the Indian School of Business, uh, and I was part of this.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I was fortunate enough to be invited to uh this exercise where there were marketers, senior marketers from a wide variety of categories.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_02: They were from SMCG, they were from hospitality, uh travel, uh you know, industrial products like glue.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a very, very diverse audience.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_02: We spent one day understanding the difference between data and insight.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_02: As someone who was come from a consumer research background, I spent five years in consumer research, so I felt okay, fine, maybe I had a little bit better understanding.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_02: But what I found and what I was surprised by, and maybe I should not have been surprised by it, but uh, I think even marketers today, senior marketers, tend to confuse data with insight.
• 1:17:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think marketing at the end of the day has always been about understanding people, what they want, what they fear, what moves them to act.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Today's brands they are drowning in data, okay, but they're completely starved for insight.
• 1:17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right, most companies today have access to customer analytics, behavioral tracking, predictive modeling, you know, what all that data alone is not insight.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Data tells you what people do, insight tells you why they are doing it.
• 1:17:46
  SPEAKER_02: Data without the interpretation is just noise, right?
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_02: So uh I think that is something where I I would say a lot of at least newer marketers need to kind of because data is a lot more easily accessible right now.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_02: People tend to look at the data and then say this is what they test the data, data is the truth, right?
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_02: Data is only part of the picture, okay.
• 1:18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And for you to get into a more insightful frame of mind, insights don't just emerge, you actually need rituals to cultivate them.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think uh I was speaking to uh I mean this uh this marketer uh at a forum, and he said something to me which was which I thought was very very interesting.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_02: He said, insight is a mood, you have to be comfortable with the idea of questioning whatever is coming across your desk or your plate or your dashboard.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_02: Don't just say, don't just look at the what, try to get behind it and understand the why.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not the role of one individual.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Every person who's working in that business should try to get a better understanding of why.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we may not all be able to go to the settings, you know, to the same level of depth, but it helps.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you one very small example of how this worked out.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_02: We had a landing page for an investment product, okay, that we had recently launched, and when we looked at the all of the heat maps and the click tracking data, we had been first of all, the first thing we did was when we're creating this landing page, we benchmarked it against competition.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_02: We said, Okay, fine, what is competition doing well?
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_02: These are the things that are doing well.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, our own experience at data has told us these are the things that customers tend to look for.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's marry these two things together, come up with this version of this page, this landing page, because it's gonna help us convert.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_02: We put that page up there, and then when we start looking at the data, we said, Yeah, okay, fine.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_02: If the uh uh the performance of this page, the conversion is in line with the expected trends.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, how can we kind of optimize this?
• 1:19:49
  unknown: Right?
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we said, okay, fine, let's look at the heat maps and the flip tracking data and say, where are people not spending any time?
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_02: What are the parts that is skimming over or just avoiding?
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we looked at all of the data and we said, okay, fine, there are a whole bunch of things that they don't spend time on.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because oh, maybe they think the product is too complex, maybe that's a second stage or a third stage sort of query, they don't need it in stage one.
• 1:20:09
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I just need them to move further down the funnel.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Said let's take that out.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, let's redesign the page, but let's take out all what we think is extraneous information.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_02: When we did that, we were expecting to see better throughput.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_02: That didn't happen in certain cases, it actually went down, but it was counterintuitive for us.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_02: So we said, okay, fine, we need to figure out what this is.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_02: We can go back to you know the same old older version of the page, but then that's there, but there's no insight there, right?
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we said, let's start listening to all of the calls that are coming in.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, all this imagine the people who are dropping out, we had no way to contact them, and they had not even left a phone number.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, we said, let's start listening to all of the calls of the people who actually have moved down further down the chain and just understand what are the questions that they're asking.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, if there were a hundred questions that typically come in, we just tacked ranked and said these are the top five, most repeated, like in FAQs, but uh you know, actually asked by the customer speaking to an agent.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, What if I just take those five questions and if I put them and if I package them nicely and I make them you know in a format that's more relatable, that sounds like an individual is talking to you.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_02: If I just take those five questions out of like say maybe a hundred calls and I put that back on the page, what happens?
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_02: When we did that, all of a sudden we saw that our convergence began to really improve within a very short period of time.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we're gonna we are talking about like you know a couple of two to three weeks, right?
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, really, that is just illustrative of the what tends to happen.
• 1:21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Data can give you part of the picture, cannot fill in everything.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_02: It can it can lead you to different hypotheses, okay, some of which might work, but if they work, you don't even know why they're working.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_02: You're making an assumption, right?
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it's always important to kind of go back in question and understand the right.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I would say to most marketers out there, we are all of us today very fortunate that we live in a world where data is so easily available, but that doesn't mean that we need to be disconnected from actually the insight end.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Insighting is a mood, right?
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's a habit, it's a daily ritual, right?
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And it's something you need to inculcate in every member of your team, right?
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and other teams as well.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like okay, fine, only marketers have access to data and should look at it.
• 1:22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Finance guys have access to data, product teams have access to data, customer experience guys, customer service, everyone has access.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's at our fingertips.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_02: We should just try to make the most take advantage by asking the wide hand.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks Itanakil.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I really found your answers very thoughtful.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was in-depth.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a lot of uh passion with which you really went through the thought process and came back with deep answers.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, not often I see many marketers do that.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a lovely conversation, a lot of things that I learned, and I'm sure our audience is going to find it extremely valuable.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I believe this can be an extremely beautiful episode for anybody who wants to understand and practice the art of marketing.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Sabrina.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_02: It was great having this conversation.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_02: I really appreciate you having me on the show.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_01: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contramines.com.
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  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening and stay safe.