1. Tell us about your background and journey.
I come from Coimbatore, a tier-2 city in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in a middle-income class family with working parents. Frugality, empathy, time consciousness, and non-wastage were the key themes at home while I was growing up. During my childhood days, I often used to go to brand shops to analyze the features of their products and seek similar features in a local store to buy at an affordable rate. When my friends used to go gung-ho about brands, I used to wonder about their choices.
This wonder turned into curiosity to analyze human behaviors and the way brands can influence consumers positively to their products. While I pursued my bachelor’s in engineering and subsequently worked as an engineer at a top automotive tech firm, my curiosity to understand brands and their ability to influence behaviors only kept growing all along. My journey into marketing began after my MBA with a specialization in marketing. I now have nearly a decade and half years of experience in the business world engineering marketing and driving growth for companies.
Having come from an engineering
background, I have nurtured a problem-solving mindset and focused a lot on
creating value through marketing. I like to build functions from scratch, and
that led me to explore varied domains, including automotive, IT services,
product engineering, sports tech, and currently in data analytics. I have worked
in large, mid-size, and start-up companies, in b2b and b2c, and in both product
and service-oriented organizations.
As a marketer, I had opportunities to build digital marketing practices and user communities, drive business through content and inbound marketing, enable tech partnerships, celebrity endorsements, and brand associations, and rebrand companies to attract investors and acquirers.
I treat my career as a journey to
learn new things, explore new domains, experiment with new ideas, build new
careers and practices, and design a new future for my companies.
2. What has changed about marketing in the last decade and what will be the future according to you?
Marketing has always been about bridging the gap between the target audience and the company. The fundamentals haven’t changed, but the customer/consumer preferences and the channels of engagement have evolved significantly over the years. As obvious an answer as it can be, the major shift came with the infusion of digital media in our daily lives.
If you look at a B2C setting, your avenues to reach the target audience have grown exponentially over the years. You are no longer restricted to traditional platforms like events or billboards or physical ads or postcards etc. to reach the end audience. You can be everywhere around your customer through digital media. It can start with a simple email, to social media feeds, to WhatsApp messages, to phone app notifications, and to even answering through voice bots. The avenues to connect actively and passively with the target audience have increased dramatically over the years.
This challenge is no longer in getting yourself visible to the target audience, but to get their “attention” and the desired “action” on your campaigns. Today, you can spend millions of dollars on your digital campaigns without having any effect on the brand outcomes. Whether crazy or informative, having a compelling and sustained narrative around your brand will play a key role in getting outcomes.
While the content and social media marketing dominated the mindshare among marketers in the last few years, I predict the below 4 key themes to play out significantly in the next decade.
- Personalization at mass scale: With AI and ML becoming mainstream, brands that can precisely
understand customer preferences and patterns will be able to dominate the
market. Technologies like AR and VR will help consumers to try and check out the
merchandise digitally before making a physical choice of purchase. You will see
more contextual and relevant campaigns hitting your inbox and social media
feeds that will be very hard to ignore. Brands will accelerate impulse
purchase behavior by targeting your intuitive brain even more.
- Marketing as a product feature: Every company that has a phone app is working hard to become an ecosystem that encourages more time spent by the user on their platform. Product managers have become pseudo-marketers as more marketing opportunities are built within the app ecosystem. Features such as referrals, promo codes, in-app notifications, product recommendations, upselling, user leaderboards, and more are being integrated into the product itself.
- Building a company brand through personal brands: Today, a lot of social media users, including casual users, create highly engaging content, be it personal or community focused. Intentionally or unintentionally, every company today looks for engaging with their own employees and user base to expand their word of mouse (refers to word of mouth online) share in the digital landscape. The collective personal brands of their community will soon become a reflection of the overall company brand. Companies that can tap into this opportunity will have more scalability than their peers.
- Globalization will be more about scaling localization: The days of the “One size fits all” product strategy will be sun-setting around the world. To scale large meant the ability to contextualize the experiences for the users. This meant understanding the regional dynamics, local preferences, and language choices during product design and promotions. This push is also influenced by country-specific rules and regulations for technology companies. You will see more global products looking and behaving differently in each country, city, and local community.
3. 3. How is B2B marketing different from B2C in your opinion?
The key difference is, in a B2B scenario you are dealing with a lot of decision-makers in the system and hence the individual preferences will have a closer alignment to the logical outcomes. In a B2C setting, the preferences are more individualistic, and the choices will be less rational than in a B2B scenario. So, what does this mean for a marketer?
If you are in a B2B setting, you will be aligned to do a lot of value-focused activities in your campaign planning. You will most often focus on how you can position your company and offerings to be seen as a value creator for the target business. Most often, the structures are set and channels of engagement are also relatively lesser compared to a B2C campaign.
In a B2C setting, the choices tend to shift more on the emotional level and hence the campaigns need to have the right mixture of emotion and value. The avenues to reach the audience are also high and so is the case for most of the competing brands as well. Hence, to differentiate, the messaging must have higher emotive power and should be more distinctive, compelling, and contextual.
4. 4. How was your experience working with a cricket tech firm building and promoting a new category tech product?
Sports tech is a fascinating industry, but quite nascent in the Indian sports ecosystem. We were building an innovative IoT smart sticker for cricket bats, for players to analyze their batting performance and enhance their skills. The product involved a fusion between a hardware sticker and a software app to deliver insights in real time to the players on their mobile phones. I was involved in both product development and marketing operations.
Building a new category of sports tech products involved the following key aspects:
- Understanding the sporting ecosystem in India
- Understanding the player preferences
- Designing a compelling value proposition for players, coaches, broadcasters, and brands
- Understanding the technological capabilities and limitations
- Designing the monetization options
- Understanding the promotion options.
On the marketing front, product promotion involved a lot of educational campaigns to build product awareness and adoption. We activated multiple promotions through brand ambassadors and our tech partnership programs. We also worked with many teams and players in major tournaments to design interactive and engaging segments like the Power Hitting contest in broadcasting to enhance the fan experience. To build the user base before the launch, we also activated community building through content and social media campaigns. We also personalized the product and business models to enhance the coaching experience for academics.
5. 5. How do you measure marketing performance?
Small or big, I treat marketing as an opportunity to create
meaningful impacts. While data on the web, apps, and campaigns give an indication of marketing performance, it is essential to not fall for vanity metrics. It
is even more critical to not treat marketing as an activity. Marketing is not a
short-term game, but an investment for long-term gains. If your marketing
vision is myopic, you might end up doing plenty without focusing on the right
impacts to be created within the target segment. Brand recall is the result of
sustained marketing impacts over the long term.
6. 6. Which is your favorite book and why?
One of the books that had a lot of influence on my career and propelled my interest in marketing was “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely. In the book, Dan points to how our decisions, preferences, and desires can be easily swayed in ways we may not even realize. Our decisions always have a high ratio of irrationality even if we strongly believe that we can be purely rational in our choices. It piqued my curiosity to understand human behaviors as I could relate to many of the examples mentioned in the book to my own decisions and others around me.
In a similar genre, I also loved reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. I also read a lot of non-fictional, psychology, biographies, history, and self-help books.
For young marketers, I would recommend “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Health, “Stories at Work” by Indranil Chakraborty, and “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin.
7. 7. What is your greatest life lesson so far and a piece of advice that you would like to share with future marketers?
If you treat your career as a journey, there is no success or failure. Tactically you may have some peaks and troughs, but strategically your pursuit to grow is always on. Sometimes failures are also a blessing in disguise as they may help you with newer perspectives in your career and life. The market and business dynamics may not be in your control, but your ideas are always yours to implement.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not reflect the views or opinions of any of my current or previous employers.
Brief Bio:
1) What do I practice?
I am a self-claimed ethical marketer trying to make a difference in the way marketing functions today. Having come from an engineering background, I lay emphasis on marketing creating value, alongside promotions, to the clients and internal stakeholders.
2) What is my experience so far?
Have a distinctive experience of working in large, mid-size, and start-up companies, in b2b and b2c, and in both product and service oriented organizations. I have over a decade of experience in product engineering spanning diverse roles, including product development, consulting, demand generation, and marketing strategy.
3) What do I focus on in my current marketing role?
Working on delivering top-line growth through content marketing and branding activities. Concentrate on the nexus of content, design, and digital, for incorporating inbound marketing practice in the organization.
Interviewed By - Mitali Jain
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