The Future Of Marketing Post-COVID ft. Saurabh Bajaj

Saurabh Bajaj, based in Mumbai, India, is an accomplished professional with a strong educational background. He holds an MBA in Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and a B.Tech in Civil Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering. Saurabh also serves as Visiting Faculty for Brand Management at Bharathidasan Institute of Management Tiruchirapalli. In

The Future Of Marketing Post-COVID ft. Saurabh Bajaj

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    Summary

    In a podcast episode titled “The Future of Marketing Post-COVID,” Saurabh Bajaj discusses the evolving landscape of marketing in the wake of the pandemic. Bajaj emphasizes the importance of adapting to the changing consumer behavior and leveraging digital platforms to reach the target audience effectively. He highlights the significance of data-driven marketing strategies and the role of artificial intelligence in personalizing customer experiences. Bajaj also emphasizes the need for marketers to stay updated with the latest trends and technologies to stay ahead in the competitive market. Overall, the podcast delves into the future of marketing, emphasizing the need for agility, innovation, and a customer-centric approach in the post-COVID era.

    Key Take Aways

    8 Key Takeaways for Digital Marketers from “The Future of Marketing Post-COVID” Blog:

    1. Importance of Data-Driven Marketing: Utilize data to understand customer behavior, preferences, and trends to create targeted marketing strategies.
    2. Rise of AI and Automation: Embrace artificial intelligence and automation tools to streamline marketing processes and enhance efficiency.
    3. Focus on Personalization: Tailor marketing messages and experiences to individual customers to increase engagement and conversion rates.
    4. Shift towards Omnichannel Marketing: Integrate various digital channels like social media, email, and websites to provide a seamless customer experience.
    5. Emphasis on Content Marketing: Create valuable and relevant content to establish thought leadership, build trust, and attract and retain customers.
    6. Enhanced Customer Experience: Prioritize customer satisfaction by providing personalized experiences, quick response times, and efficient customer support.
    7. Importance of Video Marketing: Leverage the power of video content to engage and connect with customers, as it has become a preferred medium for consuming information.
    8. Adaptability and Agility: Stay updated with the latest marketing trends and technologies, and be ready to adapt and pivot strategies quickly to meet changing customer needs and market dynamics.

    Read Transcript

    Saurabh Bajaj:- Whether digital plays a small or a large part in your category, it should play a disproportionate role in your thinking. When you truly drive the belief behind a proposition or a purpose that you believe in, that makes a difference. One of the activities is about us saying that we’re putting our money behind a belief; it’s not just stigma. Using neuro-based techniques to do research is again interesting.

    Kaushal Thakkar:- Welcome to The Growth Genius show brought to you by Infidigit. I’m Kaushal Thakkar, Founder of Infidigit and your Host for the show. Today we have a special guest, Saurabh Bajaj, the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Vodafone Idea. The last two decades have taken him into many different fields. He has worked in Business Development, Marketing, and Innovation, for various brands like Britannia, Mondelez, Diageo, etc. He was recognised as the marketing marvel by White Page International and made it to the 50 Best Marketing & Communication professionals list. Saurabh, how are you doing today?

    Saurabh:- Great! It’s indeed a pleasure to be here.

    Kaushal :- Thank you, Saurabh. Saurabh, we heard about your upcoming book, The Practical Marketer, and are eager to know more about it before we head into any other topic.

    Saurabh:- Thanks so much. Labour of love. Any time anybody creates a piece of art based on an article or a book, you have a little of yourself in it. So also the pandemic. Whenever I would have an interesting conversation at work, I would always come back and say, “You know what? I know this. Why doesn’t everybody know this?” So I would put it down as an article, which is the culmination of what led to the book. So it’s a labour of love and will benefit marketing students and early jobbers. These people are venturing into the freedom of marketing, maybe somebody who wants to know what marketing is. For entrepreneurs, it should be helpful. It’s a book not just about what marketing is but really how marketing is done. And it can be like a Kunji or a guide, right? You pick it up, and you can do it step by step. From how you craft a brand strategy to evaluate packaging and design. What are the various insights or the multiple kinds of research in your company’s Research Department? So it’s got end-to-end learning; interestingly, it’s all from my own experience. There’s nothing that I’ve picked up from another book or another source. It’s all I have done and experienced; hence, I’m sure the viewers will enjoy it.

    Kaushal:- Really good. Looking forward to it. As of now, at what stage is it? Is it in the early stage where we don’t know the launch date? Or is it at an advanced stage where we know the launch date?

    Saurabh:- I’ve got the entire draft ready and got feedback from some publishers. So right now, I’m working on a refined draft. At the same time, I have yet to lock-lock up the publisher because, as I said, I’m still under discussion regarding the contract stage. Once the contract is signed, then you will know that, okay, it’s now there. But even post-signing of a document tends to take around seven-eight months. Definitely, yes! It will take more time for it to hit the ground. 

    Kaushal :- That’s good. Looking forward to that particular book. I would love to read it. Saurabh, getting into the conversation around growth. Now, this show is called The Growth Genius. We have you on the show today because you created marketing growth for various organisations and brought innovations to multiple organisations. However, during the last few years, because of COVID specifically, things have changed in the marketing world. So I’d like to understand your views about how marketing has transitioned in the last few years during COVID. 

    Saurabh:- Sure!! I’ve had the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of how things evolve. And I’ve been fortunate with the opportunities I’ve been presented with. And so, think about my early years as a Brand Manager for Cadbury Celebrations. So it’s about then that social media had just started taking off. So this was way back in 2009 when organic growth was still something social media handles would offer us. In recent days, everything has been a paid campaign. You won’t get average growth from Facebook just by putting great content out there, right? So I was one of the first Brand Managers to experiment with the Facebook page for Cadbury Celebrations in 2009, and in about six months, we took it to a million fans. And I didn’t spend a single rupee promoting it. It became the centrepiece of my campaign, or I would put the link on the back of my ad or the back, and even just by simply weaving it together, you could get excessive growth. And it had become a playbook on how Cadbury would do social media marketing, right? Then from there, I got a chance to move on to Diageo, where again, digital and social all play a significant role because, frankly, you can only, in alcohol, speak to the consumer when the consumer gives consent and wants to talk to you—those areas where, again, digital becomes prominent.

    I was fortunate in Britannia, where we got a double whammy. The pandemic hit in early March, and we were all wondering what would happen to our business. And I remember when the lockdown probably started by the 1st of March. On the 22nd of March, I realised that cheese had been growing at 78%. So you’re like, okay, something is happening here, and it is pretty evident that the restaurants were shut right. All the businesses were going to retain. And hence I got an opportunity to do the most extensive and best digital campaign ever done by Britannia, which is Britannia Cheese Star Chef, which is done in collaboration, where we had a partnership with India Food Network, which also happened to have Saif Ali Khan as one of the people on their roster and list. Hence, he was a prominent part of the show. We’re fortunate to have him there. And it was an initiative that I was proud of. It gave us good results and gave us a few awards in the industry as well. And now, as I move on to telecom, I realise that this world is truly fascinating. And the stuff you can experience here is miles and miles ahead of what anybody in an FMCG ever gets to interact with. So I’m still learning the ropes and figuring out all there is to learn and how I can play my part in this journey. But this is a large milestone in my personal growth and development journey.

    Kaushal:- Great! And specifically, when we did this particular campaign around the COVID period, do you think that now with COVID has taken care of to a great extent, I would say at least, are we seeing back the trends we saw in 2019 or the early 2020s before COVID started?

    Saurabh:- So there is this one question I always ask myself as a marketer, right? What is the fad, and what’s the trend? It takes work to answer. Because fads and trends seem almost complimentary regarding jargon, right? But one of the things I realised is that fads are just the season’s flavour. It is where the search rankings go high. It’s something that everybody wants to talk about, but it’s not based on learned behaviour. A trend is fundamentally based on learned behaviour. You teach somebody something that sticks, 

    Kaushal:- True.

    Saurabh:- So, while a lot of what we experienced in the pandemic was for that moment, right? But there’s a lot that we all learned during that time. We learned how to do interviews on a video conference like we’re doing now. We were not done years back.

    Kaushal:- Definitely!

    Saurabh:- We became comfortable with digital as a medium. We learned how to do a lot more shopping online, right? We learnt how to do transactions without touch, which probably fueled the payment journeys we see. Every paan shop now has a QR code. Yeah. We also learned new kinds of cuisine. Categories like cheese, right? It may be conflicts with organic food. Much of that got learnt because it’s always out there, but you never had any reason to have it. And while you may not consume it with the same frequency or the same gusto, just because you have learned that this is not possible has a particular effect that lasts with you. Frankly, I was a large consumer of Licious all through the pandemic because you could go to a restaurant and pick up delicious meat and consume them. So now, my life may not do it as often, but it is still significantly higher than my pre-pandemic levels.

    Kaushal:- Got that. And brands like Licious were built during that period, and they’re doing fantastic. Definitely really good! And I agree with that particular thing. Even in the search site where we saw some search volumes increasing during the pandemic, it came down slightly but not back to the 2019 level. So that’s something that connects with your answer as well. Thanks for that. Saurabh, we spoke a little about digital marketing and how you initiated those few campaigns where those campaigns became the world’s playbook at Britannia. Any other ideas you would like to share with the audience over here that can help them optimise their campaigns? Any secret sauce or the playbooks you have created other than this campaign you already spoke of?

    Saurabh:- So I’d like to share a story; I’d like to share the story, maybe not so much regarding digital, but how do we do the activation? And this was again this was in 2008. My favourite stint was the one at Cadbury Celebration, so it’s memorable. We were stuck when I took on Cadbury Celebrations as the Brand Manager. The brand still needed to earn profit for the last 15 years. It started even slowing down on growth. So you’re in a very challenging space. And in fact, there was a question that the Managing Director then asked in an open forum: why should we even keep this brand alive?

    Let’s look at phasing it out. So it’s a Challenge for a new Brand Manager to hear something as stuck as that. But the next four years are quite golden for us. We doubled the brand from 150 crores to around 300 and improved its profitability from -5% to +12%, so it was a fairly dramatic shift. We touched every part of the brand score, from re-engineering the business model to the proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge”, right? And that proposition was born during my time, and I have the privilege of being the brand custodian when something like this is born. So it’s not an individual effort ever. It’s always a team effort. But you’re always gracious about the fact that I was there when it started, right? So that gives you a story to tell. So that proposition has also bloomed through the edges to winning a Cannes now with the Sharukh Khan commercial. So it’s just amazing how that activation has grown.

    Interestingly, that brand or the whole proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge” was always so activation fertile and continuously led by activation. So not only did we run the ad on the air, but we would always find these opportunities to get the consumer to go out there and experience the proposition. How do you push somebody to say that this Diwali genuinely makes somebody happy by going over to their house? Rather than just seeing an ad and enjoying it? And it was in 2012 when we did this Cadbury Celebrations Airways initiative and flew a flight full of people from Bombay to Delhi. If you called in on a radio show and said that you know what this Diwali is, you wanted to go home, but I’ve been unable to. And we took the entire cohort of people, and again, one of the activities is about us saying that we’re putting our money behind a belief; it’s not just a tick mark, right? And nothing is activations like these that make brands endearing to consumers. It shows that you mean business; you mean what you’re talking about, right? And it also gives a lot of joy to marketers here to say that I’ve made a proposition so fertile that it allows for opportunities to touch the consumer,

    Kaushal:- Nice So, more about both the campaigns of all the campaigns that you mentioned, one common connect was the customer experience which you took to the next level, as you rightly said, that instead of just making them sit in front of the television, make them experience something which would create that next level of engagement. So that’s something we have seen across various brands, specifically from the organisations you have worked for. Still, any other campaigns you have not done, which you feel like, Kaushal, this is one campaign that I admire in the marketing world.

    Saurabh:- Absolutely! So while Mondelez is an organisation, it is known for doing many fertile, exciting stuff. One of the companies does not do it as often as Britannia. Britannia is relatively the more placid cousin because while chocolate is impulse, biscuits are planted. But whether you are in a plant or an impulse category, when you genuinely drive the belief behind a proposition or a purpose you believe in makes a difference, right? And hence one of those campaigns for which Britannia has consistently won awards or accolades. In fact, Doshi just put up a post, Amit Doshi just put up a post on the same Friday morning, and LinkedIn reminded me is The Britannia Marie My Startup. The Britannia Marie My Startup contest is really about the fact that…you know, a Marie biscuit is a housewife’s favourite because as the husband and kids go off to their schools and office, she has those few minutes of reflection, right? And when she dips her biscuit, which is usually a Marie, she introspects on who else she could be. And that’s where the germ of an idea is to say, “why don’t we urge these ladies to say that you can be more? Why don’t you think of your startup? And that startup could be big or small, but we will put our money where our mouth is. We will give you the seed capital.” Right? And that is something that I feel Britannia Marie has done successfully, well and consistently. If you have a gold dust proposition, you should have the metal to invest in it year after year. And that has made the Britannia Marie My Startup such a powerful proposition.

    Kaushal:- Definitely! In India, we need more women entrepreneurs to step up. Looking forward to that day when we see a good number of entrepreneurs coming because of this campaign as well. Saurabh, I also wanted to understand, while we have already spoken little about digital marketing from your perspective and how you’re driving it, how important is digital marketing as a part of the overall marketing game these days? If you had to put in some percentage-wise, that would also be wonderful if you could do that. But we just wanted a generic marketing view from the leaders and CMOS at your level. How do you look at digital marketing these days? 

    Saurabh:- Sure!! I’ve had the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of how things evolve. And I’ve been fortunate with the opportunities I’ve been presented with. And so, think about my early years as a Brand Manager for Cadbury Celebrations. So it’s about then that social media had just started taking off. So this was way back in 2009 when organic growth was still something social media handles would offer us. In recent days, everything has been a paid campaign. You won’t get average growth from Facebook just by putting great content out there, right? So I was one of the first Brand Managers to experiment with the Facebook page for Cadbury Celebrations in 2009, and in about six months, we took it to a million fans. And I didn’t spend a single rupee promoting it. It became the centerpiece of my campaign, or I would put the link on the back of my ad or the back, and even just by simply weaving it together, you could get excessive growth. And it had become a playbook on how Cadbury would do social media marketing, right? Then from there, I got a chance to move on to Diageo, where again, digital and social all play a significant role because, frankly, you can only, in alcohol, speak to the consumer when the consumer gives consent and wants to talk to you—those areas where, again, digital becomes prominent.

    I was fortunate in Britannia, where we got a double whammy. The pandemic hit in early March, and we were all wondering what would happen to our business. And I remember when the lockdown probably started by the 1st of March. On the 22nd of March, I realized that cheese had been growing at 78%. So you’re like, okay, something is happening here, and it is pretty evident that the restaurants were shut right. All the businesses were going to retain. And hence I got an opportunity to do the most extensive and best digital campaign ever done by Britannia, which is Britannia Cheese Star Chef, which is done in collaboration, where we had a partnership with India Food Network, which also happened to have Saif Ali Khan as one of the people on their roster and list. Hence, he was a prominent part of the show. We’re fortunate to have him there. And it was an initiative that I was proud of. It gave us good results and gave us a few awards in the industry as well. And now, as I move on to telecom, I realize that this world is truly fascinating. And the stuff you can experience here is miles and miles ahead of what anybody in an FMCG ever gets to interact with. So I’m still learning the ropes and figuring out all there is to learn and how I can play my part in this journey. But this is a large milestone in my personal growth and development journey.

    Kaushal:- Great! And specifically, when we did this particular campaign around the COVID period, do you think that now with COVID has taken care of to a great extent, I would say at least, are we seeing back the trends we saw in 2019 or the early 2020s before COVID started?

    Saurabh:- So there is this one question I always ask myself as a marketer, right? What is the fad, and what’s the trend? It takes work to answer. Because fads and trends seem almost complimentary regarding jargon, right? But one of the things I realized is that fads are just the season’s flavor. It is where the search rankings go high. It’s something that everybody wants to talk about, but it’s not based on learned behavior. A trend is fundamentally based on learned behavior. You teach somebody something that sticks, 

    Kaushal:- True.

    Saurabh:- So, while a lot of what we experienced in the pandemic was for that moment, right? But there’s a lot that we all learned during that time. We learned how to do interviews on a video conference like we’re doing now. We were not done years back.

    Kaushal:- Definitely!

    Saurabh:- We became comfortable with digital as a medium. We learned how to do a lot more shopping online, right? We learned how to do transactions without touch, which probably fueled the payment journeys we see. Every paan shop now has a QR code. Yeah. We also learned new kinds of cuisine. Categories like cheese, right? It may be conflicts with organic food. Much of that got learned because it’s always out there, but you never had any reason to have it. And while you may not consume it with the same frequency or the same gusto, just because you have learned that this is not possible has a particular effect that lasts with you. Frankly, I was a large consumer of Licious all through the pandemic because you could go to a restaurant and pick up delicious meat and consume them. So now, my life may not do it as often, but it is still significantly higher than my pre-pandemic levels.

    Kaushal:- Got that. And brands like Licious were built during that period, and they’re doing fantastic. Definitely really good! And I agree with that particular thing. Even in the search site where we saw some search volumes increasing during the pandemic, it came down slightly but not back to the 2019 level. So that’s something that connects with your answer as well. Thanks for that. Saurabh, we spoke a little about digital marketing and how you initiated those few campaigns where those campaigns became the world’s playbook at Britannia. Any other ideas you would like to share with the audience over here that can help them optimize their campaigns? Any secret sauce or the playbooks you have created other than this campaign you already spoke of?

    Saurabh:- So I’d like to share a story; I’d like to share the story, maybe not so much regarding digital, but how do we do the activation? And this was again this was in 2008. My favorite stint was the one at Cadbury Celebration, so it’s memorable. We were stuck when I took on Cadbury Celebrations as the Brand Manager. The brand still needed to earn profit for the last 15 years. It started even slowing down on growth. So you’re in a very challenging space. And in fact, there was a question that the Managing Director then asked in an open forum: why should we even keep this brand alive?

    Let’s look at phasing it out. So it’s a Challenge for a new Brand Manager to hear something as stuck as that. But the next four years are quite golden for us. We doubled the brand from 150 crores to around 300 and improved its profitability from -5% to +12%, so it was a fairly dramatic shift. We touched every part of the brand score, from re-engineering the business model to the proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge,” right? And that proposition was born during my time, and I have the privilege of being the brand custodian when something like this is born. So it’s not an individual effort ever. It’s always a team effort. But you’re always gracious about the fact that I was there when it started, right? So that gives you a story to tell. So that proposition has also bloomed through the edges to winning a Cannes now with the Sharukh Khan commercial. So it’s just amazing how that activation has grown.

    Interestingly, that brand or the whole proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge” was always so activation fertile and continuously led by activation. So not only did we run the ad on the air, but we would always find these opportunities to get the consumer to go out there and experience the proposition. How do you push somebody to say that this Diwali genuinely makes somebody happy by going over to their house? Rather than just seeing an ad and enjoying it? And it was in 2012 when we did this Cadbury Celebrations Airways initiative and flew a flight full of people from Bombay to Delhi. If you called in on a radio show and said that you know what this Diwali is, you wanted to go home, but I’ve been unable to. And we took the entire cohort of people, and again, one of the activities is about us saying that we’re putting our money behind a belief; it’s not just a tick mark, right? And nothing is activations like these that make brands endearing to consumers. It shows that you mean business; you mean what you’re talking about, right? And it also gives a lot of joy to marketers here to say that I’ve made a proposition so fertile that it allows for opportunities to touch the consumer,

    Kaushal:- Nice So, more about both the campaigns of all the campaigns that you mentioned, one common connect was the customer experience which you took to the next level, as you rightly said, that instead of just making them sit in front of the television, make them experience something which would create that next level of engagement. So that’s something we have seen across various brands, specifically from the organizations you have worked for. Still, any other campaigns you have not done, which you feel like, Kaushal, this is one campaign that I admire in the marketing world.

    Saurabh:- Absolutely! So while Mondelez is an organization, it is known for doing many fertile, exciting stuff. One of the companies does not do it as often as Britannia. Britannia is relatively the more placid cousin because while chocolate is impulse, biscuits are planted. But whether you are in a plant or an impulse category, when you genuinely drive the belief behind a proposition or a purpose you believe in makes a difference, right? And hence one of those campaigns for which Britannia has consistently won awards or accolades. In fact, Doshi just put up a post, Amit Doshi just put up a post on the same Friday morning, and LinkedIn reminded me is The Britannia Marie My Startup. The Britannia Marie My Startup contest is really about the fact that…you know, a Marie biscuit is a housewife’s favorite because as the husband and kids go off to their schools and office, she has those few minutes of reflection, right? And when she dips her biscuit, which is usually a Marie, she introspects on who else she could be. And that’s where the germ of an idea is to say, “why don’t we urge these ladies to say that you can be more? Why don’t you think of your startup? And that startup could be big or small, but we will put our money where our mouth is. We will give you the seed capital.” Right? And that is something that I feel Britannia Marie has done successfully, well, and consistently. If you have a gold dust proposition, you should have the metal to invest in it year after year. And that has made the Britannia Marie My Startup such a powerful proposition.

    Kaushal:- Definitely! In India, we need more women entrepreneurs to step up. Looking forward to that day when we see a good number of entrepreneurs coming because of this campaign as well. Saurabh, I also wanted to understand, while we have already spoken little about digital marketing from your perspective and how you’re driving it, how important is digital marketing as a part of the overall marketing game these days? If you had to put in some percentage-wise, that would also be wonderful if you could do that. But we just wanted a generic marketing view from the leaders and CMOS at your level. How do you look at digital marketing these days? 

    Saurabh:- Sure!! I’ve had the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of how things evolve. And I’ve been fortunate with the opportunities I’ve been presented with. And so, think about my early years as a Brand Manager for Cadbury Celebrations. So it’s about then that social media had just started taking off. So this was way back in 2009 when organic growth was still something social media handles would offer us. In recent days, everything has been a paid campaign. You won’t get average growth from Facebook just by putting great content out there, right? So I was one of the first Brand Managers to experiment with the Facebook page for Cadbury Celebrations in 2009, and in about six months, we took it to a million fans. And I didn’t spend a single rupee promoting it. It became the centerpiece of my campaign, or I would put the link on the back of my ad or the back, and even just by simply weaving it together, you could get excessive growth. And it had become a playbook on how Cadbury would do social media marketing, right? Then from there, I got a chance to move on to Diageo, where again, digital and social all play a significant role because, frankly, you can only, in alcohol, speak to the consumer when the consumer gives consent and wants to talk to you. Those areas where, again, digital becomes prominent. I was fortunate in Britannia, where we got a double whammy. The pandemic hit in early March, and we were all wondering what would happen to our business. And I remember when the lockdown probably started by the 1st of March. On the 22nd of March, I realized that cheese had been growing at 78%. So you’re like, okay, something is happening here, and it is pretty evident that the restaurants were shut right. All the businesses were going to retain. And hence I got an opportunity to do the most extensive and best digital campaign ever done by Britannia, which is Britannia Cheese Star Chef, which is done in collaboration, where we had a partnership with India Food Network, which also happened to have Saif Ali Khan as one of the people on their roster and list. Hence, he was a prominent part of the show. We’re fortunate to have him there. And it was an initiative that I was proud of. It gave us good results and gave us a few awards in the industry as well. And now, as I move on to telecom, I realize that this world is truly fascinating. And the stuff you can experience here is miles and miles ahead of what anybody in an FMCG ever gets to interact with. So I’m still learning the ropes and figuring out all there is to learn and how I can play my part in this journey. But this is a large milestone in my personal growth and development journey.

    Kaushal:- Great! And specifically, when we did this particular campaign around the COVID period, do you think that now with COVID has taken care of to a great extent, I would say at least, are we seeing back the trends we saw in 2019 or the early 2020s before COVID started?

    Saurabh:- So there is this one question I always ask myself as a marketer, right? What is the fad, and what’s the trend? It takes work to answer. Because fads and trends seem almost complimentary regarding jargon, right? But one of the things I realized is that fads are just the season’s flavor. It is where the search rankings go high. It’s something that everybody wants to talk about, but it’s not based on learned behavior. A trend is fundamentally based on learned behavior. You teach somebody something that sticks, 

    Kaushal:- True.

    Saurabh:- So, while a lot of what we experienced in the pandemic was for that moment, right? But there’s a lot that we all learned during that time. We learned how to do interviews on a video conference like we’re doing now. We were not done years back.

    Kaushal:- Definitely!

    Saurabh:- We became comfortable with digital as a medium. We learned how to do a lot more shopping online, right? We learned how to do transactions without touch, which probably fueled the payment journeys we see. Every paan shop now has a QR code. Yeah. We also learned new kinds of cuisine. Categories like cheese, right? It may be conflicts with organic food. A lot of that got learned because it’s always out there, but you never really had any reason to have it. And while you may not consume it with the same frequency or the same gusto, just because you have learned that this is not possible has a particular effect that lasts with you. Frankly, I was a large consumer of Licious all through the pandemic because you could go to a restaurant and pick up delicious meat and consume them. So now, my life may not do it as often, but it is still significantly higher than my pre-pandemic levels.

    Kaushal:- Got that. And brands like Licious were built during that period, and they’re doing fantastic. Definitely really good! And I agree with that particular thing. Even in the search site where we saw some search volumes increasing during the pandemic, it came down slightly but not back to the 2019 level. So that’s something that connects with your answer as well. Thanks for that. Saurabh, we spoke a little about digital marketing and how you initiated those few campaigns where those campaigns became the world’s playbook at Britannia. Any other ideas you would like to share with the audience over here that can help them optimize their campaigns? Any secret sauce or the playbooks you have created other than this campaign you already spoke of?

    Saurabh:- So I’d like to share a story; I’d like to share the story, maybe not so much regarding digital, but how do we do the activation? And this was again this was in 2008. My favorite stint was the one at Cadbury Celebration, so it’s memorable. We were stuck when I took on Cadbury Celebrations as the Brand Manager. The brand still needed to earn profit for the last 15 years. It started even slowing down on growth. So you’re in a very challenging space. And in fact, there was a question that the Managing Director then asked in an open forum: why should we even keep this brand alive?

    Let’s look at phasing it out. So it’s a Challenge for a new Brand Manager to hear something as stuck as that. But the next four years are quite golden for us. We doubled the brand from 150 crores to around 300 and improved its profitability from -5% to +12%, so it was a fairly dramatic shift. We touched every part of the brand score, from re-engineering the business model to the proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge,” right? And that proposition was born during my time, and I have the privilege of being the brand custodian when something like this is born. It’s not an individual effort ever, right? It’s always a team effort. But you’re always gracious about the fact that I was there when it started, right? So that gives you a story to tell. So that proposition has also bloomed through the edges to winning a Cannes now with the Sharukh Khan commercial, right? So it’s just amazing how that activation has grown.

    Interestingly, that brand or the whole proposition of “Iss Diwali aap kise khush karenge” was always so activation fertile and continuously led by activation. So not only did we run the ad on the air, but we would always find these opportunities to get the consumer to go out there and experience the proposition. How do you push somebody to say that this Diwali genuinely makes somebody happy by going over to their house? Rather than just seeing an ad and enjoying it? And it was in 2012 when we did this Cadbury Celebrations Airways initiative and flew a flight full of people from Bombay to Delhi. If you called in on a radio show and said that you know what this Diwali is, you wanted to go home, but I’ve been unable to. And we took the entire cohort of people, and again, one of the activities is about us saying that we’re putting our money behind a belief; it’s not just a tick mark, right? And nothing is activations like these that make brands endearing to consumers. It shows that you mean business; you mean what you’re talking about, right? And it also gives a lot of joy to marketers here to say that I’ve made a proposition so fertile that it allows for opportunities to touch the consumer,

    Kaushal:- Nice So, more about both the campaigns of all the campaigns that you mentioned, one common connect was the customer experience which you took to the next level, as you rightly said, that instead of just making them sit in front of the television, make them experience something which would create that next level of engagement. So that’s something we have seen across various brands, specifically from the organizations you have worked for. Still, any other campaigns you have not done, which you feel like, Kaushal, this is one campaign that I admire in the marketing world.

    Saurabh:- Absolutely! So while Mondelez is an organization, it is known for doing many fertile, exciting stuff. One of the companies does not do it as often as Britannia. Britannia is relatively the more placid cousin because while chocolate is impulse, biscuits are planted. But whether you are in a plant or an impulse category, when you genuinely drive the belief behind a proposition or a purpose you believe in makes a difference, right? And hence one of those campaigns for which Britannia has consistently won awards or accolades. In fact, Judosi just put up a post, Amit Doshi just put up a post on the same Friday morning, and LinkedIn reminded me is The Britannia Marie My Startup. The Britannia Marie My Startup contest is really about the fact that…you know, a Marie biscuit is actually a housewife’s favorite because as the husband and kids go off to their schools and office, she has those few minutes of reflection, right? And when she dips her biscuit, which is usually a Marie, she introspects on who else she could be. And that’s where the germ of an idea is to say, “why don’t we urge these ladies to say that you can be more? Why don’t you think of your startup? And that startup could be big or small, but we will put our money where our mouth is. We will give you the seed capital.” Right? And that is something that I feel Britannia Marie has done successfully, well, and consistently. If you have a gold dust proposition, you should have the metal to invest in it year after year. And I think that has made the Britannia Marie My Startup such a powerful proposition.

    Kaushal:- Definitely! In India, we need more women entrepreneurs to step up. Looking forward to that day when we see a good number of entrepreneurs coming because of this campaign as well. While we have already spoken a little about digital marketing from your perspective and how you’re driving it, Saurabh also wanted to understand how important digital marketing is in today’s overall marketing game. If you had to put in some percentage-wise, that would also be wonderful if you could do that. But we just wanted a generic marketing view from the leaders and CMOS at your level. How do you look at digital marketing these days? 

    Saurabh:- Sure! So there are two parts to this answer. Both parts are equally important, right? So the first part of the answer is that digital is just a medium. It’s been an off-stated argument, which I probably would have given at one stage to say that digital marketing is just a medium. It’s about marketing. And you can do digital marketing; you can do it from conventional sources. And believe me, once you start dividing media vehicles by tasks, they’re exactly complimentary. So if I want to do a task linked to scale, but I want a passive response, I want to give a proposition like an ad, and I just want to push it out to the consumer. So which is passive and scale, I would make a TV ad, and that ad goes on TV, or it can go on YouTube, right? So they are complementary. Right, complimentary.

    Similarly, if I wanted to do tropicality and I wanted to hit a lot of eyeballs with a static message to say that, you know, come this Diwali you must buy my gift packs. I could do outdoor, I could do banner ads. Both are again complimentary.

    Kaushal :- Complimentary there.

    Saurabh:- If I want to engage the consumer, I want something topical for large metros, and I want to do very cinema…slightly complicated message, right? Like this whole Saffola World Heart Day, right? I would probably pick up the radio, or I would pick up social media. Because then you can have a conversation there, right? So one part of the answer is the fact that digital as a medium is complementary to traditional, and you can do both. And it is just about depending on the scale of your campaign or the geography of your campaign, you can decide to do one versus the other. But the second part of the answer, the second part of the answer, is that there are certain categories where the ticket size is optimal, where a large part of the consumer is already available digitally, and where you have a large amount of data at your disposal, right? From there, performance marketing, how you sell your services, and how you provide a better customer experience becomes important. At that point in time, it ceases to remain just a complementary medium. It sees us remain just a medium of choice, right? Because if you were to see a mobile phone that you want to sell, right, where, say, an Amazon or a Flipkart might sell 30% or 40% of huge volumes on a big billion day, right? Yeah. Or you are working with, say, Domino’s, and you might realize that the Swiggys of the world have made a large part of their selling online now, and you need to know how you drive conversions and traffic. Or you are in Google, and you realize that the Google engine complements a MakeMyTrip; it’s a complement to an Ola-Uber at one, and it’s a compliment to so many other resources, right? It becomes a different ball game. So I would say the answer depends on which category and industry you belong in. If you belong to the complement, the conventional FMCG arms showed the importance to you, but maybe it is still just a medium of choice, and it is one of those opportunities if I can not be there, but it may not be business critical. But then there are an equal set of industries and services that are growing daily. 

    They are probably outpacing traditional companies in many ways. I mean, just as the revolution of Wow Cosmetics or Mamaearth has shown, there was a much larger opportunity in digital or D2C, you see, than probably the conventional majors ever realized. I mean, for me, the moment of a Mamaearth or Wow Cosmetics taking on is probably like the same moment 30 years back when a Chik shampoo launched a sachet and Hindustan Unilever Brand Managers realized that Chick in the sachet is selling more volumes by Chik than all the shampoo bottles put together, right? So one of those “Aha!” moments where everything changed, right, is probably what Mamaearth or Wow Cosmetics showed again to the cosmetic industry to say that there was a large world sitting out there, you just did not know how to access it. So I would say that digital plays a small or a large part in your category. Still, it should play a disproportionate role in the way you think because those large changing opportunities are the opportunities to provide a disruption are probably more digital than anywhere else. 

    Kaushal:- Nice! And definitely, we have seen examples like Mamaearth and others setting a completely different perspective to the marketers today, and all of them are getting more involved in digital. That’s something that is seen. In fact, for several of the queries related to digital, we have seen growth which is almost 2x-3x of what it was pre-COVID, and your answer validates it. Thank you! So moving on to the next interesting topic, usually discussed in the marketing community, is the Metaverse. Different marketers are taking a very different view on that. We wanted to understand what your views are about Metaverse and its role in marketing.

    Saurabh:- So again, let me share only my experience, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than I am aware of, Right? But neurotechnologies or methodologies as a way of research is something that I’ve witnessed and quite aggressively in that sense because when I was in Diageo, most of our research was neuro-based. So whether it’s a packaging test or a liquid test, we would typically use neuro to do it because the benefit of neuro is that there is no chance of a claim response. Whatever it is, it is what happens. I think from the point of view of research methodology, of course, it is aggressively used, right? But see, as a marketer, I have a large belief in complementing researchers for qual and quant because I often believe that quantitative researchers can often be a red herring. Because you are not able to understand why that response has been illicit. And hence, if there’s a research technology that is a complete black box and does not have a clear core understanding link to it, I feel a little sceptical to say that if I don’t know why something has happened, am I wrong in believing what has happened? 

    And hence I have an ambivalent view of neuro as a research opportunity. This science is growing, and one of my favourite books I recently read was Right Between the Ears, which is about how brands use brain science to build epic brands, right? So I liked that book; in many ways, it probably packaged what we knew through another lens. So what they talked about was the fact that most brand building happens in System One and System Two. And this is essentially about how the brain works where System One is more intuitive, right? It feels right and must be right. And many emotional brands like FMC brands work with the same logic to say that, you know what, if the Lux bar makes you feel glamorous but feels good, it must be good. I don’t need to overthink it. Finally, it’s a choice of 10 or 12 bucks, so I want to put it on the Lux level. Hence System One is slightly more intuitive; it’s more emotional. While System Two is causing dissonance. And even in my articles, I often talk about growing a category versus stealing shares.

    When you want to grow a category, it’s usually more intuitive; you have to make chocolate feel like a mithai. And that’s what has grown Dairy Milk or Cadbury over some years, right? “Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye,” it just feels right. And there is System Two, which is about stealing shares. System Two is about causing dissonance. System Two is trying to get your lazy mind to work a little bit harder because you have to create a sense of conflict, which is probably what Fogg did so well. They talked about the fact that you’re probably being treated as a fool with all the gas in spring on yourself when you could have used liquid, right? So I think that is pretty lit because it was a System Two at work, right? This is a rational, compelling argument: complete sheer dissonance with everything System One was telling you. System One told you that, boss, you put an accent, you feel like a chocolate man, and women are funny all over. System Two says boss, come on. So you’re buying gas, and you think you are the king of the world. So I think the understanding of brain science and neuro, whether it is in terms of making marketing constructs on building your brand or making them more epic, I would say, is a great area of study. Using neuro-based techniques to research is interesting, but the more we understand, the nicer the field will be. But definitely, it’s an engaging and interesting field to track, and it will probably again have more relevance for a few brands versus others.

    Kaushal :- Okay, perfect. Thanks! We also would like to discuss in terms of why we spoke of two things which are already getting implemented for the future. We are looking forward to it for the future years, both the Metaverse and in terms of neuromarketing, anything else that you think would be the driver of marketing in the future?

    Saurabh:- Sure! So I think one of the things that everybody has talked more and more about in recent days is the role of data, and data is a large commodity is an interesting word. Not many marketers know what it means and what to do with it. We all use Excel sheets, but what’s so big about data? Right? I think the fact that as the average rupee value which each individual consumer brings to us, as that becomes more valuable, as marketplaces become more competitive when the heat of the battle really rises, I would say the one thing that actually separates one way of marketing versus the other is really how do we harness and use data? And I would say this is an exciting field, I’m sure not everybody knows what to do with it or how it is done. But I would say this is something that for marketers is playing a larger role and it’s not about the fact that “Oh, we need to look at numbers.” We all look at numbers, right? Maybe we’ve been looking at numbers for the last century. But the power of harnessing these data engines, right, which churn volumes of data, which helps you understand what is the propensity of a consumer to do A versus a B? How do you bring some of this knowledge into ways and means to sort of reach out to them, give them personalised experiences, give them individual journeys, tailor-make products specifically based on database trends and insights. I would say that is in my mind the next frontier that marketers are all trying to mine. But gold, as they say, “Data is the new oil,” must be refined to make some value and sense. Otherwise, it’s just liquid. That’s why data is something that we’re all trying to understand how to harness and how to get them to play a larger role in the experience that we finally offer to a consumer.

    Kaushal:- Yeah, and rightly said, it needs to be converted to that information format, or else it’s all in those Excel sheets not making any sense to the management teams. So that’s something which is needed. Digital marketing, at least, is a better place, I would say, with tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics helping us to measure the core KPIs in a very different way and helping us transform that into information sets, at least which could be digested by humans’ minds. So that’s something which is working. But for the marketing world, brands are yet dependent on other ads like television and newspaper; getting that data and transforming that into information would be a completely new thing. Not sure which players would get into that.

    Saurabh:- Yeah, it’s like when you move from data to artificial intelligence. One thing I see is that the sales field has probably picked up faster than marketing. Right. It is really on how tablets are used across industries today to optimise a salesman’s order. And this is something that probably P&G started 15 years back, right? And today almost every FMCG firm uses this pretty well, right? Today if you see more salespeople in the market, they essentially have a tablet that sells the orders. And you have about 100 and 150 SKUs, Stock Keeping Units per company, but the average retailer only takes seven of them monthly. So how do you glean maximum value, right? So that the SKUs you sell to that retailer are complimentary or adding to his business without essentially getting your money stuck because, finally, if you don’t get the inventory off his shell, he won’t place his second order. So that’s one of those fields where data is already being used, artificial intelligence is already being used, and machine learning is being used to optimise the sales process. Similarly, from the point of view of marketing, there is a fascinating world of opportunity from the point of view of harvesting data and artificial intelligence, and machine learning to sort of make a difference in the life of the consumer positively.

    Kaushal:- Nice! Yeah, that’s something, it should work. Great! Thanks for all this information. One last question from my side. Imagine that millions of people are watching you live today. What is your message to these marketers and growth leaders?

    Saurabh:- Great! No, I think it’s a very pertinent and fabulous question, right? And obviously not an easy one to answer but one of the things that I always held to myself was say how do I create space? How do I create space for myself and my teams to introspect, right? And I always believed that speed is overrated. I believe that speed is overrated. I believe that we like to move very fast. It should have been done yesterday. And can we save X days and so on and so forth, right? Because I believe, well, in the quest to move very fast, we can never implement big changes. And probably what would have led to a Kodak or a Nokia losing the plot at that particular point in time, not because they delayed the project by three-four days. It’s probably in the largest form that took the long call, right? So how do we as marketers and strategists, take out that time to see the larger picture and allow our teams to participate in that and not leave it to say, you know what? I’m going to do the larger picture thing. Well, everybody else will do the day-to-day tasks. How do we engage and involve our teams in creating the larger picture? And hence, how do we create space and time for introspection brainstorming, you know, visiting the consumer, leaving those times where insights are taken out of occasions where people marketers are sitting there and observing consumers or people? How do we take out time for that? Because, as organisations, the pace of competition, and the need for agility, all of these become buzzwords. I feel what gets lost in the bargain is the opportunity to make truly transformative changes that typically require due diligence, right? And the important thing to understand is the task of doing all of that is not just for the leaders. The task of that is the ecosystem, which is the team. But the leaders need to create that fertile space where everybody has the time to breathe and to say, you know what, I’m probably going to be running helter and skelter for 9 hours a day, right? Or whatever the number of hours people work in a day. But half an hour a day or one hour a day, I’m going to take on something genuinely transformative, which will deliver a large shift in the long run. And is that space for introspection and genuine larger conversations, right? Is that something? As leaders, are we creating that? And are we inviting our teams and doing stuff that is not just fast but finally meaningful?

    Kaushal:- And this would help this thought process would also help in getting more disruptions by the existing organisation instead of the new age organisations coming up with something which the existing organisation missed. That’s a good point. Thank you for sharing. Yes, Saurabh, having you on this particular episode of The Growth Genius was wonderful. I loved the great insights which you provided and the deep knowledge that you have about marketing. Commendable. So thanks a lot for joining, and happy to have you here.

    Saurabh:- Absolutely! Great! Indeed, my pleasure. Thank you so much for all of you and, you know, lovely being here.

    Kaushal :- Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Grow Genius. I hope you learned more about growth and marketing from Saurabh. Please share your most important takeaway from today’s talk in the YouTube comment section if you did. Thank you. Now go away and create growth for yourself and your organization. Thank you.

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    The Future Of Marketing Post-COVID ft. Saurabh Bajaj

    The Future Of Marketing Post-COVID ft. Saurabh Bajaj