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Indestructible Brands – D Shivakumar at 2nd National Leadership Conclave

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Below is an excerpt from the speech of Mr. D Shivakumar, Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave on the theme “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption”.

D Shivakumar at AIMA's 2nd NLC

D Shivakumar addressing AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave

A digital society changes the way we live work, relate to brands and to each other. We become far more horizontal in the way we work, end of the chain. It’s not a vertical society anymore. India has for a long been a vertical society. Hierarchy somebody orders somebody to do it. And then we follow their order. That’s not true in a digital society. Almost every activity and transaction is horizontal and not vertical. That’s the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is if you look at the top 10 populations of the world for the last 10 years, Facebook has 1.5 billion subscribers or users and 70% of them come back almost every day. WhatsApp has a billion people. Twitter has 600 million people. Instagram has 400 million people. Now we are conversing individual to individual, group to group, completely on the social network, completely digital. This is what we are seeing right now. Continue reading →

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Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption

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A special session on “Indestructible Brands: Building Brands to Survive Disruption” was held at AIMA’s 2nd National Leadership Conclave (NLC) on 3rd & 4th March 2016 at New Delhi.

Below is an excerpt of the Q & A between Ms Supriya Shrinate, Chief Editor-News at ET NOW and Mr Santosh Desai, Managing Director & CEO of Futurebrands India Ltd, Author, Columnist, Social Commentator.

Santosh Desai at AIMA's 2nd NLC

Santosh Desai addressing AIMA’s 2nd NLC

How has brand building changed in India and why are we so obsessed with disruption?

I think we live in a time where things are changing very fast and we have said this for a few decades now. You know there is a sense that things are changing but in the last seven or eight years, in particular, it’s not just the pace of change, It’s as if our foundational assumptions, the way we see the world itself has changed. And I think this creates a very interesting challenge at this particular point in time. I found the subject interesting, ‘indestructible brands: building brands to survive disruption’. Implicit in this articulation, It’s curious because there are certain assumptions that are built into this. It says building brands to survive disruption, not to create disruption. Brands are implicitly imagined as some sort of citadels, fortresses which do not create the new but which somehow must survive the new, which are not found in the source of change but they are under attack from change and they must protect themselves against disruption. This is very interesting. I just find this unconscious mental model of the brands as not being the source of change but being under threat. I also find it interesting that we are yearning for indestructibility. This idea that a brand is a permanent asset that you create once which stays for life and forever and forever, which survives attacks that marauders and invaders make on it and it stands there proud defined over millennia, this is an outdated idea. This yearning, this nostalgia for a permanent notion of a brand, It’s fundamentally at odds with the world that we live in.

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