Indestructible Brands – D Shivakumar at 2nd National Leadership Conclave

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

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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Building World Class Indian Brand – Rajiv Bajaj

Below is an excerpt from the speech of Mr. Rajeev Bajaj, Managing Director, Bajaj Auto Ltd on the theme ‘Building World Class Indian Brand’ at AIMA’s National Leadership Conclave.

Rajiv Bajaj at AIMA's NLC

Rajiv Bajaj at AIMA’s NLC

 “I would in the context of today’s discussion tell you a little story about my own self. This is about when I was in college in Pune. I passed out in 1988 and I must tell you I was the most popular student in college and let me tell you the reason why because in 1988 if you wanted to buy a scooter, you had to wait for one and half year. So every professor and student was my friend and whenever they wanted a pair of wheels they had to come to me and make a request. That was the glorious period of “Hamara Bajaj”. I joined Bajaj in 1990 and the financial year 2000 was thankfully the first and last year when the company didn’t make any money making two wheelers. That is how dramatically my world changed from  1990 to the year 2000.The scooter went from having a waiting period to being in a situation where nobody wanted to buy it anymore.

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Tips to be followed in Digital Marketing

Koichiro Shima – Co-Chief Executive Officer, Creative Director, Editor Hakuhodo Kettle, Japan & Yasuharu Sasaki – Executive Creative Director – Dentsu New York

In this new era Japanese agencies have created many successful digital advertising campaigns along with some campaigns which should not have been launched as they followed the policy of copy & paste from the successful campaigns. These unsuccessful campaigns were myopic and only focused on results and damaged the digital advertising field. So, here are some of our tips for a successful digital marketing campaign.

Digital is not a medium to express but it is the tool that we should use to integrate the diverse marketing media of business.

Here are two examples:

  • We launched a successful digital campaign on internet where we asked people to join this campaign on internet and we shot a TVC for same featuring actual people.
  • Just after tsunami in Japan we launched a campaign in collaboration with Honda where we provided information about road condition of areas affected by tsunami to people free of charge to make rescue and reconstruction much quicker. Continue reading
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Myopic principles which marketers still follow – Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President – IMEA, Nokia

Mr. D Shivakumar, President AIMA & Sr. Vice President – IMEA, Nokia

Principally while defining your business you have to take into consideration the needs of your business. That’s the fundamental point of Marketing Myopia. I believe marketing has changed fundamentally.

Here are some changes:

  1. It is not the era of product brands anymore; it is the era of experience. Consumers now want a certain aura of experience now.
  2. The concept of place has changed, place today is any site which a consumer can access to know about your product, it could be internet or a physical store.
  3. We have moved significantly from price to value.  It is not about just promotion, we have classically run brand on the basis of promotion in our country. Advertising affect attitude to change the consumer behavior.
  4. When you are doing promotion like 20% off & 30% free, you are changing behavior. By offering this promotion we are changing the consumer behavior and we are hoping that their attitude will change.  We are planning to educate the consumer today rather than just promoting our product.

Advertising has changed dramatically, In 1980s for adverstising we had just two programmes in our mind: Hindi feature films & Chitrahar, with these two we could cover 80% of our target consumers in any category. Today it is a difficult task. The fragmentation of media now is dramatic. Continue reading

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Indian economy is growing in all spheres – Shri Pranab Mukherjee, President of India

Shri Pranab Mukherjee, President of India

At the very outset, I would like to take the opportunity of congratulating all the award winners. I am happy to join you on this happy occasion – Managing India Awards 2013. These are prestigious corporate awards that recognize outstanding contribution of individuals and organizations to Indian business management. Our country today has corporate leaders who can manage the development of Indian business into models of excellence. Indian managers are recognized all over the world for their managerial capacity. Many global business giants are headed by Indian managers and technocrats today.

Philip Kotler, the acclaimed expert on Marketing had once observed and I quote: “Today you have to run faster to stay in place” (unquote). We have set upon us a challenge to make India count amongst the top few nations in the world. To mark India’s growing stature, management principles should find application not only in our business and industry, but also in other important processes such as social change and governance. How change is managed will determine our progress. This is a need that the Managing India Awards denote, and is also a reality epitomized by this year’s award winners. Continue reading

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