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A Marketing Masterclass with Aditya Save
159 Plays5 years ago
“It is possible to disproportionately colour consumers’ opinion about yourself” - Aditya Save.
A marketing mega mind Aditya has previously worked with big brands such as Shaadi.com, Marico & GSK where he’s held senior leadership positions. Having made his mark in the corporate world Aditya is now the co-founder of Agilio Labs - a startup studio that works with experts to launch innovative & successful startups.
He calls himself a student of human behavior & has a keen interest in how technology is helping scale brilliant ideas faster. Aditya Save is also an angel investor and has invested in and incubated ideas for about 8 years now.
This episode of the Founder Thesis show is a marketing masterclass with Aditya. Here are a few key takeaways:
- An open and autonomous work culture encourages employees to take risks & achieve higher performance.
- The difference between risk & uncertainty.
- How to create a distinctive brand image, in a market with several competitive & similar products.
- How to tap into consumers as a source of learning.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
HD Smartcast You are listening to an HD Smartcast original
00:00:23
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Arav. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Featuring Aditya Savay: Marketing Masterclass
00:00:38
Speaker
Hi, I'm Aditya Savay. I'm a lifelong student of human behavior.
00:00:43
Speaker
And it has led me down a lot of rabbit holes, sometimes marketing, sometimes entrepreneurship. In my current avatar, I'm working with some really fascinating ideas, concepts and startups. I'm trying to make a big story in this world.
00:00:58
Speaker
Aditya Savi is an exception to the type of people we generally interview in this show. He is best known for his marketing stint at Mariko and shavi.com and is currently an angel in western. We had originally recorded Aritpya's interview for a marketing podcast but the conversation with him was so fascinating that we decided to make it a masterclass for founders on the fundamentals of marketing.
Aditya's Journey: From Middle-Class Roots to Marketing Leader
00:01:25
Speaker
Aditya has had an amazing journey from a middle class family in Mumbai to running large marketing operations in both traditional FMCG companies and also a digital products company. Here's Aditya talking about how he got his first job in a marketing agency in early 90s.
00:01:50
Speaker
A friend of mine had appeared for an interview in an office, and she said, they're still looking for people. So if you want, you send your resume. And I sent him a resume. And I got an interview call. I went there. I think Google was very, very new to Hong Kong or Google. So I didn't know what the company did, except for the fact that it was an advertising. And I still remember the person sitting across from me. Behind him, there was a poster of close up, some ad of close up on the wall. And my first thought in the room was, what a strange place to put up
00:02:18
Speaker
poster for an ad. And he asked me, you know, why do you want to work for us? And I said, you know, someday I want to make a film. And if I want to make a film, then you know, ad films are the way to go. And if ad films are the way to go, then I have to work in advertising. And he said, he said, but we don't do any of those ad films, we don't make ad films here.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I just looked at him and like, okay, so what do you guys do? So he said, we are a media company. And I, you know, if I have this conversation today with somebody, I'll probably never see the guy again. But I asked him, so what's a media company? And he was nice enough to tell me what a media company does. In those days, there was only one, you know, I was sitting in HDF fulcrum and doing this.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I was talking to Sandeep Tarkas. And I don't know why I got a call back and they said, come and work for us. So by all stretch of imagination, that interview shouldn't have gone the way it did and definitely shouldn't have. In fact, I tried to ask Sandy a couple of years later. What made you choose us?
00:03:19
Speaker
And you know, he says, I don't remember which one was yours, but we really needed people to work for us. So, but yeah, so I mean, a lot of coincidences, things went in my favor. Again, fulcrum was an absolutely life changing experience. I almost spent five. So this was in 2000, your first job. Yes, this was.
00:03:41
Speaker
So what was the profile they offered you? What exactly did you do there? So fulcrum was or it still is a unit dedicated for media planning and buying for Unilever, Hindustan Unilever. So HLL in those days, HUL today. It was the only one of its kind because in those at that time, media had not been consolidated, which means that every creative agency still also had a media department. Right. And HUL was the only one which had a separate standalone entity called fulcrum.
00:04:11
Speaker
So Falcon was a subsidiary of HUL. It was a subsidiary of HTA, which then became JWT. It was an agency's outfit, but it was completely separate from the agency. So for example, the creative agency was still in South Bombay and we were in the other. And we looked at them just the way we looked at every other creative agency.
00:04:30
Speaker
But it was a magical time. I mean, there was a lot of money floating around because it was one of those clients who really wanted to make a difference, had the means to do business well in India. Business was booming, lots of great brands to work on, lots of latitude to do stuff. So my batch, we were, I think about 12 or 13 management trainees in the batch. And from day one, we were pretty much allowed to do whatever we wanted to do. We were equals in that place.
00:05:00
Speaker
And one of the things that struck me a few years after that was that you know, till you start your first job, you don't really know how you will be at work.
00:05:10
Speaker
Because as a student, you know, you became a student before you realized it, right? So, but can you work? Can you be a worker? You know, can you be an employee? Okay.
Media Planning and Buying: Fulcrum and Doordarshan Experience
00:05:20
Speaker
And it is only when you end up in your first job that you realize, you know, is this something you want to do? Is this something you can do? And I think fulcrum that way in that, in that way was really magical because it allowed you to pretty much define your role. It allowed you to figure out what is good.
00:05:38
Speaker
and chase it on your own. So my profile was that I was a buyer, a media buyer, and I had to work with Durdarshan centers around the country. That was my first portfolio, but it was complete freedom. I mean, I ran my own shop. I ran my own portfolio. I had somebody who was my supervisor, but he had his work and I had mine. And so long as I took care of work, I had a free hand.
00:06:04
Speaker
Help me understand your deliverable better. You had to ensure that there are advertisements coming out on Dourdarshan for HLL or HUL. Was that your mandate?
00:06:18
Speaker
Yes, so if I look at terms of KPIs being efficient, so cost efficient was a huge thing because HUL was the biggest buyer of media at that time. And so there was certain efficiency that was expected that was one. The second thing was how well can you marry a brand to
00:06:38
Speaker
the given opportunity. So trying to marry advertising to content is something we did in those days, you know, we didn't realize it till people started writing about it 10 years later. But it was something that we were trying to do as much as we could, you know, so look at what the content is, try and figure out how do you map the right kind of advertising to it? How do you create opportunities for advertising that take the brand content that takes the brand message forward. So branded content was something we worked on long before again, it was crafted as a as a buzzword.
00:07:08
Speaker
Give me some examples also. So, for example, Fair and Lovely used to be a big brand and Fair and Lovely had a certain tonality to it. The new advertising campaign had a certain proposition and because I was working with Dursarshan and Dursarshan has a lot of norms on what content it will and it will not allow. It was left to me to figure out how to marry the right kind of content to the advertising, right? So, for example, if the theme was about beauty at night or midnight beauty or
00:07:37
Speaker
you know beautiful like the moon for example. Then I would seek out as many programs as possible which had references to you know moonlit romantic conversations moonlit beauty all of those things and try and slot them together around each other. Largely working within the constraints of what Doordarshan allowed its producers to do but also trying to understand how to make sure that that stood out for you as compared to other other competitors or marketeers.
00:08:06
Speaker
So you would have conversations with the show producers of all the various shows to figure out which show would marry well with what advertisement. At one point of time, I was managing, I think, 19 different Doosasan centers. And I didn't have a mobile phone then.
00:08:21
Speaker
Could you help me understand what you mean by managing 19 centers?
Education and Early Career Insights
00:08:26
Speaker
I mean, I'm not from the industry, so I'm not able to. So let's take the private channels. A star plus essentially tells the producer, come and sell me your content. I will pay you per episode. I will sell the advertising and I will make the money.
00:08:44
Speaker
ok. So, the risk is mine and the upside is also mine, ok. Doordarshan followed a different model. Doordarshan said we will give you a slot, you will pay me a slot fee and then and in return for a slot fee, I will give you certain advertising time allowed within your program. You go sell that advertising time outside to advertisers and make your money, right.
00:09:06
Speaker
to Russia was safeguarded in terms and it was capped in terms of what it could do. But the producer had an incentive if the producers program did well, he would obviously make more money by selling at higher advertising rates outside.
00:09:20
Speaker
So that was the model. And so there is a, there is Dursation 1, which today, you know, Dursation 1 and Dursation 2, which are national feeds. And then every state had a feed, right? So Marathi Dursation DD10 used to operate from Bombay. There were one from Patna, there was one from Gujarat, there was one from Karnadath, Tamil Telgu, every language. So I was working with 19 of the state Dursation Centre and the national feed.
00:09:47
Speaker
And because I was almost, I think at one point of time, was the only one working on Durodarshan in the office, a lot of people wouldn't even understand how Durodarshan worked because everybody was getting very used to the satellite way of working.
00:09:59
Speaker
So what feed comes when? What feed gets cut when? If I'm watching TV, when will I switch from a national feed to a local feed? So when do you air in local language advertising versus national advertising? When do you do local promotion versus vernacular promotion versus national promotion? All of that. And the other thing was because of the volume that I held, a lot of producers actually wanted to talk to me. So every producer realized that if they could get our advertising on board, they would at least be safeguarded in their revenue.
00:10:29
Speaker
So like I was saying, it was before mobile. And I think we had two, two lines on the switchboard. One line was almost always full with calls for me, because I was 70 different producers. And most of the other guys were dealing with the channels. And so over time, I realized I could remember everybody's phone number, everybody's number, I knew the line lines and their mobile numbers. And I could recognize voices on the phone. So the way somebody said hello, I knew which of my 70 producers was calling.
00:10:59
Speaker
So your experience in MBA days of those projects with different people would have contributed in making you effective here, I guess. Yeah, so I think of people as individuals, even if they are part of a collective. So I mentally I'm able to map similarities and differences separately. So I, I tend to notice uniqueness in a person specifically.
00:11:25
Speaker
I don't know when that started, but it's something that over time I've realized I tend to do a lot more. And I think what also happened was the fact that the independence that I got from my first day on the job
00:11:39
Speaker
made me feel that I could take risks and that you know even if I took a risk I had to know what was the quantum of risk and therefore how do you correct it you know if something was wrong how do you how do you salvage it what do you do when when there's a problem and that made me incompatible with companies where you have a very well-defined job you have a process you only are supposed to find a process you know your ingenuity is not required and it made me extremely comfortable in companies where they depended on you
00:12:08
Speaker
Pretty much define your own. So culturally, I tended to do better in those kinds of companies. So how many years did you spend at fulcrum?
Transition to Heinz and GSK: Balancing Marketing and Supply Chain
00:12:17
Speaker
Almost five. Okay, then why did you switch? Money, because the salary wasn't enough. In fact, there was, you know, joke that if you really wanted to get married, you had to quit a job, you know, because nobody, no father is going to give his daughter to you if he finds out that you are fulcrum.
00:12:39
Speaker
And it is quite an open joke and all of us used to have a lot of fun about it. But yeah, it was in a way, it was also true. So I had to switch because of the money. Okay, so where next? So I work for a company called Heinz. Heinz was an American firm, but the only American product they had at that point of time was Heinz Ketchup. Everything else was the old Glaxo portfolio of Complan, Glucondi, etc. And I joined the marketing team there.
00:13:08
Speaker
It was not a very long stint. I was there for less than two years. Like I said, some some setups don't really agree too much with me. And I realized that I wanted to get out from there. What also happened is I in that period I got married, we were expecting a baby. And I needed to make sure that I continue making more money. And I figured that the better way to do it at that stage was to switch jobs rather than expect an increment.
00:13:34
Speaker
And that's why I started looking for a job and I got an offer from GSK in Delhi. So, Heinz was also media buying? So, Heinz I did. Yes, Heinz I did. So, it wasn't media buying that was run by the agency.
00:13:49
Speaker
The client role tends to be everything, which means the agency reports into you and you pretty much handle all advertising, planning, buying. You oversee all of it. You don't do any of it directly. Your job is essentially to sit with brands closely and figure out what works for a brand from the client point of view. So it is the move from the agency end to the client end.
00:14:11
Speaker
And you were handling a specific brand or a portfolio of brands? No. So there was a conversation for me to handle a brand, but by the time I quit, I didn't think the company was really working out for me.
00:14:25
Speaker
Can you move to GSK then? I moved to GSK. So GSK was, I don't think of myself as a risk taker. So even when, even what sounds like a risk is actually in my mind, not a risk. So in the case of GSK, for example, I had never lived outside Bombay and I wanted to see what it was like, you know, if I could be able to manage with just my family alone without the sort of support infra that, you know, we have in Bombay and
00:14:48
Speaker
family and friends and you just know the city well right so wanted to try something different and again I was very lucky to get a great boss that really may help my decision along and looking back it was a it was a risky time to move per se because we just had a baby both of us me and my wife here from Bombay didn't know anybody in Gurgaon
00:15:10
Speaker
Your wife was working? No, she was not working. So she'd quit and we'd moved. And it seemed in hindsight, I think it was a little silly. But again, it worked out. I got some great teammate company and boss spoiled me silly. So it worked out. And what was the role there? That was an interesting role. So while I was at Heinz, one of the things I realized is that, you know, with brands, there are so many aspects that most people don't get to know about.
00:15:36
Speaker
So, for example, a brand doesn't grow just because you put an ad out, right, although that's how a marketeer wants to believe it. So, the role that R&D plays, the role that supply chain plays, the role that, you know, competition plays, the role that your CFO plays in the company doing well, in the brand doing well, because Heinz was a smaller setup.
00:15:57
Speaker
I got exposed to all of it and it was pretty eye-opening to find what else can derail you from the path that you are trying to set yourself on.
00:16:09
Speaker
So in in GSK my role was actually a marketing and supply chain put together role So I would report into the marketing head and the supply chain head the procurement head My job was to make sure that we were able to get the best value for our brands while making sure so think of Think of an extension of what the fulcrum role was in terms of figuring out what brand values to propagate what
00:16:39
Speaker
advertising content, what non-advertising content, what to do on mass media, what to do on digital, very very nascent digital at that stage and how do you bring efficiency into this such that small brands can actually ride on big ones.
00:16:55
Speaker
those were the contours of what I was trying to do. And GSK, so I work for GSK consumer, but the parent organization was a pharma company is a pharma company. And in fact, GSK consumer was just sold last year to Hindustan Gindiver. So processes were all set up from the pharma, which means you were very, very straight jacketed processes, you couldn't take risks on stuff, all kinds of constraints put in all of that. It was a very
00:17:21
Speaker
It is a very challenging time, very interesting time to work in the middle of all of that, trying to explain stakeholders how media is different, how marketing is different, how it cannot fit in the norms that have been set up, what you need to step outside for, how do you still manage risk? You know, so one of the things I realized is that most companies tend to mix risk and uncertainty.
00:17:43
Speaker
And one thing I find in my current life is that most entrepreneurs instinctively understand the difference between risk and uncertainty.
Understanding Risk and Uncertainty in Marketing
00:17:51
Speaker
So that was sort of a filter for me because there is very little risk. It's just a lot of uncertainty that you're trying to walk away from. So that was my time in GSK. Help me understand better on risk versus uncertainty.
00:18:06
Speaker
So a lot of intelligent people have written a lot of stuff about it. So I'm obviously not the right person to speak about it, but in my mind, the way I see it is risk is measurable. Risk is manageable. Okay. So which means there's a quantum attached to risk. There is a metric attached to it. Uncertainty is just the probability of something happening. Okay. And so people tend to react more to uncertainty than they tend to react to risk.
00:18:37
Speaker
I don't think most people tend to think of the two of them as separate. So I'll give you an example in current times, for example, you're not sure if you're going to get infected, right?
00:18:47
Speaker
but social distancing or lack of social distancing will increase the risk of you getting infected ok. Masks will reduce the risk of you getting infected ok. So while the probability of an uncertainty remains of an event happening, risk is the measure or the metric of a particular sub-event happening and therefore to sort of cover for the risk you can do things. On uncertainty you pretty much can't do anything about it.
00:19:17
Speaker
that's the difference in my mind so usually when I think of something I'm thinking of what is the probability of this happening so for example if I'm talking to you right now and I'm you know sitting with my laptop my laptop might might conk off you know I might get a blue screen the way windows gives you some once in a while okay I can't do anything about that but there is a risk that I might run out of battery okay and I can do something about that
00:19:39
Speaker
This is a measure that I use in almost every conversation, every business decision, consciously or subconsciously. And I find increasingly, I find that a lot of people don't understand the difference. So I sort of bring up the topic if I'm talking to a founder. What is your advice that you should embrace risk and don't worry about uncertainty because risk can be managed or like
00:20:04
Speaker
What is the advice that you give to people? My starting point is recognize the fact that two of them are different. Very, very important. The moment I say they are different, you will obviously ask, how are they different? So at least that is the starting point.
00:20:22
Speaker
Like I said, I think you can't do much about uncertainty. Okay. You will be able to find another definition, but it's important to bifurcate to do and in your own business, figure out which one is risk-prone and which one is uncertainty-prone. So I can argue that having seen what China had to do for Wuhan, once we knew that there are COVID patients in India, there was always a high risk of spreading.
00:20:53
Speaker
Right? The uncertainty of the government ordering a lockdown was another parameter altogether. I can't predict what the government will do. Right? The government will probably look at its own data and say, Hey, if I don't do this, there is higher risk. So what is uncertainty to me of a government action is actually a calculated risk for the government. You understand?
00:21:17
Speaker
And similarly for economic policy, similarly for stock market, similarly for everybody else. So the way people see a risk and uncertainty depends on where they are standing. The closer you get to something, the more you are able to bifurcate the two. So coming back to GSK, so two years you spent at GSK, then why did you decide to make a switch? Was it again for
00:21:40
Speaker
No, so one of the things that was that my boss had moved to another
Marketing Excellence at Mariko: Male Grooming and Digital Media
00:21:46
Speaker
role. He moved to London. Okay. And the offer that I had was to move to Singapore in a regional role. And I figured that, you know, my mom stays with me so or rather I stay with my mom. So I figured that we would she would not be, you know, able to go there, we won't be able to displace the family. So I started looking for something back in Bombay.
00:22:07
Speaker
And luckily I managed to find an amazing role in an amazing company. So that was how I got started in Mariko. And what was the role at Mariko? So Mariko was a dual role. I was category head marketing for the male grooming franchise. And I still manage digital and media as a portfolio. For digital for the entire set of brands?
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, so those are essentially, you can't do that for a brand, you end up doing it for all brands, yes. And what was that experience like? You spent a very long time at Mariko, so you must have been pretty happy there. Yes, my Google search, even today, if you put my name, most of the time you come up with, so if you search for Aditya Savai, it ends up with Aditya Savai Mariko.
00:22:56
Speaker
I think, like I said, I've been extremely lucky to have some associations with some institutions. Mariko was another one. I still think of it as my college. I couldn't, I can't see myself as an entrepreneur if I wouldn't have spent my time at Mariko. I was there for about eight years. And it's an amazing culture, very early in the first year.
00:23:18
Speaker
you figure out either if you are going to stick around or that this place is not at all for you, you know. So, it is an amazing culture. So, most people either live within the first year or if they stick around then they are lifers, you know, even after the Meru Mariko Alumni Association that is as vocal and as active.
00:23:37
Speaker
It's the place that gave me more confidence about my kind of marketing. It's the place that gave me opportunities across categories. It helped me pull together a lot of probably experience that I was already holding. It allowed synchronize it with a lot of things. It helped me take risks. The last role that I was doing at Mariko
00:23:57
Speaker
was the JD was written by me. The concept was mine. My designation was written by me. I don't think any company would allow that level of freedom to its employees. So absolutely magical place to be in. What was the thesis you formed at Malico? You said that it helped you do your kind of marketing. So what is your kind of marketing? What is the thesis that you have around that? Like what is marketing?
00:24:24
Speaker
So, if you remember, I was telling you about 1993 and then 2000, right? So by 2008, 2008 is when I joined Maricor, okay? And 2008 was also the world crisis, the financial crisis.
00:24:37
Speaker
A lot of companies started doing a lot of taking a lot of measures to safeguard themselves and in the middle of that I realized that the companies that had some sort of an affiliation to consumers or consumers had an affiliation to them if there was a stronger relationship those companies did better. I was always curious about why someone likes a particular brand in the same category if the category is largely the same you know.
00:25:05
Speaker
And Mariko allowed me to probe a lot deeper in that. So the percentage of intangibles that help a person decide, right? Take a purchase decision. I learned to craft at Mariko. I learned to understand when to let go. What do you not keep fighting on? What is in favor of the customer? And what is not in favor of the customer? And why?
00:25:28
Speaker
you know, going up against that is never going to be in your, you know, going to help you. Mariko helped me understand that. It helps you let, take failure as easily as you take success. So as a company, you know, I still remember, I joined and after six months or so, my boss was doing a review, half failure review or something like that. And he said, he said, you know, he said, okay,
00:25:54
Speaker
I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had to intervene in your case. I have never had
00:26:14
Speaker
So until that time, I had never consciously realized that I actually do this. But I always thought my work was my work and not my boss's work. So I don't want to go to people and crib about this didn't happen, that didn't happen. I just want to figure out how it works. So if I want to report into somebody, I want to report
00:26:32
Speaker
closure, whether success occurred here, rather than saying happening, you know, and him saying that was was pretty interesting, because I had never consciously thought of it like that. But you think it to me, I realized that it was because he was comparing me with other people. So I had a lot of that kind of great revelations in Mariko.
00:26:49
Speaker
So what were the answers to some of the questions which you told me like you had a question on why does a consumer prefer one brand over another in a category? What's the answer to that? So I don't I don't have a good way of explaining that at an overall level. So my starting point is that I know that brands can be differentiated.
00:27:08
Speaker
products might be same, brands are differentiated. That's my thesis going in. Okay, then I tried to find out who the current consumer is. Who's the person who's using this particular product category? Who's the person who's using this brand? Who's the person using the other brand, you know, competitive brand, and using sort of a tripod of these three, I tried to build up some sort of initial concepts, propositions of my own, some hypothesis.
00:27:35
Speaker
around what will make the person lean more towards you and away from some other brand? Or how will you be able to reframe this category? But my going in position is that it is possible, always possible. Give me like a case study example of figuring out why a consumer prefers one brand over another. I mean, if you can share something from maybe the Mariko brands or something where you understood, formed a hypothesis and tested it out and
00:28:04
Speaker
Okay. I'll take, I'll take a, you know, iOS versus Android, right? So iPhone sources, everybody else in the world, everybody now knows that iPhones have features, which Android had last year, right? And yet, and these are some of the smartest people they earn. Well, they're well-read, you know, they're not living under a rock, right? And yet they prefer the iPhone. Okay. And when you ask them why they give you 20 reasons why, okay. 15 of them are about performance of some sort of the other.
00:28:34
Speaker
Okay, and if you have to logically argue with them, be able to say that that performance already exists in Android either exists or has been better by Android, right? But what you have to understand is that that consumer is not giving you the reason.
00:28:49
Speaker
consumer is presenting a reason to be able to justify the decision is already taken. And I don't think that's new either. But just to be able to see this play out, you know, everybody in the world knows that you're justifying your own decision to continue to be able to do that to your own brand.
00:29:07
Speaker
you know, having a fan base of that sort is fascinating. So I take two things away from it. One is the fact that it is possible to disproportionately color consumer's opinion about yourself. Okay. As a starting point, I like that. And second, it is not about what the product does. It is how the product is experienced. So those are two, those two are my usual starting points. And this, you know, if you look at it, applies both to physical products, which I used to be part of, and now digital products.
00:29:37
Speaker
So, it's not constrained by the physical world so to speak. So, did the Mariko brands overall like you know all of them did well under you or were there some problem brands which you could not figure out and some brands where you figured out and cracked that? I had spectacular failures yeah and you know it's very sobering like for example you know I'm talking about male grooming in 2008 okay there was no category other than us.
00:30:05
Speaker
I mean there were a few imported brands that you would see but other than that there was nothing. And the hurdle you had to cross was getting Indian men to behave differently. Adopt a new habit of hair gel and hair creams in their hair etc. or grooming.
00:30:29
Speaker
But at that point, you were thinking about how to build a habit. And we did a lot to the product to train, you know, India is a very humid country, people spend a lot of time outside, you know, if your hair, if you have some product in your hair, it can become sticky, you might sweat, there might be dirt in it, it might attract dirt, all of those things can happen. And we tried to do
00:30:50
Speaker
a lot with that product to try and make it easier for people. And then I then I figured that while all of this existed, all of these issues existed in terms of opening up the category format, you know, being able to break a glass ceiling, exactly the same problem existed with oil. But Indian men had a reason for using it, right? So there was something in their makeup in their mental makeup that made them differentiate between formats.
00:31:16
Speaker
for the same brand and sort of justify their behavior with some reasons. The same thing as what I give you the same example in the case of iPhone. I mean at one point of time I just gave up and I said if people prefer something then you know we should be selling more of that and we double down on the oil format rather than on the cream format.
00:31:36
Speaker
But could you figure out why men were okay with oil, with all those problems, but not with gel? Oh yeah, so part of it is got to do with the chemistry of hair. Part of it has to do with the regimen that people have in their mornings.
00:31:53
Speaker
I don't want to go into details of that but essentially it was I realized that the real fight was against habits that consumers already had and I was too small as a category to be able to impact it both in terms of consumer communication and in terms of the sheer amount of money required to be able to transform it you know so at that point of time for example the other company that was trying to change behavior was Kellogg's
00:32:19
Speaker
you know, and they were trying to introduce Indians to cold breakfast in those days, right. And do what you might, you know, you can watch all the English films you want, but you will not want a cold, you wouldn't want conflicts in cold milk. And that had a very sobering impact on what I was trying to do. So it just made practical sense to say, let's not try and change consumer behavior towards us. Let's try and build on what the consumer existing habit is, because it just makes more business sense right now.
00:32:44
Speaker
So in general, would you say it's best not to bet that you will get to change consumer behavior for any startup or any company looking to launch products? I think marketing is not an ego trip. Marketing is about enjoying the challenge and accepting when you succeed and accepting when you fail.
00:33:06
Speaker
in either case you only played a part you are consumer at most of the work you know if people have to change their mindset people have to change their usage they have changed it okay that's the way I look at it so there was this company called Viber which had a chat application and there was whatsapp right what acted well Viber didn't right
00:33:26
Speaker
If I look at feature to feature, in those days, they were almost identical. Viber actually did really well in, I think, Japan and Korea. WhatsApp didn't. WhatsApp did extremely well in India and those didn't. So, what you need to do as a marketeer is you need to, if you don't bring your ego into the picture, it is possible for you to learn from your consumer. That's your biggest source of learning.
00:33:47
Speaker
actually any profession for that matter I mean forget marketing I think business depends on how much you can understand what is happening right and then there are there's something called the law of diffusion of innovation so how how can you look at new product adoption across different kinds of people etc etc so you can cut it in a lot of different ways you can do a lot of science to it but the broad the the broad principle is that people typically tend to tell you what's and what's not if you're willing to adopt
00:34:14
Speaker
So in a way you could say marketing is like surfing where you have to be able to see the wave coming and ride it rather than trying to invent waves and if I could give that as a summary. Actually that's a good analogy because most people who are standing on the beach think that the surfer is simply managing the wave. The surfer himself thinks he's doing a lot. So yeah, in a way it's the right example to give.
00:34:38
Speaker
So coming back to Marco, so you spent a fairly long time, then what next?
Switching to Digital: From Mariko to Shadi.com
00:34:44
Speaker
Why did you decide to leave Marco?
00:34:46
Speaker
So I think leaving Mariko was the toughest decision because by the time I left, I was handling a portfolio which helped me spread digital from two different countries. I mean, from Asia and Africa. We had about 10 different hubs and we were in about, I think, 20 different countries. And it was a fairly exciting role. It was something I had dreamed up of. I had seen it as a need within the firm. So I was doing that. But I realized that as an FMCG company, it would always lag behind in digital.
00:35:15
Speaker
And I was very clear that digital will change the world. So it was a bet more on myself than on the company, saying I want to be in a category or in a place where I can do this full time. And it really matters to the company itself.
00:35:30
Speaker
So FMCG companies, the business model is fairly set, the reception model is fairly set. And so in that sense, whatever you do will only have a 10%, 15% impact on the company. I wanted to see if I can impact the life cycle of a firm if it matters. And that was the reason. So that's the reason why I decided to move out of Mariko. I actually was planning to go abroad and study. I was looking at courses on Harvard and Stanford on digital.
00:35:57
Speaker
And just as I was doing that, I got an offer from Shadi.com. And my first thought was, you know, here I am trying to pay a fee to learn something which these people are willing to pay me for.
00:36:10
Speaker
It seemed like a no-brainer to get into the category. That's how I made a switch. So tell me about your stint at Shadi.com. So Shadi was, it was a short but very different experience. Firstly, I didn't realize how much I was seeped in product marketing.
00:36:32
Speaker
So, working in a company where there was no physical product, it changed a lot of my assumptions. I think the first three months, I was really struggling because all my thinking was oriented towards marketing for products or categories of brands which had a physical presence of some sort. So, for example, how do you test with consumers? So, my actual thing was to do research.
00:37:01
Speaker
how do you how do you change a feature you know what if people don't like something how do you figure out what they don't like how do you change it how do you test it every aspect of every single part of marketing I got to learn all over again at Shadi
00:37:18
Speaker
And in my previous stint at Mariko, we had done some really good work on using word of mouth, using mobile marketing, digital marketing on someone growing brands and someone actually launching brands. And if I wouldn't have had that experience, I probably would have taught KRA medicine yoga.
00:37:42
Speaker
So it was also the first time that I had a creative team in house. So which typically FMC team, you have a creative agency, right? So whereas here you had a creative team. So the visual rendition of what you were thinking about happened right outside your door.
00:38:11
Speaker
So the pace of work, the scale of work, you know, we had a team sitting in Bombay, and we had a team in London. And between the two, we were able to manage marketing in about 180 countries, you know, so it was it's extremely mind opening, you know, how do you think about product flows? How do you think about which feature should go in first? How do you get because you can now see every part of the consumer journey, how do you
00:38:40
Speaker
pull the data together to understand what it means. How do you create cohorts? You know, so, you know, the concept of aj hum yeh kareng yeh aur kalisko test kareng yeh aur perso consumer ke paas jai ngeh doesn't exist in digital. Okay.
00:38:56
Speaker
because you can do all of that in one day, firstly. Second thing is, there is no such thing as, because the concept of a day doesn't exist. And those are constraints that you realize have been put in by the physical world on you. So, if you have an app as your business, a consumer can open that app 17 times on the same day. And each one is a new consumer journey for the same consumer.
00:39:25
Speaker
So how you define cohorts sometimes ends up defining, sometimes ends up influencing how much success you see. Right? So even consumer definition by itself needs to change. And that's why a lot of, you know, good marketeers tend to struggle in digital media, in digital media companies, in digital product companies.
00:39:52
Speaker
And I think that's very important in when you move from physical companies to digital companies.
Challenges in Digital Marketing and Brand Evolution
00:39:58
Speaker
And when you move from one digital category to another, because what is valid for PTM is not necessarily valid for geo money, or is definitely not valid for hot star. What works for startups doesn't work for a hot star.
00:40:12
Speaker
And what works for Hotstar doesn't necessarily work for Prime Video. So what was Shadi.com's growth engine? Like how were they getting users?
00:40:23
Speaker
It's a brand that was built in the first wave of Indian digitization. By the time I joined it, the company was almost, the brand was almost, I think 20 years old or so. Okay. Plus the need is very, very clearly identified. The people who worked on that brand initially in the first three or four years did a fantastic job of figuring out what the actual need is, which they can fulfill. And they stuck to that need.
00:40:51
Speaker
So, it was not about dating, it was not about getting people to meet etcetera, it was very very clear in terms of the intention of why people would come to it.
00:41:00
Speaker
Okay? That obviously has trade offs because you typically in India, people get married only once, right? So you are essentially building a brand that most people will work with once in their life. So branding has to be absolutely rock solid because the same consumer is not going to come back again. And that's a huge challenge because everybody who does well with your brand will fall out of it. Right? So how do you engineer word of mouth?
00:41:26
Speaker
such that you can keep getting repeat audiences. Okay. That's one part. The other thing is that every three or four years, the digital landscape changes. What I mean by that is that, you know, when, when the brand started, there was only a website, a desktop version. Okay. So up desktop websites or apps, my key for key here. Okay. Other men is realize we are shampooed by the website, but you want a page, but you want it.
00:41:53
Speaker
If you want to make sure that you don't have a consumer app, then you have to update your app. That makes a big difference in how you plan your work. How do you plan your communication? How do you plan your product? How do you plan your algos? So the world moved from websites to app world.
00:42:21
Speaker
Within the app world, the role that search over time started to play in terms of consumer acquisition. Within that, the role played by social media over time. Okay. So every three or four years, there's a new kind of intervention that comes up and you readjust your brand, stay contemporary because the person who's going to use you is probably going to be a 24 to 26 year old. Okay. So today's 24 year old is very different from the 24 year old five years ago.
00:42:58
Speaker
So by the time he comes to your app, that person has changed His expectations, her expectations have changed
00:43:17
Speaker
So today's product has to appeal to today's generation. So my usual way of looking at marketing as a whole is three things, relevance, preference, and influence. Those are the three things I try to keep steady across all my marketing work. Okay. I mean, decided when I was working for companies and today, when I do this for startups, can you expand on this a bit more? Like how exactly does this framework work? So, you know, it's.
00:43:47
Speaker
Because there's so much of noise around marketing, and there's so much of noise around, you know, media channels, communication media, a lot of this, I try to try and see strip it down and see what is what is the bare bone basics that you need. So in marketing, if you want, if you want the consumer to be on your side, there are two reasons to want it. One is for consumption. And the second is business growth through that consumer.
00:44:14
Speaker
So brands grow well when consumers talk to consumers about them, okay? Because it helps you optimize your marketing spend. So the first one, which is relevance. Relevance means are you really able to find a spot in that person's life? What need do you fulfill? What pain point do you fulfill? What role are you playing in? What kind of situation? When people talk about needs, needs are very universal.
00:44:44
Speaker
Pyaas lagya tu nid ho pani pini ki nid is universal. But sometimes you want, you feel that there is pyaas at the same time you are sweating a lot. So you want an irritated drink. You don't want water. You know, sometimes you feel yaar paharitni ghar miyamishka tandha pani ca yeh. So relevance is not just identifying the need. Relevance is understanding the context of that need. And then trying to fit your brand, your product, your proposition to that subset.
00:45:14
Speaker
I think that is, that is a key part of what you do for a brand. You know, if you can recraft it, that's the first thing. The second thing is preference. I think of preference as monopolistic interest. Okay, Mira consumer, Mira brand go, Alak, Baki brand say Alak Samjega. You know, iPhone versus all the other phones. They just don't think it is comparable.
00:45:40
Speaker
not Apple, the consumer. So preference is something that the consumer affords to you. And so what in your four P's allows you to become preferred by your consumer parachute? For example, there are probably 50 other brands that have almost the same product, right? Yeah, the product is super generic. It's just coconut oil.
00:46:07
Speaker
But knowing that you wouldn't find a woman who would be happy to substitute it. Apola, which is another product from Mariko. Similar, you know, understanding with its consumers. So consumers prefer you over everybody else. Some part of that is branding, because it also sort of projects who the consumer is, etc, etc. But those are ways to build it. The final impact is that you should look like a category of one for your consumer.
00:46:35
Speaker
This is very crucial in digital companies because in digital, all other barriers are zero. So for example, in physical product companies, availability is a big thing.
00:46:57
Speaker
online, they are both kept next to each other. So if you can't find them, you pick up something else. So preference plays a much bigger role in digital companies than it does in physical companies. In physical, it is not anything to laugh about either. And the last one is influence.
00:47:14
Speaker
I think that is the real Dhande Ki Bhat. Acquiring consumers is a very, very costly proposition for all businesses. And so, for a marketeer to expect KR company Kharcha Karthi Reigi is not realistic. So, a good brand is a brand where the consumer recruits a consumer for you. How well you create the cycle of influence. How well you help your consumer talk about you.
00:47:39
Speaker
How easily does the consumer understand what to say? How much of that consumer's ego is vested in recommending you? All of these things come under this third head of influence and they are fairly simplistic things to say but obviously it's a full-time job to do each of the three. So you could almost divide your marketing team into three parts and say one team will try to drive relevance, one team will work only on preference and one team will try to generate as much influence as possible.
00:48:09
Speaker
So in a way, if I could further expand this, so the team driving relevance would be like your product team. The team driving preference would be your marketing communication team. The team driving influence would be, for example, teams doing, say, working with bloggers or people who do video reviews or those kind of celebrities to get them to talk about your product.
00:48:35
Speaker
Actually, that's the way a lot of people end up interpreting it. A lot of people actually reorient their teams like that. But honestly, relevance is not the only place where product teams are important. Preference by you need a product team. So think of it like three cross-functional teams having different skill sets. Okay, available skill sets if you don't have enough people, but three very different KPIs.
00:48:58
Speaker
three very different objectives to attain. So I wouldn't say it is skill sets of the teammates. It is what they achieve together, what they orient themselves together. That matters. So why was the Shadi stint short? I mean two years compared to six years, seven years at Mariko.
00:49:16
Speaker
So when I was 25, I had told my wife that I would want to retire at 40. And while I was at Shadi, I was about to turn 40. And you know, she sort of reminded me about it. And by the time I was already working with startups, you know, so my weekdays are full in office and my weekends are full with with startup companies.
Retirement and New Ventures: Angel Investing and Business Problem Solving
00:49:37
Speaker
And she was like, you know, the amount of work you're putting in doesn't make sense or so rethink it. And I said, you know, at the end of the day, I think it was it was more a decision that we just took, saying, I will retire from active work life. Okay. And does your wife work now? What does she do? She has a company of her own. She has a health food brand of her own. Okay. So, okay.
00:50:07
Speaker
But it was, I think it was a joint call. We took a couple of weeks to think about it. And explaining it is still difficult to people because a lot of my friends are my age. And a few of them resent the fact that it's too early.
00:50:24
Speaker
But I thought it was, in hindsight, I think it worked out really well for me. It gave me more time to do what I wanted to do. And the choice making has really worked out. Essentially, the decision it took was to not be in a job and instead be an angel investor or be a mentor to start. What exactly did you decide to do?
00:50:43
Speaker
started I had started investing when I was in Mariko and Mariko in that sense is extremely encouraging to doing whatever you want to do in life you know so I had a I had a written approval from my CMD to invest outside if I wanted to so long as it didn't you know conflict with any of Mariko's interests and that so what I realized is that my thinking
00:51:07
Speaker
was very, very jaded in Mariko. And working with startups allowed me to sort of open up some of those assumptions all over again. And the more I did it, the more I realized that I enjoyed it, that nothing that I thought was a given is a given. And so I started wanting more of it. And giving up a job allowed me more time to do this. To do what? What is this? Like be an angel investor? What do you call yourself now?
00:51:38
Speaker
I'm a repairman. I repair businesses. Most of the people who approach me are people who have tried to do something of their own and have got stuck somewhere. And I work with them on repairing that business. I invest some of my own money. We have a company where we help startups, strategy, market access and funding. But the broad thing that I think about is happiness comes from solving problems.
00:52:04
Speaker
So whatever helps me solve problems makes me happy. So I want to spend more time on it. I want to try and allocate as much time to it as I can. Can you share publicly some repair jobs that you have done? So actually, I won't do that because you could use hypothetical situations. There's a very famous investor called Monish Pabrai.
00:52:30
Speaker
I think he said this, or one of the other investors said this, he said, you know, every time I talk about my investments, I convince myself that I was right. You know, because you're gonna be wrong about them, right? So, so I, and when I read it, I was like, shit, I do that myself.
00:52:48
Speaker
So from that day, I stopped taking proper nouns. Because generally speaking, so I've been interested in equity investing since 2003. I'm a Buffett and Charlie Munger fan. There's a book called The Little Book of Building Wealth by Joel Greenblatt, I think is outstanding. And so my introduction to understanding business came from the point of view of figuring out
00:53:16
Speaker
what is real value? Right? So marketing in my mind is a subset of building value, the process of building that value. And so value investing or investing, per se, is a way of participating in increasing the value of that company of that firm, and then by association of it falls up in your lap.
00:53:36
Speaker
right? So my intention was not to do value investing or to do angel investing or whatever. My intention was to just give myself more time to do the things I enjoyed. And I believed at that time that if I do this over time, I'll get some returns, you know, some of it will work out in whatever. So the decision was to
00:54:01
Speaker
reallocate my day towards things that I wanted to spend time with. And like I said, I enjoy understanding people's problems. A lot of times, people's problems and business problems collide into each other. The founder's problem is the business car problem.
00:54:19
Speaker
So I figured, and while I was in Mariko, I was actively mentoring companies, startup founders. So I just started doing a lot more of that. And so yeah, so I have a portfolio where I have diverse interests in design houses, in food companies, in a travel company, in healthcare, in entertainment. The business funders remain the same.
00:54:44
Speaker
what you need to repair remains the same. So you essentially work with B2C companies, lastly? No, I have worked with B2B companies as well. But even when you're working with a B2B company, the second B is the customer, right? So in my mind, it is always consumer decision making that defines all of this. So even in the situation, I'm trying to understand what that consumer is thinking.
00:55:08
Speaker
And what would make you interested to invest in a company and become a mentor for them? What is your shortlisting criteria? Because a lot of people would approach you, but you would take it ahead with a few. So I think of it as the horse and the jockey. The business is the horse, the founder is the jockey.
00:55:30
Speaker
And early on, I realized that I was betting a lot more on the jockey, the person, the founder. And over time, I realized it is more and more the horse. So if you want to run a horse race, the horse is much more important than the jockey. So define horse, would that mean the market opportunity or would that mean the business plan? How that business is placed today to take advantage of a market opportunity?
00:55:56
Speaker
And what if change in business, can it be still possible to run faster or you know, do well. So I think I over time I've started putting more emphasis on that compared to the person who's running the company.
00:56:10
Speaker
So as you could probably make out, Aditya loves solving problems. If your business is facing a marketing problem and you want one of the top marketing brains of the country to help you crack your market and reach scale, then write to us at hello at podium.in and we'll be sure to request Aditya to take a crack at your challenge.
00:56:37
Speaker
If you like the Foundry Thesis podcast, then do check out our other shows on subjects like marketing, technology, career advice, books and drama. Visit the podium.in for a complete list of all our shows.
00:57:24
Speaker
This was an HD Smartcast original.