Building Agility into Marketing Strategies: Relevance Vs Speed

The CMOs’ Charcha – Delhi Chapter 2025, held today, brought together top marketing leaders for a day of insightful discussions and strategic exchanges. With the theme “Marketing in the Fast Lane: Turbocharging Brand Success and Beyond”, the event featured thought-provoking sessions, expert insights, and cutting-edge strategies shaping the future of marketing.

Industry visionaries explored the latest trends, tackled pressing challenges, and shared innovative approaches to brand building in a rapidly evolving landscape. The event also served as a key networking platform, allowing attendees to engage with peers, exchange ideas, and gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic marketing ecosystem.

A key highlight of the summit was a fireside chat on ‘Building Agility into Marketing Strategies’, chaired by Kumar Awanish, Chief Growth Officer, Cheil India. The esteemed panel consisted of:

Anita Nayyar, Consultant and former COO, Patanjali Ayurved

Basant Rathore, Senior VP, Strategy, Brand and Business Development, Jagran Prakashan

Rahul Mudgal, Consultant, and Former Head of Growth - Ripple, Enfactum Growth Marketing

Kumar Awanish commenced the session by asking how technology is shaping up into the agility of marketing. Rahul Mudgal responded by saying, “There are three ways you can divide how technology is shaping the agility of marketing one is to model your world, second is to model your customer and the final is to iterate at scale.”

He further said, “When I say model the world, predictive analytics have existed long before ChatGPT. This is generative artificial intelligence—predicting behaviours, simulating behaviors, and thinking about outcomes. On the B2B side, we have done attribution modeling and lead scoring. On the consumer side, we have analyzed social data feeds, conducted social listening, and triangulated customer interests, buying intent, and journeys to curate and orchestrate experiences across different mediums. We have been doing this for years, and generative AI adds another input to model consumer insights and stress-test them against real-time analytics.”

Mudgal noted that technology creates a deluge of data—more data means more noise. AI and the latest tools help filter this noise, offering a holistic view of the world. “Think of it as running a digital twin of your marketing ecosystem, allowing you to stress-test outcomes before spending a marketing dollar.

That’s essentially modeling your world,” he added.

Model your customer

Netflix and Spotify have been excelling at bringing about hyper-personalization at scale. What many don’t realize is that beyond curating personalized feeds, they tailor even the smallest details. For instance, if someone in India and someone in Thailand receive a ‘Squid Game’ promotion, their thumbnails will differ based on cultural preferences – same show, different presentations.

AI has democratized access to this level of personalization, where one no longer needs massive budgets like Netflix to achieve it. Spotify does the same with its Wrapped feature, summarizing a user’s yearly listening habits.

Now, with AI-driven search, traditional SEO strategies are shifting. However, new tools enable businesses to analyze dark web data at scale, identify key patterns, perform cohort analysis, and connect disparate dots in the marketing ecosystem. That’s hyper-personalization at scale—modeling one’s customer based on real-time buying intent and behaviour.

Iteration at Scale: Agility and Efficiency

Everyone talks about how creatives can now be produced in hours instead of weeks or months. Campaigns that once took months to develop in the early 2000s can now be executed almost instantly. That is the power of modern algorithms and inference tools built on foundational models. They enable rapid creative generation from a single brief while simulating how an ideal customer profile would react to and engage with the content. This agility in iteration fundamentally transforms marketing, allowing brands to optimize and refine their messaging in real time.

Furthering the conversation, Kumar Awanish questioned Basant Rathore how omnichannel marketing or omnichannel agility is better for any advertiser.

Basant Rathore emphasized that in the news and media sector, the product is changing every day, while the brand remains constant. “Agility comes naturally to us. We’ve got to put our ears to the ground, and have always got to be there. At the same time, the larger context in which I’ll base my argument is, the fact that we are in the content creation, content distribution and content monetization space. Each of these three spaces are being disrupted at a never before seen scale. Content creation is no longer our monopoly, content distribution is no longer in our hands. And monetization, the kind of fragmentation that's happened, is getting difficult by the day. all, the three strategic pillars of our business are getting disrupted at a very, very different pace.”

Rathore further said, “In our minds there’s a binary of print and TV and mobile, etc., but in the consumer’s mindset, there’s no binary that exists. They are moving seamlessly from one to the other. When I mount any campaign, typically when we look at our audiences, most of our campaigns are around how the community can leverage my platform to create the change around them. So, that’s the core of our existence as a brand, because we are in the new space. I’m not telling people to go and buy more newspapers. That’s not what we want really. I want my community to be very deeply engaged with me, find relevance in me and actually be able to use my platform to create change.”

When asked how adaptive storytelling fits in this whole narration of agility, Anita Nayyar said, “There’s nothing to get overwhelmed about it. As long as you understand that it’s the same old story, but it’s just been advanced by technology.”

“Brands today approach agility in different ways. For startups, agility often means reacting to every occasion—Republic Day, Valentine’s Day—ensuring the sales meter keeps ticking, sometimes at the expense of long-term brand building.

I come from an era where building brands like Cadbury or Dove took years, earning consumer trust and loyalty over time. That doesn’t mean they weren’t agile; they operated at the speed of their time, just as brands today operate at today’s speed. The key is ensuring communication remains relevant, consistent, and true to the brand’s core,” Nayyar elaborated.

“Technology has only accelerated this process. But agility shouldn’t be confused with moment marketing. Take Swiggy, Zomato, and Blinkit’s witty back-and-forths—these are great examples of brands being quick to capitalize on trends. However, moment marketing isn’t the same as brand communication; it simply keeps the brand top-of-mind in the short term,” she clarified.