Mastering brand management: Building & sustaining strong brands in today’s market

The 2024 edition of CMOs’ Charcha – Bengaluru Chapter, held on September 25, brought together the country’s leading marketing heads to converge and set the future roadmap for India Inc. The CMOs' Charcha – Bengaluru Chapter 2024 centered around the theme of ‘Revolutionising Marketing: The Fusion of Data, Creativity, and Technology’.

The event saw a panel discussion on ‘Mastering Brand Management: Building & Sustaining Strong Brands’. The session was chaired by Rahul Vengalil, Co-Founder & CEO, tgthr, and the esteemed panelists included:

Nabajit Nath, Head of Sales, India, Blis
Nitin Khanna, VP, Marketing, Acko
Richa Khera, Global Social Media Director, Schneider Electric
Sampurna Rakshit, Marketing & ECommerce Head - MIa by Tanishq, Titan Company
Varun Oberoi, VP and Head Marketing and Corporate Communication, Indo Nissin Foods

Rahul Vengalil started the session by remarking, “I personally feel that over the next three four years when digital is going to saturate, our new users are not looking at it. The performance, marketing, the cost of acquisition, the way we know it will no longer be there. It will be expensive, there will be even more and more newer brands coming into the picture. And in such a scenario, brand will be the mode for large companies.”

He asked Sampurna Rakshit, “Off late, every one of us have been exposed to multiple of these over the top advertising content, right? But if you really look at it, if you put the same brands as one after the other, there's no real coherence, there is no same messaging or sustained messaging. So in your opinion, I would also like to understand what it takes for the brand across their entire journey to actually have that consistency? Is it only advertising? Is it demand advertising? What is it that it takes?”

Sampurna Rakshit responded by saying, “I think firstly, the brand needs to be honest about what it stands for. You have to be very clear why the brand exists. Who is your TG? What do you stand for? What are your USPs? If you are honest to that, I don’t think you will be jumping a lot through various channels. You won’t be chasing virality for the sake of virality. Second is that a brand goes beyond advertising. Brand touch points are not only limited to the kind of ads you see, but your packaging is a touch point. Your stores are a touch point, your products are a touch point. So, we need to ensure that whatever the brand stands for is translated across the organizations to all the teams that are working on your brand.”

Rahul Vengalil then asked Richa Khera, “Jumping from the entire process to the social media world where you have a truckload of content creation and a lot of brands ask for multiple and multiple number of posts, videos to be made. In such an environment, where some brands are doing 30 pieces of content per month, some brands are doing hundred piece content, some brands are doing even more. How do you think brands can actually have consistent messaging? Because there are so many touch points these days. There will be something called Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, so on and so forth. What do you think should be the approach over there?”

Richa Khera replied, “A brand is not just a visual identity, it truly goes beyond that. Also, everything to do with the brand voice, the verbiage, your core values, really defines who you are. So, at the heart of it is really your mission, the purpose. And then you start building around it by way of visual semantics. The brand is also cutting across your employees, your channel partners, your distributors. In very large, complex manufacturing businesses like ours, channel partners are extremely important. So, the touch points truly just go beyond social or even storefronts or packaging, etc. The point I’m trying to make is that social is one of the very important touch points, today it is probably one of the most trusted touch points on a brand’s own handles. As marketers we also have the responsibility to keep it sacrosanct and not clutter the feeds of people with a host of content. There is a system which is needed and big brands clearly follow that. The brand identity is clearly defined, brand guidelines are clearly defined.”

She further said that it also boils down to how you are complementing, there is a massive amount of training that brands need to do, not just with internal teams but also with agency partners for that matter, also with channel partners, storefronts. That’s really where the businesses have been. I think a lot of consistent audits are needed, the mechanisms are important, that’s how consistency is maintained.”

Rahul Vengalil asked Nitin Khanna, “From a start-up point of view, how important is consistent brand messaging?”

Nitin Khanna said, “Consistent brand messaging is very important. How do you cope with the reality of the startup world which is a ‘Fail and Fail fast’ sort of mechanism to also ensure that there is consistency? There is a classical and pragmatic answer to it. A lot of the consistency is actually brought alive by the people who are in that journey every day. It depends on how well you have been able to internalize what the brand stands for and the purpose towards what you are trying to do. Also, external agency partners play a very important role. As a young start-up, mostly you are not doing everything, depending on the partner ecosystem to give you that initial thrust. How well you have been able to make your external agency partners to imbibe the essence is extremely critical. When done well both on the internal and external side, is then you see it translated into something of the classical assets or touchpoints. For instance, consistency with the visual identity, the brand playbook. You are known for certain colours and mnemonics in the market.”

Continuing further, he said, “Second part is understanding that you will not be perfect. It will take time for you to get there. It’s difficult to get that initial rigor when employees are churning and the agencies are churning. When rigor and definition are in place, then it’s a lot easier for people who are coming in later to follow through. Even if you get 80 per cent of the things right, you are probably doing better than 80 per cent of the people who are not.”

Rahul Vengalil asked Nabajit Shah, “Coming to a completely different topic, you have been on the other side now. In the last, let’s say 10- 15 years, you would have seen how digital became digital plus television then AR, performance then technology and the kind of position targeting. So, in all sense, you have had the opportunity to actually see how the marketing team, the agency ethos have actually evolved. What’s your take on it? As an outsider, how can you see the evolution from a consistency of planning? Was it different ten years back?”

Nabajit Nath responded by saying, “Let’s talk about adex and then digital adex. Adex for this year, as forecasted at the start of the year, was around Rs 120,000 crore. H1 of 2024 has been good because of the elections, the ICC World Cup and cricket. Therefore, I’m assuming that number will be touched. Now, coming to the most interesting part, digital will be 55% to 60% of this. So, this will be the unprecedented number which digital will achieve. Earlier it was, of course, chasing TV. Last year it crossed TV, this year it will be unanimously beating TV in terms of the amount of money. So, that way digital has been growing in the last five years, more or more or less. But then the ten years that I’ve seen, you have to pick up two channels which have really excited me and which have really exploded in the last five years. Firstly, is e-commerce, because I have been with Flipkart and therefore, have a slight bias towards that. But then Flipkart and Amazon and all the e-commerce sites see double digit growth every year. And in terms of growing e-commerce, a lot of brands are digital-first users. They plan their marketing activities focusing on digital, not just TV or radio channels.”

“In terms of the second media which I can call out is, of course, CTV. There are 45 million users in India who have connected TV in their homes in the last one year. If you study the metro market, you will notice that 47% of the TVs are CTVs now and 25% of the rest of the people who own traditional TV are transforming to or moving towards CTV in the next 4-5 months. So, CTV has been exploding multi-fold in the last two years. Overall, if I talk about digital as a medium, we will have something called the ‘living room takeover’, where from CTV to radio to the audio mediums to mobile phones to laptops, everything will converge and marketers will use all the devices inside the living room and take it over across digital devices, that’s what my prediction is about digital. Of course, it will grow towards 70%, though we are a little behind the US and the UK, but we will definitely touch that.”

Rahul Vengalil asked Varun Oberoi, “Compared to, let’s say a high intent category, CPG goes like this – brand comes, brand goes. How do you capture the attention? How do you get that emotional connection so that you stay with the consumers for a longer period of time?”

Varun Oberoi replied, “We struggle. This is not a category where people are emotionally connected with. They don’t care about it. The only thing that works well in, let’s say, the food space is nostalgia, for example, Maggie. But not everyone can do it. And it’s a double edged sword. So, in a category like ours, there’s no real exit or entry into the category, unlike, for example, real estate or insurance, or washing machines. So, people come in and go out. It is very difficult to hold on to that, especially when we are trying to target the Gen Z, who are very suspicious of advertising, who absolutely dislike intrusive communication, and is a very difficult crowd to please. So, what a brand – especially a brand like ours, which is in the traditional space and is in a low environment category – can do is work on three things. First is the consumer – and when I say consumer, pick up a very sharp segment. Don’t go for the biggest segment. Pick up a segment which is sharp. And the consumers in that segment are actually advocates. They go out and talk about brands to other people. Second is at the product level – don’t go for the best product. Do a very good product which has a very strong product differentiator and a benefit – a functional benefit which can be articulated in three words at the brand level. What we have learned the hard way is don’t talk about the brand at all. We are talking to consumers. So talk about the consumers and not about the brand.”

He admitted that traditional brands and companies are somewhere too much in love with their product, with their brand. “They want to keep talking about it all the time. Then they think the more they talk about it, the more people will start connecting with it. It used to work as a proven strategy, however, it no longer works today, especially with the Gen Z. So, right now we are simply happy and feel honoured that the consumer has allowed us to exist in their space in the universe. Currently, if a low involvement product like ours can even manage that, that itself is a massive success. Because then you will travel through their journey as they grow up.”

Also Read: Mastering the Festive Funnel: Omnichannel Marketing for the Hybrid Shopper