Purpose, Pivot, People - Experts discuss winning formulae for Bharat

By aligning purpose, embracing change, and investing in its people, Bharat can unlock its full potential and pave the way for a prosperous and inclusive future. To understand more of this scenario, CMOs’ Charcha - Kolkata Chapter 2023 hosted a panel discussion on ‘Purpose, Pivot and People - Winning Formulae for Bharat’. The session was chaired by Kanchan Datta, Founder and CEO, Inner Circle Advertising, President - Advertising Club of Calcutta, while the esteemed panellists included:

Jalaluddin Mondal, Chief Channel Officer, Zee Bangla Cinema and Cluster Marketing Head - East

Mohit Kampani, CEO, Sumosave Retail Ventures

Murali Krishnan, Co-founder & CMO, Wow! Momo Foods

Samrat Mukherjee, Vice-President, Madison Digital

Kanchan Datta commenced the session by sharing his journey in advertising, where he mentioned, “There are two important occasions in your life – the day you walk and the day you find out why.” Given this context, he asked the panellists to share their points of view on how they see defining the clear brand purpose and empowering the people with the same greater clarity, consistency, and discipline.

According to Mohit Kampani, “Without brand pivot, you are likely to go out of the place and eventually be unsuccessful. The better you are at defining the clear brand purpose and the sharper you are at that will obviously be a source of advantage. You could align everything according to your resources in order to achieve that. Whatever problem they are solving, whatever business they are in, be very clear about what your brand stands for.”

When asked how difficult it has been to come up with agility and innovation to scale their brand, Wow! Momo Foods’ Murali Krishnan stressed that agility is the most important for any start-up. “Start-up is not about unicorns, or funding, or valuation. A start-up is about a brand that is ready to cope. Agility works in two ways: Step one is, how strongly are you listening to your consumers’ demands, and the second step of agility is meeting your management team and having clear communication with them about your plans.”

“Pivoting has helped us to reimagine every single city as a country in itself. We have become the 4-kilometer brand. If you are the talk of the town within the 4 kilometers and reach out to every household, you are a brand. The 4 km rule we have for marketing and for branding is helping our brand a lot in growing,” he shared.

Zee Bangla’s Jalaluddin Mondial added here, “The strong reason that people act is because of their emotions. If we talk about Bharat, then everywhere this is going to be the buzzword. Basically, what we are seeing is that Bharat has got the full essence, it has unity in diversity. However, because of technology, product association is becoming narrow, which is raising the question among people about how do we create awareness of our business. That is where we got to create the brand.”

Continuing further Mondial said, “The primary objective of any brand is to deeply resonate with the audience and remain relevant to the evolving lifestyles of consumers.”

Sharing Cadbury’s example, Madison Digital’s Samrat Mukherjee said that their purpose is to spread general awareness, and that’s what the agency is doing. “We are communicating across different channels, in different languages, and with different cultural contexts as per the consumers’ requirements. The core purpose is about sharing and giving awareness about your brand to the people,” he added.

He further said, “Digital is definitely a part of the digital mix. Whenever we advertise, how we choose the platform to advertise is according to the right set of audience we are targeting. There is nothing like going for traditional media, there is no need to be restricted to TV, there is no divide in my mind.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete panel discussion, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xceAS6Kdkac