I have prided myself as a somewhat successful advertising professional to an advertising entrepreneur in my second innings having spent 45 years in the advertising industry between one of world’s largest networked agencies McCann Erickson Group to building my modestly medium-large entrepreneurial venture BEI Confluence in 1998. When I jumped from the McCann ship into the huge ocean of advertising entrepreneurship, little did I know (in all humility) that 25 years later I would be overseeing one of the better known & professionally reputed Indian-owned fully integrated advertising agencies of the current times.
However, this is only a precursor to an interesting turn at the final lap of my professional career with an exciting opportunity of learning and re-discovering the core of marketing after the Chairman of a large global MNC conglomerate (worth over US$ 1.5 billion+) persuaded me to be the Marketing Consultant in his large & established FMCG venture in India for a Rs. 800 cr+ megabrand and third largest category player in the country and steer the marketing team of that MNC company to ensure rejuvenating & ‘healthyfing’ the brands in a category dominated by a global competitor which is one of India’s most salient and best loved brands with 50%+ market share, and growing YoY at the category growth rate of nearly 10% pa.
It turned out to be a fascinating ‘role reversal’ for me. Overnight I started seeing myself in the clients’ shoes and demanding from the agency (which also happens to be the same agency I own) strategic and creative standards of my expectations, while keeping an arm’s length from any conflict of interest. The new journey on an uncharted territory for me entailed a lot of things I had learnt in a premier Management institute 46 years back under legendary marketing professors like late Labdhi Bhandari & Subrata Sengupta, Abhinandan Jain and more.
At the marketing side of a brand business, the left brain has to lead the right brain, and this is a fact that we advertising folks often tend to overlook. Market feedbacks, data, logic, research & analysis and immersing deeply into these miles long XL sheets and trying to derive meanings and conclusions out of these are essentially a left brain function that as traditional advertising and creative professionals we have not exercised enough. Thankfully in our Management Institute days in late 70s’ we were encouraged to deal with huge number crunching as S&M students. The only difference was there were no Excel sheets in those days and enormous number crunching was done manually, or by old mechanical adding machines (comptometers) and towards end 70s’ by ‘wall to ceiling’ wardrobe sized Honeywell 1st generation computers. The basics of conceptual & analytical work remain the same as were many years back, only the ease of technology through application of relevant soft-wares has speeded up the process and the quantum of data processed is much faster with far more voluminous and complicated databases.
As a Marketing Consultant, overseeing a large FMCG brand operating with more than 10 variants & 50+ SKUs across the length and breadth of India, with tonnes of data starting with company’s market-led MIS every month, Neilson Retail Audit Data, numerous quantitative & qualitative researches, the first job was to sift the data and analyse these, simplify to derive a meaning and a direction to finally arrive at strategic directions for the brand.
As an advertising professional, who often tend to be more right-brained, this was initially a challenge but human mind is such a super computer, that I could vividly recall my institute learnings nearly five decades back to refresh & lubricate my left brain to start reading meanings out of the monstrous numbers that were shared with me to derive insightful conclusions for forward marketing directions.
For today’s generation of advertising folks, the word ‘marketing’ is often misused or interchanged with marketing communications which is very different. The fountain-head of classical marketing is actually the data and how it is interpreted and finally translated into a potent marketing strategy. Without the depth of data and its analytics, any marketing strategy can be hollow or half-baked.
Many marketing professionals at brand’s side don’t always share all the data to their ad agencies due to confidentiality reasons and therefore ad agencies often work on the given marketing objectives set by the CMO and the team. Most of us in ad agencies receive brand briefs this way, but after being involved on the other side of the table, I have realised that a competent CMO would base his brief on tonnes of data he and his team would have sifted through to arrive at the brand’s marketing objectives and strategy given out to the agency.
My current stint as a Marketing Consultant has given me a rare experience of wearing a different hats simultaneously, and diligently trying to understand and do the job of a CMO, that has convinced me that a rounded and 360 Marketing & Advertising professional is the one that lets his left brain lead the right brain to initiate & create great marketing & communication strategies for brands.
With due apologies to Brand Planning professionals (often called Account Planners in ad agencies), many of whom have worked with me in my 45 years’ agency life, I am not sure how many I have met in Account Planning who had the ideal combinations of the left and the right brain to read data, analyse, derive insights, formulate winning (yet simple) brand strategies to inspire the creative team to generate Big Ideas for brands.
This ongoing & rare dual experience of being on both sides of the table simultaneously has given me a clear first hand understanding of the role of each brain segment- left and right, and how these go hand in hand to create great brand strategies and Big Brand Ideas. I would even dare to say that in creating potent marketing and communication strategies, it’s the left brain that often leads the right brain to take the Big Leap in creating disruptive and potent brand ideas.
Authored by: Tapas Gupta – Chairman & MD, BEI Confluence Communication Ltd.
