Industry experts deliberate on the challenges in ‘building brands for tomorrow’

The business environment has been volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and the marketing environment has been quite brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible. To discuss these challenges and more, Pitch Brand Talk 2022 saw a panel discussion on the subject “Building brands for tomorrow”.

On the panel were Dr Ipsita Chatterjee, head - innovation development and brand strategy, Lotus Herbals; Nupur Gupta, head – LTV products and partnerships, Sportz Village; Ruchika Gupta, chief marketing officer, Luminous Power Technologies; Sandeep Ranade; executive vice president and head of quantitative research, Hansa Research Group; Shivam Ranjan, head of marketing - India, Motorola Mobility and Vinit Kapahi, head of marketing, Aviva India. The session was chaired by Sudhakar Rao, director, ICFAI Group.

Opening the session, Rao said: “The challenges are - how brands can navigate these difficulties and how to build brands while making sure that you are building themselves for tomorrow and yet align your brand vision with the business growth.”

As for Kapahi, a brand has to clearly have a purpose. “A purposeful brand has to solve a problem or an issue at hand. You may have great products and great services, and if it cannot do either of the two, it cannot become a great brand. Also, the one thing you really need to look at is, the audience today is not really looking at what you have to offer; they are looking at how you are going to make their life easier. And it is not really about sitting in boardrooms and talking about positioning and purposes – that is one part of it. You may do all that but whatever you are communicating to a consumer, if you do not breathe and live within the organisation then it really does not solve anything. First and foremost is that within the organisation, everybody has to know what is that one particular thing that you are going to do for the customer before you go out and really talk about it. It has to be authentic and cannot be just a show.”

When asked if there is anything unique that her brand has done to remain relevant, Chatterjee pointed out, “In the beauty and personal care space, you would see that terms like conscious consumerism, green beauty and clean beauty are becoming popular today. But Lotus has always been the pioneer and has championed these causes ever since the launch of the brand about 30 years ago. I think the greatest asset has been staying true to our values and also not getting affected by whatever is happening in the market. Albert Einstein had said – Intelligence is measured by the ability to change. And that is how we have survived all these years. We are adaptable, nimble and agile,” she said and illustrated with an example. “Beauty and personal care were the worst affected during the pandemic. However, we took quick changes and decided that the digital transformation has to happen quickly. We finished the digital transformation in three months, which normally takes about nine to ten months. Now, within two-three years of its inception, Lotus Botanicals is number one on every e-commerce platform,” she added.

Speaking about the purpose of her organisation, Nupur said, “Our purpose is to get kids to play. It started 19 years ago with a very simple purpose that kids need to play and that we need to create opportunities for them to play. That is how we link that access with the brands to help them live out their purpose in the schools,” she said and shared an example related to Tata Tea's Jaago Re campaign. “That is not just contained on social media, we helped them walk the talk on the ground through our school access by creating a Tata Tea Suraksha campaign, in which the campaign was centered around women empowerment and self-defence. So, we created self-defence classes which were run for one lakh girls in 340 odd schools across the country. That is how we help brands live out their purpose inside the schools.”

Next, Rao asked Ranjan what could be learnt in the face of adversity and how one could align the vision of the brand with the business growth targets that you have. Rao asked, “Was there any dissonance and if so, how was that managed and navigated through.” Explained Ranjan, “As an organisation, Motorola has seen a rise in the past. We were one of the largest selling mobile smartphones in the world and then we saw challenging times when we had to take a step back only to come back again. The purpose although, I believe, has always remained the same. And I believe that is the same for any organisation. Purpose has always been the use of innovation to create meaningful consumer experiences, which was behind us inventing the mobile phone in the first place. The purpose has remained the same and the steps that we have taken as a business as well as in terms of consumer communication has been in-sync with the purpose.”

Ruchika spoke on how we could make sure we have a purpose and live through that. “I think the brand purpose or business purpose requires a certain amount of conviction – you need to be actually buying into it as it can come across easily as a stopgap or a statement. So, you need that true conviction. What you also need is consensus. And the biggest one of them all is just to have the courage because building that brand purpose or that business purpose will need investments, time, patience and might also need a hit on your ROI for a certain amount of time. But if you have the conviction and the consensus behind it, the courage will take you through,” she said.

Ranade shared his insights on the kind of dissonance he notices between the brand vision and the pursued path. He elaborated, “It is more how consumers are looking at the brand. Every brand will have a vision and a purpose when it comes into play but, like what we talked about here, there are so many insurance brands. If I am an insurance brand and even if I do have a purpose of positioning, I have to figure out how to make sure that the consumers know about me and look at me differently. That's an example.”