Discussion Topics: How to Navigate Branding Challenges

• World Cup, Anthems, and Brand Blitz
• Branding is misunderstood in India
• What will your brand be in the long-term?
• Brands as emotional assets have their own value
• Think of your brand as a person in a group setting
• What are the challenges with brand custodians?
• Case study of a poor consumer experience
• Closing

Transcript: How to Navigate Branding Challenges

Welcome to another episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Well, this is my favourite time of every four years. One of us enjoys the Cricket World Cup quite a lot. It’s a fun time and it’s in India, so you don’t have to watch it at odd times. That also helps. But it got me curious.

World Cup, Anthems, and Brand Blitz

I saw a video circulating about this. Event anthem, right? There was a song video and then you see different brands trying to capitalise on the event and some are sponsors. Some aren’t so lucky. So they try to use other ways to associate.

And somehow there’s a feeling that like, how does someone make it all come together? Because there are so many bits and pieces for what is essentially for me, one big event slash brand, which is the ICC World Cup. it’s almost a very public IP. Nobody can own it. In fact, a lot of interesting campaigns we saw around the World Cup, a lot of the good campaigns, the muscle behind the marketing really came, I think, from the brands, other brands themselves.

Like I remember Pepsi having a huge role to play back in the 90s. And I think the celebrity of the players also, right? Sachin at that time was one of a kind in some ways and every time he came out onto the pitch, there was something to be said in that context.

The interesting thing that you brought out about such in et cetera, that I just realised there’s one more entity who’s kind of putting this brand out there because earlier I didn’t have access to such in, but today, for example, after every match, there’s without posting his own pics.

There’s KL Rahul posting his pics. They’re doing video interviews. They’re talking about how the match went and they’re giving me insider tidbits. What were we talking to each other about on the pitch? What, but I didn’t have access to all of this when, Sachin’s heyday, was.

You watch the match on TV and in the paper the next day and then you never see him again until the next match, right? In fact, it’s interesting in Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People, the guest there makes a case for saying, that the reason creators have had a boom is because celebrity is more accessible now.

Branding is misunderstood in India

And I was also just thinking like then what happens to the brand, right? Because the same Sachin who walked out with the trophy didn’t really make the front page. Like where is the cricket fever? Apparently, it’s not happening and it just kind of reminds me of how difficult it is, especially in a country like India to be the custodian of a brand, if I could call it that, because we see so many interesting cases, anecdotes of, how branding can be misunderstood.

Yeah, not an easy job and I hope outside of all the niggles that have also been part of the World Cup this year the marketing push really does kick in because usually even someone like me, who’s not at all a cricket fan. And this time of year, or at this time of four years, I can’t help but listen to something and I know what’s going on, but this time I’m not.

Because it’s also a lot more private, right? Like we are watching on our phones. So for example, someone in your house could very well be following it on an app or, watching on their phone and you’re not even aware of that.

But yeah, it’s a challenge I’m sure. Right. For folks like you on the branding side when you work with clients who have such a large let’s say sphere of influence. And who could also be projecting your brand? And in fact, as we are heading into the Dussehra Diwali Christmas festive season, there are, there’s a lot riding on, the festive period this year, right?

The three years of the pandemic, you could say, no, because of that people are not spending or, the festive spirit is a bit dampened even last year, you could get away with it because people are just recovering and everything is, we don’t know how to be normal anymore.

But this year, what excuse do you have? And the fact is that it’s quite interesting because social media and the memes that we see on social media are usually a good indicator of how people are thinking, right? And some interesting conversations around, like in the past, if someone was being stupid, then the meme would go, I hope they don’t reproduce like that was the, but now when a similar context is presented, the meme goes, I hope climate change takes right.

And it’s interesting because you suddenly realise what is top of mind for a lot of people. People are questioning their own consumption patterns and, proof of what’s happening around us is very clear and present. In general, I feel like when you’re setting a budget.

Budgets are usually still quite old school, right? You will do the same themes and decorations and offers and discounts and win a coin and, so many different ways of doing the same thing. But unfortunately in India, the brand is still a very nascent idea, despite us having seen, and experienced so many brands ourselves, celebrities are a brand. A lot of homespun, coming home to Siaram it’s not that we don’t know how brands work. It’s just the scientific thinking around it is probably still a little new and nascent which is where I find the gap arises really.

What will your brand be in the long-term?

I think the core question that a lot of brand managers ideally who should be part of the system should be asking is, what is this going to mean in terms of long-term impact, right? Today, I may spend an X amount of money, and I might recover from it, but once I put myself out there in a certain way. And that is not received well enough.

The long-term ramification of that event is going to be very unpleasant. Today everything is very short-lived because like, look at us, when we start talking of brands and lasting brands, we can end up going back to the Amuls and the Bajajs of the 80s, right? We’re not thinking of something very recent even like a Tanishq or a wild craft or so many brands which have established themselves, but they all seem a little more fleeting in our minds.

Because there are so many ways to consume it probably makes the job of that brand custodian even harder because you always want to, I’m wondering like, do you create for the moment and say, hey, I don’t expect to be remembered 20 years from now. I’m only aiming for. Like the current three-year buzz around something.

Brands as emotional assets have their own value

No, the only downside of that kind of thinking is that brands as emotional assets have their own value. Like if we were to take some of the largest global brands today. Maybe half of their valuation actually comes from their revenue. The other half is in the perceived value, which is what the brand is.

Right? And perceived value allows you to sell other stuff tomorrow. Like the reason why even Apple holds a hostage for iCloud memory or, tries to make me subscribe to Apple TV, but also rent movies that I want to watch. Additionally, the reason I’m not still fully detached from that ecosystem is because there is a perceived value in saying when Apple does something, they do it well.

So let me, this seems like a small price to pay for experiencing that quality. Delivery, right, which is the reason why sometimes when Apple products conk, it’s an emotional feeling and exactly how emotional, because we weren’t expecting them to give up on us. Right. And that’s the reason why, today the iPhone 15, costs a lack and a half.

But the fact is that finally the perceived value of the brand Apple still to this day, despite them pulling all or rather I would say the reason they can get away with so many things is because the perceived value is one of quality and innovation.

Right? So, that’s a clear example of how you can charge people for something that’s not even real. So it’s not that I can say, I can’t, or I’m okay to not think long term in terms of my brand. Everybody should be thinking long-term in terms of their brand. And interestingly, the moment you start thinking long-term, a lot of the knee jerks, reactions and responses, will start quickly fading away.

In fact, Subha, we’ve spoken about this before and you’ve been a victim more recently as well in terms of how much brands communicate with customers. So where does that need to say 10 things coming from constantly?

I think it’s coming from not knowing what is the one thing that you need to say. And you would know that if you knew who you were as a brand, I think you’re right. That’s what it really comes down to. And I think every brand needs someone saying, Hey, this is what we are. And this is what we definitely aren’t.

And I mean, we’ve talked about ads even on this podcast saying who approved that? Like why is that out there? And honestly, there have been instances where there have been 20 people in the room, including us and nobody’s been able to say this is a bad idea, right?

It also comes down to what is the pain point of the person who is the group of individuals who are trying to solve that problem. Like we were talking about the aftermath of a pandemic if we were to take retail as one category in that context. See, we’ve quickly followed it up with inflation.

We followed it up with global catastrophes, it’s not exactly a pleasant time to be on planet Earth if I could put it that way. With the optimistic consumerism of the 90s and the early 2000s, suddenly you’re discovering Boney M for the first time. That’s not the environment in which we are, operating today.

So in that environment, why would people not buy? I think it starts to seem a little more obvious, right? Like no longer can I say if you bought for this much, then you win this award because they are not in that headspace, right? If the reward was really that important to them, they’d just buy that damn thing. Like they will not be, it’s not a fun experience, right? Festivals have now become more about spending time with family, with loved ones, small group events and environments.

And certain things stay, like it’s not, just because COVID 2,000 other people in a closed room. That’s not happening. So the things that get us excited are very different today. So once we work with that insight, and there’s an interesting podcast called Sweathead, they call themselves a strategy podcast.

That’s all they talk about. And in one context, he says, if you’re going to write a creative brief, then the longest amount of time you should spend is by dwelling on the problem. If you have sat with the problem for long enough, that’s where the insight comes from and if you really kind of work backwards, how many brands are really, or even how many individuals are able to take that kind of time to say, I need a week just to explore this problem statement.

No. And that is so powerful and I think also this is a drive of what can I put out there. It’s all just so, reactive or you’re, you are desperate to not miss an opportunity.

Don’t miss that. Oh, my viewership peaks on Tuesday afternoon. So Tuesday morning, whatever I can think of just put it out there, right? But there’s an interesting way to think about this also as an ecosystem of, different stakeholders, right?

Think of your brand as a person in a group setting

So if you were to think of a brand as a person who knows or who interacts with a bunch of different people or groups of people, right? Then obviously there is the customer, but there are also your employees, your investors, and vendor partners. There’s also, I would go so far as to say an ecosystem of future employees or future stakeholders, right?

I think it’s important to qualify what these relationships are to each other, right? For example, when a brand interacts with a vendor, the priority could be being seen as a good place to work with.

Another priority could be being seen as an easy company to, process invoices and procurement and whatever else. Likewise, that happens with the vendor side as well. So these two things matter, right? So social standing reputation. As well as ease of doing business. If we see these as the main pillars, these very same pillars would not apply to maybe a different stakeholder, like an employee, right?

An employee is looking for a place where they can grow, where they can, build their own individual career while also contributing to a bigger vision. So, and I think we all do this as people in our lives, right? Our relationships with each other are very different based on how we met what was the context and what kinds of conversations.

So what a brand custodian can do is to start asking the questions around what this relationship is qualitatively like then you’ll know like, is this on brand? It’s almost like a relationship with a friend, right? Like there are certain things you might not see because that friend is sensitive to, it’s exactly the same thing.

What are the challenges with brand custodians?

You’re right, that’s interesting. The trend analogy, because there are also times when I don’t know, like kind of those outside the changing room moments where you say, Hey, that’s not your look or that’s not on brand for you. So what are the challenges that you face? I’m sure you’re in the room often with brand custodians.

What are they? Maybe the top, they may be your pet peeves also, but what are those two, or three things that you sometimes find that consistently or often not doing optimally and what could they maybe do differently? I think we’re not receptive to the idea of what a brand really means. It’s too abstract.

And in fact, unfortunately, we made it worse by introducing things like brand archetypes and things like you’re the hunter and the shadow and what, like finally, I think what we’re all trying to do is to capture something that cannot be captured in a bottle.

It’s like saying. This entirety of the human will be defined by an MBTI, right? Like it’s not going to happen, it will highlight one aspect of who they are, right? And even then, in the closest of relationships, you only still know one or two aspects of the human being. So to remove that blindness, not a lot of business leaders, or owners are very willing.

We see a lack of willingness and unfortunately, the way it translates is into those knee-jerk reactions, right? So you’ve built a nice brand system. And the only tangible thing in that entire brand system is actually your logo. So you start fiddling with the logo. 

But really, I mean, how significant is a logo if the brand itself doesn’t have any record. Right. So sometimes you really need to take a step back and say, why am I even doing this quantum of work? If I’m going to go in for a rebranding and we’ve seen this happen where people have rebranded and then just gone to town with the new colours with the new logo, but the cohesion in terms of why have we rebranded?

Nobody understands. The customer doesn’t understand. The vendor doesn’t understand. Interestingly, the biggest gap that I find is somehow you do all these things, but you don’t communicate with your vendor ecosystem and with your internal employee ecosystem. You don’t do it. You just shove it down their throats and you hope.

They’ll get it, which I find fascinating to me. That you wouldn’t take the time to write because what happens then? Right? So you have five logos, each employee will start using a different logo because they’re mandate just said, to update your email signature to your new logo. That’s all you don’t know which logo by logo.

So true. There are times when you’re interacting with a certain person. Organisation and hence multiple people in that organisation and you get such different types of email. Some have like 20 links in their signature and make you go to everything that’s happening on their website and some have nothing.

And so that cohesion is not there, though. They’ve all probably been given that one email, which says this is the brand collateral. And then do whatever you want with it, because I don’t know what to do with it. So that really not so much of a pet peeve, but it really hurts to see what is essentially a very beautiful science kind of butchered like that, I mean, here is an opportunity to essentially craft something from scratch where nothing existed.

Very few instances that I’ve seen people understand the value of, building something and building it consistently and doing it well. And it always surprises me, like if you ask them, why is it that you, why is this exercise important to you?

Usually, it comes down to legacy, like, Hey we’ve built this over 20 years. So there’s an emotional attachment. So I think more and more in businesses emotional quantification is important. And it’s like you said earlier, right? For if the data tells me Tuesday afternoon is important, then I’m feeling that knee-jerk necessity to go say something on a Tuesday afternoon.

Was this just feeling that emotional connection with some of these things and seeing them as a bigger personality exercise? And I think that piece is so important that the brand is not just your ads and what you’re putting on social media and what your brochure looks like. It’s the experience that I’m left with as a consumer at the end of the day, right?

Case study of a poor consumer experience

Like the jewellery brand that I was talking to you about. This is one of the large brands and their own online jewellery, right? And, but I, we happened to walk into a retail outlet. Now I get that if you’re online, then you’re expected to sign in, create an account, do all of that. And get some coupon code, apply it, everything.

Now in the retail store, after you have spent some amount of time picking out something guy had to take another and I’m not kidding you another 30 to 40 minutes to set up, my customer profile on his tablet machine. I had to download the app. The Wi-Fi was poor then I had to create an account.

He had to go and actually like as though he’s purchasing here to add to cart and, go through so much pain. Now in the retail store, you can’t expect me to behave like I would have done from the comfort of my couch.

And we’re calling it the omni channel experience and we’re all getting very excited about it. It was such a pathetic experience. And then after 10 minutes, I of, getting into the car, I opened my phone and I kid you not, There were 12 emails from the brand. Of each stage of this process for which I was physically present.

I think a lot of brand work is research work and I think sometimes we don’t do it well enough because we all seem to be in such a hurry to just get from point A to point B. I would say 50-60 per cent of your time as a brand team should not be spent in interacting with people.

In fact, the appeal of the industry to me in the first place was the amount of quiet time you’re supposedly going to get, right? Imagine a team, and especially this brand is large enough to be able to afford a team of people just travelling these stores, understanding where the gaps are.

Because you have to understand that in a country like India, even the internet is not a steady state, right? And if the shop happens to be in the lower basement, then you better believe nothing is downloading or uploading from there, right? So the reason they’re not catching this is because they are sitting and writing the brief for the next marketing campaign and the next thing.

So really please marketing and branding are not the same thing. They are very separate. Functions, and I think we could all benefit from I think thinking in those terms as well. No, very true. I think the and finally, all of that effort under that umbrella of marketing, branding, and just owning your brand comes to naught if it doesn’t tie in well for the customer.

Exactly. And knowing that customers often give us a very simple positioning in their heads, right? And this applies to even one person, two people, companies, and brands, they have already made up their mind as to who we are in their minds. Our job is simply to understand why. And if it’s a good positioning, you strengthen it.

If it’s not a good positioning, then you have a lot of work ahead of you. This thing to shift human cognition, but that’s literally all there is to it, right? Like you, if I think of decathlon, it’s like for me I have to buy swimwear in bulk. So, it’s cheaper to do it in decathlon and the product lasts.

That’s all. And that’s an interesting point you make, because I think slowly over a period of time, it’s not cheaper. But in our mind, in my mind, it’s still a cheaper alternative to other brands that I will now not visit because I have decided Decathlon is cheaper. And because if I’m in this in, if I’m experiencing this brand, it’s like this huge warehouse feels almost like a wholesale purchase rather than a retail then it’s got to be cheaper, right? The dial from the sack and not Maybe even that visual effect is engineering your mind into thinking that it could be right. I do hope that a lot more brands invest in the concept of brand But when it comes together, it’s so beautiful.

It is. It really is. And it’s one of the more fulfilling things to do. Again, it’s such an emotional work, right? It’s not logical, okay. And which is also sometimes the brand measurement of metrics, like what would you measure? How do you do it? We should really save that topic for another day. It’s an extensive one.

It’s a very colourful and diverse world. And if nothing else, we’d start seeing better billboards. We’d start seeing more entertaining content at the very least. If we were to just separate the role of brand as being so much more than just marketing, jet fuel. Makes sense. Hope you’re listening to brand guys and girls.

Closing

Yes. Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the damn good marketing podcast on all things branding. Interestingly, How do we separate both functions and what is the benefit of doing so? We hope you enjoyed listening to us. And if you have any questions, where to find us on LinkedIn, by the way, we are also on YouTube.

So if you need to passively listen on a different platform, we’ll share the link to the damn good marketing podcast on YouTube.

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Are content heads prepared for the challenges posed by AI, ChatGPT, and shifting search engine policies? In this episode of Damn Good Marketing, Hasita Krishna and Subha Chandrasekaran delve into the complexities of content management in the modern landscape. Join them to discover strategies for making your content stand out and how creative collaboration can enhance your efforts in an ever-noisier world.

Discussion Topics: How to play the role of head of content

• Lawsuits on Open AI
• What does a content head do in this situation?
• Hierarchies and expertise
• How much of the info is real?
• Biggest pain points of content heads
• Managing expectations
• The need for good editors is in the rise
• Things to be mindful about

Transcript: How to play the role of head of content

Hasita Krishna: So Subha, search engines led by Google have followed through very quietly with an interesting update they’ve made to their search engine policy wherein they no longer don’t allow you to rank for chat GPT written articles.

Lawsuits on Open AI

Hasita Krishna: On the parallel, as we know, a lot of authors have been suing OpenAI for using their books to train its models and there’s an article on Search Engine Journal, which is one of the more renowned publications in the SEO space, which says how to block OpenAI ChatGPT from using your website content.

And the subtitle is very suggestive, right? It says ChatGPT gets access to website content to learn from it. That’s how we trained it. This is how to block your content from becoming AI training data. And it doesn’t stop there. As of 8.9.2023, OpenAI has published a robots.txt standards file for blocking the GPT bot from crawling your website. Oh, wow. Got it. I’m just thinking how many lawsuits is everyone trying to avoid here?

Subha Chandrasekaran: And it’s all confusing, no? I’m putting out a lot of content on my website. Why am I writing these blogs? So that some robot crawls it and finds it.

Hasita Krishna: Preferably not the ChatGPT bot, apparently.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And it somehow lands up on a Google search. And now I also have to worry that the wrong robot won’t find it. That makes me think of content like ours. What is the misuse that you and I should be worried about? 

Hasita Krishna: Honestly, are we even producing enough to be misused, right? Like sometimes, if you have a GPT board, I could sit now and write 40 articles. What’s to stop me? How do you compete, right? Like I can make a listicle of a thousand things you should know before launching your content function. It’s not hard today.

Subha Chandrasekaran: That’s true. I get John Grisham’s anger and a lawsuit thing because I could give a prompt that says, 20-page short story. In the style of John Grisham.

Hasita Krishna: And this is your, yeah, this is your context. Like this is your environment. It’s happening in the streets of Mumbai or whatever. There are so many opportunities, which is an interesting dichotomy and sometimes I wonder like this, I really don’t envy the job of a head of content at this point.

Because this is way too many variables to keep up with and whether you are de facto or you’ve been, given that position. You’re still somebody who’s responsible for running a content function in these waters. So how do you do that?

What does a content head do in this situation?

Subha Chandrasekaran: No, quite tough because we’ve managed these roles for others in our earlier affairs. We continue to support content in different ways. And we meet with folks who are running businesses and trying to generate good content. There was, there were enough variables as is.

Hasita Krishna: Right, and in fact, we’ve also, at least I have at some point also worked with people who became heads of content in their own kind of spaces and rights. There are many interesting transformations that have taken place in the industry, not the least of which is obviously the use of AI and I think somewhere it brings in this idea of if we can all talk about everything under the sun. What’s to stop me from writing a science fiction novel which is very accurate to the physics of it?

Today, there’s enough information and I don’t even have to do the research therefore, if there are 10 billion topics that I can talk about, what should I still be talking about? 

Subha Chandrasekaran: And it just struck me that what you say makes sense and it’s making sense because even in my own mind, I have confused social media versus science fiction.

What I want to say, is because on a daily basis, you have access to so many other people and their thoughts that you’ve got used to commenting on topics, you’re way out of your depth. What stops you from putting a comment, right? Or what stops you from saying, Hey, I have an opinion or a view on this.

So today, if you post something on sustainability or the environment. I can comment on it, but I’m not coming from any expertise. But I would rather hear something you have to say, because you’re in that space, you’re thinking about it rather than me posing as someone who has an interest or a side interest or some thoughts about it because I have heard from five other environmental lobbyists.

Hierarchies and expertise

Hasita Krishna: That’s actually interesting to me because what we’re talking about is hierarchies and expertise, right? So for me, somebody else, and there are several of them who I look up to in terms of where I get my climate information from. And that’s a very interesting nuance, right? If I am a business and this is my industry and I’m a head of content for that business, then where in that hierarchy would I fit?

And I think we can err on both sides, right? One is to say, I’m an expert, I know everything. And I’m at the cutting edge of technology, which is also dangerous. But there’s also the risk of positioning yourself too low, right? And we see this a lot with startups, especially wherein I think a lot of where you place yourself is dependent on how investor opinion reflects on you, right?

If I’m seen as a valuable company, Then I’m allowed to have an opinion and that’s a very difficult cycle to break out of. So really where on that opinion hierarchy do you fit? I think that would be the first question to ask.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And I would not even counter it, but just take that one step further and say, okay, so there’s a hierarchy, but at your level in that hierarchy.

Do you at least have clarity as to who is listening to you? If today you talk about sustainability the guy who made the Apple climate change video is not listening to it.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely and I wouldn’t want him to also, right? Because he will think I’m an idiot as I am is the point I’m trying to make.

Subha Chandrasekaran: But there are those who are listening to you for whom your content is. 

Hasita Krishna: It’s just at the level that they want it right, which brings up an interesting dichotomy even for other creators, including myself to say, do I stay there right? Or do I keep moving? Assuming my audience is also going to evolve.

So one, we’ve established a hierarchy. In terms of doing a very, I think, practical, objective reality check of where my strengths are, where are my weaknesses, and what are three topics that I feel passionately enough to talk about? Because what I’m counting on is the idea that even on a day when I’m not feeling motivated to do a lot of other stuff, I’m probably still consuming content in this regard.

And for us, that applies to say pop culture. We’re always trying to consume content around that. Maybe not always actively, or at least we’re sharing it enough with each other. So today, if there’s a Rajinikanth film and there’s also a Shah Rukh Khan film that’s fighting at the box office, we have something to say about that.

And then also to make actually two lists, I would say one is an objective, moral inventory of what should I not be saying. 

Subha Chandrasekaran: So important. No updates on my dog having diarrhea there are probably smaller circles in which that conversation would make more sense than a business platform, at least.

And the second is a basket of things. I may be excited about it or I may feel sufficiently motivated because it’s my industry, but I’m not ready to talk about it, right? And again, I want to go back to the Apple example of producing the series nine fully carbon neutral as a product, which is what the claim says.

And there’s a long report supporting that claim as well. But the moment I saw that ad, involving Octavia Spencer, my first thought was exactly that. Is it an ad or are they walking the talk? So also to be very conscious of the fact that today when it’s possible to create and consume so much information, people are also asking the question, how much of this is real?

How much of the info is real?

Hasita Krishna: Somebody as big and influential as Apple is not going to put out this ad and not be able to back it up. They are going to get questioned somebody is going to say this is greenwashing and many have said, and they are going to dive deep into it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So they’re going to be doubly sure or triply sure that what they are saying is real, but you’re right. How do we know who we are consuming what from? And I think we hit upon something when in that whole hierarchy of things also, there’s another dimension of what is it that you do and hence an expert at over a period of time.

There are always enough people above you, better than you, who started earlier than you. And a set of things that you are genuinely interested in. Which you can also talk about. Not from the voice of an expert, but can I come along with you on this ride and learn more?

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely and that’s why that evolution component I think becomes that much more significant, when we started Motley through a couple of years ago, we could get away with saying, we put the marketing back in digital marketing, right?

And that’s still in fact, we stand by that. But the nuance of it has changed in the two years since we’ve started, right? No longer are people saying, Hey, here’s this shiny new object and I just want to be a part of it. Please, how do I get into the inner circle? No, that people are understanding. It is difficult.

It is tough. We need somebody to do it and take care of both the technical and the creative aspect of it. And that’s where we really just want you to come in and support us. And that nuance is very important for us to also be mindful of, because no longer can we send a pitch deck that says, Have you tried these four things?

No, the likelihood that they’ve tried those four things and they’re tired of those four things is very high. So now we need to start speaking that language of saying, okay, here’s a problem. Here’s the diagnosis. Here’s where we can do better. So a lot of, in fact, even the proposal stages have become us looking at campaign reports as looking through a lot of data before even proposing anything to them.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Very true, like you meet with so many content heads, Hasitha, like at least folks in charge of it. What do you think is their biggest pain point?

Biggest pain points of content heads

Hasita Krishna: Everything. But I always like to, I think these days more and more, I’m trying to do that as we do campaigns that have More financial value attached to them the stakes are higher if I think of that one person that you said, which is the head of content as a pinpoint in an infinite space.

And there are going to be branches outward, and these are two-way streets, right? There is communication from them to the others and communication from the others to them. And definitely for a head of content, a key other point in that ecosystem is going to be the person that they’re trying to influence. Whether that is an influencer in a buying journey or a decision maker.

And this is where we also say, get very clear as to who are the seven people in the buying committee. So there is that committee, which I think is a big circle. I would use some of the bubble charts, and references here in terms of saying really draw because circles give that circle the weight and importance that it deserves.

But also there are two other key stakeholders. Who is going to influence how that circle is impacted through you, right? The one stakeholder is your creative team, video producers, content writers, and ad planners. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say account managers. All of these people have an impact on how that other bigger circle is flowing through you.

But also I think one of the more underrated impacts, especially in B2B, more so in tech. Is the product team, the sales team, or the management team, whose unequivocal buy-in you need in order to be able to do any of these things, right? So for this road to not have potholes, you need that management team to be fully brought into the process, right?

And you really need people to say, I am willing to go all guns out on this plan, right? And this plan involves content. It could be explainer videos. It could be product demos. It could be us showcasing at an event physically, and therefore we need support.

It could be an email you send. To close the sales conversation where along these touch points is the content team able to support number one? And given that said and done we are operating in a very technically advanced domain. Where can I come in and contribute? Because the content team cannot imagine your product.

Some of the people came earlier in my life, at which point I didn’t even know what I was doing, but I’m so lucky for those opportunities to have come up that a lot of them started by giving me a product demo and saying, these are the screens.

This is why we have this prompt here. This is why I use the inventory management example because that’s where I did a lot of work and we worked with a product, which eventually has been sold to delivery, the logistics company in that product, there were nuances, which.

What’s so important to the writing that I was doing? So for me to say if you’re going to do just-in-time inventory management these are the seven principles you need to bear in mind at the back of my mind, I’m thinking, okay, in the product, there’s this feature that’s going to support the execution of that piece.

And that logical segue can only happen when these three points in the ecosystem of a head of content come together, which brings up the question of how, like if the job is to manage three different expectations, and that’s why I said, it’s not a very easy place to be in right now.

Subha Chandrasekaran: They had my sympathies and even more so now, but I think what all of this is coming back to you’re only as good as that brief that you get. Absolutely even as a content head or, how much clarity can you give?

So you have to be talking about and here’s why this is how it addresses different stakeholders and hence, starting from largely from and as any company, you’ll always start inward. So largely starting on what am I good at? What am I doing? What do I want to see? And then incorporating feedback, what does the customer also want to hear from us?

Managing expectations

Hasita Krishna: But in some ways, I feel like a brief is managing expectations, right? That’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s finally an A4 document or whatever it is, a storyboard. But what it’s doing is it’s telling these three different points, which unfortunately don’t talk to each other as often as they should.

That the common meeting ground is this, right? In the creation of this report, this white paper, this survey, this whatever else, this interactive line graph for all I care. What we’re trying to do is meet this common objective and therefore feel free. And this is where repurposing comes into the picture, right?

When we say repurposing, we don’t mean take from LinkedIn and put it on Twitter. What we mean is I’ve created this piece of content. I know it’s valuable because my brief was good. How can I use it in as many different ways and contexts as possible? Where can I share it? Where it makes the most amount of sense to the other person that’s receiving it.

And in that, I just want to bring out a small nuance today. I think a lot of teams that are 10 and above run on Slack channels, lots of interesting conversations happening there, right? So as a head of content, I would also keep my ears very close to that channel ground in terms of where the different teams disagree.

What is the product team saying, which is not translating to the sales guy? What is the sales guy saying, which is not translating perhaps to the design team? Where are they not able to see eye to eye? And how can content play a role in really even bringing some of these internal stakeholders together? And then that piece becomes a beautiful collaboration, which I can then distribute to the world outside.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Got it. What worked well in some of the engagements that we had is that you’re creating a lot of content. You need that one objective soul who is really thinking about how this sounds to the listener or the reader in terms of a title. It’s the editor, but you need one person who is not generating the content or is. Holding it so close to their heart, but

Hasita Krishna: They can’t be critical about it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: But, they need to see, or they need to be able to tell you that, Hey, this doesn’t read like us, or this doesn’t sound like us, or this is too technical or this needs to have some more references or examples or whatever you need to hear so that you hit your audience in the best possible way.

The need for good editors is in the rise

Hasita Krishna: So true and more and more, I think we need editors who can come in and say, okay, fine, produce however many blogs you want to chat GPT the hell out of.

But how can I say it in a way that’s nice, we’ve had a writer who’s written some really nice headlines around infrared and the company that was so there was a nice natural rhythm to it, which she was able to extract.

So I think that’s fun. In the production, right? The reason we read is not only or even for that matter consume any piece of content is not only to be educated but also to be entertained in some ways and more and more as the democratic access to being able to produce content goes out, we’re going to need more people to come in and add that.

An extra layer, I would say, of just making it more relatable, more resonant, more relevant. And that’s where I think editors will have a very interesting job in the future. And I’m sure editors were able to look at articles and say, Hey, this was not written by you. We’ll have that much more of a greater edge because they’ve got that instinct for how to make something sound good.

Subha Chandrasekaran: No, it makes sense. So what do you want to leave this, now we’ve made them sound like poor Harris told you again, woke up this morning, and had a Google algorithm change. What do you think are the top three, or four things that they have to be, I won’t say to do, but at least to be mindful of, or to think about.

Things to be mindful about

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, number one definitely I think is to have that ability to consume as many diverse pieces of content through a critical lens of saying this was nice. This was not nice. Some of these maybe we could try and adapt to our use cases and policies and come up with slightly more, I think, creative interpretations of the channels and the media that exist out there.

Like I’m just thinking, following up on the Slack example. Why can we not start a podcast with guests? Not me. I don’t have a large enough team, but I’m saying in any team, that’s got 10 people and that’s got people who are functional heads of different things. Why do you need to have a podcast with guests coming from the outside?

You can just have a limited series, and have a nice story around it. Let people come in and really experience the joy of building the product that you’re building. And that could be a five-episode limited series and you launch the product off the back of that. So there are many interesting ways to do things.

Now that we don’t have to be bound down by the production itself. And I know a lot of heads of content and editors have had that problem in the not-so-recent past including myself, I’ve suffered from not knowing when the next article will come in. If you give them a due date, will it happen?

That’s not a problem anymore. So how can you then really use that as a launchpad and take it to the next level? So that would be, I think the first two things, one is to really consume and keep consuming and keep coming from diverse places and then translate that into how to interpret this for my business, my use case, the brand that I’m working with.

The third thing I think, in an ad agency, there is not as much as from the outside, we think there exists, there is no writer. There is no designer. These are all titles, right?

If I’m good at Adobe, I’m called a designer. If I am not good at Adobe, I’m called a copywriter, things like that. But what these people are studios of the human psyche. And in fact, some of the best campaigns in the world that have come from copywriters’ minds don’t have a single word in them.

So really to go diverse in terms of the interpretation of some of our ideas, right? So again, it comes from observation, but also to see if I identify as a copywriter, does that mean that’s all I can do? Or can I also make line art? I don’t know. And explain to the designer what I want. So creating those collaborative opportunities, I think between, so if we really zoom into one of the circles, which is the creative team, there are so many people within those circles.

So how can I really facilitate collaboration and trust amongst these people so that they’re all able to walk up to each other and say, this is not working? I think this is what we should do. Or this is a great idea, but I think this is how we make it better. So more and more, as I’m saying that, I think it’s becoming a, almost a soft skill.

What you need to be very clear on is that one singular vision, so much so that tomorrow, when you do get called into a meeting to justify your functions, cost versus return, or any number of those things, you’re able to say, this is the vision that I’m working towards.

So just come in and say, let’s whiteboard this. Let’s know for the next six months why we are doing what we are doing. And then it doesn’t matter, right? Make 10 creatives, make 20, make 40, I think today we live in a noisy enough world that the only thing that will stand out is that resonance. And if we can make one thing that’s.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Extraordinarily resonant. I think we could all benefit from that. No, that’s awesome. I think it all came together very nicely and very usefully, if I may it’s not an easy job and made it tougher with, oh, there’s a ChatGPT and God knows who’s actually writing what and all of that, but the code is still the same.

Hasita Krishna: And some questions can be asked in that regard, especially in organisations where maybe this is happening for the first time. It’s okay to say, let’s workshop this. And there are tools available to make that happen.

People are available if you need that external perspective to just come in and see. Let’s think through this, right? Like, why are we doing LinkedIn in the first place? Like, why is no one asking that question? I think I would really start from there. Makes sense thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode on all things.

How do I produce content at scale? Should I produce content at scale? What is chat GPT doing and how do I become more efficient, and more resonant as a head of content? We hope you enjoyed listening to us. If you have any questions, you know where to find us. The LinkedIn links are also in the show notes and we really look forward to seeing you next time.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Bye.

The post S3E06 – How to play the role of head of content appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

How do you create a brand that’s not just visually stunning but also drives profitability while focusing on social impact? Join us on a journey with Siddharth Purohit, co-founder of Aazol, a direct-to-consumer food company. In this episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast, we dive deep into the art of clarity and how it can free up valuable time, the importance of controlling costs, and the challenges of entering the retail space. Whether you’re a startup founder or simply curious about the intersection of design, business, and social impact, this episode offers valuable insights that will leave you inspired. Tune in now and discover the secrets behind Aazol’s success!

Discussion Topics: Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding

• Jumping to the visual shooting process
• How did he become a professional diver?
• Siddharth’s past experiences before joining Aazol
• What inspired Siddharth to create Aazol’s designs?
• How to manage logistics as a small brand?
• Which customer feedback to address at which point of time?
• What does growth mean for Aazol?
• Which elements to prioritise as a founder?
• Clarity gives time
• Advice for someone starting from the visual standpoint and trying to succeed
• Future for Aazol

Transcript: Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding

Subha Chandrasekaran Hasita, I’m such a sucker for nice puri bhaji. I can live on that three meals a day, every day of the year. But, I just saw this divine image of this piece of puri dunking itself in a bowl of amras. And I just can’t get it out of my head.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, mango season is over. Why are you putting me through this?

Subha Chandrasekaran I just need to have it now. And luckily I can just add it to the cart and I can have it now.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, because I know where you saw that image because I also saw that image. I ordered it also, by the way, it’s on the way. And I have ordered several other products from this really lovely brand called Aazol which is a direct to consumer food company, and we’ve had the opportunity to enjoy that visual language quite a bit. 

I’ve drooled quite a bit over their pancake syrup in the virtual world before drooling on it in real life. And it’s only right that we should bring one of the founders onto the Damn Good Marketing podcast and talk to them about Making some of those very clear, very crisp, beautiful, frankly, drool worthy visual decisions so early in the life of a brand, right?

 To the good-damn marketing podcast today we have with us Rohit co-founder. At the website is Aazol guys, first we order a product, listen to the podcast, and he’s talking to us today about visual design and making decisions around that, which is really big for a company that operates in a space where the job is to tempt people to try something. We hope you take away a lot more from this episode as well, as we have done and are happy listening.

Jumping to the visual shooting process

Hasita Krishna: How complicated is the shoot process usually for a product like this?

Siddharth Purohit: I wouldn’t say it’s particularly complicated. We have our partners, Lost & Hungry Studios, we have been working with now for two and a half years

They shoot our products for us. And they started around the time Aazol did, And both of us have been growing together as well. Having strategic partners like them who have been part of the whole journey means that at this stage shoots are relatively uncomplicated affairs because they understand you and them.

So as long as you come in with a fairly clear brief. Things happen nicely and efficiently.

Hasita Krishna: That’s interesting. I just realised about a minute before we started that you are a professional diver.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Tell her more because that’s when I come to find her, she’s probably deep underwater.

Hasita Krishna: So how long have you been diving for?

How did he become a professional diver?

Siddharth Purohit: I dived enthusiastically for the first time ever, exactly a decade ago, and got very much bitten by the diving bug. Then over the next few years dive, many locations across the world. Indonesia, Maldives, Oman, Japan Lakshadweep many times, the Andamans. 

And right before I went for my master’s program, I decided to do my professional certification and become a divemaster. So I went to stay for a little over a month in Okinawa, the southernmost Japanese, and there I did my professional certification. So I became a divemaster.

The last two, three years, I haven’t dived much. I think the activity as a whole is becoming a little too commercial for my liking. But I’ve still done about 200 ish dives.

Hasita Krishna: That’s interesting. You went all the way up to Divemaster. Yeah. So honestly, that’s a dream. I only got my open water in March. But yeah, there is like a very clear plan in terms of completing that master in the next one and a half year or so.

Siddharth Purohit: Very cool.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think because we complement each other in so many ways and we do two podcasts together and I don’t know how to swim. So she comes back from these dives and she’s, describing, the surreal experience that she’s had. And I’m like, okay I’ll go with it. 

Hasita Krishna: To her, it’s fiction, right? like a story. Yeah, no, we’re very nice. Very nice to meet a fellow diver. And thank you so much for agreeing to come on today.

Siddharth Purohit: My pleasure.

Hasita Krishna: So how the brand caught our attention is we saw a very interesting Instagram ad. It was a video ad for Amritsar. and What I really liked is the commitment to going the whole distance when it comes to visual communication, right?

Even your Instagram page actually is a very refreshing departure from, here’s my product here’s another product. Here’s a third product. Here’s the shop button. What’s the same? Yeah. You can maybe make brownies. You can maybe make something interesting with this on a Sunday.

So I really liked that kind of approach to bringing consumers in. And that’s why we really wanted to talk to you about what that journey was like, and how some of these decisions were made before you knew that they were good decisions, right? Thank you so Yeah, a little bit of maybe context so have you worked in FMCG or D2C before?

Siddharth’s past experiences before joining Aazol

Siddharth Purohit: I have worked only as a management consultant

Hasita Krishna: Okay.

Siddharth Purohit: before Aazol, professionally. It’s pretty much divided into three categories: conduct analysis on heavy sets of data in Excel, and make attractive presentations. Convince people of the relatively simple decisions that you have taken. That’s about it. That’s what I did in various capacities for six years. So the short answer is no. There is no D2C, no FMCG experience.

Hasita Krishna: That much more fascinating, right? Because seeing clearly what you’re doing is working as a consumer, purely looking at it, or even someone in the domain who’s seen a lot of brands not be able to achieve maybe the kind of acuity that you’ve managed to achieve with the brand.

And what I understand is that this department is entirely yours. The branding, the marketing, the digital communication. So can you walk us through maybe what were the first two or three decisions you made on that front, which you think are good decisions at this course.

Siddharth Purohit: If I may be allowed to add one more element to the text, I think anything and everything that I have done from designing Aazol’s brand language has come from being a discerning customer over the years. So I’m very house grown. I have stayed. Alone in our family’s old apartment for the last eight years now, since I was 22, all of the furnishings have been done by me. I have a specific taste in fashion as well. So stylistically, I’ve always greatly enjoyed aesthetics.

So to have those sensibilities as a consumer, I think has been very important in designing anything from a manufacturer, producer, marketeer lens.

Hasita Krishna: Oh, were there any brands? In India, preferably that you would look at and say, okay, this is something I want to do or this is something I don’t want to do. or was it you saying, okay, there are all of these brilliant examples and I’m adding on to that. What was that?

What inspired Siddharth to create Aazol’s designs?

Siddharth Purohit: I would say the answer is a bit of both, and I’ll detail it out as follows. I thought no one was doing this. For instance, to the idea of having brown paper packaging.

Very keen to communicate the earthy element, the rustic element of Aazol through it. So I had to avoid plastic packaging, even if it meant higher cost. I think it is around the pandemic, so I’m talking mid 2020. Okay. I think none of us really ventured more than maybe 200, 300 metres. away from homes. I stay in a very nice, jumpy area in Bombay, and we had the original Subco open very close by.

And it was started by a young gentleman, a friend of a friend. So my friend took me there to the store and I was really impressed with their visual language, as you called it. And what really spoke to me, was the incredible attention to detail. This was something that had been to every single spacing, every single line, sentence, word letter used, been very carefully detailed out by someone who had a clear idea as to how it was to look.

I also greatly enjoyed Subcode’s use of regional typography. And I was quite captured by that being a way for young people looking to start interesting things in the country that were rooted in our tradition. So young people are exploring our own heritage and bringing in interesting things. ways. So that’s one, Brandon did these couple of things to me, show me that attention to detail element, show me the regional typography and the nice ways it can be used and catered to the philosophy that I believe.

Hasita Krishna: Sure, of course. And speaking of support, I think now seeing as all in that context, it makes a lot more sense, right? Even the name that you’ve chosen is not probably a word that a lot of us outside of Maharashtra may be familiar with. But you’ve done a good job of explaining. And I also like that attention to detail, which percolates into the actual packaging itself even of liquid products, right? I have a bottle of your liquid jaggery, I’m addicted to it, but it’s a pretty solid bottle, right? And it’s not very common for liquid goods to travel very well.

As much as I love the ad and I love how things look, if the packaging is damaged or if the bottle is broken, then I’m going to be disappointed. So how do you manage all of these expectations?

How to manage logistics as a small brand?

Siddharth Purohit: So the whole company today is divided into two large sections responsible for sales and then an equally hefty, equally robust, equally talented operations team responsible logistics responsible for product quality and responsible for any and all self help group sourcing which is right now in this nascent stage itself from 17 different self help groups all across Maharashtra and Some really rural from getting them first of all trained to handle it hygienically to pack the products to send it the task.

We have a warehouse partner responsible for holding our products. safely, hygienically. We have a logistics partner responsible for getting it across to consumers. There is no doubt that this whole journey is a learning journey.

For instance, you might have a lovely robust plastic bottle, but we initially started with glass. Glass, a fair few bottles broke along the way.

There are two elements here. One is does it get across to Hasitha in Bangalore safely? The answer is 80 percent of the time, yes. 20 percent of the time, we can only hold our hand up in apology and say, Hasitha, sorry, forgive us. Sometimes the Indian logistics system is cruel. It really is.

The second element is, of course, the cost and not just the cost, the extra weight as a part of it, the cost of all of the protective elements, just drop this plastic bottle in a larger box, send it to you. The glass bottle had to come in its own box and that box, larger box, and then went to you.

Significantly increasing our costs. The only thing you can do is along the journey, identify pain points as quickly as possible and work towards rectifying them.

Hasita Krishna: Which actually brings me to a lot of food brand founders especially of food brands that are five years and younger, perhaps have come out and spoken about being very closely in touch with the consumer. a disappointed consumer will probably go leave a review somewhere rather than even today, right? Despite me knowing that I’ll receive a message from the brand on WhatsApp, or I might get a call, the likelihood that I’ll express my disappointment in very public ways is still very high.

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely.

Hasita Krishna: How do you decide what feedback to address at which point in time?

Which customer feedback to address at which point of time?

Siddharth Purohit: I believe the only thing you can really do is every single communication channel that we as people are used to in our daily lives. You keep open. From a brand perspective, can you write to me on email? Yes. Can you write to me on Instagram? Yes. Can you write to me on WhatsApp? Yes. Can you call me? Yes.

So first is to open all channels to the consumer. Second, trust that you can reach us. Should you have any query, any concern, any hassle whatsoever, reach out. Reach out on WhatsApp, reach out on email, call us, reach out on Instagram. Many people do. Many people also pass judgement only through reviews.

We live and die by reviews. We have to make a significant effort in garnering reviews. One person who’s, I would say, 50 to 50 percent of their job at Huzzle is just to focus on calling up customers saying, Please get us reviews. Please, did you like the product? Please give us a review.

Good, bad, ugly, just give us a review. So in that process, every single customer gets called There are still people who… behave extremely vitriolically with the brand. You can do nothing but develop a thick skin, because some of these comments, despite you being so clear that you are open, so responsive when any query does come in, are frankly unkind and hurtful. These You can only ignore.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. For what it’s worth, the products are amazing. I’m a very picky eater and I’ve tried several products and they’re all. Truly, genuinely very nice and they feel very homegrown, right?

But also I sometimes wonder the niche that you’ve chosen is just that, right? It’s a very niche segment. You’ve named yourself Aazol, which is again a reference to a very specific part of the country. What does growth look like for you? Does it mean more people buying? Does it mean retention?

What does growth mean for Aazol?

Siddharth Purohit: I think here for every brand and every person, it’s about defining what success is to them. Mother and I both started as old because we wanted to start a social impact organisation right? For us, Aazol is not about chasing valuation.

For us, Aazol is not about becoming a unicorn. We would like Aazol to sustain itself on internal investment, what we have put in our family money. Therefore profitability is extremely important.

From, I would say day minus 60 or minus 124 months before launch, we were extremely clear. That cost control has to be an extremely tight burn to launch, right? The capital that we had spent in order to launch was the same amount as a friend of mine who also started a food company that has just closed down, spent only on his branding project.

And that means a lot of things on your own and be extremely judicious in both the people you can work with from a partner lens. And from whom you can hire,  right? So tight cost control because we have to achieve profitability. Profitability also can only be achieved if we hit a certain scale in terms of sales growth. But I can’t increase my marketing costs any more than this level.

Here just under, under my marketing budget. I need to bring in 2x the amount of sales that I’m currently doing. So that’s the goal.

We are paying our self help groups a fair, unnegotiated price. And Aazol is set up for the long term, regardless of. Mine and mother’s presence, as long as someone sensible is handling, And if this is achieved. That is success, plain and simple. And that goes from there. Do we start incorporating more self help groups?

Do we further help our current self help groups to grow? We will figure that out. Again, the goal there, Harsita, would be, I don’t want to help one lady in Alibaug. or become queen of that area.

It is about how do you ensure that money is going to that area for community upliftment. Otherwise, it’s not a social impact project. It’s about nurturing the business because it’s not yet self-sustaining. This becomes self sustaining all of our attention or a large chunk of our attention is directed towards the money going to what we targeted doing in the first place.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, what’s really interesting and would love to know more is there are so many important areas that you have been able to focus on equally, right? The visual language, the quality of the product and the social impact. And on top of all of that, staying profitable or being a profitable enterprise. If you had to choose two out of these four, because how would you go about that?

Because I do see some people who have a great product, but they’re just selling on WhatsApp. They’ve not built that website. They’ve not done that branding. In this case, you also have to create that customer education piece, right? This is the story behind us. So would you choose or what would be your two bits to someone who’s saying I have so many things I need to look at?

How do I do this?

Which elements to prioritise as a founder?

Siddharth Purohit: I can’t say much more than having a capable co-founder. for everything that you said, the only thing that was flashing through my mind was, Oh, here there was push and pull between mother and me.

And we always managed to, in that push and pull, arrive at the right decision for Azur. There were several things on the brand front which she was against. A lot of the lovely images that you see on our Instagram of the self help groups that I got shot through at a huge subsidy through an incredibly talented friend of mine who is Bangalore based photographer, a guy called Sameer Mohan, who runs Yoke Studios with his wife.

But even with a high subsidy, the cost was scary for us at that stage. So mother against spending such money, lots of discussions followed, let’s not go to all self help groups, only five. Let’s force Sameer to shoot both photographs and videos. One is push and pull with a good co-founder who compliments you well. I think the second thing, Subha, the second answer to your question is, you don’t have to necessarily choose only one or two out of those four things, as long as you are extremely strict and disciplined with yourself in the art of controlling costs. I can’t tell you how many good people we have.

Said, you are so right for this position. You are so right for us, or we would love to work with you. Lost & Hungry, for instance, I’m sitting in their office. Back when we started together, there were others, we had reached out to a whole set of photographers. While of course talented, a huge part of Lost and Hungary’s appeal at that point of time was that their costs were amongst the lowest.

So to with our designer Norma, who made the entire household brand language. As long as you are uncompromising about controlling costs, you can have brand good packaging. a good set of people, all of those necessary three, four pillars that you spoke about.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Sure. The discussions, or your With your co-founder and the way, it’s a huge time investment, right?

Vetting so many photographers, interviewing so many people, having so many conversations. It’s worth it because finally it’s serving a very important purpose for you.

Clarity gives time

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely. And the sort of the interesting thing that you just said is having the time, which I think so many people will claim not to have, I believe I have a lot of time. I think clarity gives time. For instance, When we started Aazol, it wasn’t clear that we were never going to seek external funding.

It was not clear that options were open. When we made that decision, and now we’re wedded to the idea, internally funded, profitable, not seeking external funding it frees up so much of mothers and my time, because Investor presentations, don’t have to think about oh, or long, or returning customers rate topline. Growth ka he. So then you’re trying to orient your journey in the direction of those.

I’ve heard from at least two, three people that 50 percent of the founder’s time is spent around investment activities. So that automatically means that 50 percent of my mother and my time is now cleared up. I can think of a brand, I can think of an app, I can think of bettering operations and making sure that 4 percent return rate comes down to 2 percent return rate, all of the things that will help us achieve that goal of profitability.

Hasita Krishna: So it’s quite interesting because I think a lot of marketing problems that we try to solve or any functional challenges for that matter by then, usually we have tried something and that’s when we know that, it’s not working and therefore we’re probably trying to fix that. But really, I think what we are learning from this conversation is that you really need to spend a little bit of time on that level zero and know exactly what you’re doing.

Disagree about things. Hopefully begin to start agreeing about a few things and then start taking some decisions from there and then all the tactics evolve, which is very interesting

Siddharth Purohit: So you know how you said one question I get asked in my consulting engagements is when is a Good thing to invest in visual assets.

Hasita Krishna: Say, for example, the co-founder or the founder in question is not a very visually acute person. Visual language obviously has a far greater impact than any number of words ever could. And that’s just, that’s the harsh truth. What would be your recommendation to someone who’s really starting from that standpoint and trying to still succeed, right?

Advice for someone starting from the visual standpoint and trying to succeed

Siddharth Purohit: So if I understand your question correctly my answer would be that there is really no working around the fact that you need that expertise. If you don’t own it yourself, and you do not have a co-founder who possesses it, or if you don’t have a co-founder at all, then the only option as far as I see it is, Getting on a trusted strategic partner who can fulfil that space. That gap for you in a meaningful manner and in an invested manner?

I think every single strategic partner that I see of us, Norma Aya, and Lost & Hungry. I see a certain amount of investment in the whole brand on their side. They have committed a part of their heart and soul, if I may. To this journey and to the Aazol brand we, in the beginning gave them extremely clear, tight briefs. That was the requirement on our end. It is a requirement. I think many people give loose briefs, so they are very open to interpretation. Then it’s an iterative process. they’ll come back with their vision.

And post that iterative process, to an extent also letting go and trusting the vision of your strategic partner.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. That’s interesting. And somehow it makes sense, right? Because I think what we see is the stick figures and we see a little bit of the, stick figures is actually the wrong word. It’s a very beautiful system using lines and shapes, which are basic. And I could ask you, Hey, why that?

Why not like a render? But it’s really not bad at all. It’s more about finding what appeals to any number of different things which could eventually have achieved the same purpose.

Siddharth Purohit: What you spoke of is called line art. I also wasn’t aware of what line art was until. Norma shared this with us and it spoke to us and she was, you actually, in an example, beautifully articulated my point, which is she gave something that we had no idea and would have never conceptualised on our own because we don’t have experience or expertise.

I have a little bit of aesthetic ability. Not much beyond that. It spoke to us, but it spoke to us and Norma was able to create it because we had shared an extremely clear brief.

I knew exactly, I didn’t know how it would manifest, but I knew what the Spins of the brand were when I reached out to Norma, whoever else I did at that stage. From a design perspective.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. And that synergy or the lack thereof is something that constantly plays out in our lives in different contexts, right? And when the synergy is there it obviously makes a huge amount of difference to both parties working. Yeah, this is actually, usually because the guest conversations always end up being so much more than we ever prepare for.

I don’t mean in terms of time, in terms of how much we are learning from this as well. Like it’s been such a, I think a soothing conversation almost, and reinforces a lot of things that we’ve suspected about the respective businesses we run. Especially Siddharth, I think your messaging on clarity brings time.

I think We’re gonna be thinking about that for a very long time because I think it’s so true more than anything. And we kind just want to ask you one last thing about future plans for a brand like Aazol, or do you see yourselves going on shelf?

Future for Aazol

Siddharth Purohit: Absolutely. We have already over the last few months been making a concerted push towards retail.

And I was telling Vinayak, the founder of Lost and Hungry, just today, who asked me, Oh, how’s Aazol going? And I said, if the expected base, or if the maximum base on detail is 100, After building in buffers, we said, okay, expected base will be 30. Actual base is three.

This is the actual base after you have finally, after months figured out. In the beginning, when you come, you say, I want to be in general trade and modern trade and this and that and the other what we are, and this is just from a retail perspective, I answer what we are coalescing around. What we are finally coalescing around,

We belong to specialty stores, right? A finite range of speciality stores, which will give us access to premium customers. This includes the likes of, in Bombay, Nature’s Basket, the signature Reliance stores, Fashion Pick, for instance. These all are classified under modern trade.

And we’ve tried a lot, trust me, a lot of dead ends here. A lot of stores that we have entered, but then given no dividends, we’re selling three products a month. For instance, it’s just a complete waste of time. There are also a lot of these, in fact, at least niche super speciality stores would say that we are, we are

the farmers markets, stores, Ayurveda, et cetera, et cetera. Consider them to have super speciality, very snooty about the products that they will put in. I think most premium customers are discerning, not snooty.

Few snooty people will go there, but not enough to sustain either them or us.

These stores, you have to avoid, the general trade where you won’t get premium customers, you need to avoid,

Hasita Krishna: I was just gonna ask you how is it that clarity is so strong, but I get where you’re coming from.

Siddharth Purohit: I think it’s really simple. You have to try. You have to try intelligently, by the way, retail, there are a lot of upfront costs. And if you said yes to every single opportunity. That came, we would have spent tens of lakhs on those upfront costs itself, and we would have sunk by now. You have to be judicious in your decision making, but you have to try, and you have to evaluate quickly, and lessons learned have to be implemented fast.

So now in the last, I would say maybe as little as two weeks, but I’m being gracious and saying last month, which is the third big team that we are building at Aazol along with brand marketing, online sales, which I handle and operations, which mother handles retail, the team that we are building has finally reached that stage of clarity.

Where they aren’t headlessly chasing multiple opportunities and doing nothing correctly. They are in a focused manner, realising the potential of 20 stores only in Bombay. Bangalore nahi jaana, abhi Delhi nahi jaana, Pune bhi nahi jaana. Bombay mein 20 stores hai. Figure out what to do from a visibility perspective.

Get your processes right. For example, are they giving you purchase orders? How simple is that? Paying you on time. Just get the processes right, get visibility and make these 20 stores a success. And

Hasita Krishna: then you have a template for. Yeah. Yeah.

Siddharth Purohit: and that clarity builds time because now with that clarity, they have the time to do things correctly in these 20 stores.

And once you start doing things correctly, no doubt you will get the results.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, absolutely. This is amazing. Yeah. I think, a B2C kind of brand and exploring the early days of it. But I think a lot of what you’ve discussed today actually applies. to any startup in, especially in the early days. So thank you so much. We hope you had a good time recording.

Siddharth Purohit: It was so lovely meeting both of you.

Our Guest: Siddharth Purohit

Siddharth is a bonafide Type-A, Siddharth helms Aazol’s sales, marketing and digital operations. A management consultant with Kearney in a former life, he is also a professional diver, keen trekker and adventure sports enthusiast. Siddharth’s peripatetic life (he has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and travelled to over 40 countries) has found root back in the land of his birth where he takes great joy in showcasing Maharashtra to the world through the foods of Aazol.

The post S3E05 – Clarity in Purpose is Clarity in Branding appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Ever wondered if the concept of a “thread” in social media is evolving faster than you can keep up? Join Subha Chandrasekaran and Hasita Krishna on the “Damn Good Marketing” podcast as they explore the ever-changing world of content creation. Is marketing changing, or are business owners overwhelmed by the pace of change? From the allure of AI to the pitfalls of over-marketing, they discuss the challenges faced by businesses today. Tune in for insights on simplifying content creation, achieving marketing sanity, and finding your brand’s true voice in the modern marketing landscape.

Discussion Topics: Content Marketing Expectations vs Reality

• What is a thread?
• Thinking thoughts based on medium
• Challenges of needing to be present everywhere
• Disillusionment in content creation
• Using AI for content creation
• Social media optimization
• Self-awareness in content marketing
• Prioritising customer experience
• Case study – Yoga bar
• Content creation – a challenge?
• Topical segment – Apple’s marketing
• It’s okay to not jump into new things

Transcript: Content Marketing Expectations vs Reality

What is a Thread?

Subha Chandrasekaran: As though marketing as a business owner wasn’t frustrating enough, A bunch of tweets was a thread, but now a thread is like one tweet, isn’t it? I liked what someone said that on Instagram we were seeing the photo and then reading the caption. So now we read the caption and then we see the photo. What’s changed? Nothing is the right answer, but everything if you’re a business owner because you just don’t know what to do and what not to do, Hasita, there’s like that content animal is huge.

Hasita Krishna: And frankly, I think even marketing teams are tired, right? This time we are simply not jumping at new things with the kind of enthusiasm that typically characterises the marketing function.

Because you don’t know, is it going to help? And genuinely why start one more thing? Because content production, god knows, is not an easy enough thing to do in normal circumstances. In fact, I was going to write an article on Substack, which is my new shiny toy.

That article was going to be called Losing my Thread of Thought. And then I lost my thread of thought. So it’s really difficult, right? It’s not something that you can just constantly keep churning while also somehow keeping a day job.

I think that’s a unicorn dream, and we are all realising that. So what will threads do to us there is that fear. What if my competitors are there and they’re suddenly building a following, then what happens to me?

Subha Chandrasekaran: It is daunting. Because like you said, my thoughts used to be on Medium, then maybe they were on a blog and now they’re on Substack and it feels like there are so many places to say things and I don’t have anything to say.

Hasita Krishna: So welcome to the Damn Good Marketing podcast. Let’s talk about content creation. What do we expect and what’s reality? Do you sometimes also feel like you’re thinking a thought based on what medium you will eventually put it out on?

Thinking Thoughts Based on Medium

Subha Chandrasekaran: So true. That’s what I said. I feel like I should be better at threading because the words come to me first. And then I could think about, okay, is there an image that goes with it? But for the professional side, I struggle with Instagram because the image has to come first.

Hasita Krishna: In saying all of that, we’ve already contextualised the thought to the medium onto which it would go out, which is probably taking something away from it in and of itself.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And so we need a way to think about simplifying content where the thoughts come first and you think about what is it? Why do you wanna say anything at all? Maybe if you’re running a really good business and you have customers, then maybe just keep your mouth shut and run the business.

Hasita Krishna: To some extent. Absolutely. I think, but we are all in a hurry to grow, and we do see content as a cheaper alternative to gain traction. I think something about it because it’s not quantifiable in money, I guess because it’s more of a time thing So we see it as an easy channel for that very reason, I think, which I mean, time and experience again have taught us that it’s not.

Challenges of Needing to be Present Everywhere

Subha Chandrasekaran: And unfortunately, that easiness makes us present everywhere. So one of the challenges is that every time there’s a new toy to be present on, we start and then we lose the team or we don’t know why we are there. 

Hasita Krishna: And in fact, just the other day someone was talking to me about wanting to test out a new business idea with a small group of people and see what happens.

They wanted to know if, should run ads on Instagram. Should I run ads on Facebook? Should I be on threads? Should I be somewhere else? And to me, the most logical thing for their use case seemed like a WhatsApp group. To build a community, all you need is a tool. And WhatsApp is a good enough tool, which everybody has on their phones.

You don’t have to force people to go anywhere else. So where do people come for that specific WhatsApp group? They already exist in your contacts. And I think in the creation of something, we often forget that even a WhatsApp message is a piece of content. 

Subha Chandrasekaran: Very true and you can put out the sweetest, nicest posts on Facebook or Instagram. Or LinkedIn. but then you also go and send very unprofessional messages in your WhatsApp interaction with your customers. Then you’ve lost them.

Hasita Krishna: Correct. And also at no point are social media channels going to simply give you reach because you created an account right.

For them, the priority is who can bring in more other people. That is literally the algorithm on which social media runs. In fact, I’ve been following the Zina Thaman page for quite some time, and I enjoy interacting with that content as well. But these days when she posts, I just don’t see it in my feed anymore unless I go looking for it.

So someone who’s had that kind of growth on a platform like Instagram in just a couple of months can have the same problems.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And you don’t even know why. Maybe somewhere you went and too quickly shut down a post about. 

Hasita Krishna: Or you said you’re not interested in something and that itself is having an impact on that.

Disillusionment in Content Creation

Subha Chandrasekaran: Also, the other challenge I find in content creation is that there’s a certain amount of disillusionment. On the one hand, there’s a lot of hope and excitement that, okay, maybe this new thing will give me that traction and that utopian dream of followers, which nothing else has been able to.

Hasita Krishna: Or there’s the other end of the spectrum where we feel like we’ve tried things in the past and they have not worked. Surprisingly, one of the most common things I hear is we’ve tried SEO in the past and there’s so much that’s wrong with that sentence because first you past tense your SEO and therefore it’s not working anymore.

I think one client really put it beautifully. We ran a huge campaign for them. We did PR. Suddenly the Quantum of Traction on their LinkedIn page went up and he said it. Now we are on the hamster wheel. We have to run, and I think that pretty much sums up any content production slash influencing exercise. You’re on it and then there’s no stopping. Correct.

Using AI for Content Creation

Subha Chandrasekaran: And now there’s the allure of, oh, if you’re struggling with all of this, then just put some sort of AI chatbot and it’ll be the answer to all your problems, which creates another content problem. Because somebody has to feed that chatbot, I presume.

Hasita Krishna: Exactly and also, we’ve had an instance recently, and I’m not sure what the mechanics are. We are still researching it. A client created a post using ChatGPT and put it on LinkedIn.

The post before it had a few hundred engagement parameters and this post had seven likes. It’s ticking all the boxes, but then the platforms are also becoming smarter in terms of, okay, if I see more than five emojis, then I know this has to be a bot and therefore I’ll simply not.

In fact, LinkedIn came out and they said, now that content creation has become so much easier, our parameters for judging your work are going to be, how much work have you done in that space in the past for you to even, ’cause we have access to your job history. We have access to what you’ve done.

So are you talking about the thing that you say? You’re supposed to be good at it, so your job qualifications are being matched. And I think that’s a beautiful thing because suddenly if you’ve noticed all the posts about helping the street dog on my way to work have just vanished all of a sudden, you’re right. The algorithm does sometimes work in our favour also.

Social Media Optimization

Hasita Krishna: They’ll continue to optimise because like I said, I think social media is always going to optimise for what is it that is going to bring more of your kind to me, and what is it that’s going to keep them there?

I think the only way for threads to really work and become something is for Twitter to really collapse to a state where it’s simply not serving the purpose it’s supposed to serve anymore. Speaking of which, Elon Musk did come out and say, ad revenues on the platform have fallen by 50%.

But the only thing that means is that brands have given up and brands of course have never been known for their loyalty to one platform over the other. So we’ll just have to wait and watch.

I think it comes back to the fundamental challenge that in marketing you do need to create a lot of content and you need to put it out there and it’s everywhere. Sometimes we don’t think of something as content, but it’s everywhere.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think we’re all sold on the premise that a good business will exist on some platforms and will also generate content in different forms. Like, it could be emails, it could be WhatsApp messages, but how do we have a process that keeps working so that I’m not also saying when I did content, It didn’t work for me?

Self-Awareness In Content Marketing

Hasita Krishna: I think self-awareness itself is a big step, right? It’s quite interesting you bring that up because I saw an Instagram ad and I’m very prone to shopping things off of Instagram randomly all the time. And it was a very pretty-looking skirt. I went, I clicked on the page and I saw the skirt and it was not that great once I landed up there.

So I wanted to see what other things they have. I went to the menu. It’s an e-commerce store. The first tab says about us fine. The second tab says our story and the third tab says, meet the founders. The fourth tab says sustainability, which is still fine, but there is no shop button in the menu.

Oh my God. There is no collection, there is nothing to indicate that there is a collection of things on this website that one can buy. That’s sad. I’m just thinking that someone has not noticed it, or is it just that we’ve then moved on and somebody has told us, Hey, now you need to go do 10 things on Instagram and run 20 ads on Facebook.

And we simply didn’t have the time to come back and even look at this and see this glaring problem, which is right in front of us. And analytics will only tell you your bounce rate is very high. They’re not gonna tell you people clicked and didn’t find what they were looking for. And some of these very obvious problems, how do we solve them, right?

And I think the first step is to just inventory all the communication that is going out from you as a brand. And that could be as simple as an SMS.

Subha Chandrasekaran: If I had one kind of thing on my wishlist for brand marketers out there, please inventory the emails that you send.

Hasita Krishna: Just kill five of them at random. And you’d still do better. You won’t even have to read. 

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. Like I was telling you earlier, I bought one bottle of vitamins from an online platform, and I kid you not, the series of emails that I got were, we’ve got your payment, then we’ve got your order, then we’ve confirmed your order. And not only was it five to six emails and I’m not joking. Literally, these were individual emails and the same story was repeating itself on WhatsApp.

Hasita Krishna: I blocked that at some stage, but at least I was able to do that. Now, this email I can’t even get out of that loop. Because if there’s an issue, I need to know.

Subha Chandrasekaran: They have to have some way to contact me and I need to get the invoice. And there are so many reasons why that channel is important, but when they blatantly misuse it, what’s the customer experience like?

Prioritising Customer Experience

Subha Chandrasekaran: So why is it that when we are brands, somehow the mindset is different from when we are customers? I think if we just look at some of our customer interactions, it will be very obvious to us what we’re doing wrong on the selling side of things as well.

Hasita Krishna: So which is really the second step? I think once you have your inventory and you know what you’re doing on a daily basis, how much of it is recurring, how much of it is one time, for example, you won’t make a pitch deck again and again, you probably make it once and you share it contextually, then the next step, of course, is to remove what doesn’t make sense from that process anymore.

For example, for this podcast, which is now also on Substack, is there really a need for a separate episode-wise write-up to appear on my website?

I don’t know. It’s one more thing for me to do. Once you’ve started something, you want to continue it. You want to do it for as long as possible, but removing these little bits and pieces will only make the experience better.

Also, when you do see that you’re at the receiving end of so much communication from large brands and large influencers, let’s say, that you wonder, if they need to shout from the rooftop so much, who do you think that you don’t need to?

Absolutely. But shouting from the rooftops can take various forms and formats. And it doesn’t always mean quantity. So if I have one or two newsletters that are happening in a month How do I make each of them so good that people look forward to it over and over again? Versus maybe producing something on a daily basis.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Definitely. We shop from a lot of smaller brands very consciously. And we try to see where we can promote a small business. And I’m more than happy to get just that one mail which says we’ve got your payment and the stuff will reach you. And then when the product actually comes a thoughtful little note in the box or the bag saying this is our story and hope you like it. And that’s all I need for me to just be connected to that brand. 

Hasita Krishna: This is happening because I think everyone has found what is their locus of control and they’re controlling only that much. Recently, I placed a cash-on-delivery order from a new brand, which then. Their entire logistics are handled by Shiprocket.

So it is Shiprocket messaging me to check if you placed this order. Are you sure you want it? Because it’s a cash-on-delivery order. So if you want to change your mind, now is a good time. And once you confirm it, it says, okay, your order will be delivered by this date. And on the day of delivery, I just got one message saying you can pay by cash or you can use a link and that’s it because they’re a logistics partner. They know the pain of somebody suffering through 10 emails just to get one medicine delivered.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And not only that, they are very focused on the outcome they want to achieve. Absolutely. When I go there, you’re ready to pay.

Hasita Krishna: I really don’t see the need, even in larger organisations, for there to existing templates for everything. I think it really takes humanity out of some of these things. And it really doesn’t give people a choice to say, okay, maybe this is not required because your algorithm is saying you have to send this after this.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Or perhaps that’s what creeps in when you have a marketing team and you have different folks doing different things. Not really sure who owns it and maybe it’s always okay, finally the founder owns it. So if I shouldn’t be sending this, they’ll tell me.

Hasita Krishna: And a good way to even just look at it is to see what you have sent in the last month. It’s not a door that’s shut forever, right? You can always fix it. You can always correct it. And there are beautiful examples. I think for the longest time, Dunzo’s push notifications were just the sweetest things to receive.

It’s very personal and very conversational. I think they’ve really optimised their logistics to the point where they know when to send that push notification when to just not say anything. That’s the beauty of data, right? Like we have enough indicators today to tell us where customers need more of us and where they need a lot less of us.

Subha Chandrasekaran: If you start by saying, okay, there are 20 platforms I could potentially exist on. I could be on Quora, and I could be on Pinterest, and I could be everywhere, and I could be on a billboard on the way to the airport. What’s stopping me? I could be everywhere. But what am I doing now? And what’s ideal for my brand? And what’s ideal for my capacity and sanity.

Case Study – Yoga Bar

Hasita Krishna: Recently, I was reading this case study about the founders of Yoga Bar and how they went about the process of just figuring out do customers even want us, which is a big problem,

Is there a large enough segment of people who will buy over and over again from me to the point where I’m breaking even at least if nothing else? And I really liked the two, or three things she said, where one, she talks about just staying away from this whole social media D2C e-commerce game entirely.

And instead of choosing to be on shelves, being top of mind in front of people’s faces in places like Namdhari, in places like nature’s basket, where, based on their research, they found that the people who might like something like this will visit. And she also talks about how the packaging itself is very, I think they were one of the earliest brands to put all of their ingredients prominently on the packaging.

And she says, for the longest time, my personal phone number used to be on the packet, so that if someone had a problem, the person they were reaching was me, and I was hearing from them firsthand what the problem was. And we only launched a second flavour after we realised that the first flavour has enough lifetime value, meaning there are enough repeat customers to justify the cost of advertising for that product.

You want people to come back and say, Hey, I really missed it while it wasn’t there. Which interestingly is what happened when I posted a picture saying we are restarting recording for season three of this podcast. So many people reached out and said, we’re so excited.

Hasita Krishna: This was important to us. And I feel very humbled and honoured that we’ve been able to play that role in somebody’s life.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And I think that ties down to how much communication you put out, right? If you know that, hey, I’ve got the energy only for two episodes a month, then let me not also bombard the listener with a post about my podcast every two days.

Hasita Krishna: Unless you feel like it. If it’s really something you’re so excited about that you have to go tell the world four times a week, then please do that.

And recently, we were doing a very interesting engagement with somebody. A very small team is just starting out figuring out how to even set up a content marketing process around the work that I do. And one of the things we told them upfront is to give yourself those early wins, like there are things you can create and then you don’t have to look at them probably for the next six to nine months.

A pitch deck again is a great example. There are probably some case studies. There will be some product offerings for which you’ve created individual slides and presentations. These things can be done. Your WhatsApp templates can be done. Reaching out to people using that template can be done because until we get that feedback from the outside, it’s very difficult to stay consistent, and just say, no, I’m just going to constantly keep posting irrespective of whether it results in anything at all.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct. Then it just becomes noise and we are not getting feedback and we don’t realise that you’re talking to a vacuum and not really being received by anyone.

Hasita Krishna: Of course, common advice does say to keep at it for at least a three-month period. But in that three-month period, we are not saying close your eyes and do nothing about it. We’re also saying observe how things are being received. What can you tweak? Sometimes it could simply be that you have a lot to say, but you don’t know how to say it. Storytelling in and of itself is a big enough piece to sometimes have to worry about.

Content Creation – A Challenge?

Hasita Krishna: I think content will continue to be a challenge, especially for smaller teams and smaller businesses with limited resources. It’s so important what you say about taking stock, finding focus, being intentional, going for wins because you really do need them on most days, going for something that looks, sounds, and feels right, and being willing to give up something that you get feedback isn’t working and optimising.

We’re all busy people, but the good ones have actually taken months, if not more, just to tweak, optimise, and set the baseline to a point where after that, once you amplify that sound, it still makes a lot of sense.

And that’s not always an easy thing to do. Especially in the context of startups where everything is moving fast. Sometimes it’s very easy to feel like, Oh, okay, I’m not doing enough to justify my salary, perhaps. And that in and of itself sometimes causes us to want to do more. But I think, as long as you have a plan, and you say, this is what I’m working towards, and this is how it’s going to look as I’m working towards it, it’s still a very sellable proposition.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Even when you’re not doing something, it stresses you out because you’ve not intentionally said, Hey, that’s not important for me now. So you’re constantly saying, Hey, should I be there? Should I be doing that? Saying, okay, for the next six months, this is my roadmap, and sticking to it, I think, takes away a lot of that stress.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. It also gives you a chance to experiment and play around with things and not take everything seriously to the point where it has to be a 12-month content calendar. We don’t know if the platform will exist. What if Elon Musk buys out threads also? Any number of things could happen. So how can you hitch a ride on something that you’re not enjoying today?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think finally hitch a ride on your core business. I think that’s where you should be spending the maximum time, no matter what.

Topical Segment – Apple’s Marketing

Subha Chandrasekaran: So Hasita, did you hear that Apple’s found a new way to ask for your kidney? 

Hasita Krishna: I don’t have any more kidneys to spare, I’m sorry.

Subha Chandrasekaran: But have you seen that headgear?

Hasita Krishna: I have seen the Apple Vision Pro and I would like to unsee the Apple Vision Pro. Because I think just the premise of something on my face, you have to understand I underwent surgery to avoid glasses on my face. I’m not going to intentionally go back and put something on my face and then look at you and talk to you while also engaging with other stuff.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I’m not making any commitments because I made a lot of fun of the apple airpod when it came. So did I and the initial marketing collateral that they put out, I did make fun of it in about how it just hangs from the year and how it’s going to fall off and I take all that back so many times. Because I can’t live without them now. 

Hasita Krishna: But adoption is adoption. Finally, right? It’s not just a software product challenge where you uninstall the app and you’re done with it, you’re asking for a much bigger commitment at a much bigger price point.

And I came across this comic on LinkedIn the other day. I follow this page called market owners run by Tom Fishman, who’s just amazing at comics in general in this space. And he talks about a concept that was introduced way back in 1991. When I’m sure the market was not this busy and it’s called crossing the chasm.

It’s a Geoffrey Moore concept apparently. And it says… Yes, you have your innovators, which are the very early buyers, the people selling two kidneys to buy the Apple Vision Pro, maybe getting some early samples of it. Then you have the early adopters, people who are excited about the tech and who are going to advocate, and evangelise.

But somewhere in between that and the early majority itself which is saying, I have an Apple Vision Pro, you also have one, and let’s both of us talk. That is the early majority, literally, right? It’s people who already enjoy gadgets. Making a very conscious choice. In between these two exists the chasm.

And a lot of people just fall off there. And we’ve seen it happen with so many other platforms. Orkut was great, maybe not early adoption but late adoption definitely. Google used to have a social media platform at one point.

That’s gone, right? And we don’t know what else will continue, what else will not. So do I want to make that kind of an investment in an ecosystem that’s not even known for its gaming capabilities?

Subha Chandrasekaran: It just seems it adds to our content conundrum in a way that there’s one more way in which people are going to see, hear, and listen to you in a much more powerful and impactful way, right?

Like when you put a visual in front of somebody. And you’re talking to their ears, and you’re taking their attention away from something else, like playing with their child, or they’re trying to focus on this while they’re playing with their child, apparently. Wow.

Just the worst-case scenario. And you just imagine if you’ve got this headgear in front of you. And you’re getting SMS after SMS on how that pizza guy has reached this point and now he’s at this point and now he’s opening his umbrella and he’ll be 10 minutes late and all of that is happening in real time.

Hasita Krishna: Honestly, it just seems like too much of an intrusion. But honestly, I think it seems like too much of an intrusion into my headspace which is one reason why I’ve avoided the Apple Watch for so long. And I still continue to avoid it because I don’t know if I want to receive WhatsApp messages on my wrist and have that thing constantly. I’m distracted enough as it is.

Subha Chandrasekaran: There will be one shiny new object every few months and the onus is on us to say yes or no and saying no is not going to kill your life. All your business. 

It’s Okay to Not Jump Into New Things

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. If there is one takeaway, let it be that. It’s okay to not always jump onto something new as long as you’re doing what you’re doing and you’re constantly doing that better

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Damn Good Marketing podcast. Today we discussed a lot about just getting intentional with the content that you’re already producing because you are probably already producing a lot of it, maybe intentionally, maybe otherwise start with an inventory, and see what’s happening there.

Ask customers. I think that’s always a very valuable way of doing it. Ask your best customers what’s working, and what’s not working for them. Send them a gift voucher while you’re there. They’d appreciate that too. And let us know how it goes. Has that made the process easier for you? Has that cleared up your headspace?

Helped you set the right expectations. What is the outcome of this exercise? We’d love to hear. You can find us on LinkedIn. Thank you so much and we’ll see you soon.

The post S3E04 – Content Marketing Expectations vs Reality appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Thinking of Starting a Podcast? The allure of this shiny new toy has captivated everyone, but it’s serious business. In this episode of the Damn Good Marketing Podcast, Join Subha Chandrasekaran and Hasita Krishna as they dive into the depths of podcasting, sharing their experiences, insights, and unexpected discoveries. From the challenges of finding the right niche and keeping up with the demands of consistent content to deciphering podcast metrics and managing distribution, they reveal the realities behind the scenes. Explore the question: Is starting a podcast the right move for you? Get ready to uncover the truth about the podcasting journey!

Discussion Topics: Should I Start a Podcast?

• Should I Start A Podcast?
• Why Start A Podcast?
• Effort vs. Outcome
• What Is The Contribution of Podcasts?
• How Do They Manage?
• The Distribution Process
• Keeping Your Promise To The Audience
• How the Podcast Rankings Change
• What is Hasita’s Response To Clients Wanting To Start a Podcast?
• Podcasts As Standalone Ventures
• Increasing Awareness About Podcasts
• Celebrity Podcasts
• Hosting a Podcast
• What is a Big Podcast?
• Segment – Only Murders in The Building
• Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding
• How Do You Decide If Podcast Is The Right Thing For You?

Transcript: Should I Start a Podcast?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Leverage dopamine to overcome procrastination and optimise effort. I can listen to Dr. Huberman talk about this for hours, and I just did. There’s something about his voice, his ability to really break it down to the listener, if you will, that just keeps you so hooked.

And you keep coming back for more. And on the other side, if I’m really feeling down and out or even just want something that is so mindless, then I reach out to James and Jimmy and Suddenly, I’m in a little small town in rural America, population 800, and I’m laughing away as they describe a grizzly murder.

This really is my favourite new toy.

Hasita Krishna: Good to know you’re enjoying the podcasting scene Subha, which you’ve been doing for a while, because on the other hand, I listened to William Dalrymple’s podcast recently. I love the man’s books. I’ve enjoyed them so much, but then I heard the podcast and such a big let down.

I’m like, I just spent an hour and a half listening to you. Give me my time back. And with that kind of leverage where you are essentially asking people to pay attention to you for 15, 20, 30 minutes, hours, marketing teams are asking a question,

Subha Chandrasekaran: Should I start a podcast?

Hasita Krishna: Should you, let’s find out.

Should I Start A Podcast?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think this is definitely something new and it’s the shiny new toy that everyone wants to be playing with, and I get the allure wherever you go, you are seeing and hearing about podcasts.

But I think both you and I know that it’s a serious business.

Hasita Krishna: As we are finding out by the day. In fact, I think we are very much on the journey still, and there’s so much else for us to consider. In fact, this season was, we were, talking about whether this should be a video podcast which was a big jump considering we’ve never been on camera while we record.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think there’s quite a few things for us to cover, one why podcast? I think that’s the fundamental question. What can it do for you? What’s the upside? And I think more importantly, what’s the downside? There’s a lot of effort that goes into each episode and how do you figure out if it’s the right fit for you?

Why Start A Podcast?

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely.

This is an interesting question, right? Because there is production value involved. you can do it, you can put on your AirPods and just do a recording and upload it, which is something we did for a very long time as well. But it is a commitment and in that context I find that sometimes maybe we go after it.

Because we are afraid of missing out on something that maybe a competitor might latch onto. Say they start a podcast in a month and I don’t, then what happens? But then also I find that it’s a bigger question than that. What we are saying is, in the doing of this podcast, is it going to solve the problems that the rest of my marketing effort has not solved for?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think many do come to it as a magic pill? Because other marketing efforts haven’t worked too well. And now everybody’s talking about podcasts, so maybe that’s what will then make everything go upward.

Hasita Krishna: So let’s burst that bubble first as we found out to our own sadness and misery.

Launching a podcast is not gonna get listeners. Distributing a podcast is a whole other beast, and the number of variables in that context are just simply too high. I don’t know if anyone has cracked performance marketing for podcasts. And subha, you’ve had this experience of someone reaching out and saying, I’ll get you listenership in a 24 hour period, which smelled a little funny to you. And then that conversation, we know went a bit south as well.

Subha Chandrasekaran: She tried to scam me, basically.

Hasita Krishna: I was trying to be kind about it.

So your question then is if it’s not gonna get your listenership on the day that you launch, why do a podcast?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think there are enough real life examples. If. Meghan Markle can get cancelled.

Hasita Krishna: And the Obamas can get cancelled.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And for what? For lack of audience.

Hasita Krishna: Can you imagine?

Subha Chandrasekaran: How did Megan Markle think people haven’t heard enough from her anyway. But the point is that just starting one and honestly even starting one and having good content or having a good topic or a good niche. We now know that’s just not enough.

Effort vs. Outcome

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. Which is let’s zero down on that effort versus outcome conversation a little bit. What would you want through the launch of the podcast? Say you do episodes continuously for six months. And at best you do a biweekly or even a weekly programming if you’re able to.

What is that end goal that will make you feel like, okay I’ve succeeded at this. And it’s interesting because I was on a round table with Jay Acunzo, who I admire and appreciate just out of this world. He writes beautiful stuff on LinkedIn. We’ve enjoyed his storytelling, examples and master classes.

And in fact, someone came to him with this exact question and they asked him, but I’m doing all this and my podcast is not getting listeners. And he just said, “Why do you want listeners?”

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think we have to start there and if we are honest, it took us a while to admit what we really wanted out of this and to recalibrate our expectations.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. I think there is, in the production of a podcast, it has to be satisfying at the process level, and then it has to be satisfying at the outcome level as well. And, for us, especially for me at season two to look for sponsorships, which was a big success metric in my mind that if I get sponsored by someone, then I’ve arrived.

I see now that was the wrong thing to go after. Cause first and foremost, it would’ve limited my own ability to create what I want. And secondly, sponsorship to the extent of what was really going to satisfy me completely. And then I think coming into season two, the clarity has emerged for both of us that firstly, we do this because we like to do it.

It’s interesting, it’s fun. It’s a new medium. It’s something we are excited to consume, first of all.

What Is The Contribution of Podcasts?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think it adds to our work in a very nuanced way. For example, we are talking about things that are otherwise also part of the work that we do individually. So researching for the podcast, talking about it marking out stuff that we want to dive deeper into.

Not only excites and interests us, but it adds value to the core work that we do. Exactly right. This is not our core work. This is above and beyond that, and it adds value to your role as a marketer, my role as a coach, and that’s what we enjoy.

Hasita Krishna: Which is interesting because when we started the podcast, Motley Crew was a very new company as well. These two things happened almost, in parallel. And if you ask me, was it intentional? Absolutely not. I didn’t know what I was doing at that point in time, but it has definitely helped over the course of a couple of years in terms of people seeing me as a marketing person and not only as a content person. And I think that is the biggest contribution and leverage. That podcast has given me this space.

Subha Chandrasekaran: That’s true. I think it unintentionally got well timed with your transition. And the setting up of Motley Crew, so it helped build that identity. And once we’ve talked about that offline and once we were clear that’s what the intent of the podcast is. It establishes what is the kind of work you do, what are the areas that interest you and what are you thinking about reading about deep diving into today that is of value to your current clients and potential clients And that kind of credibility, honestly, where else would I build?

Hasita Krishna: I’ve gotten somebody’s attention for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, however long people tune in. And during that period of time, they get a sneak peek into how I think And I think that to me is the biggest contribution that a podcast could make. So, talking about conversions, if other vehicles are working, other engines are working, I think podcasts are a great addition. Purely from a thought leadership standpoint. It gives people a perspective into other people whom they never meet, and that to me is a very valuable thing in and of itself.

Subha Chandrasekaran: To add to what you said, if other parts of the engine are not working, then this is not going to revive that.

Hasita Krishna: Yes, that is also true, right? If other parts of the engine are not working, then there’s a bigger problem there in terms of probably the messaging itself. So that needs to be solved first, I think.

So before you start a podcast of your own, would you please hit the subscribe and follow button because we have some really interesting conversation brewing here.

How Do They Manage?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I do get a lot of very genuine questions around, Hey, how do you guys manage, right? Because we really have two shows running. At the same time. Always two very different niches. It’s not easy. I think that’s the first thing that I’d like to put out there.

Hasita Krishna: If you saw the number of coffee cups that are on our tables right now,

Subha Chandrasekaran: It’s definitely not easy. I did, I think almost three seasons of a weekly. And that was tough. Weekly, including a lot of guest episodes. Is a very unique kind of pressure. turn up at the quality that you want to be there for your listeners.

Hasita Krishna: And I think in one of those seasons you did a lot of guest episodes as well.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct. So it’s not just that you turn on Zoom or you pick up a mic and then you talk because there’s a lot of work that goes into it pre and post. You don’t want to invite somebody onto your podcast and not have done.

Hasita Krishna: Your homework or have been ready for them.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Because there’s also the pressure of what am I asking them that hasn’t been asked of them before in some public forum, how am I adding value to my listeners and to any audience that they may share with.

So there are a lot of expectations from these conversations. So there is a lot of preparation that goes into it. And then once you record, there’s obviously the entire production angle and maybe we’ll touch upon that. A little later. And also then the distribution.

The Distribution Process

Hasita Krishna: The distribution. Please share this with five people before we proceed.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So interestingly, you are starting a podcast because your social media channels are not getting the kind of following that you want. And then our first discovery was that we have to put the podcast on social media to get more listeners.

So literally running around in circles, chasing our own tail.

Hasita Krishna: Which is interesting, right? Because I think of a podcast, we mistake it for one in our heads. It’s not a social media platform, right? None of these platforms are organically promoting your content. Unless you apply somewhere and get featured out of the thousands of the others that are applying. Can you imagine how busy the business category must be?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Or they have paid you millions to be there.

Hasita Krishna: That too. Nobody’s paying us that. But, hopefully, why not? So it really does come down to the fact that you’ve started another thing, which again, doesn’t have the wings to take itself places.

You have to take it places. It’s like a baby. You have to ferry it around. You have to put it in front of people. So honestly, I think if numbers are what is the primary metric of success, maybe just go after good guests. Because they will bring in their own leverage and distribution. Obviously your episode to episode retainer ship may not be very high in that context, but at least you have the number of listens that justify early investment, and I get that right.

A lot of companies need early proof that this is working and the only way we know how things work is when we see the numbers.

Keeping Your Promise To The Audience

Subha Chandrasekaran: And sticking to that baby metaphor, this is not the baby that’s going to save the marriage.

Hasita Krishna: I hate to say that, but true.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So it’s something that really needs to be nurtured for what it is. And that does take a lot of effort. And it also, finally when you do realise that it’s something that you’re doing for. Increased awareness, increased credibility, then you have to show up when you say you’ll show up.

Hasita Krishna: So it’s it’s almost a promise you’re making to the audience.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Because if you, typically you are attracting listeners who are, also otherwise listening to podcasts, and they’re probably listening to much bigger names. So if you follow Dax Shepard and Armchair, you know that Monday and Thursday an episode’s going to drop. And if you follow Ferriss you know that once a week something’s gonna drop and you start very subconsciously planning your listening around it.

So if you wanna be one of them, not in the sense of numbers and the same, but if you want to be someone who’s there, when you say you will be there, then you better get your act together. You can’t disappear for a few weeks. And then suddenly drop an episode and, the podcast metrics and the world right now around it is, It’s a little bizarre.

How the Podcast Rankings Change

Hasita Krishna: It is because I think podcast rankings change by the hour. Which I find very fascinating.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So suddenly you are in the top 10 in India.

Hasita Krishna: And then two days later you are like one fifty six, two hundred and fifty in Burkina Faso.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Or Oman

Hasita Krishna: and you’ve just fallen off the India chart entirely honestly, if that’s what we look at, and I know for a fact that we looked at that quite a bit before going into season two. It’s extremely taxing on the mind. It just changes your perspective entirely on why you are in it in the first place.

What is Hasita’s Response To Clients Wanting To Start a Podcast?

Subha Chandrasekaran: So then I’m gonna ask you again, if I am your client, a founder, a business owner, and I say, should I start a podcast?

Hasita Krishna: So let me be very honest with you. I’ve not told a single client to start a podcast. There have been a couple of instances where we have and the purpose was very different. In fact, one of them I’m very happy to share they were inviting on the podcast, the guests who would eventually become sales opportunities, right?

Which I think is a great way to leverage a podcast. Because you’re essentially able to establish a conversation with someone in a very neutral space, which is not something we see enough of. The other podcast, unfortunately, stopped before it even started. Again, a lack of, I think just direction in terms of what we want to say because that’s the other thing, right?

You make one episode, you make two episodes, you have a perspective, but what happens when you have to make 20, 25 episodes?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Do you have enough to say? And that’s an important thing to think about. I think that’s what I would take away that be very clear why you are starting it.

Set your expectations accordingly. And this is something that is a bit of a long game. Because just suddenly dropping a set of four, five episodes and disappearing I don’t think you’ll ever get found again by somebody. And you’ll even be making any use of that material.

Podcasts As Standalone Ventures

Hasita Krishna: Interesting because what I’m taking away from that is to really look at the podcast as a standalone venture of its own and not always tv. Because it’s gonna sit on the internet for a while. And if you’ve not really thought about it as, okay, hey, here’s a part-time job that now I’ve also taken on, I think it’s probably not gonna go too far.

Subha Chandrasekaran: You’re right. It’s not an afterthought. It’s the main thought. It’s one more thing that you have fully taken on. So how many, I don’t know if you are seeing it, but I’m getting these messages especially on LinkedIn. Saying, Hey, would you like to co-host? A podcast, Hey, would you like to be a guest on this podcast. And so definitely there’s I think the awareness and the audience for this kind of content, audio or video is increasing.

Increasing Awareness About Podcasts

Hasita Krishna: I think honestly, since I’ve put podcast host down as a position on my LinkedIn profile, I’ve had a lot of people reach out and ask if I would be open to hosting other podcasts. And just for the record, the answer is no at this point in time. But what I did is I just went and updated my bio to say exactly that, right? I think the understanding of a podcast host is a speaker of the podcast, the person who shows up and speaks.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think what you’re looking for is a voiceover artist.

Hasita Krishna: To some extent, right? Or you’re a big influencer in the space who’s now becoming the face of a brand. That I think is a completely different conversation. I don’t know if I mean as a business, I’m just thinking if I’m really huge, and we’ve seen those examples as well, it makes sense for me to have a celebrity host and a celebrity guest profile. But you and me, we don’t have the budgets to be able to afford.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct. No and for us it’s about not talking from the brand’s voice, but about what we want to say,

Hasita Krishna: which is a big thing. No, beyond the point you, you have to work with the brand guardrails if you’re doing it in that ecosystem. Correct.

Celebrity Podcasts

Subha Chandrasekaran: And even the Good celebrity podcast that we have heard, like from Meredith Grace, Ellen Pompeo to Julia Dreyfus, they are doing it in their own voice and in their own style. They’re investing that time and energy. I’m sure they have a production crew that’s huge and somebody who’s helping them find the guests and script it to an extent and do the research. But finally on that day, they have to land up and.

Hasita Krishna: If you ask Megan Markle, apparently you don’t have to land up, but who knows.

And also the retainership of those podcasts. I think when you share Ellen Pompeo’s podcast, I think I heard the first one and then I never went back to it. So there’s going to be that audience who’s showing up just for the curiosity of it all. Never gonna come back again.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct. And also because some of these people you don’t want to get so up close and personal maybe.

Hasita Krishna: Like William Dalrymple. I would’ve just, I should have stuck to the books.

Subha Chandrasekaran: You learned the hard way, but that’s right. Some people you don’t tend to like any medium you like, sometimes you like the style, sometimes you don’t.

And you have to be ready for the fact that not everyone who you thought would listen is listening.

Hosting a Podcast

Hasita Krishna: And just, talking about hosting, who should host what kind of pull they have. I think if you’ve made up your mind that you’re going to do a podcast and you’re going to do it at least for a year or a couple of years, minimum, it’s okay to find a host, right?

If you found someone who’s got the ability to pull that particular topic off, I think it’s perfectly alright. Obviously, our context is different. We started it in. This is our baby in that sense. But it’s not always necessary that we have to be the name of the voice of the podcast all the time, I think.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct. No, definitely, if you’re busy running your company, you’re a founder, but you do want to create some talking points around, Your space because maybe it’s new, maybe it’s up and coming. Then, definitely makes sense to think it through, find the right voice for it and get it produced and put it out there.

But I think what we are coming back to is that you need to have your why clearly in place. You need to be consistent. You need to see what are the metrics that truly mean something to you. Because I don’t know today, if let’s say you and I by some stroke of luck gather thousands and thousands of listeners. It’s great. But we don’t have the capacity to handle any incoming business of that scale.

What is a Big Podcast?

Hasita Krishna: That, and also I was thinking, I think a lot of people look at this podcast in particular and actually think it’s bigger than it is. And I don’t know what is bigger because ever since Joyce put that question in my mind, I’m just asking if it’s bigger, how is it bigger?

And I watch a lot of shows with them. I’m sure they have a lot more listeners, but for example, they don’t have the same number of reviews. But we have some really amazing reviews and we have people coming back and telling us, this was useful to me. Which I think is a far better reason to stick to it than maybe the numbers alone, because like you said, honestly I’m very happy to admit that bandwidth doesn’t exist at this point in there.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. We don’t want to be saddled with that burden. And I think you’re right. Once you do start hearing back from your listeners, which, if you’re putting out quality stuff, you will. Then be loyal to that group. Because listeners do come back and tell us, I listened to this particular episode and I tried this out.

Or, I love this episode on this topic. It really resonated or I’ve been thinking about it and. Frankly, that’s really all that we’re asking for.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. In fact, the number of people who decided not to build a website after listening to the website episode, I’m quite proud and I’m very grateful that we’ve been able to make that difference to someone.

I think that makes a huge difference to us back. Correct.

Subha Chandrasekaran: That keeps us going. Definitely. But so do your reviews and follows.

Hasita Krishna: Please follow. Please subscribe. Please share it with five people for good luck.

Segment – Only Murders in The Building

Hasita Krishna: Speaking of diversity in podcasts, if I get to the segment without dying laughing, it’s gonna be an achievement.

Subha Chandrasekaran: This is by the way, and it is just, It’s gonna be hilarious.

Hasita Krishna: Only murders in the building. Let’s start there.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think only murders in the building probably spiked a lot of interest in podcasts.

Hasita Krishna: It’s that whole art imitates life situations because clearly podcasts have been on the collective consciousness for a while. Maybe more so during the pandemic. And I just see that whole series as an expression of just that,

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think the only challenges are that they make it look. Quite effortless.

Hasita Krishna: Oh, running around with mics on the streets of New York. Good luck getting a single dialog in.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. We are soundproof in a podcast studio and still we sometimes can’t hear each other.

But definitely it brings about the fact that if you’re saying the right things in a way, or if you attack that topic with. Honesty and intent. And authenticity. There will be listeners,

Hasita Krishna: and especially if it’s a murder mystery, Subha will write you her inheritance.

Subha Chandrasekaran: It’s right now in the name of two people in Arizona.

But now, let’s get to the other one that I recently discovered.

Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding

Hasita Krishna: Actually why don’t you just read the thing that this person has posted. She’s gone Stella on Twitter.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I need to tell you all about the podcast I’ve discovered called Who,

Hasita Krishna: Who shat on the floor at my wedding.

Subha Chandrasekaran: No. The title is not the funniest part because it goes on to say it’s a 12 part investigation into literally exactly that. Two women on a mission to discover which friend slash family member shat on the floor at their wedding.

Hasita Krishna: Just to put this in perspective, guys, this is the ecosystem in which we are producing and hoping to rank a podcast. Given a choice between listening to my own episode and listening to Who Shat on the floor at my wedding, I think I know where my chips are falling.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Oh my God. And then, They interrogate the mother-in-law.

Okay. And she in full exasperation claims. I’ll say again what I’ve already said to your wife and to the detectives. It wasn’t the right time of day for me.

Oh, it doesn’t get better than this, but it does cause it’s listed under true crime

Hasita Krishna: and that’s how Subha found it.

Which actually is interesting, podcasts are supposed to be entertainment vehicles as well, right?

Subha Chandrasekaran: What more do I need in life than a 12 part investigative series of this kind?

Hasita Krishna: It’s an interesting conversation on the different mindsets in which we listen to them. Because you opened with Huberman Lab, right?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. Huberman Lab is a neurologist and ophthalmologist at Stanford University, and he is some other level of competence and articulation.

Hasita Krishna: And smoothness and sophistication in a lot of things that make us very happy.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And then we have these guys and the wedding. Take your pick. Pick both. That’s what we do. It, actually, brings me to another point before we wrap up. How do you decide if a podcast is the thing for you?

How Do You Decide If Podcast Is The Right Thing For You?

Hasita Krishna: I think two, three things, right? First of all, do you enjoy listening to them yourself? Have you ever listened to one? At any point in time assuming you’re listening to this, you probably have, but like in general, make that decision with that lens in mind.

And I think that a way to gently dip your toes is to go be a guest on other shows, I think, that are relevant to your industry and your domain. In fact, you can go on five and you can look up people who do podcast placements and they’ll easily get you two, three placements. You can also specify saying, this is a kind of podcast I want to be on, and give that a try and see what happens.

Right? Are you enjoying the experience? Are you enjoying having that conversation? Are you enjoying it beyond just being a guest and sharing what you think? Are the mechanics of it making sense to you? Is it exciting to you? And I think if it’s right, it, you’ll know. It is what I’ve found. I think.

And we’ve also known when it was wrong and when we needed to just stop.

Subha Chandrasekaran: For example, I think we know that for some reason we’re not yet fully convinced and we are not fully ready to make this a video podcast. And how do we know that? Maybe because we tried a few video reels.

We tried a few video posts on Instagram. And we know the effort that it takes and you wanna do it right and you wanna do it well. And maybe we’ll get there. Maybe we won’t. I’m personally not a very video person in terms of even consumption. I don’t watch videos. I can listen for hours.

And so take that call, listen to others, and watch other video podcasts. Like she said, become a guest. And experience how the production side of things is how many retakes you have to do. Unless you’re like us and you wing it, but

Hasita Krishna: Well do we? I think it’s the poor editing team that suffers the brunt of, so all those logistics as well. I mean take it to a good production company, like CrazyTok. It makes a huge difference when you have someone else who’s backing you up on

Subha Chandrasekaran: And that’s. CrazyTok. That’s their name.

Hasita Krishna: Yes.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Great guys to work with. So what did we finally decide?

Hasita Krishna: Should you start a podcast? It’s like asking should you have a baby? I don’t know.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. I don’t know what’s like for you, what’s your context?

And why are you having that baby? And what do you wanna, what do you plan to do with that baby? Now it’s getting morbid, but I don’t think there’s a straightforward answer, but I would really maybe veer towards a no till you can do a bit of groundwork around all of these things that we’ve spoken about honestly,

Hasita Krishna: I think if you’ve got, and purely from a tactical standpoint, if you can fix your other marketing channels versus doing a podcast, I think fix your other marketing channels there’s a lot more potential and opportunity in just doing the plain old simple things, right? And that is where I would expend my energy.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And If you want to try this out, do, but please give it a budget for that time and energy. It’s not going to happen suddenly, overnight, et cetera. It is going to take Hours of your time? And is it expensive?

Reasonably. You do need to if you wanna do a good show, then you do need production support. You need a good studio environment, or you need good mics. And your time is money too. And you need to invest that time.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Sounds good.

Hasita Krishna: If you start a podcast, please let us know. But until you do that, please share, subscribe, follow, click on the big CTA that you see on a podcast platform of your choice.

Thank you so much for tuning in. If you have any questions on whether you shouldn’t start a podcast, you’ve already started a podcast and now you don’t know what to do, find us on LinkedIn and we’ll talk about it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Bye.

The post S3E03 – Should I Start a Podcast? appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

In the latest episode of the Damn Good Marketing Podcast, hosts Subha and Hasita are joined by Manisha Kapoor, CEO of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), who reveals the importance of self-regulation in the advertising industry. They delve into the role of ASCI in monitoring and maintaining trustworthy advertising, emphasising the connection between honest advertising, consumer trust, and brand integrity. Tune in now!

Discussion Topics: Who Approved That Ad with Manisha Kapoor

• What Kind Of Work Does Manisha Do At Advertising Standards Council of India?
• How Much Is Advertising and Law Related in India?
• Surrogate Advertising
• What is the Difference between Offline Advertising and Digital Marketing?
• How Can A Small Brand Advertise?
• Influencer Marketing
• What is Due Diligence?
• Is the Consumer Side More Aware Now?
• Role of AI in Advertising
• Moral Aspects of Ads
• Topical Segment: Most Bizarre Ad
• Strangest WhatsApp Forward
• What Are The Upcoming Advertising Trends

Transcript: Who Approved That Ad with Manisha Kapoor

Subha Chandrasekaran: Hey, morning, Hasita. Does my voice sound extremely bright and cheerful today because I brushed my teeth with the number one toothpaste in the country, and then I washed my face with the number one face wash in the country?

Hasita Krishna: And did you make sure it was sulphate and parabens free also while you were at it?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Of course, no whales, seals, birds, or elephants, nothing was harmed in the making of my soap today.

Hasita Krishna: Tell me about it. Apparently, the face cream that I’ve been using for the last year has sheep extracts, which I had no idea about because I thought the brand was vegan.

But here we are, right? And I’m just, sometimes I’m quite trumped by, we are in the business of producing content, right? That’s what we do. But who is filtering this content, especially in the context of advertising? I actually believe that my skincare brand was vegan for the longest time because they never made any claim.

It’s just that their packaging, their morals and their ethics and their values, they just made me feel like, okay, they care.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I found out something very interesting yesterday because I was on a call with a friend of mine who’s many miles away, and her daughter distracted her she was handing over some sunscreen to her and she said, you take this.

And I heard her daughter say, where’s the barcode? Because I need to scan that barcode on my app, which will tell me if it doesn’t have that, it doesn’t have any harmful chemicals. And I was like, wow. Even that exists and somebody’s holding these guys accountable to their number one.

Hasita Krishna: But for those of us who don’t scan barcodes, we have a guest today whose job it is to watch 8,000 ads a year apparently. And decide whether they make the cut in terms of just pulling the wool over our heads or not. Which influencer do we trust? 

And which ad is telling you the truth when it says it’s Paraben-free? So let’s have Manisha over. Manisha Kapoor is the CEO and Secretary General of the Advertising Standards Council of India, and she’s here to talk about exactly this.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I’m really looking forward to it.

Hasita Krishna: Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing podcast. Did you know we’ve upgraded to being a universe? We are a damn good marketing universe now because I have decided that I’m gonna be writing as well. And go check us out on Substack. Very subtle plug. In today’s conversation, especially, there’s a lot of need for regulation because we don’t know what we are buying and we certainly don’t know what we are using.

And that’s where Subha and I are having a conversation with Manisha Kapoor.

Hi Manisha. Glad to have you here.

Manisha Kapoor: Hi, I’m very glad to be here as well.

What Kind Of Work Does Manisha Do At Advertising Standards Council of India?

Hasita Krishna: We are really looking forward to this conversation because I think we have not had a conversation so far on standards and regulations in advertising, and that’s super exciting for us. So Manisha, do tell us a little bit about the kind of work that you guys do at the Advertising Standards Council of India and how you see yourself in the ecosystem of advertising today, especially.

Manisha Kapoor: Sure. The Advertising Standards Council of India or ASCI as we call it is what is called a self-regulatory body which means that the industry has voluntarily come up to say that we want to create a set of guardrails and rules around advertising. And we want a set of standards to monitor our own advertising and the reason why this is useful for advertisers, one may ask, why does anyone want their own kind of limitations as it were?

Or, why does the industry itself want to put some rules around creativity? And really the idea is that I think honest advertisers understand that good advertising, honest, responsible advertising, Is needed to build trustworthy brands. That’s number one. The second thing is that advertising is a key way in which brands communicate with consumers and therefore they would like consumers to trust advertising.

And if consumers don’t trust advertising because they feel that advertising is dishonest or is always lying about things. Then a very important way in which brands can talk to consumers is compromised, and therefore, in a sense, to maintain the integrity of advertising as it were.

The need to protect consumers from misleading advertising is very closely linked with that and which is why consumer interest and consumer protection from misleading ads is actually in the industry’s own interest as well, and which is why you would see in fact world over that.

Advertisers do come together to set up self-regulatory organisations and the self-regulatory organisations, we set up an independent system which is, in our case, a jury to actually adjudicate to look at ads that are found violative to redress consumer issues with respect to advertising.

Even when we set up our own surveillance it’s an impartial jury that is looking at ads and, keeps the ecosystem clean and as I said makes sure that advertising is something that consumers can trust.

How Much Is Advertising and Law Related in India?

Hasita Krishna: Right, and how much of this is also related to the legal system of the country in which we operate? Do you also filter advertising based on what is and is not said, against the law in India at this point in time? Is that part of the scope as well?

Manisha Kapoor: So they are certainly linked. A self-regulatory organisation will always work under the ambit of the larger law. We can’t, for example, make rules that are, let’s say law permits or vice versa, that we cannot disallow something, which the law permits. So in that sense, there is a regulatory framework. I think the way we can look at it is saying that there are several ways in which advertising is regulated. So there are rules, in fact, there are several laws relating to advertising. So there are general laws like the Cable TV Network Act, which has its own advertising code.

There is the Consumer Protection Act, which talks of misleading ads, but there are also sector-specific ads. So there is the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, FSSAI which controls food advertising to a great extent. Or you could have TRAI, which looks at telecom advertising. You have the Drugs and Cosmetic ad act, which looks at advertisements for drugs and cosmetic products. All of these apps also have certain rules regarding. Some specific advertising, but what self-regulation does is it becomes, in a sense, a first port of call.

So our code really has four tenets so one is against misleading advertisements And then we have codes against advertisements that may be considered harmful or dangerous, particularly to children et cetera. Ads that are indecent or vulgar become, again, ads that we are trying to prohibit.

Really the ambit of, what the law is versus self-regulation. It works closely together to make sure that again, as we said, the principles of advertising that we are trying to uphold are well considered.

Surrogate Advertising

Subha Chandrasekaran: Manisha, in the context of self-regulation and what is, maybe a black and white line or sometimes a grey line between what’s okay and not okay to advertise.

For example, what comes to mind is brands that use surrogate products, right? Like alcohol brands may use music or CDs or water. And is that something where you have the authority to say yes, or no? Is there an understood convention that, okay, this is allowed and this is, and here is where we draw the line, but this is allowed?

Manisha Kapoor: Absolutely, this area of surrogate advertising sometimes can be a little confusing for people because I think it’s understood differently by different stakeholders. So one is the law itself does not permit surrogate advertising. Okay. So that’s quite clear. And there are several acts that say that surrogate advertising will not be allowed.

I think the confusion arises when what is the definition of a surrogate ad. So how do we define that? Because while the law says no to surrogate advertising, it says yes to brand extensions. And these brand extensions can be extensions of flicker brands. Okay, so what is the difference between an extension, which is allowed by law versus surrogate advertising which is disallowed by law? So what we have tried to do as ASCI, is to create a certain line as you said, that will shift it over. So we have put down certain criteria for sales, turnover, and registration of these businesses.

Under the different acts where they’re supposed to be registered, what is the investment level in these new ventures? So those are the kind of criteria that we try and separate out saying that, this can be considered a genuine brand extension versus this is actually surrogate ads.

So surrogate ad we say is when the business that you are looking to advertise actually does not really exist in reality. So I think that’s the fine line. But yes, I would say that this is not necessarily understood uniformly by everyone. But that’s the line that we have tried to draw between surrogate versus brand extensions.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So if you’re claiming to make CDs, you should at least be making CDs and

Hasita Krishna: and then you are clear,

Manisha Kapoor: And then and you know that business itself has a certain turnover and you have invested a certain amount in let’s say, machinery or in, in a factory or whatever. So there are some hurdles that other brands need to cross.

What is the Difference between Offline Advertising and Digital Marketing?

Hasita Krishna: Manisha. There’s also today, that the line between digital versus what is not digital is so blurry. And Zomato’s hoardings come to mind here where they became meme material and everyone was having a good time. And that’s a great example of what’s essentially an offline campaign, which has become online because people decided so. And then also there’s that whole conversation around digital marketing being the new frontier in terms of how we talk to people. But what, in your opinion, is the difference between marketing and advertising?

Firstly and in the context of the world that we are in? Do we really have control of our campaigns anymore?

Manisha Kapoor: Yeah, I think digital really brings some very interesting challenges, and I think particularly to us as regulators. Even as you said, what’s the difference between content and advertising is very blurry.

Yeah. And when you have influencers again coming into the picture it’s very difficult sometimes for consumers to make out again, what is organic versus what is perhaps being paid for. So I think those are challenges. I think from our point of view, any communication to the consumer that is in some way paid for, owned, or authorised by the brand is what we would call advertising, whether or not consumers recognize it as advertising or not.

So that’s a definition that at ASCI we look at when it comes to advertising. So there are some things that are not in the purview of advertising or in the purview of ASCI even though they fall under advertising. So for example, on what media does your ad come, or how often do your ads come?

Frequency of ads, placement of ads, sponsorship of events. Now those are not things that we look at. But anything to do primarily with the content of the advertising message is something that ASCI has its site over, and that is then media agnostic. If you have a campaign on print or on digital or on both places you know that for us.

That’s not a key consideration, so long as it is in any consumer-facing medium even a SMS message for us would constitute advertising.

Hasita Krishna: That’s interesting that, and that’s actually very interesting to me because what you’re then gauging is the concept itself, right?

The creative and not so much, the distribution medium. Yeah. And I guess that’s the only way to tame the beast today because we don’t know where it might run. And you also spoke about influencers, and that’s again, a very interesting subject to us here. Because what is influenced, right? And how do we quantify and influence impact?

On a brand. And you guys have just released this very interesting report, which says that the quantum of influencers making a phupha on Instagram has actually gone up. And at the same time, LinkedIn influencers made an appearance on the report for the first time, in the second half of last year as well.

But if I were a B2C e-commerce brand, and already there’s a lot of. Pets that are hedged against me as a consumer. While there are brands that I love, usually for me to discover a new brand, especially through an Instagram ad, takes about four, or five ads, and then I click on it, and I fall off.

Very rarely do I add to the cart and check anything out. And then, on the other hand, my influencer trust score is also going down. And I think it’s only going to be a matter of time before people also realise that not everything that an influencer is claiming is always true. So if I were a small brand, an up-and-coming brand, how do I win this digital game?

Really, in the context of so much mistrust when it comes to a brand.

How Can A Small Brand Advertise?

Manisha Kapoor: Yeah, I think so there are two things in fact, one is I think consumers recognize that content has an agenda today. I think there are very few customers or consumers that don’t see that part of it. I think what they don’t appreciate is if you are trying to pass off.

Content that has an agenda, organic, or something that is not trying to do it. So I think the axis of trust now does not lie in the fact that, don’t sell me anything. I think it just lies in the fact that if you’re selling me something, be transparent about it. And consumers are also looking to Instagram.

One of the reasons. Consumers are on Instagram to make discoveries about brands and to aid their own consumption. Instagram particularly, I think is really a consumption platform more than anything else. And there is really no harm in influencers talking about brands and brands, communicating through influencers.

I think the only thing that we require is that there is a disclosure of transparency and I would in a sense say that I think influencers really have come up on the strength of their being authentic with their audiences and followers. And all they need to do is to make sure that’s the same principle they apply even when they’re talking about brands.

If you disclose that, this is a paid partnership, it does not automatically mean that your review is dishonest, right? But it allows the consumer to make an informed decision on whether to put weight on your advice. And we’ve spoken with a lot of influencers who tell us sometimes that, when brands come to them, either they don’t believe in brands or sometimes they use a brand and it doesn’t work for them.

Either they say that we would not like to do that promotion. So I think it’s the authenticity that builds I think really the trust around influencing. I think so long as both brands and influencers are respectful of the audience’s trust I see no reason why influencers and brands should not work closely together.

Influencer Marketing

Hasita Krishna: Fair enough. And also what I’m really hearing is that the window is still very much open to a brand to use. Influencer marketing is not dead and it’s not dying anytime soon. So that’s good to know.

Manisha Kapoor: No, no not certainly. I think it’s only growing which is why I think it’s important for it to be built on a foundation of honesty and transparency so that it can grow. Okay, So I think that authenticity and transparency are key to actually making sure that this industry has sustainable growth.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And, on that note, influencers may be going one step higher to celebrities given that you do so much due diligence around the product the brand, as a standards authority, do you have celebs coming to you and saying, Hey, is it okay to advertise something or to be part of something, because it may save them some time and effort in, in figuring it out.

What is Due Diligence?

Manisha Kapoor: Yeah. I wish they would, we actually have a service called endorser due diligence, because now not only is it a nice-to-do thing, but it is also something that is mandated by law, right? So the Consumer Protection Act says that any endorser appearing in an ad must do their due diligence.

And if they have done their due diligence, and eventually, even if the ad is found misleading, the influencer will not be liable. However, the influencer will be liable if the ad is found misleading and the influencer has no proof of due diligence. Now, what do we mean by due diligence? We recognize that influencers who are by and large actors and cricketers, may not know about cars or technology or about appliances.

And these are the products that they’re endorsing. So what do you do instead? The idea is that you then talk to an expert. So let’s say you are endorsing a car brand, that is claiming a certain fuel mileage then you need to reach out to a person like that who’s able to tell you that yes, these claims that are made in the ad based on any evidence that the advertiser has given them, is authentic, is correct.

And I think that’s the due diligence that is required. As I said, ASCI offers that service, but there would be others that they can approach. And, it’s but it’s just about. Knowing that when you make a statement again to your audiences, there is a certain trust that the audiences have in you, and, make sure that you are not betraying that trust.

Is the Consumer Side More Aware Now?

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, I think as consumers also, we have wisened up because we know that there are maybe standards boards and there are rules and laws of the land and every celeb can’t really get away with saying whatever they want about a brand or a product. Do you find that, do you find that the consumer side is also kind of more aware of and has more opinions about what they’re seeing?

Manisha Kapoor: I think both. Yes and no. I would say yes. Definitely, consumers are more aware, but I think just the ways in which advertising itself is evolving, the formats that are evolving are also not so easy for the consumers to keep track of.

And I think one of them. Questions I constantly ask myself are with greater consumer awareness today, are consumers more vulnerable or less vulnerable? And to me, digital, and in the many avatars that it comes in again, where you can’t make out the difference between content and advertising, celebrities and endorsers are all part of that ecosystem.

Yeah. It’s not so easy. And I would say that even with consumer awareness, The way that digital functions I don’t think as consumers we are necessarily tuned in to, let’s say, how our choices are being organised online. What is the online choice architecture when I click a buy, on a certain product, and because it says that, last two left, is that a real reflection of inventory or is that something that is just to push me to buy or when you, let’s say, are buying a ticket somewhere, and then at the end when you check out, you see a few other charges of insurance, and then you don’t remember signing up for those, although technically you have because there’s a pre tick box.

The UIUX design works in the way that your eye works on the screen, right? Where does it go? What does it highlight versus what does it subdue or suppress? And those are again, ways in which. Our online consumption or purchase of information about products and services can be manipulated.

And sometimes that may not always be in our interest. So I would say that just the nature of digital and the kind of specific information that. Brands today can have about you, is something that I don’t think consumers are completely aware of or tuned into in terms of online safety.

Role of AI in Advertising

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. Manisha. I also think that this is the year of artificial intelligence and I think we are making such strides. It’s stunning sometimes in terms of what comes up and deep fakes and videos of celebrities. In fact, a lot of marketing campaigns have actually leveraged deep fakes as a way to say, Hey, here’s a campaign that is not by this person, but still here is a person.

And as a consumer, then the onus has been placed on me to be aware of how the ad was made in the first place, or to know that, hey, a bit of this campaign is an inside joke. But at the same time, there are certain things that are slight, I would reduce my barrier of how much influence I would be under if Priyanka Chopra were advertising something versus someone else.

Especially with the advent of AI and the potential to basically generate whatever it is that we want. How do you see the role of a body like ASCI evolving, especially this year, and what kinds of steps and measures would you be putting in place?

Manisha Kapoor: No, absolutely. I think. Even with AI, I would say the principles still remain the same, right?

When a consumer gets misled by any representation in an ad then that would be a misleading ad for us. Whether it’s been made by an individual or a creative or handwritten or generated by AI doesn’t matter. I think there are two aspects to this. One is also from The perspective of the individual or an institution that has been portrayed in a manner that is not necessarily with their consent.

So in fact, we have a very specific provision that the use of pictures or images or any kind of reference to an individual or an institution without their consent is something that is not allowed under the ASCI code. And if you recollect a couple of years back we had.

And a tech company that was selling to children coding used the names of some really big names in the world of technology, all the big founders and, obviously it was done with them, without their knowledge or permission. And, again, that was found to be violative of the ASCI Code.

So I think there are both things. So one is The responsibility towards the individuals that you’re portraying. And are you doing that with consent? And the other is, are you misrepresenting that these individuals are actually endorsing or are part of your organisation or believe in your product when they’re not?

And that’s how you’re cheating the consumer as well. So both these things whether it is generated by AI or not will find themselves being violated by the Ask E Code.

Moral Aspects of Ads

Hasita Krishna: Fair enough. We have a question for you on the moral aspect of certain ads, and obviously there’s no judgment here.

It’s just a question of ads that are within the legal ambit, in fact, but the public perception around them may have. Not very positive. We’ve had an instance of Tanishq running a series of ads which resulted in some of the stores needing to be shut down, and the safety of their employees being under threat, which is obviously a very extreme example.

And more recently, we also had Starbucks put out an ad on the LGBTQA community which Legally it’s well within its rights, but then the reception to it was extremely harsh and hostile. Typically when it comes to ads of this nature, there is always a certain quantum of polarising that’s possible.

What is your stand on that? Do you advise on aspects like these or is it completely within the creative control of the brand?

Manisha Kapoor: No, certainly. I wonder what it is. Legally permissible is something that can be advertised. And I think what our court says is that it should not denigrate any person, and class should not cause widespread harm or, should not cause widespread outrage.

Now what does this mean? And we had some very interesting examples actually even within ASCI, and so I’ll come back to the Tanishq case. In fact, I’ll talk to you about it. But another example I want to give you is, a few years back an advertisement for a brand called Rio Sanitary Pads.

And I think for the first time showed blood and red colour in a sanitary napkin ad. And there was a huge outrage. There were people who were very upset. We had a lot of complaints, including from women. And the ad was deliberated within our jury, and I think it really split the jury as well.

A lot of people felt that this is natural and what is really the problem in showing things the way they are versus others who felt it’s never been shown like this or it, you get taken aback and stuff. And actually, the jury gave a decision against the advertiser.

But I think the advertiser really had a lot of. Conviction and what they were doing. And, within ASCI we also have an appeals mechanism, so they appealed against the decision. And in an appeals mechanism, we have a retired high court judge who looks at these cases.

And it was very interesting the judgment that was given in that case where they said that it has to cause both a widespread and a grave offence. Now what is a grave offence? Is this something that is really going to impact the lives of people? Is this something that is causing harm to society?

Is that a grave harm? What is grave harm is something like murder, those are things that you call a grave in nature? This is a process which is natural in a woman’s life. And you know why? You can understand the response of people. The fact is that this is not a grave issue.

And therefore, the decision was given back in favour of the advertiser. So we’ve also read through a few judgements given not just at ASCI, but in courts. And I think the courts are quite clear in terms of what freedom of expression is and the fact that.

These ads or any kind of content. So whether it’s ads or films or whatever needs to be seen from the point of view of an ordinary citizen and not a hypersensitive one. So these are part of the judgments given by codes. Okay? So that’s the principle for us to apply. Most of the ads that you’ve mentioned, if they have come to ASCI usually the verdict has gone in favour of the advertiser, including the Tanishq Ad.

I think, however, from an advertiser point of view, particularly when it becomes a law and order issue or it becomes an issue of employee safety then they have to turn to the legal machinery to protect that freedom of speech, which is guaranteed under the Constitution.

And, there are a lot of legal cases and judgments that protect. That freedom. And like I said they very clearly say that these have to be taken from the point of view of an ordinary individual and a regular citizen and not a hypersensitive one. So I think there are some lessons here, but yeah, I think having said that for a brand, sometimes this ends up in campaign disruption.

And my take on that is that the brands should touch upon these subjects if they truly believe in them. Otherwise, if you’re just doing it because it’s convenient and because you feel this is a cause of the day, then I would say be careful because this could backfire and you have to be willing to say that if there is an opinion against it, but I believe in this cause so much or it’s so integrated with what my brand stands for, that I will defend it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, I think that has worked well for brands under the Tata umbrella because even with Starbucks while there they were polarising views there were also voices that said, Hey, but they do this kind of stuff and they’ve done it before in a Tanishq or in a Titan, or, in another brand.

And so we know that they talk about things which they want to and which they feel need to be talked about. So I guess a brand also has to make a start somewhere. Yeah.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah. So, Manisha, we’ll do a segment now. It’s about five minutes and it’s just a fun lighthearted kind of segment we’ll ask you a couple of questions and we can then.

Manisha Kapoor: You’re gonna ask me about my favourite ad.

Everyone asks me. I always get stumped.

Topic al Segment: Most Bizarre Ad

Hasita Krishna: So Manisha, this segment is called Topical, and topical is a cat. For reasons that we are also trying, still trying to figure out. But the question we have for you is what’s the most bizarre ad that you’ve rejected? You said, no, this cannot be running.

Manisha Kapoor: So I think under Covid there were a lot of ads. We had a mattress. Promising that you would not have COVID-19. So they were really bizarre. There. was even a mobile app that said that, if you install this app, you will not get covid. So those were, I think, really bizarre kinds of promises to make.

And they were also particularly dangerous because consumers were so vulnerable at that point in time. You people had seen illness and death around them, and they were really, I think, willing to do a lot of things. Yeah. To keep themselves safe. I would say, that the ads, particularly if you play around health when it comes to consumers, I would say that those ads certainly deserve not to be there.

Strangest WhatsApp Forward

Subha Chandrasekaran: Fair enough. So in that same vein, what is the strangest or most known illogical WhatsApp forward that you have received? Because that’s a playground for anything and everything.

Manisha Kapoor: Yeah, I think WhatsApp forward I would say each one is.

Sometimes more bizarre than the others. I think there’s clearly a very hot competition, even for the number one spot. But yeah, all sorts of things really, I think right from, do this and pass it on to 10 people and it gets you bad luck. So all those kinds of chain messages are just, I think bizarre, reinterpretations of history too and I think the sad part is that, while some of them.

May just be irritants, but I think some of them actually cause real harm. They shape consumer perceptions or, citizens, our perceptions get shaped. Especially when you see certain kinds of messages coming consistently. So I think again, I think authenticity and transparency are something that we can all strive for and one of the things I always keep telling people is that if you get a message, at least don’t pass it on without checking yourself.

And the other important thing that I do is to call it out because a lot of us also ignore this, right? We said, okay, this is coming. We know it’s not true. I dunno who’s gonna fight with all these messages? So I think it’s also a time for each of us who want. To gain authenticity from the environment. And we want to see authentic things to also then call out and stand for things in some ways.

Subha Chandrasekaran: So on a good day, Manisha, how many ads do you watch?

Hasita Krishna: How many do you reject?

Manisha Kapoor: Manisha Yeah, so our complaints team is very busy. They’re the one’s scrutinising ads. I think last year we did close to 8,000 ads in the year, So that’s really a lot of ads that ASCI, collectively we see.

Sometimes it’s great fun also to see ads and, sometimes even if they’re bizarre and violate the ASCI code, sometimes we look at this and say, God what’s happening? But yeah, we see a lot of advertising.

The good, bad, ugly, all of, all varieties

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think thank you to folks like you who make sure that there’s a filter in. We see only the good ones.

Hasita Krishna: Seriously. I’m just like, right now I’m just thinking how much have we not seen? If we are already watching the ones we are and we are laughing about them, then thank you.

Thank you for doing the hard work and making sure that the space is as clean as it gets, but what do you see in terms of trends over the next two, or three years? Where do you think advertising is headed?

What Are The Upcoming Advertising Trends

Manisha Kapoor: So I think one of the big areas that we are focusing on is actually the preventive footprint.

So advertising will continue on digital and as I said, that kind of brings its own set of unique challenges. Campaign durations are so short by the time a consumer reports and, the campaign is over like I said, blurring lines between content and advertising.

And I think that really. Pushes us to think that. Regulation and self-regulation need to be vibrant at the point of creation of the advertising. Whatever we do in the corrective space, once an ad has been published and it’s out there for consumers to see, even if we catch it very soon, let’s say only a small segment of consumers have seen it.

The fact is that it has already in some way caused some harm. And I think the idea and one of the big initiatives that we are taking and we are constantly pushing at is, besides the corrective work, which obviously we need to do, and we will continue to do, we’ve done investments in artificial intelligence to monitor ads.

So while ads are being created, we also need to do a bit. But I think the whole emphasis is on how we can educate, how we can create a more aware advertising and a more responsible advertising industry itself. So to that end, we’ve been doing a lot of work on key issues in advertising.

We do a lot of reports that we are working on. We are setting up an entire infrastructure called the ASCI Academy which is actually going to work with the industry, with students who are going to come into the industry. So you would student footprint as well to really raise the standards of advertising, as it were, how do you make advertising more responsible, more progressive?

And because we do recognize that advertising is a big force in society. It shapes society. Yeah. And therefore, I think progressive and responsible advertising is something that we must drive. So that for us is a big area of work. And so while advertising we know will continue to get more complex through technology and through digital, I think what we are doing is almost going back to basics and saying that, when you are making an ad, Can you have a sense of what the rules are and a basic sense of what can or can’t be done, even if you’re not a legal expert so that when you make the ad, you make it right in the first place.

How do we get the industry to get it right rather than having to correct it later?

So I think those become the newer ways in which advertising is engaging with consumers and I think where people are advertising is and where advertising is, ASCI will follow.

Hasita Krishna: Amazing. Yeah, no, that was beautiful and I think the Academy idea especially appeals to me because I think a lot of us have just found our way into the creative industry.

It’s not very heavily regulated in the sense that only if you’ve studied mass communication, you’ll be in advertising. That’s never been the case. So I think baseline education, especially in the context that you spoke about on the one hand we are headed so rapidly towards a world that’s run on AI.

And on the other hand, I think climate change is a cause that is very dear to my heart as well. And we are also thinking about what communication means in that context, right? So we are very excited to see that report and we wish you the best. And thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Manisha Kapoor: No, thank you. Absolute pleasure talking to both of you and very happy to have been a part of this conversation. Thank you.

Closing

Manisha Kapoor:

Hasita Krishna: Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of The Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Now, part of the damn good marketing universe, I hope to be able to say that someday without breaking into a fit of giggles,

Subha Chandrasekaran: This is brought to you by some Damn Good Marketing Products.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, if you have any complaints about the nomenclature, please feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn even otherwise, do come to say hi.

We always like hearing from you. Thank you. Bye.

Our Guest: Manisha Kapoor

Manisha Kapoor heads the Advertising Standards Council of India. ASCI is a self regulatory body that is committed to the cause of fairness and honesty in advertising. She is also part of the leadership team of International Council of Advertising Self-regulation (ICAS).

Over the past 25 years, she has helped companies establish and nurture brands through brand building, new product development, marketing strategy development as well and media strategies.

Cross-sectoral consulting experience- includes banking, insurance, financial broking, automotive, FMCG, healthcare, wellness, food, media, aviation, apparel and lifestyle.

She also helped businesses grow and differentiate through the integration of social development goals into business and brand strategy. She has worked with Corporations, NGOs, Foundations, and International development organisations developing programs that work effectively for business while simultaneously creating social impact.

The post S3E02 – Who Approved That Ad with Manisha Kapoor appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Discussion Topics: What did ChatGPT do to digital marketing?

• An Instance Of Using ChatGPT Badly for Marketing
• Linkedin and ChatGPT
• Ai Tools Can Be Used For Benefits Too
• How Is ChatGPT Impacting Our Day-to-Day Lives?
• ChatGPT as a Conversational AI
• How ChatGPT Can Help You In Numerous Ways
• Is It Worth Teaching The Team To Use The Tool?
• How Can You Be a Good Thought Leader If Your Thoughts Are Coming From ChatGPT
• ChatGPT and Education
• Why Shouldn’t You Stop The Usage Of ChatGPT in Organisation
• ChatGPT and Safety of Data
• Did Subha Expect ChatGPT To Become What It Is Today?
• Should You Replace Your Team With ChatGPT?
• Closing

Transcript: What did ChatGPT do to digital marketing?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Hasita, my favourite pastime is finding Instagram bloopers and sending them to you when I’m not sending memes. So this one’s quite a riot, a calming gel pen they say. What do you think of when you think of a calming gel pen that reduces dark circles and pigmentation?

An Instance Of Using ChatGPT Badly for Marketing

Hasita Krishna: Oh, right. You mean the cosmetic pens, the ones you use while going to bed, I’m assuming.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, or a concealer maybe. And then you say, okay, let me read a bit more. Some poor marketing intern has written this copy, and then you realise, oh yeah, it is a marketing intern and maybe not a human one because it says that the pen will glide effortlessly across the page. And that it’ll unleash my creativity as I jot down my thoughts.

Hasita Krishna: Oh, damn, they took the pen quite literally, didn’t they?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Poor ChatGPT has not seen a calming gel pen. It had no precedent, I think. It took it as literally as it could, but that’s what happens when you combine interns. A lazy marketing effort maybe, or just a very over-enthusiastic attempt to use ChatGPT.

Hasita Krishna: I’d like to be kind about it, but yeah, it’s interesting because I think there are examples and there are anecdotes of people thinking about whether they should be replacing the entire marketing team. Especially digital marketing and creative teams with ChatGPT, or, let me expand that ambit a little bit.

You have generative AI tools for making images today as well, making presentations, and pitch decks. There’s a tool for everything, pretty much, right? CRM sales it’s endless. So should we really be replacing all of this effort with ChatGPT?

Subha Chandrasekaran: And it’s interesting also because when you hear from the other side I met a writer recently who swore that ChatGPT can’t replace her unique touch and flavour.

But of course, design, if you give it the right prompts, I’m sure you can get some images. And then I met a designer who said, nothing’s gonna put me out of business, but I’m sure.

Hasita Krishna: But the writers are going down.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I’m sure that’s like a dead job now.

Linkedin and ChatGPT

Hasita Krishna: I wish. That’s interesting, right? I think any new tool in the system always exposes our inherent biases. We are both very excited about it. If you go on LinkedIn, can you even breathe without seeing a single mention of ChatGPT?

Subha Chandrasekaran: And it’s never a single mention, right? It’s the 10 tools that will save your life, and it’s the 25 AI somethings that will revolutionise your business.

Hasita Krishna: Most people use ChatGPT but do you know how many of them use it?

Subha Chandrasekaran: And I’m guilty of saving so many of those links that I’ve never gone back to look at.

Hasita Krishna: Let me burst your bubble and tell you that maybe they were written by ChatGPT.

Ai Tools Can Be Used For Benefits Too

Subha Chandrasekaran: But having said that, there’s the complete flip side and I think both of us are very intentional users on ChatGPT for our businesses, and in any kind of group of small business owners or women entrepreneurs I do sense a lot of excitement. 

Maybe finally there’s something that can fill the gap that we feel as business owners, that there’s so much we want to do, can’t find the right person, can’t find the time and energy to give them that brief and get it done. And maybe getting on this bandwagon will fill all those gaps overnight.

Hasita Krishna: And which is where I want to clarify in terms of where my chips fall as far as when ChatGPT is up in the air is concerned, they actually fall. In reasonable places. This is not an episode about dissing the use of generative ai.

I just wanna make that very clear. We also work with clients in the enterprise AI space who are now thinking about how some of these models can be used in a business context. So there’s a huge conversation that’s happening, right? As much as we see, a one-off, like a ChatGPT. And the interesting thing is it’s not even the first large language model.

There’s lots of research being done around it, but the interesting thing to me is that. While we think about it as individuals, the work that we do with ChatGPT is going to have larger ramifications. So I think what we should be talking about, Subha, really is how do we leverage and make the most of it?

Because you can’t take a tool. It’s like saying, the internet has been invented, but I will not use it. It’s not going to work like that.

Subha Chandrasekaran: No. There are huge upsides to getting familiar with the tool and the entire concept. In a way, creating personas that the tool is writing, for or on behalf of.

It also opens up your mind and it really helps in generating your own ideas. Because finally, you’re prompting a system and the system is saying, Hey, this could be looked at as A, B, C, and D, and, C and D you might not have thought of otherwise. Exactly.

Hasita Krishna: And the interesting thing to me is also that Google has now come up with a course on how to prompt engineers, right?

So clearly the world is headed in a direction where AI is the norm, right? And I think sometimes we also assume that just because of prompt engineering, there’s a name to it, we don’t know how to do it. It’s just a question of A, remembering that it’s a system, and B, using our own knowledge and expertise and then seeing how best to use a system to level that up, I think.

How Is ChatGPT Impacting Our Day-to-Day Lives?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Correct, So how are you seeing ChatGPT really impact your day-to-day creation efforts?

Hasita Krishna: So interestingly, I get asked that question three times a day cuz everyone is curious now, right? You’re an agency. You’re in the business of creating content to some extent.

How do you do in the context where you’re so replaceable? I think it’s just honestly made our lives and work a lot better because the day it came out, or maybe even within the week, if I’m being more practical, We had an internal discussion and we said, if it exists, and if it’s doing a good job of being a brainstorming vehicle, it should be used.

And I think there’s one article on Moneycontrol where the author talks about how different people from product marketing, digital, software services, content creative, how are these people using, ChatGPT as a tool, and we’ll put that in the show notes as well. But what’s interesting to me is that there’s an equal mix of fear and hope, right?

I think a lot of founders, business owners are asking the question right now. I want to use this. I know there’s a use case for this. A, I don’t know how to use it. B, I’m worried about the ramifications of not knowing, right? I think that’s what it comes down to, the more intentional side of it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: The good thing is, and I think more people like you should put it out there that you are using it because somehow I feel it started with this,

Hasita Krishna: Replace the agency narrative, right?

Subha Chandrasekaran: That’s what everybody jumped to. Let’s get rid of these people that we don’t wanna deal with. But also I think, it removes that. Under current circumstances, using ChatGPT is like using a cheat sheet or you are taking a shortcut, which you wouldn’t otherwise take, or you’re taking an illegitimate shortcut in a way.

I am paying you as a writer or as any, anything actually right now you can use it in multiple ways, but I am paying you to do things as a human. And are you short-changing me? By using a tool. And so if more and more creators and those who are using the tool effectively could come out with one, own it.

Hey, I do use it and this is exactly how I use it. I use it to brainstorm. I use it to generate ideas and that is 20% of what I do, which not only means that I still have to do 80%, but it’s freed up 20% of my time.

Hasita Krishna: Absolutely. So yeah, let’s use this podcast as a platform and I will tell you I do use it.

In fact, I use the latest version. I’ve paid for it. I’m very happy with it. And about 20% of my time definitely is saved because of ChatGPT. In fact, I have written a piece on how ChatGPT can be used as a brainstorming engine, especially also Subha in a context where now we are a very small team.

I may not always have another strategist in the room to brainstorm with, but I want to be able to look at my ideas from the outside- in. It may still be my thinking, but I need to see it in a form and format that’s not familiar to me. And that’s where I find ChatGPT to be insanely valuable. And I think especially in that example, the creative input in terms of this is A, this is B, I’ll put these two together.

The A and the B were supplied by me. And that’s, I think, The true nature of human potential. If I could do that and I could do more of that.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Exactly. Why are we shying away from it? It’s like moving from, it’s a stale metaphor, but it’s like moving from the calculator to the computer.

And really exponentially increasing capability, but also the time that you’re creating for something else. Absolutely. So if you can use this tool to do good work, Which also means you have now more time to do better work.

Hasita Krishna: And that is exactly what it is, right?

The output that we’ve received from the writers where we’ve said, Hey, ChatGPT the outline. It’s a case study. A case study always follows some structure. You decide what you want to add and remove, but at least let it do the job of thinking for you in terms of best practices, and then you populate, right?

There have been use cases where we’ve probably not received the best brief from the client where we’ve written the entire article, we’ve put it on ChatGPT and said, how can I make this article better? And now we have to understand. This is where I think sometimes we forget and it’s so easy to forget because it’s talking to us. That’s conversational AI, right? ChatGPT is trained to talk.

ChatGPT as a Conversational AI

Subha Chandrasekaran: The chat in the gpt.

Hasita Krishna: Not to know. So we have to take that feedback with a little bit of cognizance, but some interesting insights have come out, in terms of, if a big four consulting firm published this case study, what else do you think they would add to it?

No, that’s a prompt that will give you some purely solid output. So you had a great experience. I think we should use it and we should use mid-journey and we should use everything else as well.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And I think perhaps wearing my coach hat, but it also means that it’s okay to admit that you don’t have all these perspectives and you don’t know everything.

So if as an agency, as a writer, as a consultant, or even as an employee let’s say you are working in a particular industry it’s okay to admit that I don’t know everything. So I’m using a tool to trigger ideas, to trigger thoughts, or to refine what I’ve put down

Hasita Krishna: My thought process.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Because otherwise, it feels like now that I’ve used the tool and experienced it, dismissing it is. I won’t say arrogance, but it’s like saying, Hey, how can this know more than me? But you don’t know everything

How ChatGPT Can Help You In Numerous Ways

Hasita Krishna: And it knows other things, whether it knows more or less.

Again, it’s a subjective call that I think we all have to take, but it knows things that we don’t know how to do, which is to type at the speed, which it does. Reasonably cognizant answers, right? And then we can improvise, right? We exist.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And I do think those who are youngsters in the space of any kind of work, it’s a great tool to help you learn more about your own work and the industry that you’re in and the kind of the way you should be writing or what’s good writing in that space.

Not just from, not everybody’s publishing articles and blogs, but even your internal communication can be better or memos that you put up can be better.

Hasita Krishna: More structured, more streamlined. I’ve also found it a very good way of basically processing summaries of very long articles, which we don’t have the time to read and just copy, paste the whole thing, and say, summarise.

These are the three things I want to know. What does the article say about it? So it may not be the most effective way of reading a whole piece, but it’s definitely a great way of understanding what that

Subha Chandrasekaran: True I’ve used it as a quick and easy Google, if you may, so when we were travelling and I said, gimme a quick, brief history of this city.

And you get the main highlights in one paragraph. Rather than a page of links and then saying, which one do I go to? And then I read the whole thing and then summarise it in my own hand.

Hasita Krishna: And come to your own conclusions, right?

Subha Chandrasekaran: We are coming back to our dear intern and their cosmetic gel pen. Why don’t you prove to us that you are human and not a bot? Go to any platform that you use for podcasts and please subscribe to the damn good marketing podcast. You won’t regret it.

Hasita Krishna: Definitely.

Is It Worth Teaching The Team To Use The Tool?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Would it be worth your while to invest in teaching your team how to use the tool?

Hasita Krishna: That’s an interesting question. Because I think everybody needs to explore and learn it and make it work in their own use cases and context. The guardrails I would set whether it’s the context of my own work or even in client work is to not go too far away from the brand language of things, right? There’s a reason it’s been built. They’ve been talking that way for a while. So it’s important we continue to work with that. And the easiest way to do that, I found, is to just open a new chat window on ChatGPT and tell it. This is how we speak.

This is an example of language we can and cannot use. This is how we think about campaigns for them. We don’t do flamboyant, we don’t do exuberant. So whatever it is, what is that guardrail that you want to set? And also maybe tell it, the creatives will have bright colors or it’ll be muted and dull.

So you think about that while you’re writing. And then get it to write. I think also the question that a lot of people are asking in that context is, can I replace human effort and therefore maybe human revenue? With a tool like this, I think it’s like a pen, right?

If you want good handwriting, you have to go to a calligrapher at least in today’s day & and age. Now, three months later we listen to this episode, what will the world look like? We don’t know. Things are moving very fast, but I think today, I would think twice before replacing the person entirely with ChatGPT.

Subha Chandrasekaran: No makes sense. And I think maybe that’s an interesting piece of advice or a nuance that you do have to take the effort to tell the tool. Who you are or in whose voice you are writing or what is the kind of context or background?

You don’t just go and say, write an article on X, Y, Z. Listen, I am this person writing for this kind of audience. And hence, what would be a good outline?

How Can You Be a Good Thought Leader If Your Thoughts Are Coming From ChatGPT

Hasita Krishna: And in saying that, you bring up an interesting nuance on thought leadership, right? How can you be a thought leader if your thoughts are coming from ChatGPT And I don’t mean that as an individual, any organisation for that matter?

And I think this is a problem we are solving on a daily basis. In fact more and more now, the need for content that speaks to a certain audience and that has authority is only growing. One way of doing it, I’ve realised, is to let the leader or the founder, whoever’s the person speaking or representing the brand, put down their thoughts on a subject and then use ChatGPT to find facts and statistics to either support or deny that conclusion.

ChatGPT and Education

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, that’s interesting. And back to your question of, should a leader use this for their thoughts, et cetera. I think that we both read an article recently on how ChatGPT is really revamping education. Right space. A lot of homework and a lot of essays are being written by this tool.

But I think what really caught our attention was that it is also something that you can’t ban. That’s not the answer, to say that. Okay. All students ChatGPT’s banned and it’s been created. And has a certain purpose and it has a certain, it adds something to the entire content generation space.

So it’s about maybe teaching them how to use it. And saying, Hey, you can say, go write an essay, and the tool will write an essay. Do you wanna really stop there? Why don’t you use this too? Trigger ideas for you. Why don’t you brainstorm it? As you said, it’s conversational.

Why don’t you chat with this tool? And, come back with something that is more you and more unique because it has triggered all these ideas in your head. That’s true. Coming back to the leaders like, It’s really about flipping the question and saying, why is your leader not using exactly? Why is your employee not using this to better understand a concept or to get there? Get first-cut feedback. If I am going in, if this is the audience that I’m writing for, am I going in the right direction, et cetera?

Why Shouldn’t You Stop The Usage Of ChatGPT in Organisation

Hasita Krishna: And the problem with saying, denying it or hush hushing it is that people may end up using it anyway, and that is going to cause problems at an organisation level, which are much bigger, honestly.

Because these are tools that are, whatever you chat with, it is used as its training data. For it’s furthering its knowledge through the conversation that it’s having with you. So do you really want an employee to secretly go ask for something that’s proprietary to you and then it becomes common knowledge on the internet?

So it’s rather, I think you set policies, set guidelines around the use of AI in the context of everyday work and you just roll with it and it, I think companies of all scales and sizes could really benefit from a policy of that nature, which says this is sensitive information, this is not sensitive information. And this you can use in the context of.

Subha Chandrasekaran: I would honestly prefer the team member that says, Hey, this was the brief, and ChatGPT and I came up with these ideas together. Which one should I explore more? Or which one should I deep dive into? And then, I’d rather that be and as you said, I don’t want them hiding.

And pretending it’s their work. And then you are maybe rewarding the wrong result or person, I don’t know. It’s a very murky space still.

ChatGPT and Safety of Data

Hasita Krishna: This brings up a lot of safety aspects of data privacy downtime. The considerations are endless. A lot of companies work with information that’s very proprietary to them.

Exposing it is not always in the best interest. And if you use ChatGPT in its original form & format, that’s what you’re doing. So now it’s time for the topic. And before we move to that, may we please request you to subscribe or hit the follow button so you never miss another episode. So Subha, tell me this when ChatGPT first made its appearance on the LinkedIn scene because that’s where everything always seems to happen. Did you think it would take on the life that it has taken on right now?

Did Subha Expect ChatGPT To Become What It Is Today?

Subha Chandrasekaran: Honestly, I didn’t. Knowing me and knowing us, I jumped onto the bandwagon immediately. It was a new toy and I had to try it out. And the first, one of the first few prompts that I gave it was to write. A college application essay Oh, wow. In the persona of my daughter. Because she was going through the process at that time and I was just amazed. That could have been written by her. That could have been a 17-year-old with that particular hobby or interest describing it in great detail. And so I was hooked because very clearly, they were onto something.

Something that Yes, is it dangerous and can it go can it be misused? What can’t be? So you have to, I think, really get your hands dirty and see what it can do.

Hasita Krishna: Honestly, the biggest misuse of time is social media, so we don’t really say no to it.

Should You Replace Your Team With ChatGPT?

Subha Chandrasekaran: I think on that note, I got onto threads today.

Hasita Krishna: Oh, damn.

Subha Chandrasekaran: One more place I shouldn’t be, but I am.

So let me put you in the hot seat. Do you think I should replace my digital marketing team with a paid version of ChatGPT? $20 and I’m done.

Hasita Krishna: With the oversight. Honestly, I think we all know this. There is no free lunch, unfortunately. I think this is really a great opportunity to ask better of your creativity.

Because the baseline is being taken care of. Something can produce something that’s not the job anymore. How do you make it impactful? How do you make it different? Unique. I think it’s time to level the jobs up of everyone involved in the system, honestly.

Subha Chandrasekaran: And don’t mistrust those who are using it.

Hasita Krishna: Yeah, that too. Come, let’s have a chat. We’ll figure it out. Like what is the resistance to it? Let’s talk about it. We’ll find out.

Closing

Subha Chandrasekaran: Awesome. I think there’s a lot to take away from today. Really folks, if I had to summarise, which I’m not too good at, but I’ll try to cause the mind does wonder.

But I think the simple question is, how do I use ChatGPT to make my life easier? And when I say me, it could be whatever profession that you’re in. It’s definitely a great starting point and a great tool to brainstorm. It definitely does help you process a lot of information faster, so you know, if you’re doing research or if you’re just putting things together to kickstart some conversation you can get specific information, but you do maybe have to fact-check it.

It may not be recent. It may sometimes be wrong also. As Google found out in a very live launch. And maybe you can also get more efficient and productive, which is man’s purpose on earth anyway. Productivity if I integrate it with other tools.

Hasita Krishna: In fact, there are some interesting ways to integrate ChatGPT with other tools, and interfaces.

And yeah, it’s just the beginning of Generative AI. I think the ability to have a conversation with the system that makes sense must be the greatest innovation of our time. And maybe three months later, I’ll say something else, but for now, this seems like such a big deal. That said, yes, there are some considerations around safety that we have to be cognizant of.

And I don’t just mean data safety, human safety as well, which quite frankly, I don’t think anyone knows enough. So let’s leave that to the experts and use it the way it’s meant to be used.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Very true. So see you on the other side of that.

Hasita Krishna: Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of The Damn Good Marketing Podcast on all things ChatGPT I know we took some time to come up with this episode because we wanted to try things out ourselves and really have some proof of concept before we tell you what’s a good thing to do and what’s not a good thing to do.

We hope you’ve taken away an immense amount from this episode. If you have any questions, do find us on LinkedIn and reach out. A lot of the links and commentary will be in the show notes as well, and you can read those articles. You can find ways to do the dance with ChatGPT if I could put it that way.

And have fun doing it.

Subha Chandrasekaran: Yeah, and if you’re stuck you can always just ping Hasita and she’ll get onto a chat about ChatGPT. Bye.

The post S3E01 – What Did ChatGPT Do To Digital Marketing? appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Do you have to be a mad genius to be creative? Or get inspired somehow? Or is it something within reach of all of us, something that can actually be executed reliably and within deadlines?

Discussion Topics: How to be more creative with your marketing ideas

• How can we be creative?
• Do you always have to be inspired?
• How can a single person be consistently creative?
• 70% of ads aren’t memorable – how do you ensure yours don’t flop?
• Ways to get fresh ideas
• Connect the best ideas to your brand
• How to measure the effectiveness of your ideas
• Brands that transcend their status as a business

Transcript: How to be more creative with your marketing ideas

Hasita: Like, what a lot of famous authors have to say about creativity and it’s about putting pen to paper for 30 minutes every day, accepting that the first time you do it the 10th time, maybe even the 50th, time it is going to look ugly. But hopefully, after that, something resembling creative output will start emerging. And I think it’s so much more important in today’s context, because creativity, in some ways, is the last stand and the differentiation between what you and somebody else can potentially do.

Subha: You know, now that I’m a YouTube star with about six and a half followers, I happen to open the app a little more often Hasita, and so YouTube decided that I’m going to answer a bunch of surveys for them. And they keep asking me, do you remember this ad? Do you remember that ad? And there are so few that I remember, I’m quite surprised. You know, like, you and I, usually we pay attention to this stuff so often, and I find even on television, and during cricket matches, I see ads, and like, hey, I saw this, and I can’t remember the brand, or I can’t remember the product. And they’re spending so much just to get me to remember.

Hasita: Yeah, firstly, congratulations on your six and a half followers Subha. You have broken the bane of our existence just to show our faces on video. So congratulations. I do find that survey interesting. And in fact, I remember asking somebody as well, a senior colleague of mine as to what exactly are they trying to measure. And he told me that actually, it’s about measuring the brand recall. And as you said, you know, half the time, you remember the ad, you remember the creative, you remember how it looks also, but you can’t remember which brand it was that was doing the advertising.

I mean, all that creativity and then for what? That’s the question that I think we ask sometimes, especially when budgets are involved. So let’s dive deep into that. Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast, episode 10 it is. And we thought, what is it about creativity that makes it so hard to grasp? What about it is tangible? What about it is not? And can we really even find a process to just consistently do good creative work that makes us happy?

Subha: That’s interesting that you spoke about creativity. And then you brought in something, which I wouldn’t think of when I’m thinking creativity, which is a process, what really is the creativity that works as ours takes, by our work, I mean, running, supporting and growing a business or a brand, which is what most of us are out here doing what kind of creativity does it need? Like is creativity too bigger word? And is it the right word?

Hasita: No, it’s definitely a very scary word because I think when we think creative, we think insanity somehow I think that’s the creative genius, creative maverick, you know, the Mad creative what would Don Draper do? Like, it’s always the thing that is just outside of our reach, because nobody really teaches us.

You know, they teach us maths, they teach us science, they teach us languages, but they don’t teach us how to think. And that’s why I think some of us also fall into these buckets of either thinking of ourselves as, Oh I’m a very logically oriented person so therefore, I must not be creative, Oh I’m a very fact-driven individual and therefore, I must not be creative.

But the fact I think is that just in the act of living our lives on a day-to-day basis, you know, coming up with business ideas, talking to people in various ways some of the smartest marketing people I know, are simply people who are so good at contextualising their information, right, the story might be the same, but they know how to tell it to a different audience each time. And I like what a lot of famous authors have to say about creativity, I think they all say, finally, it’s about discipline.

It’s about putting pen to paper for 30 minutes every day, accepting that the first time you do it the 10th time, maybe even the 50th time it is going to look ugly. But hopefully, after that, something resembling the output will start emerging. And I think it’s so much more important in today’s context, because creativity, in some ways, is the last stand and the differentiation between what you and somebody else can potentially do.

I read this anecdote somewhere that apparently though we have such democratic access to social media, we are all influencers in our own right. And all of that is happening. But still, the bestselling authors in New York Times are people who have been bestsellers for 30, 40 years. So I mean, definitely experience probably has a role to play there. Right?

Subha: No, definitely. I think if you remove the glamour around the word creativity, it’s just that right? It’s kind of solving a problem and saying, Okay, how am I going to land up every day to solve this problem? Now my problem is to write a book or write a script or make a movie or make an ad, or even just think of certain products for my business.

Hasita: Yeah, and if we say that it doesn’t work it’s like how they say in that will be called the Prestige. The moment the magic trick is revealed it’s no longer magic. And I think that’s true for creativity as well. If the sheer mundanity of it ever kind of made itself felt, then it wouldn’t be so magical, I suppose.

Subha: Correct. There are steps to it, it’s not a sudden light or a warm glow that comes over you and the idea is, you know, on all parts of you, etc., there’s that whole intent of wanting to create something and then spending some time thinking about it. And then the process, as you said, it starts looking not so pretty. And then it gets a little prettier and prettier. But I think there’s also room for certain creative bursts, and we all have it once in a while.

Hasita: No, that’s just the best feeling isn’t it just like things land like ting, it’s there in your head, and then it just makes you so happy. But in saying all of that, what we also then kind of recognize is that creativity is a process that takes time because it’s about gathering enough information to be able to connect certain dots or to be able to stimulate the mind to think in certain ways.

Now, we all know that in the real world, context, time is not often a luxury that we have, because campaigns have to still launch on time, they can’t wait for the creative director to have gone and taken a walk as simple as that. And sometimes it feels a bit like diving without any harnessing, I suppose in the sense that, okay, I’ve done all this creative work, but how do I know it’s going to work?

And actually Subha, it’s a very common question that we get asked, usually when we pitch creative work, we pitch more than one concept root. It’s two, in most cases, but at least three sometimes do make it to the table. And you realise, finally, the person making the call as to what should go out, has actually made a very subjective call, like there is no, actual resonance in terms of, okay, I know that this campaign worked for my industry in the past, because the moment you do that, you’ve already taken the creativity out of the equation.

So sometimes, we still have to ground it in practicality, though, it can’t just be all sunshine and rainbows.

Subha: And spoken about earlier that while there may be this creative director, or there’s somebody who’s kind of running or hitting the show, so many times it’s such a group process as we’ve talked about the Daily Show and the room in which they just really are sitting down as a group and writing jokes. It was supposed to be one guy’s spur-of-the-moment, Brainwave, that’s where the joke was supposed to come from. And a group of people sit in the room on a daily basis and get creative. I mean, that’s so weird.

Hasita: But again, it kind of just reinforces the whole idea of there actually being a method to the madness. And sometimes the reason for that method is really what we discussed earlier on about, say, a YouTube asking you, which of these ads do you remember, and there’s an interesting statistic 71% of B2B brands cannot create memorable advertising. Now, I am both the glass half full and the glass half empty kind of person.

So the optimist in me says see 3 in 10 Ads, that work is not a bad number, actually, if you think about it, but the fact is 7 in 10, people have spent on something that didn’t have an outcome because you have to set a budget, say quarterly reviews coming up. And for the next quarter, I have an XYZ goal. And to meet that I have to increase my pipeline value. And to do that, I have to tell a bunch of new people who’ve never met me before that I exist. And how many people do I tell?

How do I tell it? And how do I know that it worked in the first place? And especially in the context of some of these really long sales cycles you really don’t know which is which like which ad from four years ago, really did the job. And that is where I think it’s important to contextualise because there are the tangibles, in the sense that now we’re all riding the AI as a generative and creative wave.

Sometimes they do wonder, if is ChatGPT going to push that number from 70% to 80%. Because if everyone talks similarly, then you already have a problem. And if I just had to kind of think about what is a tangible way of measuring creative output, then I would say, just keep falling back on the brand. Keep thinking about what is it that I can say, consistently and repeatedly without losing the essence of that message. So I think that’s what finally brand tone voice comes down to. And that is the part that I can finely control as well.

Subha: The notion that we start with, is that if you’re creative, you will come out with this one really good idea. But what I hear you saying is that if you have a creative process, then actually you come out with 20 ideas and then say, Okay, what’s the best for the brand here or what’s the best for the medium that we’re choosing, or the channel that we’re choosing. So there is value to volume and breath like it’s not one stroke of genius.

Hasita: That reminds me of an exercise that both of us really admire in the advertising space kind of taught us about a week ago. And the process is called 40 boxes. So this was given to us. So I kind of reached out to Niranjan. And I said, now there are four or five of us. And creativity, of course, is already hard enough as it is. And then it’s all scattered because nobody knows what’s a good idea, what’s a bad idea, how do I even decide, how do I filter, and how do I even think sometimes when you’re handling a bunch of different mandates, and he said just come, let’s do it, let’s workshop this.

And he taught us this technique called 40 boxes, which is essentially about so if I’m the creative director, and I run a team of four or five creatives, and we know that we have a campaign coming up 24 hours from now, right, we have to pitch concepts. 24 hours, the moment you say, 24 hours, I think, half of us start freaking out, I definitely do or I did until I discovered this process. And the idea is that each person on the team, including maybe the director themselves, fills out a sheet with 40 boxes with 40 unique ideas or ways to sell that campaign.

So if you pick, for example, a shampoo, what are 40 different ways of making shampoo? So you can go as creative and as wild as you want there. Like there are no bad ideas. And the benefit I have realised of doing that is that firstly, you have 40 ideas so you’ve broken through that barrier of saying, oh my god, now how do I come up with something in 24 hours?

But the interesting thing there and let me actually ask you Subha, if you were given 40 boxes, and you had to do a campaign on something that you knew you were familiar with, how many ideas do you think you would come up with?

Subha: I mean, surely not 40 that seems like a tough task, I’m thinking, I’d be lucky with a dozen or so.

Hasita: A dozen is brilliant. A dozen on a box is actually good progress. And even to break through through that. Because the idea is that the director will not take a meeting until everyone’s finished their 40 boxes.

So to that end, I think one of the things that you can do, and this is also suggested by Niranjan is that you can just open a dictionary, pick a random word and use that word as your jump-off point for further ideas and further concept roots. Or you could just look out the window and you could say this is the first object that I’m spotting and use that as a jump-off.

So the idea, I think, is to give your creative stimulus enough room to grow. Because beyond the point, the brain is like, Okay, I’m done heading in this general direction. Now, where else can we go? And then you say, Hey, here’s a road. And you can actually kind of go take this road, you know, by saying that I was looking out through the window, and the first thing I saw was the lamppost. And I’m like, Oh, God, I have boring windows.

But I think I like this parable way to have about the monster who just wants work like he cannot sit still, you have to constantly give him something to do. I think in some ways, the brain is very similar to that like it constantly needs stimulus, and it needs it in as many different ways as possible. And funnily enough, the moment he gave us all of these different jumps of points, we had more than 40 happening.

And there was a point in time where two ideas merged and became one and between me and another girl we exchanged and we came up with something really cool as well. So I would not have come up with that, at the beginning of that, I would not even have believed that I could have come up with that at the beginning of that session. So yeah, I think we can all take some comfort in knowing that there is a process.

Subha: Yes, and it’s a very doable process. It doesn’t take away from the fun and joy of what we think creativity should be. And yet it gives you something tangible at the end of it.

Hasita: And it’s interesting, you say that, because I remember that day I was not keeping too well, I went very low on energy. And we did this exercise, and I felt so good on the inside. Like suddenly, my heart was so happy that the rest of me started feeling just fine. So I think there are other ways to derive joy as well out of these processes, I think.

Subha: Yeah, it puts your faith back in creativity.

Hasita: Yeah, in some ways, which I was losing a little bit here and there for sure. And I think also, what it really helps you do is to say that out of 14, we all know that there will be probably 20, 25% good ideas, but 10 good ideas are still better than one good idea that never appeared. And that’s where I think we can apply the filter of okay, what can and cannot my brand say, what will not I be saying. So these are certain filters, which will actually make it easy to maybe even remove some of those ideas, take them out. And the rest of them still have the potential to do just as well.

Subha: So I think this helps Hasita that one doesn’t get frustrated with the notion of you know, that creative burst coming or not coming, there is a process there are different I’m sure you know even more tools that you can apply or different ways to get to this much larger generation of ideas, and then be cognizant that because you do have like a bigger basket now 100% of it is definitely not going to be suitable or work for you.

So again, you have to filter, you have to pick from that, and then you use your expertise to say, what’s going to work for the output that I need. I don’t know, there’s a mix of, you know, being very cognitive. And then I think I’m still stuck on the part of it that’s supposed to be very sudden and inspired. So, what’s really happening in the head there?

Hasita: No, I think frankly creative output is finally one half of the equation because there are so many intangible associations we ended up making, for reasons that maybe when the creator didn’t think of, but it just happened to work that way. Like, I’ve been on a bit of an online ordering spree, suddenly, these last couple of days.

And somewhere, I realised that I have this feeling that if I pay on Razorpay, then my orders will come very quickly. Now, this is so irrational, because firstly, Razorpay is not an order fulfillment platform. It’s a payment gateway. But in my mind, there has been an association made that firstly, once payment is done, then the next thing to do is to just wait for the thing to come.

And I think somewhere the word Razor has triggered in my mind this association, that it is going to happen very quickly. And also, to some extent, I think the way the letters are bent forward probably has a bit of an impact as well. And the moment I realised, I thought like, how many of us are, frankly, so irrational about the whole thing at the end of the day, like, I mean, the reason we do certain things or take certain actions is because finally, the brand has transcended its transactional value, honestly.

It has managed to do something that’s so much bigger, I mean, honestly, let me ask you, this actually, and will know which brands have transcended and which have not. You Subha, much like myself, watch a lot of OTT content, right? So on average, if, say, Disney, Amazon Prime, and Netflix made 10 shows, who among them do you think would have made the most number of good shows just off the top of your head?

Subha: So I’m going to go with Netflix.

Hasita: So did I. But the fact is that they all have their phases. I think Disney had a phase over the last one year or so when they started making really good shows. Before that, in the early days of OTT, it was Netflix, that produced a lot of interesting content. Prime also had its moment in the sun, by the way, we’re in for a six, seven-month period, and with Daisy Jones and the six coming out, it’s expected to have a good summer run. So there is no quantitative evidence that it’s Netflix. But still, that’s what the brain defaults to because Netflix is the first OTT platform in our heads.

Subha: Like when you say binge or when you say chill, yeah, they’ve kind of cornered that market in our mind.

Hasita: And the same thing with finally your Swiggy, Dunzo as well, like, at least in the Bangalore context, between Swiggy and Dunzo, who, in your mind, delivers more orders on time?

Subha: Interesting, because if I think food, I think only Swiggy. Like, if you would have asked me Swiggy, Zomato I would just say Swiggy hands down for anything, I still can’t get myself to use Swiggy for anything non-food. And for me, anything which is non-food is Dunzo. Like they will safely take it from point A to point B. So there have been so many times when I’ve got an alert on my phone saying there is incoming from Swiggy and I’m thinking I haven’t ordered food, but it’s somebody else.

Hasita: Sending you a parcel. Which is where actually if you think we’re just purely from a delivery standpoint, I think most of us would say Dunzo. Because in our mind Dunzo delivers. That association has become so strong that no one else can deliver. It’s just not a thing that other people do.

Subha: Like I now say, I’ll Dunzo it to you, I don’t say use an app or a courier service or something.

Hasita: And in fact, when GooglePay was first launched, and I downloaded it, I thought, what a stupid name like GooglePay. But then you realise you’re asking people can GooglePay you? You’re not saying can I PayTM like that’s usually because the pay is part of the offering.

So I think yeah, it’s about frankly, knowing that human beings will continue to be irrational in the association’s that they make, which is that I think simplicity of messaging finally, like you may have the most creative idea on the planet. But you have to, I think, measure it on three different levels in my mind.

One is obviously the context in which you’re doing the advertising, like, are you doing it to damage control? Are you doing it to build a brand? Are you doing it to launch something new? So these are all different contexts in which you want to obviously think about different campaigns, they’re not going to be all the same, and probably the 40 boxes exercise there, it has the risk of becoming too simplistic because for products, it’s easier, like sell a shampoo bottle, sell a mic, sell a phone case, it’s a lot easier.

But when I have to say Vim is launching a new product in the market, which has XYZ attributes, now that’s what you have to sell, which is where the complexity kind of builds, and you have to constantly remember that your ideas are towards that goal and context. Then the next thing, obviously, is understanding your customer, which I think in some ways is still the context conversation.

But just to say Hey, if I say this, and I say this on the platform, in the context of whatever it is that I’m trying to communicate, will they get it? Is it simple enough? Is it resonant enough? And I think finally you have to AB test. And it’s a combination of experience and data I think so, you know past campaigns and past circumstances have either worked or failed for these reasons. So you use that as a launch pad for doing the rest of your work.

Subha: You know, when we’re trying to get something going for our business and our work, some kind of methodology or some kind of okay, if you do these three things, or if you include these two things, then you’re closer to getting the output that you want. That always helps even in creative things, it definitely helps.

Hasita: Absolutely. And in fact, even in slightly more abstract roles, which we ended up playing over a period of time, just a little bit of input into what direction people want us to take makes such a difference. You know, when we do workshops, are we doing that workshop to give people comfort that they are on the right path? Are we doing that workshop to ask the tough questions? Are we doing that workshop to just lay the cards on the table and then decide what the next these are all very, very, very different contexts and mindsets, so it makes a huge difference how you go into it?

Subha: I saw something interesting today on my LinkedIn feed, and someone had shared that HDFC says, Okay, why we only have OTT, kind of dropping 10 episodes at a time. And apparently, they’ve dropped an ad series, or maybe it’s one ad which is 10 ads at a time. So it’s like, there’s an overarching story of some bridegroom who runs away. But I think it’s a series of maybe 45-second ads, just one after the other telling that story, which is very different from having 10 ads and saying that over a two-week IPL, I’m going to show you…

Hasita: All of these. No, I think the logical fallacy there is just having called them ads. See, that’s the difference between a brand that actually transcends its value as a business, and a brand that is trying to do that in active ways, because frankly, I have Dunzo notifications turned on, you won’t believe just because they make me laugh.

Like, frankly, it’s not their job to make me laugh is not the mandate. But somewhere in the language and the way they’ve shown themselves have been very friendly and approachable they’ve transcended from being just a business in it to make money to a utility that now I can’t live without. See, in fact, it’s interesting the article where they said 71% of brands run boring ads, 90% of people don’t trust the banking industry any more now than they did 20 years ago.

Subha: Like they try to sell me something. So that’s very different from dropping 10 episodes at one time because there’s a story that I look forward to being entertained by.

Hasita: Exactly, I think some brands have achieved that in the process of creative storytelling. I think Tata Tiago did that with a series called Tripling, it was a collaboration with the Viral Fever. But it is possible to do that it’s possible to do interesting brand placements when you remember that you’re not the center of the universe, I think that’s what it finally comes down to.

Subha: Like you don’t have to have these bursts of doing something extremely unusual. And you feel like you don’t, you know, you’re not that for me, so don’t try it.

Hasita: Frankly, that’s where the creative director’s experience also kind of comes into the picture and to say how much of this campaign is going to demand that I fundamentally change my DNA. And sometimes you have to do that, like you know, you’ve got a bad product, you have to make it a better product. So to that extent, you have to, but in some cases, genuinely you don’t have to be the alpha in the room.

You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. You don’t have to be any of those things. The reason we look up to or we relate to certain brands is simply because they felt a lot like us finally and if we remember that, then I’m sure our 40 boxes will look very pretty for sure. Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Damn Good Marketing Podcast.

We did talk about creativity because I’ve realised over a period of time that creative output could just be the difference between a very successful marketing campaign and a not-so-great marketing campaign. I’m sure we will be discussing more of this in the coming episodes. If you like what you heard, do give us a review on Apple podcasts and give us a follow on Spotify. We really appreciate it so much. Thank you.

Subha: Bye.

The post S2E10 | How To Be More Creative With Your Marketing Ideas appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Have you been frustrated with your lead-generation efforts on LinkedIn? In today’s episode we share with you tips and (kind of) a formula that you can apply to attract and nurture quality leads at a reasonable cost. Watch out for the bonus tactic on how a certain type of LinkedIn ad could be run for almost the same price as Google ads!

Discussion Topics: How to run LinkedIn ads

• Why run LinkedIn ads?
• Think Campaigns, not ad-hoc messaging.
• How to calibrate ad spend for maximising ROI.
• A formula for successful B2B lead generation.
• LinkedIn ads are more effective than Google in many ways.
• How should you evaluate ‘success’ of a LinkedIn ad?
• How can a little company with limited budgets compete with the big guys?
• 4 easy ways to make your LinkedIn page more effective.
• A satisfying project.

Transcript: How to run LinkedIn ads

Hasita: Subha, what’s happening with that paid ads plan that you had for this year?

Subha: I don’t think I’ve achieved much. And I’m quite lost between multiple efforts. So yeah, like, you would expect I’m all over the place.

Hasita: Fair enough and also, I think when we are doing tactical stuff for technical outcomes, it’s a lot harder, because I think somewhere in investing in things like content and brand we know that it’s going to take a while, and maybe there’s some comfort in knowing that. But when I’m spending a decent budget on something in any given month, then I probably want faster results, which is what I really thought I mean, this is a confusion that all of us go through myself included, and a lot of clients as well.

So why don’t we really ask somebody whose day job it is to run these campaigns, what kinds of budgets would you set, how would you go about thinking about something like this even? Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. We are already on Episode 9 of Season 2. I don’t know how to believe that. But I’m going to give myself a minute and just believe that.

We have with us today Varnika Pasari, founder of Tic Tactic. Tic Tactic, is a performance marketing studio for B2B Companies. And that’s the most exciting thing for us because Varnika is very clear that she wants to work with B2B brands. And she does LinkedIn and Google Ads. Hi, Varnika.

Varnika Pasari: Hi, guys. Thank you so much for having me.

Hasita: Thank you. Thanks for being here. So we have a lot of questions for you today Varnika, as you’d expect, Subha is going to come to ask you questions about budgets, how do you decide if it going to be Google? Is it going to be LinkedIn? And I have some mindset-level questions as well. So let’s just get started. Yeah.

Varnika Pasari: Yes, please, shoot.

Hasita: So Varnika, my first question to you is really about convincing people. So when you have four, or five different things that you can do as part of a marketing plan firstly, why should you go the LinkedIn ads or the Google Ads route, and for someone to succeed in doing that, what are certain baseline metrics, things that should already be taken care of.

Varnika Pasari: So we normally work with clients who have two objectives, either it could be brand building, where they want a lot of awareness on their pages, or of course, lead generation. See, any company that wants to invest in marketing ultimately wants to make money out of it. So the way we work is always showing them that if you invest this much, this is a kind of an ROI that you get in return. So that’s always been the pitch that has worked till now. And also we’ve more or less always delivered on the lines that we’ve taken them through.

Because we try to understand, we do a lot of research at our end, before starting any campaign on any platform. And before even telling them so we don’t promise anything, but even giving them an idea of what we think that they can get out of the campaign, it requires a lot of research and we believe in giving them very realistic results.

Hasita: Interesting. And you’re saying that so far in most of the campaigns that you’ve run, expectations and reality have been somewhat close to each other?

Varnika Pasari: Yes, this is something that I believe very strongly, even as a person that you have to set very realistic goals to achieve anything. If I tell my clients that, you know, you invest, say 50,000 rupees, and it will turn into 50 lakhs, I can say it and there’s no reason that they’ll be able to hold me accountable because there are so many factors that come into play. But if I’m not realistic about it, they are never going to come back to me.

I have to tell them that this is what we can achieve with whatever your budget is. We are very conservative when it comes to our budgets to start off with, for example, there is a company that we run ads for that has been now we’ve been doing it for six months. So I have increased their budget gradually. And now we run ads for even one lakh rupees or two lakh rupees a month to start with.

We started with a very conservative budget of say 20,000 rupees, because I had to show them some results. See, LinkedIn ads are quite expensive in comparison to any other platform. But that is simply because the kind of results that you get from LinkedIn, and the kind of leads that you get from LinkedIn are so much better than any other platform. So LinkedIn charges you for the quality that they give you. And that you can only achieve if you start off by showing some very basic results. And then you start building trust from the client also.

Subha: You know something that you said, it stands out for me that you look at it as a series or a set of campaigns. I feel most of us as business owners, it’s a little bit unstructured. It’s like, okay, today I woke up what do I want to say, on this week what do I want to say or you know, some event happens, and hence I’m going to talk about it, but I’m never really thinking in terms of campaigns.

Varnika Pasari: Honestly, that’s how we work, especially if we have a long-term campaign. See short-term objectives are obviously, okay, I have an event I want to run an ad for an event or I have this specific thing coming up, and I want to create a lot of awareness about it. But in the long term, when we make plans for lead generation, it’s not something that can happen in one month anyway.

See B2B sales cycles are quite long, and the deal amounts are also quite big. So, for me to tell my client, okay, you spend this much money and tomorrow you’re going to get a lead, it’s not fair on their part, because they will be expecting that from me. But if I tell them that, okay, we’ll get some leads, then we’re going to nurture the leads, and at the end of, say, three months, the leads that I’m going to give you are going to be genuine good leads, that can actually turn into potential clients, then cracking the deal is on you.

So this is something that will take time, we have to be in a mindset that it’s going to be, say, three months, six months, we divide our months into short-term goals and then we have long-term goals, we achieve our short term goals in order to achieve the long term goals.

Hasita: Right. I really like the idea of layering these objectives over each other. So say my short-term goals could still be a month or a 60-day period. But the longer-term goal is just an extension of that. So that I think is a very cool way of thinking about it, which we don’t often do as Subha said, it’s always campaign to campaign, or sometimes honestly, we don’t even think in terms of campaigns.

So I think that singular focus probably really helps. And I also had a question for you Varnika on the sales cycle aspect of it. So there are obviously certain services in certain industries, which have a longer sales cycle, because they are either perceived as wants not needs, or the market is still not ready for that specific kind of solution.

So there could be any number of use cases in which conviction takes a while to build. So have you had an experience of running a campaign of that sort, wherein it took that six, nine-month period, and if you can just give us an example of how you layered these campaigns on top of each other I think that’d be very interesting to know.

Varnika Pasari: So yes, the client that I was talking about where we started off with a budget of 20,000 rupees, they were my first client that we started with. And so they are a video company, that makes B2B videos. So they wanted to connect with corporates that want training videos, which are say for two lakhs, three lakh rupees.

So that’s the kind of clients that they wanted. We started off by running very, very conservative ads at that time because they were my only client also, I was monitoring the ad every minute of every day, to be honest. And I was just checking what can be done, how can I optimise it further. So that time my short-term objectives were to just build brand awareness for their page in that particular industry.

And what we did was, we just kept building awareness, because with that budget, it is not possible to do lead generation and I was very clear about this also, then, once we got say X number of views on our videos, we got X number of likes, we got a lot of engagement, which did quite well, then I started convincing them to increase the budget slowly.

So we kind of made it 30,000 rupees, and then we made it 40. Today, when I ran a campaign for them, it starts off at one. And they’ve got three or four really, really good leads, in fact, they got a lead with one of the companies that they have been looking to connect with, since the last year, they were just not being able to get a contact in that company because they did not know. So we used a combination of LinkedIn ads with Sales Navigator, which I’ll come to later.

But Sales Navigator really helped us in nurturing the lead. And then all our ads later were just targeted towards that particular company. So for that company, we’ve spent a lot of money. But at the end of it, the amount that they spent, and the amount that they’ve got from them, in terms of their deal has been, I think, 3x or 4x.

So that’s how it works, see have to create a plan, we have to move people down the funnel, and we have a rule, when we come to B2B marketing that 95% of your buyers don’t know that they want your product, you have to continuously teach them and tell them about your product. So even the first campaign that you run for any company cannot directly be a lead generation campaign, because mostly it doesn’t work.

Hasita: Or you will get the worst kind of leads and then you will anyway be disappointed. And it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy in that sense.

Varnika Pasari: Yeah, exactly. So this is also how, you know, when we talk about Google ads, and a lot of people see that the leads we are getting are not good, it is because these people at this point, don’t even know that they want your product. They are just people who are, you know, just there for the sake of being there or just trying to inquire about things. But if you’re spending that much money and you want your ROI, so we sit and we nurture the lead, we move them through the funnel by so the first part will be an awareness side and the second ad will be more of telling them about your products, about the features of your products. So when we say awareness, I mean only brand awareness.

The second step is telling them exactly what kind of products you will give them, and how it will help to solve their pain point. Then the third step is the process. So telling them how to get in touch with you. So thinking that now they’re already a buyer so you give them all the relevant information. And in the fourth step, we bring all of this back to them through retargeting.

Hasita: Oh! That’s where the retargeting kind of comes into the picture. It’s more of a reeducation process rather than basically hitting anyone and everyone who spends even a second on the website.

Varnika Pasari: Exactly. We don’t even believe in retargeting everybody that has come to the website, because in a B2B situation, you could have a lot of people, a lot of your competitors coming onto your website over and over again. So retargeting everybody that comes to the website is of no use to you. But if you retarget people who have specifically shown a lot of engagement with your ad, not only in the first step, but in the second step, and in the third step, you know that these are people who are interested in working with you, or at least interested in knowing more about your product.

Hasita: Yeah. And that’s what I find is the difference between working with somebody who’s a really good analytics person or a really good CRO, because they know that the behavior you’re looking for is not somebody going to home product contact, or doing something that you so expect, right, it’s about the unexpected behaviours. And that’s where I think that experience of folks who are on the analytic side also matters so much, because what events are you tracking in terms of capturing intent?

Varnika Pasari: See, also, intent when it comes to B2B, see, you can track intent very easily on Google because you know that people search through these keywords, but on LinkedIn, you can track people through intent. It’s actually why I love LinkedIn because, as I mentioned, a lot of them don’t know that they want your product, but we are making them want your product. So that’s where the more interesting part comes in.

It’s actually a journey with your customers where you are taking them through all the different steps because they don’t know what they want, you will never be able to find intent in terms of, okay, I want to buy this product. How do you find that on LinkedIn? You can’t do it. But you can find people who are interested, who can be interested, and you can find the right group of people in terms of decision-makers. So nurturing the leader is a very interesting process on LinkedIn, and I really enjoy doing that.

Hasita: No, that’s really nice to hear Varnika and it explains why you’ve specifically chosen B2B.

Subha: So the effort that goes into LinkedIn has to be over a longer game plan, like, I’m thinking that if I, let’s say, have an event coming up, or if I have something very specific that I want people to sign up for, then maybe a Google Ad makes sense and you buy ads for that particular period. But if you’re really looking to nurture a kind of audience, then I should be more on LinkedIn, is that how I should look at it?

Varnika Pasari: Not really, it depends on what the event is. See if it’s a large-scale event, where you know that a lot of people in the world will be attending, then it’s fine, then you can go for Google because it’s going to be relatively cheaper. But if it’s a specific event that your company conduct, or if it’s an online event where you want people to sign up, then LinkedIn is a better platform because it will also give you the information of your leads, there’s a lead gen form that they just have to click on the button LinkedIn auto-fills the form for them. So it really depends on how much time you have and what kind of event it is.

Subha: Got it and I think, on LinkedIn, in some way, I feel that there is an opportunity to get somebody to also follow you or connect with you. And that relationship could go beyond just that one event. Whereas a Google Ad tactically might be great for that event, but to kind of nurture that relationship, you’d have to find some other ways and means, right?

Varnika Pasari: Absolutely. Also, you know, the good thing about LinkedIn ads is also there are so many ways to do it, right? It can be a video, it can be a single image, or it can even be a message. So people think that you have to spend a lot of money on LinkedIn to gain anything, which is not true at all because LinkedIn is so targeted. And because you can exactly tell LinkedIn that I only want these people you don’t end up spending a lot.

So if you have a defined target group for an event, you can just do sponsor messaging, which is almost at par with Google ads, sponsored messaging is one of the cheapest LinkedIn ads that you can go for. And the message goes from your profile, even if it’s for your company, it needs the person to send the message. Very rarely does LinkedIn allow companies to send messages and even if they do allow, it has to be a very, very high-end company with a lot of followers.

So when a person sees your face on a message, it automatically resonates with them a lot more. It makes them want to talk to you more, even if I don’t want to talk about that particular message, I might want to connect with you to understand your product or build my connection. So there are so many different things that you get out of a LinkedIn ad, it’s not just getting the lead, it’s also building your network, getting more people to follow you, which eventually overall in time might convert into a good client.

Subha: Right.

Hasita: So Varnika, I had a question actually on optimising for different parameters. So of course, you have a platform, which is essentially a professional platform, and therefore you have a lot of data on people where they work, what roles, what functions, what levels of experience, past industries, present industries, all of that. So there’s that component and understanding that confidence well, there’s also, of course, budget, and finally, how much you’re wanting to spend in any given context. In your experience, what has been the single greatest determinant of an ad’s success or failure for that matter.

Varnika Pasari: That’s a very interesting question. I think, for me, success is always if I have targeted a particular group, keeping in mind that obviously, as you mentioned, all the budgets, etc., are all in place. But at the end of the day, what our clients want is to reach out to the right people, that’s why we are telling them to do LinkedIn ads, because the group that you’re looking for is on LinkedIn, it’s not anywhere else. The decision-makers are on LinkedIn.

So for me just to see, it’s also not like, you know, whenever we even do the lead generation ads, and sometimes we get only one or two leads, which to the client looks like a failure. But for me, what I see is how many people have interacted with my ad, and what kind of people have interacted with it. So for me, the top parameters are always the demographics in terms of the decision-makers and the industry. If I’m trying to target a particular industry, or if I’m trying to target a particular company, have I managed to reach the decision makers or the required people in that company?

So if you would tell me that I want to target say, the CTO of a particular company, have I been able to do that or not? And vice versa that’s, I think, always been the number one thing for me, because it makes me realise, one is it reaching my target group, and two also in the future if I have to run a retargeting ad for these people will I get the right people or no. So we always, you know, also come back to our ad, say six months later, if I have run an ad today, I might use the interaction group of that ad six months later. So for me ensuring that I’m building the right audience on LinkedIn, is very, very essential.

Hasita: Fair enough, which actually kind of leads me to industries that have a lot of competition already in terms of LinkedIn ads, like, for example, I know for a fact that cybersecurity is an industry that’s laden with LinkedIn ads because even when I was working as an external party there, I used to be bombarded with ads about cybersecurity.

And also, I think the complexity of the domain is such that there are so many different things that you can talk about, and then there are of course, some industries, as we discovered in the project that we worked together on, such as manufacturing, where there doesn’t seem to me that be that kind of ad presence.

So when you have to operate in industries where the competition is high in terms of your competitors, probably larger competitors spending a lot more money given that LinkedIn is considered such a powerful tool, so even outside of ads, I’m sure there are other ways of reaching out to your potential audience and other ways of building a process out of that, say, for example, my two biggest competitors are really huge folks. And they’re already spending a lot of money on LinkedIn. And if I’m just this small guy starting out, I have some organic presence, what should I really be doing?

Varnika Pasari: So again, it’s always a plan of organic growth, with paid ads, and then Sales Navigator, these are the three things that go hand in hand, when it comes to lead generation on LinkedIn, you cannot just focus on any one of them and expect results, you have to try to put your eggs in all these three baskets.

So, when it comes to organic growth, also, because all your plans have to be aligned, whatever your objective is, say, for example, even as a small company, if you’re looking to target a particular company, then your organic posts and your paid ads should both reflect the same message. If you’re doing two different things, then it’s probably not going to work out for the best.

Because what happens is that the paid ad is going to take them sometimes to the page or to the website, but if my paid ad is saying something and my LinkedIn page is saying something else, and my website is seeing something completely different they’re going to drop out in less than a second, because you’re like, Okay, I don’t know what this company is doing. So that’s one part of it. The second part is your question about how small companies manage to compete against the big guys, how do these companies compete against the big guys in the real world, it’s the same thing here, as well.

See, every company has some sort of a USP or something that they’re offering against the big companies. So for example, if I’m a company in India, and I’m trying to compete with a company in the US, which is a very, very big company, but our clientele is the same. For me, the rates that I would be offering my services to my clients, or the client service that I would be offering would be a lot better. And that is what I’m trying to pitch to them as well.

So this is also what I used to target my LinkedIn ads, I obviously cannot compete with them in terms of their budget. But okay, if they are targeting 500 companies, I’m going to target only five companies. But in those five companies, I’m going to make sure that my message is very, very clear to them, that this is why you have to choose me over say a company X, Y, or Z. So we always leverage their whatever it is that they are trying to do in the real world, even in the online world, it is just that we use their budget more wisely.

You know, I also believe that even as a big company, you don’t have to spend millions just to get those five leads, because ultimately your clients are going to be those five people only. It’s about how you spend it.

Hasita: You know; this actually reminds me of a huge case study for how the small guy can really become big. And this was way back in the 1960s. And the agency involved was DDB if I’m not wrong. So Avis and Hertz were the two car rental agencies that were there in the market at that time. And Hertz was considered the leader with about 60-65% of the market share. And Avis actually went ahead and ran an entire print campaign series called we try harder.

And some of the headlines say things like “Avis can’t afford to be nice. Avis can’t afford to make you wait. Avis can’t afford dirty ashtrays.”  So they really took the small guy positioning and owned it so badly that I think within the next four, five years Hertz’s market share fell to about 49% if I’m not wrong, so I was just reminded that sometimes just playing to your strengths can actually be the single greatest differentiator in a crowded market.

Varnika Pasari: Absolutely. And this is where marketers come in, right? Our entire job is to make them look like they are somebody. That’s our entire role, for me to try to create an interesting tagline for the most boring company is my challenge. So, I think this is always a question that I have come across. And this is also something that I had very initially. So when I spoke to my mentor, he just said that, “So what if you’re a small company play to your strengths. I said, fine. Let me try it.

Subha: So now Varnika, tell me some tips and tricks for optimising the time that I’m spending on LinkedIn, like, what are some of those, you know, kind of maybe hidden features that we just don’t look at, because we don’t know, we should look for it.

Varnika Pasari: Okay, so when it comes to the LinkedIn page, I’m going to start with the page and then we’ll come to a personal profile. I think with pages’ people just don’t do the very basic things like adding a button to visit your website. So there are a lot of times that I overtake pages from companies and they don’t have something as simple as that.

See, next to the Follow button, if you add that contact us or visit my website button, it will automatically take that person into knowing everything that they have to know about your company, that is something that we should really be using to our advantage. The second thing is adding a good tagline and a good description in terms of about. So this is the same for both your personal and your company page.

See the tagline is what people see if they even scroll over your name, or your company name, so it has to be gripping enough for them to want to visit your page. But at the same time, it has to be something that tells them what you do. So this is a little tricky. But if you work on it, if people actually spend more than five minutes on it, you can come up with something good.

Subha: Yeah, because I find the page is something that I do spend some time on. And I put in some of the details like you’re mentioning, but it’s something that I give up the most on because it feels like folks are more likely to visit my personal profile, and then know that okay, I work for X, Y, Z, or I run X, Y, Z company. But the traction on your page always feels very suboptimal. And LinkedIn is not where people go for pages, they go for the people. And that’s the feeling I get is that a misunderstanding? Or is it because I’m just not running the page well enough?

Varnika Pasari: It’s sort of a misunderstanding. Because, you know, where do people go from your profile? When people come on to your profile, and on your profile, you can add your company to your header. So where do they go from there, they go to your company page. And if you have a great-looking profile and a sad-looking company page, they are probably understanding that you’re not spending a lot of time doing that.

See, I feel like your page and your profile are equal leverages, okay your profile is probably 65 and your page is 35, but that 35 is also a lot. From as something as simple as your cover image that people don’t spend any time on for your page. It’s such a great place for you to give so much information to your clients, why are you wasting that space, people are putting just their logo as a banner, we can already see your logo, and we can already see your company name everywhere.

Don’t just write your logo, add some information, or at least add a way to get in touch with you if nothing else, tell them your top five services, or if you’re a product-selling company, tell them three of your top products. Just write the names of your products. So I don’t have to even take the effort of going to your website, I can from your company page if I visit your company page on LinkedIn and I see that banner, and on the right-hand side where I can actually see a snippet of the banner if you just mentioned some information that can be useful to me it saves me so much time.

See a LinkedIn page or profile always has to be formatted for busy people, because everybody on LinkedIn is not there for leisure, they’re mostly there for work. So we have to keep that in mind with every single thing that we do, even though about us that you write whether it’s for your company or for your personal profile the first line has to be something which will tell them what you do and make them want to read the rest of your story, all of the other flowery language and all of those things can be saved for the other profiles, you can do that on Instagram or on Facebook. But on LinkedIn, you have only three seconds to capture anyone’s attention. It’s like your business card.

Hasita: Yeah, sometimes it’s the most basic of things. And it’s good to be mindful because I just realised that there are certain things that I have not done in a very long time just to kind of wrap things on a happy note which one would you consider a project that made you happy? And why?

Varnika Pasari: So we did one single campaign with a company last year in December. And that was something that really made me very happy because the person I had to convince was a 65-year-old uncle and trying to explain LinkedIn, and LinkedIn ads to him was a challenge for me. So they are a B2B company, and they’re trying to export into a new market.

And for me, just convincing him to do it was, I think, half my battle won. And also, this is a company that makes products that go beyond my understanding. So for me, the first step was understanding everything that they do. It was just a learning process because I had no idea about that industry or the company. And I was sitting with him constantly on calls, and he thought, I’m some mad girl who is pestering him so much for such basic things on his end, but he wanted a particular connect in a particular industry in the United Kingdom, and we managed to get him that first breakthrough. And then today they are in that country.

So I think that’s something which was really, really good. Because see, our company is based on the idea that we want to first help people who don’t know how to do any of these things. Like bringing those offline companies online, because they don’t know the value of this. Working with other companies that already are on LinkedIn is obviously great. But to bring that journey, where I have taught somebody that okay, this is a platform that you can use. And today now that Uncle has a proper LinkedIn profile and he is connecting with people every day. So that’s something that gives me a lot of happiness.

Hasita: I know that sounds very wholesome. And also, I think the work that we do has a way of snowballing right? I think it is both cognizant and it’s also exciting that you know, somewhere the little seed that you plant has a way of finally becoming that tree. And that’s finally the most fulfilling and the most exciting aspect of I think the work that we do. Thank you, Varnika, I learned so much and I already made a running list as we were talking of the things that I should do before you go look at my profile.

Varnika Pasari: Thank you so much.

Hasita: That was illuminating, to say the least, I think I’ve always shied away from the performance aspect of things because I have personally had experiences of people trying to rush into it too quickly. But knowing that it works, and especially knowing that it works in specific ways is always very reassuring. And to that end, I think maybe performance marketing is something that we don’t have to be too, so scared of.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Damn Good Marketing Podcast, about all things ads, we hope to see you next time and we will surely have something fun and exciting for you, as we always do. Do leave us a review on Apple podcasts. We love reading reviews. And if you’re on Spotify, please do give us a follow as well.

Subha: The websites and SEO and all of that I get that, then there is of course, LinkedIn which for the kind of work I do, you know, logically should be where I live and then there is to do ads on, you know, whether it’s Facebook, or Instagram or Google.

Varnika Pasari: So the strategy to convince anybody I mean; any client starts off at understanding what their objective is. See, we only work with people who want to achieve something out of their marketing campaigns. We don’t really focus on organic growth because they normally have somebody on board or they’re doing it themselves. But the areas that we explore where they have to invest a lot of money before we can take them into that part, we have to convince them that okay, there is some objective that you have to achieve through for which you have to do certain things.

Your organic growth is on any platform, whether it’s LinkedIn, or Google does not really have a lot of organic growth, especially through paid ads. So it’s very slow, and it’s not very easy to build a lot of audience over a lot of time. And what I understand is not everybody has those great ideas to put a lot of good posts to get traction on the pages.

Subha: Whether it’s paid or not probably makes sense to say, Okay, there’s a bunch of stuff which is similar and it’s a campaign and then you choose whether that particular campaign you’re going to spend money on whichever platform it is or not.

Varnika Pasari: So this is back when, before even Tic Tactic started, when I was working as a freelancer, what we started doing was my client, she gave me certain goals that she wants people from this particular industry to be her clients, because in terms of the sales cycle, also, they have a video, which will be probably for 20,000.

But what they want from these clients are the bigger videos. So see if all the three, say your website, your LinkedIn page, and your ads, if they’re giving three different messages, your customer is going to get really confused, and they are not going to come back to you because they will probably think that you don’t know what you’re doing. If you have a very, very big company that’s giving you a lot of things, but they’re not giving you attention, they’re not giving you that kind of service that I will be giving you I will be here, whenever you called me I will be here to solve all your problems.

With the big company, you have to go to customer service, you have to wait for the support to call you X Y Z that’s the maximum time somebody will decide whether to continue looking at your profile or not.

So I feel like people don’t use these things. A lot of people that I know have a blank cover image. And I really don’t understand why. If you spend it literally takes there are so many free tools that you can use to create a cover image. You just have to give them three or four things about yourself that will make them want to connect with you. For somebody to connect with you you have to give them enough information to know that they should connect with you. If you’re expecting them to reach your profile and then not give them any information how do you expect them to talk to you? Or why do you expect them to talk to you?

Our Guests: Varnika Pasari

Varnika Pasari is the founder of Tic Tactic, a B2B marketing solutions provider that aims to help brands grow their digital audience across platforms, convert them into quality leads, and maximise ROI.

The post S2E9 | How To Run LinkedIn Ads appeared first on CrazyTok Media.

Have you found yourself managing two personas, one of an entrepreneur and the other of a coach? Or are you wondering if you should be present on all the major platforms or maybe choose quality over quantity and stick to what’s relevant? In this episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast Hasita and Subha walk you through the dilemmas small business owners face when they have to be efficient entrepreneurs and decide if creating teams would be better than doing things themselves since the resources are limited.

They discuss the fact that business owners often wear different hats, first of entrepreneurs and a little later of coaches, and also that it can be a difficult choice wanting to continue doing that, making you ask the questions of if it’s worth it or should you drop it.

Discussion Topics: What can I cut out of my marketing effort?

• Challenges doing too many things in marketing
• Handling multiple identities
• Branded house vs house of brands
• When to invest on a single aspect and when to diversify
• How to make the separation between roles
• What worked for others might not work for you
• Focus on where the audience is
• Don’t over-focus on the metrics
• Balance between topical and timeless content
• You needn’t market everything

Transcript: What can I cut out of my marketing effort?

Subha: Hey, Hasita you know, I’ve come to you with a bit of a dilemma today, I think I’ve done something that I need to maybe undo a bit of, I’ve created two personas in terms of everything digital that I’m doing. So I’m finding that I’m having to manage in a way two brands, and then all the associated social media and digital presence for each brand. And I think I’m doing way too much. And I don’t really know what to do about it. And is there like too much? I mean, you know, what we keep hearing is that, oh, some people like to read and some people like to watch and some people like to listen. And so shouldn’t I be all over the place?

Hasita: Yeah, that’s a great Subha, and in fact one that, as you know, I’m also grappling with, because you find that you do one thing and then to distribute that you have to do other things as well. Like, if you do a podcast, you better be on LinkedIn as well. And then if you’re on LinkedIn, then you do a newsletter as well. And when is enough, because we have lives to live and businesses to run. Let’s dive in.

Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Today, let’s really deconstruct how much is too much of doing things in the context of marketing, especially for small businesses where we run with a limited number of resources and limited time, limited budget. So what do you do and what do you not do beyond the point that’s the question we are going to be answering today.

Subha: Yay, because I really need some answers and I think, not just small businesses, but maybe individuals who are their own brand, and also larger businesses who are struggling, how to give the brief to this person that they brought on as either a marketing executive internally, or even if they’re outsourcing to an agency. I think the brief becomes more challenging, or the brief is really poor quality because there is just too much happening. And you don’t know who you are, and then on what platform you are. So we’re really looking forward to deconstructing this.

Hasita: So in fact, this interesting problem of I think, how much is enough, especially as you’re growing, you want to be doing more things because that’s how you tap into a new audience, like through one medium, I may have found and X number of people, but if I have to 2X that then I have to find people on other media and other channels where they hang out. And a lot of in fact, very large companies are now kind of building their own agencies in-house, and what I mean is they’re hiring their own copy content performance folk because sometimes it’s not easy to delegate, like you said, and if someone knows the business context, it’s just so much easier.

But of course, as small businesses, we don’t have that luxury, because expertise does come at a certain price point and a certain amount of time investment. So I think, let’s really break it down. And I would look at it not so much as an execution problem because that comes much later. But as an identity issue. So Subha, in saying that, you know, I have a RainKraft handle, and I have work that’s happening there. And then I have a coach handle, and there’s work that’s happening there what in your mind is the separation between the two? How are they different from each other?

Subha: Yeah, and I think like you said, identity because, like many businesses, I didn’t really start out with multiple identities, so I started out with a brand RainKraft under which I was doing multiple things. And over the years as that work has gone in divergent ways and then found consolidation and then now, there’s a new identity that has just evolved on its own.

So I find myself as coach Subha in many situations where me being the coach is what’s important, and whether I have my own firm and whether there is a RainKraft, etc. is not so critical to really put out there. And so on its own this coach Subha persona has given birth. And like you said, it’s still very much a part of RainKraft, but it can exist on its own also. So now the challenge is done. I let it grow on its own and then now I have two things to manage or do I keep reminding the audience that Hey, we are actually one, Hey, we’re actually one which is tedious in itself.

Hasita: Yeah, so I was in a webinar the other day Subha, with somebody that I consider a brand strategist of great repute, and incidentally, his was the first webinar I attended when the pandemic hit. And the fact that I’m still continuing to attend says something about him, his name is Mark Ritson. And he talks about this very famous concept in brand strategy, which is Branded House and House of Brands. And those are the exact opposite of each other and a Branded House is one entity under which you do whatever it is that you want to do.

A good example of that is probably Apple. So whether it’s a Mac, whether it’s Apple TV, whether it’s something else, finally, whether they’re selling services, products, hardware, the whole thing is Apple, that’s a Branded House and a House of Brands is something like your FMCG Companies like Unilever has multiple brands within it. And each brand kind of takes on a life of its own. For small businesses, I think it’s very important to focus and zero down on the Branded House side of things, and build as much as possible into one entity.

And I see the kind of temptation to kind of do multiple things because the question also comes up that if there is something that is not RainKraft specific, where do I put that? Where do I be a public figure without the context of RainKraft, I think in the early days, it’s important to invest in one thing.

Now that said, it’s not early days for you. You’ve been doing a lot of marketing work for five, six years at this point, which is why in your use case, I see the benefit of that separation, because now you can talk about the books that you’re reading, podcasts that you’re listening to, what is it that makes you a good coach, is the focus of the Subha coach identity, and the work you do is part of the RainKraft identity.

But if you’re starting from scratch today, I think I would advise that you stick to RainKraft, and do just that. Subha being a coach is a product of RainKraft. So, that’s I think a distinction that a lot of us could benefit from. Because in my work in the brand workshops, as well, I’ve seen a lot of people trying to birth these new brands, give them a logo, and give them an identity. And in their heads, I see the difference.

They see it as them doing multiple different things. But a lot of times it’s actually the same thing. Finally, the story is singular. The purpose behind doing that is very unilateral. And the disadvantage of diluting that effort is that now you have to strengthen three brands, or four brands at the same time, instead of doing just one and being able to throw all your energy into that.

Subha: No, it is very, very time-consuming. And not just in terms of the execution phase where you have to think of where you want to put what and how do you put it, and what’s the, in a way who’s speaking. So as you said, if I am giving a book recommendation, then the way that even that caption is written is different from if RainKraft is giving a book recommendation.

So definitely there is more effort. And it came from a genuine place of the kind of building the credibility of the individual. And I think that’s where small businesses feel the need, because at some point, you know, people say, Hey, the founder has to be known, or the founder has to have credibility in that space in which the entity is working.

And so this kind of second persona slowly emerges. But I think it’s a good tip to keep consolidating to the extent possible, while I let the other one also live on but not kind of branch out too much because I don’t have the bandwidth.

Hasita: Yeah, because you want to be able to repurpose thoughts from one place to the other because finally, you’re one individual, and also one handy tactic for anyone kind of grappling with the same thing I would say, is to go about thinking about it in terms of where is the separation. So if the product that I’m selling or the services that I’m offering, is not explainable in one sentence. Say, Hey, I’m a baker.

Now that tells you exactly what I do. But Hey, I’m a brand strategist is not that evocative. Like, what can I do for you, I can’t bake cakes, obviously. So what else can I do the moment there is more complexity in what you do, it helps to streamline even further, because you want all of these things to finally contribute to that identity so that people can discover you for who you are, fundamentally, so what you do if it’s simple, if you can explain it in one sentence, then you can diversify as much as you want as early as you want.

But the more complicated it gets, and there are some of my friends who run toy brands that have very specific characteristics to them, so they’re not A toy brands, they are free play-based toy brands. Now, that doesn’t evoke something for me immediately. So it’s important that my entire identity also reflects that side of things.

Subha: Correct, correct. No, it’s true because we are now more and more and the generations that are coming into the workplace and being the actual consumers today are looking to identify with the people behind the brands also.

So like you said, if somebody is running a free-play kind of brand, I’m wanting to know who the founder is and does he or she believes in sustainability and unschooling, and you know, all of the things that I would maybe associate with free play. So I think, yeah, it gives me a few things to think about and to kind of rework and also, maybe, in kindness to myself, it is a journey. So, the discovery happens, because you try out many things.

So there was a time, not so far back where I would, as you said, if you have to describe yourself, struggle like, leadership coach, executive coach, performance coach, and because that space itself is so muddled with terminology. And today, over a period of time, I have realised, okay, all of that converged to the career space. And so I’m happy to just say, career growth coach. So that also was a journey where I was a career coach, and that meant different things to different people. So I am not a career coach who’s going to help you find a university abroad.

So I’m not a career counselor. So then that evolved to say, career growth coach. So it’s about you’re already doing something and how you get better at it, and how do you improve your performance, but yeah, that journey comes because you put yourself out in many channels, and you get some kind of feedback on how the audience sees you.

Hasita: Which is where, I think the execution piece is also birthed, finally. Like, I had the opportunity to speak to the Brand Manager of BlissClub, the leggings brand, which I love. By the way, I totally endorse it. I love those leggings; I could live in them. And I kind of asked her how did you go about getting her first 5,000 customers because they are D2C and D2C is a space that’s a little harder to kind of succeed in and differentiation is hard.

Finally, you’re selling leggings. And she gave me three-pointers, which are performance campaigns and running ads, the other was communities and the third was influencers. And she got into the details of how. That’s the playbook of how BlissClub got to. Now can you take it and implement it even as a D2C brand, even in apparel can you take the exact same thing and run with it? 90% of the time, probably not.

Because say I am not a community builder, for example, I don’t identify that way at this point in time. So for me to say, Okay, I will put myself through the lathe machine of building communities, it’s probably not going to end very well. So how many of these things are we doing because the world is telling us that, you know, and we saw that with Instagram reels quite a bit because suddenly, every content creator felt pressured to build short format content.

Subha: Correct. And the good thing is, I mean, I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings note that he put out this morning where he is saying that he will continue to invest in reels because it’s really growing at a phenomenal pace. And interestingly, for him, he’s not making any money on the reels, because we’re just swiping from one reel to the other.

And now he’s going to try and figure out I think, how to put a little ad in there somewhere because the ads are in the feed, and I’m spending less time on the feed, and just quickly swiping through 50 reels, and he hasn’t shown me any ad, and he hasn’t made any money. But yes, it’s a struggle that we said, oh, now there’s one more medium, how do I get there? There are so many people who approached both of us, I know saying, hey, you know, you guys are doing a great job, maybe I should also start a podcast.

Hasita: But you know and I know that there have been days when we’ve doubted this medium as well. And the only reason we’ve been able to keep going is because we fundamentally like it. We are in a studio right now, and enjoying these fancy mics and clicking pictures, because we like it. And that’s the curiosity that somewhere net-net has to drive any amount of content effort. I have found myself outside of the podcast also gravitating more towards LinkedIn than Instagram, and I think that’s also coming from my natural tendency towards doing more long format, honestly.

I’m not a let’s condense this into a 2 or 10 character I have realised that about myself and I’m okay to not be. So that’s where I’ve chosen and said okay, for now, it’s going to be the podcast and it’s going to be LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll start making some videos and listen to our producer for once, but it still seems like a bit of a distant dream to me.

Subha: I get you. So I think what I’m hearing you say is that one, don’t overcomplicate it so at early stages, stick to that branded house as much as you can because, you know, God knows there’s any way, so much work to be done so why do you want to split that across multiple houses. So stick to a branded house and then yes, we will all experiment with different ways to execute. But do what gives you comfort, but more important than that, I think, shouldn’t focus on where my audience is sitting.

Hasita: That’s a great question. So that’s where I think the supply-demand has to kind of start matching because I have to ask myself, what capabilities do I either have or I’m able to bring naturally because we have friends who are able to do that for us or there are so many different ways. Like if my best friend was a performance marketer, why would I not kind of use that capability.

So I think sometimes we underestimate the real-world implications of somebody else’s playbook. In their success were things that even they may sometimes not be aware of, in terms of why it worked exactly the way it worked. So that I would say, is the supply side. So make a list of what are the different capabilities, can I do blogs more easily or can I do LinkedIn content more easily, can I do a podcast more easily it could be right, you come from that space and it’s just easier you.

Then comes the demand side of things, which is, as you said, the audience, which is also what I think I had asked you a while ago, my audience was finally, the workshops in the consulting work that I do hanging out on LinkedIn. And we said we don’t know. And that’s still a fair enough hypothesis and a good place to start because I don’t know what is a better place.

Subha: And I think that not just gut, but the information, the feedback loops that are coming back to us they do tell you that they’re not on the reels. So it’s not an investment of time and energy that you should be making now. So LinkedIn is where you should be hanging out and producing good content or sharing very relevant stories.

Hasita: To me, that seems to be the case for the industry that I’m operating in. It’s a noisy industry, like there’s enough and more and good content out there. So people need to already sift and sort through so much, might as well be where they are, and they seem to be on LinkedIn at this point in time. So that makes sense.

But again, I think it differs from context to context. We are working with clients in the EIML space right now. And for them, the right platforms would have been LinkedIn and Twitter. But Twitter as we know, is kind of in a, I mean, does a brand want to invest in Twitter at this point in time, it’s a bit of a risk to take and therefore, again, the net-net of their effort is coming back to LinkedIn.

But it could be that for a different audience in a different company, the audience could be on TikTok for all you know because Duolingo of all apps has the strongest persona on TikTok. Duolingo’s TikTok is a case study in and of itself. So how did they figure that out? They figured it out by trying and being excited enough about it. And finally, that’s what it comes down to.

So what we’ve actually started implementing with a lot of clients is that 90 days print model of doing things, you try it for 90 days, if it’s not working, and I don’t mean not working from an external, it’s not about four people coming and liking the post, it’s about my end goal, what is my lagging metric for success? And for whatever reason, if that metric is not being met, then it’s time to change.

Subha: That’s interesting. So what do some of these lagging metrics look like? Because I think that’s where as business owners, we struggle because we’ve put ourselves out there, we don’t really know what we’re looking for. And then most likely, at the end of 90 days, I’m thinking, I don’t think I got anything out of this. Why don’t I just stop and do something else?

Hasita: No, sometimes I’ve begun to realise that even failure in that sense of the word is the signal, because finally, we dug deep with one of the clients that we were working with, and we realise that their problem is not lead generation, but retaining the customers that they were getting into the system.

So churn was a problem. It wasn’t lead gen at all, because that’s the knee-jerk reaction. It says, Oh, I don’t have enough money rotating through the system so let me generate leads. But I think what was going wrong for them is that a lot of people that were coming into the cycle, were not being able to retain them in the system.

So in identifying that your lagging metric then becomes over a six-month period, how much retention have I achieved? And that’s not going to come from my LinkedIn posts. That’s going to come from me who did the pre-sales and the sales also being there when things are not working out. So it’s a more systemic problem that has to be addressed.

In the context of offline events, especially it’s top of mind right now because we’re doing that for one of the clients. Actually, the day this episode comes out that event ends as well. And for us honestly Subha, the lagging metric is how many conversations they’re able to have in the next six months. We have zero visibility until then.

So you can ask me then how does the 90 days print work? Because you’re saying six months, and then you’re saying 90 days. So then we use the leading indicators to tell us, you know, how many new people came and visited them during the event, that’s a great sign for us because this is the only way they would have heard about them. How many placements were we able to get?

Because there was an exciting story first and foremost, and therefore people saw it, and they got excited, they wanted to cover it. That’s a leading indicator because I know that all of this in six months is going to contribute towards something.

Subha: And I think that’s also a good lesson in not overdoing the focus on metrics. Today, you go to a digital marketer or an agency and it’s their job to do it. So it’s not really the onus is not on me. But then there’s Google Analytics, and then I could look at Hot Chart and see how people are moving across my website, and I could look at all the podcast listens, and how many minutes and how many seconds.

So there’s this lot of information out there, we should also know how to read it, because otherwise one, it can be very depressing sometimes. And you can just walk away with the wrong output in a way.

Hasita: I think incremental progress really gets lost in the obsession with metrics a lot of times, because your first three, or four, LinkedIn posts are going to do nothing. People are watching, people are saying, Hey, here’s somebody new, he’s got ideas, he or she, and they’re putting themselves out there. I don’t know if I like it. And frankly, how many of us are geniuses from our first post onwards, God knows, we’ve all evolved.

So what you have to really track, and this has been true for us and a lot of clients that we work with also, is to say, am I meeting my end goal, are people seeing me differently because I put myself out there, are people knowing what to come to me for because I put myself out there. That’s the success metric. I will have posts that get zero attention.

I mean, people are welcome to kind of go scroll through my LinkedIn feed and find all the posts that got nothing. And finally, my poor dad goes and likes it, because he’s feeling sorry for me. But if I were to use that as a reference point for what I produce, or what I don’t produce, then I’m honestly doing myself a disservice.

Subha: That’s very true, and sometimes, even whatever we’ve created, it takes the world time to find it in some strange way. I mean, the podcast has been a revelation in that it’s taken for me like season four, or at least from three onwards to really then hit an audience and hit a loyal listening audience. And the medium is such that I should be expecting only loyalty.

It’s not a medium where I’m going to go very wide. And I should understand that, okay, my expectations also have to be in line with what I’m putting out there. And then, as you said, there are some, like, blog posts that were written two years back, and then suddenly this, everybody’s reading them. It came up in some search result or something and suddenly, everybody’s reading them, which, every time that happens, reminds me that, hey, there is so much stuff already there, why am I not reusing it?

Hasita: And also, there is that element of I think, topicality to some extent. So there will be content that’s timeless, and you don’t want to keep rehashing it updated from time to time, let it do what it’s doing. But finally, if something is happening in my industry, and it needs to be said, it needs to be said then, it can’t wait for my content, calendar, and my programming to kind of kick in.

So that’s where I think what we were speaking about earlier, in terms of what to delegate and what to retain finally, if you’re running a personal profile, if you’re running a company handle, it’s your company handle, it’s your personal profile, right? What people can help with is the muscle and the drive to keep pushing. And finally, you will have to show your face or you will have to put your voice out there, and you have to make sure that you are there when it matters.

Subha: That is hugely important. I think even with the small team that supports me, including you, the more I’m able to give you direction or the more I’ve thought through what I want for the month the output is it just goes up so many fold. And that’s only fair. You’ve hired somebody like you said to be the muscle, not the mind reader.

Hasita: You said it maybe there’s a T-shirt there that wears your muscle not your mind reader. You heard it first on the Damn Good Marketing Podcast.

Subha: Hey, Hasita, did you hear the breaking news? Apparently, Adit Chopra is a natural person, it’s not a rumor.

Hasita: First TV interview in 28 years Subha, can you imagine, the son of Yash Raj Films, he could have been a ghost for.

Subha: And I’m just thinking that it really appends everything that we have talked about that you have to keep marketing yourself and create a brand and be a persona. I mean that dude, like even today people are saying, does he exist?

Hasita: But clearly, if you have a good product, it can do its own marketing which is what most Yash Raj films are.

Subha: Yeah, I read an interesting line the other day that DDLJ is actually a love story between a theatre and a movie. Since 1995, at the Maratha mandir and there’s a cute little series on some OTT channel of postcards from Maharashtra, and it shows a lot of these very simple middle-class folks they just, you know, on an odd day they have a few hours to spare they just go in and watch DDLJ.

Hasita: Yeah. And in fact, on the Netflix trailer for The Romantics, which is now streaming on Netflix, there was one user who commented on the reason for Adit Chopra’s vision or even Yash Chopra who came before him. The reason it worked is because they had a Shahrukh also come out. Because who else could be so unabashedly romantic, like finally he shows up in an action movie and we’re all cheering for him, we are rooting for him.

And I like David Letterman’s fact that 50% of the world knows Shahrukh Khan. Can you imagine being known by one in two people it’s not easy in this day and age.  Yeah, a good product that I think speaks for itself. But what I really do like also is that to be timeless, you have to keep reinventing yourself. I think that’s the message because finally, after doing the Shahrukh, you know, set of films, Adit Chopra had to experiment with Ranveer Singh. He had to take a chance to see where that would go.

Subha: Such a chance that even Ranveer says, I don’t know why he chose me.

Hasita: So I think to be relevant is to keep adapting, and maybe that’s what he did. He kept himself busy adapting and he didn’t really worry too much about am I seen. Am I known? Am I heard?

Subha: Should I be on Instagram? And should I do interviews? I’m guessing that gave him a lot of time to do the really good stuff. But having said that, yes he’s literally quietly behind the scenes, he’s taken chances on a lot of people. on a lot of kinds of movies, and experimented and some have worked, and some haven’t. But maybe because fundamentally, the focus was that hey, I want to entertain. So having that focus or knowing that, hey, why am I doing what I’m doing, then guides a lot of your decisions, maybe it makes it more accessible.

Hasita: And allows you to do it for longer, because you’re not questioning some of those choices anymore. You’re just keeping at it for the fun of it. And that’s all there is to it finally, in any case, and kudos to Netflix for finding all these interesting angles on different things. I mean, only Netflix is capable of.

Subha: Yeah, there are a lot of really interesting documentaries out there, which they’ve taken the dullness out of the concept of documentary. Imagine like, I don’t know, 10 years back if you said you’re watching a documentary or like the nerdiest or dullest person on Earth, now you should be watching the Elephant Whispers and you should be watching Harry and Megan and you should be watching Pamela Anderson’s love story, which is I heard her on the Dax Shepard podcast and that’s the story there, man, that’s a real person.

Hasita: Just for that angle sometimes it’s worth getting to do some of these stories. So I’m going off to watch the remaining episodes on the Romantics and admire Shahrukh Khan. Maybe get him on this podcast, Universe I’m putting it out there and I’m just letting you know.

Subha: Yes, Universe, please know she’s put Priyanka Chopra and Shahrukh Khan out there and Tanmay Bhat also. How do you come up with that combination? Anyway, that’s for another time.

Hasita: Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the professionally done Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Not that we were unprofessional earlier but now we’re like super things are getting real people. Can you feel it?

Subha: Studio level real.

Hasita: Thank you and see you next time.

Subha: And look out for the Motley Crew page for pictures from this studio.

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