Consumer Goods Marketing and Sales

Hello people. Hope everyone is safe & has found a rhythm of working from home and I hope we soon resume normalcy because unlike for people like us for whom this is a matter of lifestyle and ways of working, for millions it is the thin line that divides destitution and livelihood. apologies for the morbid beginning but well we are living in uncertain morbid times. And I am also sorry for being away for so long. A lot happened in the last year or so including a role change, lots of work related travel, craziness overall but most importantly, writers block. I just wasn't sure what should I write about next. So thanx to a dear colleague who drew up a list of topics I could write about and this is the first one I have chosen. Before I delve deep, just a reminder - this blog is for FMCG/CPG beginners and hence may not be relevant for the experts or people who have done this for many years. Consumer promotions are what I call the absolute necessary evil of FMCG industry. You cann...

Its been a while since I wrote & apologies for that. Clearly I couldn’t keep up the discipline of writing at least once every month (much like my diet).  What prompted me to write today was actually the Maven Meet - IIM Indore - Mumbai campus’s marketing event. It was a one day event with 8 speakers including me and the theme of the event was Disrupt or Die. Each one of us had picked up a trending topic within innovation to show how innovation is the only step forward. The event made me realise I haven’t covered Innovation at all on this platform so far. So here we go - Innovation 101!!! During the course of this post; I will try and cover two fundamental things about Innovation: 1. Renovation vs Innovation 2. When to Innovate Before I start, putting out a caveat - these are my experiences & views about innovation and may not be 100% relevant for all categories and companies. So be like goblin forged metal - imbibe only what makes you stronger (apologies ...

Hello people. I am trying to keep my promise of doing at least 1 post in a month although I am super delayed on this one. Let me try and be punctual and deliver on promised timelines in the future. The genesis of this post is a conversation I had last week at the lunch table with some colleagues who were trashing Kotler and saying how it was a waste of time & how it didn't help them to learn anything at all that has aided them in delivering on their jobs. I of course disagreed because I personally am a big fan of Kotler. I know a lot of you will be scoffing right now and may not read the rest of the post at all because of this. But honestly, step back once and think - did Kotler not make all of us know 4Ps of marketing inside out. We all have evolved our thinking on the 4Ps and in fact have moved into more evolved models of 5Ps and 7Cs and all of that. But the first time we all understood what does marketing mean is through Kotler and often enough we all resort to jargon from ...

Here we are, in the middle of February and the year already seems to be slipping by. I thought its only been a few weeks since I wrote the last post, but then realized that the few weeks was actually last year and almost 2 months have gone by. So here I am writing the next part of the "Making Ads" saga. I am sure all of us have heard & maybe also used the age old saying "an ad is only as good as the brief" and even if it makes the creative people sometime wince; its actually true. The essence and the magic of a creative truly is in the brief. And hence, the next obvious question is what's in a brief.  Before I actually say what's in a brief or rather how to go about writing a brief; I think it’s important to call out what's not in a brief and what should not be in a brief. Firstly, your vision of what the ad should look like should not be in a brief because you are not the creative team and even if you can be one; it does not help anyone if...

2017 is almost over and I thought we must give something to the readers to mull over as the year ends. Year ends, in my opinion automatically put one in a reflective mode about the year gone by, what has one learnt, achieved and what will the new year bring in. As I was closing things on my to-do list today the fact that 2017 has ended hit me hard and needless to say I went into this mode of what have I done noteworthy in this year. I am putting all of these down because the post is an outcome of all the thinking.  I want to give you a brief synopsis of what I do in my current role so that you understand why am I writing about ad making all of a sudden. So I handle Equity for Dettol for all Developing Markets which means all ads that are run on Dettol irrespective of the product, country, culture, price segment, consumer et al are made by me and in 2017 I have made in excess of 20-25 ads and then they get multiplied by the number of countries and overall I have worked on approxi...