How do you change a marketing culture?

How do you change a marketing culture? Marketing covers a wide gamut of activities from branding and communication to market research and new product and service development.

This means that marketing departments are staffed by people with both quant skills and creative skills. Given corporate India's glorification of the engineer-MBA quant jocks, the analytical folks rule the roost.

But here's the thing. The quant jocks can't usually create the magic needed for new products and ideas. That needs the creatives.

Take Titan as an example. The quants may have worked the numbers but it required a different kind of thinking and sensibility to bet on watches and jewellery that were radically different from the status quo by way of design and aesthetics.

Or take a Fabindia that took the humble cotton apparel and made it a premium fashion statement.

I picked these two examples since I've met and spoken to the people who made the magic happen. In both cases, creating a culture that enabled these decisions happened from the very top.

Is that the only way? How can a marketing head in a typical company create a culture that balances creativity and rigour in a country where the engineer-MBA with his or her analytical skills is considered the corporate god?

How can you as a marketing person change the culture?

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated.

Popular posts from this blog

Europe leisure travel tips for Indians

Image
A panoramic view of Bern from Rose Garden. Picture by author. Based on a March 2019 vacation in Switzerland, France, and Italy, here are some tips for the budget-conscious Indian holiday traveller (as opposed to business travellers on a company account). Europe is an incredibly scenic place and so do visit if you can afford it. But at an exchange rate of 80 Indian rupees to a euro, it helps to be aware of ways to optimise your budget. At the end of the post, I have a rough breakup of what the trip will cost. 1. Avoid the peak tourist seasons, usually coinciding with school holidays. Airfares and hotels will be expensive, and tourist landmarks will be crowded. Choose the cusp seasons of early spring and late autumn to get a flavour of both summer and winter. 2. Shop around for the best value for airlines. If the difference in cost between two airlines is not too high, always prefer the better airline even if it costs a little more (check out sites like TripAdvisor for rev
Read more

Eating with your hands - or not

One of the ways in which we Indians assert our identity these days is to extol our custom of eating with our hands.   Eating with hands is great. Whether eating a roti or biryani, drumstick sambar or dosa -- and definitely when eating from a leaf -- hands trump utensils. But calling those who prefer eating with a spoon and fork Macaulay's children with colonised minds? That's a bit of an overstatement. Many people genuinely prefer not to eat using their hands for whatever reason. The world is divided into three broad food zones -- the western world of eating with a fork and knife; the Indian, African and Middle Eastern world of eating with hands; and the east Asian and southeast Asian world of eating with chopsticks and spoons. But because of many decades of travel and cross-cultural pollination, food customs and habits have widely diffused across cultures. So framing the preference for eating with or without utensils in simplistic occident vs orient terms is misguided. The c
Read more

Middle class apathy

Apathy? Fear? Don't care? We have a common enough problem in front of our apartment complex. A sewage drain has been clogged for several days and the civic authority in charge hasn't fixed it in spite of complaints and much follow up. A Twitter campaign would be a good way to exert some pressure, right? Some of us thought so too and posted a tweet, tagged the authority, and requested everyone in the apartment to retweet and amplify the post. More than 36 hours later, a paltry 10% of residents have participated. That's disappointing in a complex of over 200 apartment units. Not that the problem doesn't affect everyone. The smelly filth is gushing out and gathering in rivulets and pools along the road and in front of the gates. Cars and two wheelers squelch over it spreading it further. Pedestrians skirt the gooey muck and cover their nose. School children wait for their buses next to it. You can't pretend it doesn't exist. So what is keeping our educated and tech
Read more