By Storyboard18 Nov 24, 2021 2:08:01 PM IST (Published)
Raja Rajamannar, global chief marketing and communications officer and president - health care business, Mastercard, talks to Meesho's founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey about building an enduring and endearing brand.
The pandemic and the chaos it has unleashed is certainly not the last global crisis we’ll see. Given the increasingly complex and uncertain times, our greatest test will be endurance. Businesses and brands face the same challenge today. Storyboard18’s special series — Build To Last — hosted by Raja Rajamannar, global chief marketing and communications officer and president - health care business, Mastercard, helps us decode the power of Brand in building lasting and legendary companies. In the first part of the series, Rajamannar speaks to fast-growing ecommerce startup Meesho’s founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey.
Edited excerpts:
Raja Rajamannar: Vidit, you have succeeded extraordinarily in terms of the growth of the business and I will not be surprised if you go to an IPO pretty soon and come up with whatever number you fancy. But brand building and business building are two different things, and one impacts the other significantly. Can you share your perspective on brand building?
Vidit Aatrey: A lot of our growth and momentum comes from the brand. The brand is building that strong relationship with our customers and that trust that people come back to us for all the needs they have. We want to become the single ecommerce destination for the next billion consumers in the country. There are a lot of products where people don’t have to put in any money, for example, a social media platform. But, in a business like ours, people trust us with their money. The expectation of that trust is much higher. So we think of it holistically rather than just doing marketing or doing ads. That’s how we think about the brand in our business. And we keep expanding from that.
Rajamannar: Brand is sum total of every single experience the consumer has at every touchpoint and something which embodies the value and the character of your company. Even large companies struggle to embrace it fully. Marketing investment is always sort of a last-resort investment. How do you balance your investments between marketing and the rest of the company?
Aatrey: Earlier, branding was considered something that you have to do, but if you ask people can you attribute what are the benefits to the business from doing these brand investments, most people won’t have a good answer. Because of technology, a lot of these problems are now solved with attribution. Once you are able to create some kind of return on investment (RoI) model around branding, some of these conversations go away.
We have tried to put as much science as we can behind this. You can check every single investment that you do, how does that translate into RoI and because of that we are able to have a conversation inside the company, saying branding is an investment rather than a cost to the business.