The Branding masterclass

I, V, M. And then we have, this is what I did for 10 minutes before recording today. Then several sort of brands and agencies put into it. So we are going to talk about branding apparently because this came out of a WhatsApp group conversation that where the three of us were discussing things and there always comes a point unfortunately in the simplified WhatsApp group conversation where it seems for a small microsecond that the intelligence level has just crossed a certain threshold and somebody will say, we should take this a simplified episode.

And that's what basically this is. We have absolutely no idea what we're going to do. But in short, I think we are going to talk about advertising branding, the evolution of branding over the years and what branding really means in the Facebook advertising era. Does that sound about right?

Does that sound like the decendary? OK, cool. Why not? Let's start with it.

So I hit the sensor being like a classroom. I'm very sorry because there's something I've done to several several students. If anyone from Flame is listening, hi, guys. This might seem extremely familiar.

You can leave a attendance in chat and continuously. OK, so it's interesting actually, I like observing how branding has evolved over the years. And many things that came out of World War II in some ways, after World War II, the American economy wanted to kickstart itself. So basically, it had all these old factories that it converted into things that could now be used to make soap and whatever, instead of bombs and jets.

And suddenly, the American public had a lot of goods on their hands, goods needed to be manufactured and sold. And what used to happen before is, even goods were advertised, you just needed to say what the product was, hey, this is a soap or it has this ingredient or whatever it is. But soon when they were cooking. Oh, content is cooking.

I was going to say, pure scuntains glistening. But I like your example. And then it moved on. And then since once there were more brands offering the same sort of benefit, now you needed to go to what any strategies to say higher order benefit, which is OK, as a result of this, what happens?

This is lovely quote I heard on some part of this. I forgot which this was. Like if you're trying to sell a drill, because you're like, OK, what does this drill do? This drill makes a hole in the wall.

Now that's one way to sell it and you might get $5 for it. But if you sell a higher order benefit, which is because of this drill, you're able to drill a hole and then you're able to put a picture on top of it. Now appeal to a higher sense. Now you can possibly sell that for $10.

And then you keep going up like this. That's the result of that picture hanging on your wall. You feel happier or other people come to your house and think you're a man who sophisticated tastes and all that sort of thing. So you keep going up this higher order ladder benefit.

And if you look at a lot of the advertising. And average LinkedIn post. LAUGHTER So if you look at a lot of the advertising that came out in the 70s, 80s, 90s, which many people can still consider the golden era of brands. And indeed, many of the famous brands today were born in that kind of era, the whole Mad Men era, the coke, 90s sort of thing.

And they're all based on higher order benefits. And probably 90s is the best example of this. It's nothing more than a shoe. When it came out, it really wasn't.

It was just a shoe. Nobody really gave too much thought about shoes beyond athletes. But then Nike elevated the whole thing saying that, hey, anyone can be an athlete. And that's really what their promise went to.

And it catapulted what was a shoe famously made in a kitchen using Phil Knight's Wives Waffle Maker. What is actually today one of the most valuable brands, if not the most valuable brands in the world. And that's the way things work till about the 19th and 20th century. This was aided nicely by the growth of mass media that allowed for mass communication.

It's important to understand over here that back in those days, you couldn't really segregate audiences beyond the point. So a brand put out one ad. It ended up being seen by everybody. So you had products.

You had very few products that everyone knew. Am I broadly making sense here till now? And you were talking about the media. I was talking about the media.

This is something of a blas of a real world. Because all the people are saying it. Yeah. But that's where overall, when you talk about this.

Yeah, this particular thing. Actually, if you say something unsimplified, and it actually makes sense, you should actually apologize. Yeah, fair point. But the other thing was also the aspect of not just, I mean, the lack of segmenting of audience also came from the very common means of mass communication.

So in context of when mass communication opened up, it wasn't that audiences had access to different forms or niche forms of mass communication. Mass communication was just like unitary mass communication. Everyone saw the same news bulletin. Everyone saw the same music videos.

Everyone saw the same entertainment channels. Everyone listened to the same radio stations. It was so unitary. And what that allowed mass communication and advertising to do to some extent was to be able to kind of like, since I have only one medium, I create an advertisement for that medium.

And whoever that advertising reaches becomes like the consumer. I mean, I'll push the ad out there for everyone there to consume. And I'll get the spray and kind of approach. Yeah, and hopefully 1% of that will convert, which is more than.

But then you couldn't afford to make niche products. Not because the audience wasn't there. So there was no way to reach them. And actually, that's an interesting point to make, because it's not just about advertising.

It actually extends to all of culture in some ways. There are more like you had huge musicians back in the day. Your rock stars were really, really huge. Today's show, you have a Beyonce, and you have an Etchiran and all that.

But again, they are nowhere close to the popularity of stadium filling bands and acts. Absolutely. Back in the day, because you had, I mean, you had fewer but larger heroes in some sense. And that's the culture.

And also limited the amount of genres that you could have music in some way. I mean, I think in the era of unitary mass communication, I don't think like Matt Frog would have survived. Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't have survived.

Which then brings us to this glorious invention called the internet, which threw everything into despair. Which basically, if you look at it from an advertising point of view and really from a cultural point, if you're able to reach niche audiences, right? If you are a guitarist who wants to make Matt Frog, you can put it out there. Sure, the immediate people around you will not listen to it and quite likely are likely to give up their leases as well.

And you will find an audience for it on Spotify. There is some absolutely pure shit out on you. There are all kinds of crazy niches and all that and that. And by extension, what that means for advertising is now, you are able to use demographics and psychographics to reach out to the exact audiences that you want.

You can target by exact demographics and the exact likes that people have. And which means if you were to think of it this way, there was a brand that was, and this is the example I often use in class, which is, if Kellogg's wanted to launch a vegan brand back in the 70s, it's not like they didn't have the technology for it, and the audience was there for it. Except how do you reach those people? You would have to advertise on very expensive mass media, in order to reach a 10% was going to consume that.

Today, you don't need to do that, because you can target vegans on Instagram maybe, you can reach out to vegan influencers and ask them to promote. And you can just put search ads against things like vegan food, vegan recipes, etc. So overall, what is meant for advertising? And I find this absolutely fascinating.

Speaking of somebody who spent a lot of time in much more time than me in a traditional ad agency, I want to see whether this sort of thinking is going to be like, it almost seems like digital has meant that you can afford to be less creative in some ways. The emphasis on building a brand really isn't there anymore, because you don't need to appeal to everybody, which means you don't need to be as creative anymore, it just means that you need to get your targeting right. And see if somebody comes to me and says, hey, you've got exactly this kind of headphones that, a person like, they don't need to build a brand around the whole thing. I think what it has done is, it's kind of made it like there are two extremes.

There are certain products that which tried to go the brand away, which was the traditional mass media angle and discovered that they didn't need to go the brand away. All they needed was good targeting and frequency. And thereby have bombarded people with that and kind of gone with that. So what a lot of, like, certain categories of products which work like that have done is that they have done maybe one branding campaign, once in a while they paid like a large agency to come up with their brand campaign and then use it for the next four years before they refresh it again.

And in the meantime, all their bread and butter advertising is all frequency and targeting like advertising. But when you talk about the other end of the spectrum, from a digital point of view, is because of the fact that there is so much variety that's available, there is so many competitors, there's so much like, so much competition for that limited and ever-shinking attention span is actually the branding that's become even more important. Like that establishing, yeah, it's ironic and it works. And that's what I said, it's just too extreme to it.

There is one side to website that, who the brand we're just going to go frequency and it works for certain categories, but in other categories, which are so cluttered, the differentiation has to happen brand-wise, otherwise there's nothing else to be done there. So it's actually created these multiple fragmented worlds where brand matters a lot and brand doesn't matter at all. Yeah, it's kind of counter-intuitive that way. And actually a great example of what you said is something that Airbnb did a couple of years back.

And again, somebody was at any of my classes, these are same three examples that I use all the time. And eventually, every other land in Scott Gallowy will be called upon. It's impossible to escape that on a simplified episode, especially about branding. So travel is notorious for the so-called performance-based advertising, which is just put it.

And what's that's happened is everything, it's becoming the same. Nobody really has a preference for make-my-treat work or clear to the other end. In fact, if you need to book a flight, you get chances that you have all three open-ended, you just go with whoever has a sale at that particular point of time. So that's really not any form of loyalty.

That's really not any form of long-term business or anything of that sort of discount that is. So Airbnb last year, or I think the year before that, they decided we are going to stop all such advertising and we are going to focus only on brand building. And I think that's fascinating. And their insight came about because they didn't advertise for a year during the pandemic.

And then the new year is really not changed anything for us. So we might as well just focus on building the brand. And this is really nice line that somebody, somebody's advertising professional heads that I forget the name, but he said, and it's a very nice way of thinking about advertising, which is branding is basically sales promised in the future. So the more you do brand building today, the easier it is for you in the future.

And that's kind of right. I mean, even if you haven't seen a Nike ad in the last two years, chances are if you were pushed to buy a shoe on the spot, like Nike would probably feature among your top three preferences at least. And that's testament to the brand that they have built over the year. And that is the impact of actually what brand building done right can do.

So the problem is there are a lot of people who do brand building, I mean, do some stuff in the name of brand building, which is actually, or scrap, which doesn't really do much brand building for them. And then they're like, oh, we are not investing. Or we're investing time in brand building and it's not working for us. Versus there are people like you said, like Nike stuff.

I mean, once they did the calling gap and they think they can't dine out on that particular piece of content and just do product marketing for the next three, four years without really investing much in that, after which they have to kind of keep the wheel going. You know, it's like the whole inertia of brand will actually carry you to a certain level. So that is a thing. And anyway, Nari and you were asking, you wanted to ask some new questions, please.

Yeah, so first of all, this whole thing about brand building, you'd speak about brand building and brands as a universal kind of thing. But I would think that it is different for products which are functional, such as an airline. So people would be far less brand conscious when it comes to selecting an airline. They would go probably by because they want to go from point A to point B.

But a car, okay, people would spend a lot more thought in buying a car, which is essentially the same thing. It goes from point A to point B. But they're the brand really matters, right? So there are products, there are categories of services, products, whatever that will be where brand building or branding really matters.

And there are some where you need the product or service advertise to come to your attention at the very moment that you want it. So if you're really hungry and at just that moment and add pops up and you know, it could be anything and you'll go for it because you're hungry, you want to eat that. So in the second category, okay, in that category, Facebook and all the advertising suit, you know, that they did really well. But in the first one, branding, which you know, I have a very easy idea on branding but I assume it to mean that when you see the name, you automatically form an opinion about the product.

So that's what the brand is. You don't really get into the specifics of whatever they are selling. And classic example is a very qualitative thing, like headphones for example, or you know, things like that where really it's, the differences are so, so nuanced, so tiny that it's objectively very, very difficult. At least for someone like me, it would basically be hearing challenged.

You know, I would know a good headphone if it correct me and me in between the ass. But I would still go for something which, you know, someone told me it's a great brand. I know it's a great brand. I'd go for a Sennai, maybe I'd go for a Bose or whatever.

Yeah, so that's a huge one. That's one thing. Yeah, yeah. So when I start talking, I usually forget what I'm talking about.

No, I think I've got a question. Yeah, I think I've got a question. And I think all three of us are just dying to take a stab at this, having got some form of this in various institutes. So let's go to acting.

I'll hand I think should set limits for us as maximum 30 seconds or something. I think you had a nice line that you said, when I think of a brand name, I think of something. I would actually say good brands do it the other way. When you think of something, you should think of a brand to solve that.

So a good brand to solve that. When you think of a car that is safe, you might should automatically go to Zirok's. Yeah, or Zirok's for that matter. Just to take the example of airlines, while it is very true, it just means that today's brands haven't done a very good job of differentiating that.

If you go to Europe, you see that Ryanair is extraordinary, well- recalled for budget travel. And they play it up so much that they make fun of themselves a lot saying, yeah, I mean, if you want to spend money, please be my guest and go to another airline and pay for all this shit. Over here, you're going to get a crappy airline experience, but you want to travel from Madrid to London for cheap or not, if that's the case come to Ryanair. So they built themselves up like that and they're very unapologetic about it.

So I'd say good brands kind of do it the other way. But it would be category specific, right? You would go to the headphone, right? I've got to get a pair of headphones for 300 rupees.

So it depends on one app. So again, it depends. In the case of headphones, see your benefit could come from it, it could be a functional benefit, like what I said, or it could be an emotional benefit. Now, if you look at, like in the case of headphones, for example, you are absolutely right.

For a long period of time, headphones were undifferentiated and only people who actually bothered reading specifications and all would know the difference between a Sennheiser model versus an audio technique, a model and all that. Suddenly came beats into the market and said, you know what, headphones are also a fashion accessory, they're also about looking good, right? And they built up their brand company that way, and I'm guessing they have the biggest headphone brand in the world today. Audio files sneer at them, but the fact of the matter is, you know, Apple did not acquire anybody else.

That's a sort of brand building, right? My favorite definition of brand building, and I will obviously pass the baton on to CK after this, is something that I think he's one of the clearest thinkers on branding or today. He has this beautiful line, which is a throwaway line that he said in a podcast one, which is, you know, branding is basically just a shortcut to take up purchase decision. If you are looking to buy something, and if you immediately think of something to solve that, safeguard, nice airline, luxury holiday destination, that's branding for you over there.

And it even extends to freelancers also, I would like to think. But yes, I will stop talking now and pass it over. Yeah, and but the other part I would say, and I mean, to the question, the point that you initially raised, which is about how certain categories benefit with branding and certain categories don't really need it, right? If you think about it from that perspective, a brand that primarily appeals to carpenters and like B2B people, like Fevi Call has invested it as much time in branding as probably any other brand in India has.

And the point is that the thing is this, that why Fevi Call stands out as an anomaly over there, where a lot of other brands have also come in, is because they are one of the few examples, at least in the Indian market, of a brand in a category that advertising is purely functional, who have done some breakthrough emotional as well as like memorable brand-led advertising. And this is where I feel is the important point that there is, there is a scope and there is a way to do branded advertising in every possible category, right? To create that positioning, to create that recall, to create that shortcut to purchase making like Chuck said about what Scott Galloway has said, is that opportunity exists, it's that a lot of people, I mean, and the thing is this, right? There is no right branding is not the only way you can create a value for your brand or for your shareholders, or like kind of create business success.

But there is a way you can actually go big as far as brand is concerned, there is a way you can go big as far as performance is concerned, right? It's the direction you choose, and there are categories where people choose certain directions based on whatever is relevant for them, or whatever their key people are making the decision on, right? But I feel that there is potentially, there is a potential for every brand to kind of become like a major influential brand. Like there is one example that I would think of is like, I think there's a masala brand called Suhana Masala or something like that, I forget what the name is.

But they have become very cult as far as they're advertising is concerned and they've been working with the Bombay based agency for doing some really, really cool emotion like that. That's a really cool brand recall though. They need to attend a brand recall though. I mean, their recall is meant for tier two people.

So I mean, that's clearly a tier two like women. So I mean, I just found it out from a case study and of course obviously not targeted at me, but their recall is super high as far as like their audience is concerned because of the fact that they invested that amount of time and differentiation as far as their brand messaging is concerned. So it could very well be just another masala brand among all the other 500,000 masala brands that exist. But this is where a brand makes a differentiated decision and then puts itself apart.

And so that's where I feel like branding can be done by pretty much anyone. Like there is, you can be like the whole truth, the brand new whole truth which does branding from on a very different level where they're saying that, you know, we have purpose led branding and that's how we go about it. Or you could go like the whole traditional branding, what we say like at the category approach of branding in some way where I just associated myself to a emotion more than a product as such. So there are different ways you can do it, but I think there is a possibility and an opportunity for every product to become a brand, a recognizable brand in some way or the other.

Yeah, and I don't think it matters by category. So sorry Tony, I was just wondering. I've been itching to speak for the last video. Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, so I mean, I think we should just realistically just take a step back and say, why does marketing and branding exist? But why does marketing and branding exist? It doesn't exist for its own sake, right? It exists obviously to further the business objectives.

And ultimately that is profits and revenue, right? So there is sort of a traditional hangover that is crept into what marketing and branding is based on a fixed point in time, where the only way to sort of differentiate between two products was to create a strong brand, right? Why was this the case? Because there is massive information asymmetry, right?

If you were buying a product in the 1960s or 70s or even the 90s, all you have is that what the brand or what the product is communicating to you, right? Or you would have some opinion from your neighbor, which is also again formed by what the brand is telling you. Beyond that, there is no real meaningful way for you to make a decision, right? Now that has changed drastically, right?

And there is an age-old concept which was first introduced in the airline space called Moments of Truth, right? Which is basically where a customer encounters a brand and has a real understanding of whether it is delivering the promise it's set out to do, right? And we proceeded to three different moments of marketing, moments of truth. The first moment of truth is basically when you encounter a product on the shelf, right?

So if you're in a supermarket and you see a coagate sitting on the shelf, you see its packaging, you pick it up and you're like, oh, okay, this looks interesting. And then you take it home and you brush with it, which is the second moment of truth when you actually use the product and experience it. And there is a third moment of truth when you recommend it to your friends or say, this is crap or whatever. Now what Google has done is for its own interest, and also I think in a revolutionary way for marketing, he said, there is actually a zero-a-th moment of truth, right, in the digital space, which is when you search, when someone is researching about a product, right?

So this speaks to your point, Narenne, about, can you catch someone in the point at which they are interested in a product, right? So as opposed to the traditional way of brand building, where you needed to know the brand, now if you're searching for something specific, A, if you are in the top results of Google, B, if you have positive social reviews, right? So each product on Google also has a rating and a mechanism associated with it and volume in its customer feedback, right? You know, feedback from, let's say, thousand or more people, that it should be ideally sort of giving you an indication of which product is better than the other.

So their point is that there is a zero-a-th moment of truth, which is that now you don't need to necessarily build a brand by, you know, advertising senselessly on mainstream TV. There is a way to do that when the people are looking for it. And why does it convert better? Because like you said, someone has displayed an intent to buy that product, right?

And if you can catch them in that particular moment, and also give them the reassurance that thousand people have rated it at 4.7 stars, you are more likely to convert, right? So there is a huge difference in how it used to be versus how we are now. The only problem is in between a lot of smart people who went into marketing and advertising and created a needless cult for this, which no longer has a place in any sort of business leaders portfolio. The only reason you would do it is to win some fancy awards.

But otherwise old school brand building just doesn't make sense. Sorry. Yeah. So we're going to take a small break at this point, but on the other side, we will continue our marketing class.

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Back to the simplified look at branding and marketing. I don't know whether to a Shriekit or Nai would necessarily be. This was actually the question I was leading up to. So how has brand building changed?

And this pretty much has. This pretty much how it has. And I just wanted to add to one thing that Shriekit said, which was, you know, brand building can happen for pretty much any category. If you think that nobody in this category really doesn't create, then you don't need to do too much to stand out.

One of my favorite examples is always Volvo Trucks. When a few years back, they got Yantra Bandam to do a split between two trucks and these are huge fleet trucks. They were going backwards and they created a pretty much a viral sensation. And many people would have asked why does Volvo Trucks need to do that?

Is that not even like bikes or cars or something? So they were showcasing the stability of the trucks and all that. And I remember reading an interview with the CMO or one of the teams that was working on this and saying, hey, listen, the people who are going to buy this show, they may be a B2B audience, but they're humans as well. They want to feel like they're associating with a good brand.

The people are going to be driving these trucks. They want to say that, hey, yeah, this is the truck that we saw in that ad and all those kind of things. So it's kind of interesting that Brand Bling can pretty much happen in any sort of category. While Tony did say that, like, all this performance and all that is still there, the fact of the matter is when you search for many categories where you're OK going with any brand.

If you have a preference, obviously you go to the brands website directly or whatever the case may be, or you will search for that brand specifically. Suppose you just searched for say something like insurance, your bomber is with five, six different options. You don't know which one to click. You will naturally gravitate towards the result whose brand you recognize.

Or you have some level of trust for it, your first account was with HDFC or right-click on HDFC or go. Or my favorite cricketer advertisers for this particular company, because the reasons could be varied. It could be another brand to Canadian National Stans. So I will not click on this.

The reason for clicking and not clicking could be absolutely many. I don't buy Tony's point that Brand Bling is irrelevant though. The way it is happening is that it's outdated. The conventional branding.

Yeah, conventional branding. It is conventional branding had no accountability. It is like, what is future purchases discounted? The finance team has to ask you why you've spent 100 crores and they can say it will account for sales in the future.

What is changed right now is a one-to-one mapping between your marketing spends and actual objective, which is sales revenue profit. And there is a one-to-one mapping. So needless to say, building a strong brand gives you an advantage or a smaller advertising spend to convert. But how that is created is not necessarily by viewing mass advertising or something.

Yeah. And just on that line, I think, what you made, you made really good points in terms of that. But that's also the fallacy to some extent of the current state of marketing that we have is that because of the prevalence of all the numbers that we have, there is a tendency of measuring every single aspect of how well anything is performing. Now, from when you talk about performance, there's a very clear way of measuring performance, there's a very clear way of measuring all those different aspects of marketing.

But when it comes to branding, and this has obviously been abused quite badly. So there is track record for it that people are like, how branding will work over a few years? And they end up doing very, very terrible branding or really sitting on their hands and not really doing much else that differentiate themselves. And even those companies that have patience with this kind of nonsense end up biting the bullet after three or four years when they realized this whole branding nonsense was one big mirage that was sold to them.

And then now they're like, let's get back to performance based track because this branding stuff is really garbage. The point is that when there is, which is where I feel like there is space or there is an opportunity if done well that branding can cause that disproportionate growth for companies in some way or the other. And the issue is at the moment, there is no real, I'd say, measurable, like accurately measurable way where a lot of the branding can be measured. And the thing is that what leads to like some really terrible ways of measuring branding.

Like I still remember the fact that once when I was working with the previous agents he was working with, one of our clients would always have this random measure of saying that if my ad has been sent back to me on WhatsApp, that is what I hated. So what we actually did was we created like a whole network around the client where we were like, this ad will be sent to the client one way or the other so we actually see it. People, you know, the offline version of this, by the way, it's very extrapolatable. The offline version of this is the media planner would be told here is where the client stays, make sure that this banner is put up at the cut of the cluster.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So I mean, the whole point was like, I mean, a whole bunch of people are like, let's just forward the ad to the client. The client will think that the ad is done well.

And so there is a lot of arbitrary random measurement parameters that people use for branding in some way or the other. And there is no real solution. You're right. I mean, there are a lot of brands that can choose and say that I don't want to just make this freefall jump out there and like take a punt on whatever my brand is worth.

I mean, I'm playing with like hundreds of crores in some context and like taking a punt on some random branding activities, but you can't deny that there are certain branding activities that can't be measured, that can be done. It's all about the people. Like it's all about the people that you're. And you know, you know, like, like when you see good branding, you know, that is going to happen.

I mean, with the basic point is that the corollary to mainstream brand building has become your element is not a marketing manager. It's smarter. Right. It's still that at the end of the day.

Oh, yeah. I think all of us can agree on that. Yeah. If I'm still in a role for two years, more than actually driving the business objective and, you know, driving the business, one cares about, I would want to win an award for doing something fancy, which really doesn't have too much value.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's where the whole two year cycle of a brand manager moving on has really taken this brand building aspect to a whole trappy piece somewhere where there are a whole bunch of brand managers who are like screw a long term branding. Why should I do long term branding? The guy after we will brief the benefits of it, right?

I need to do something that within the two years, I can measure, please show that I can see it in the zone. How in the world would you measure a brand? I, I, I, for the life of me, I can't, you know, I think questions. I mean, not in a very, very simple measure of what your brand value is probably how much sales you make as opposed to how much you spend on advertising.

Yeah. And if that number keeps reducing your own year, it means your brand has become strong. Yeah. If you basically, if you need to keep spending to have the same amount of revenue, it means you don't have a strong enough brand.

It means that people need to see an ad of yours in order to push a product of this. That Airbnb example, I gave you a year. They stopped advertising for a year. They saw that revenue wasn't affected.

Like, Hey, wow, okay, looks like we have a strong enough brand. Let's just continue building that. That's one way, not saying that is the perfect way, but the lack of a better. There's a lot of revenue that's always better, right?

Instead of vague things like brands, salience and all that. And specifically, what is the way you measure a brand? There are a bunch of tools like there are some things called brand lift studies, which you can do via social content, by social platforms, you can do brand lift studies where I don't know if you've ever encountered this, but sometimes they'll be like, in the last 15 days, have you seen XYZ ad? Did you see this ad and did you like it?

Like sometimes these ads come up on YouTube or Instagram and stuff like that, those are brand lift studies. And in terms of offline content, there's a normal statistical sampling that happens. Like you sample a small set of the audience and you actually ask them a whole bunch of branding questions and then you extrapolate on that basis. All of this is our ways you can do it.

But again, like I said, it's the answer does not lie in any one particular metric. You do the stuff that Chuck said, you do the stuff that these measurement metrics, you also do a whole bunch of other kind of measurement of how internally the brand is performed and all that stuff. And then you come up with a measure of an educated guess. Yeah, perfect.

So just one more point is that traditionally, there is sort of like a sexiness to advertising and marketing and all of that. And we end up picking winners. So wallow data, two trucks, split, they probably spent millions of dollars on it. Bull data stratters jump after that with Felix Baumka, Felix Baumka.

But six months later someone else broke that record. No one knows about it only because nobody knows about it. Similar, I think you guys would remember, Elliot keeps showing his breaking. Yeah, the like he just the brand.

Yeah, like he did. But he didn't break two hours then he broke it with a different brand six months later. That's what he went through with that brand. Yeah, I know.

I know that he failed. I didn't know he broke it with a separate brand. But that's the one. It's inios, see?

Basically, they would have spent the same amount or considerable amount into that. And nobody remembers. At least the four of us don't remember it. So the problem is we pick winners and then say, oh, this is a great thing for you to do.

But you have no idea how markets are going to react or whether you go viral and stuff like that. It's also a section. It's perception and in a lot of cases, it's also, I mean, in certain situations, sometimes it's just frequency that wins the day. Like, I mean, how many terrible ads do we remember very well?

Right. Because I mean, everyone remembers those old school reliance ads where the Samhag and all those guys are there and horrifying ads. But coming at you with Harpik during lunchtime specific. Oh, God, yes.

I'm talking to people's houses and stuff like that. It's just the point is at a certain specific point of time, they drove frequency, which caused memorability. And even how bad they were became memeable things about something that people could talk about later. Yeah.

So it comes down to a lot of different factors. And the thing is this advertising doesn't work in a vacuum, right? It works in the real world where there are a lot of different moving parts. And in some cases, you can hit all the factors, but there's some like wind was and right, which conditions were wrong or whatever else that stuff can do.

You're happiness in whatever way. Like the thing is with advertising and when it comes to branding again, where you are, there is a point that you're taking here. It has to be up there is a level of a point that you can take. You can engineer it really well, but you just basically take a bunch of people that you trust and who will work there and you kind of put it out there.

The problem is measuring it with absolutes where everything goes to crap. And then afterwards you're like, I can't measure it. I'm going to show you that it was the hookup. Then let's go to it.

Let's not do it. Yeah. Yeah. There are two sort of actually that is the right.

It's very, very different. Yeah. There are two sort of brands. I mean, I think we've given a very comprehensive look at branding and how we see all the other just two things like kind of one to touch upon before we call it a day.

These online platforms have become so powerful and this is that you guys might have heard right out of every dollar that is spent on advertising, 70 cents goes to either Alphabet, Meta or Amazon, which is astonishing. And you don't need to be too creative in order to succeed because of all the performance based things that we said over there. So there was this theory that advertising was becoming less creative, at least in aggregate. You might have the one or two cons, winners, but bread and butter is really being driven by you like football here is football, Josie by football, that kind of very effective, but not very creative advertising.

Now interestingly enough, and I think this is really where the genesis of this conversation started and what we want to talk about actually, which is now with the sector of data driven advertising slowly possibly being taken away, one with Apple saying that increase privacy and maybe regulators also breathing down Facebook's throat and all that saying, okay, you can't hyper target to this extent and all that. It might be interesting to see where branding actually goes from here and whether they could actually be a small reversal back to where we were in the 70s. I have expected obviously to go all the way back, there will always be some level of targeting, but it might be interesting to see if big brands are being built again. One from that reason and two from which we said earlier, in this category, there is just so much undifferentiated rubbish.

It's just a matter of changing one brand's colors to the other, everything else is the same that there is actually an opportunity for one travel aggregator to have values and one car brand to actually stand for something. So these two kind of things, I think that everything that happens in the world is cyclical to some reason, to some extent. And I think that same might happen over here. So there are a couple of things that, based on what you've said, Nachak, there was, so let's look at it this way now and from the historical evolution of things you've talked about it, when we talked about it, in a pre-brand world that we were there, there were products.

And now let's draw that parallel to all of our favorite books, CPMs, where we talk about myths, myths are what actually put humans apart from everyone else. And where was the world where there were really facts, there were products, right? And then brand came into being where mythology started being built around those products. But we've come to a world where there is mythology without basis, which is effectively a lot of cryptocurrency in some ways.

There's mythology. There is a whole bunch of mythology around it. There's a lot of branding, but there is no fundamental basis to a lot of this stuff, which is what now a lot of people are becoming skeptical about, because there are no fundamentals to be seen as just hype and hype is driving everything to go. So therefore, that is the cause of the reversal where myth has now overtaken the reality and everyone's following myths to such an extent that nobody's really focusing on reality anymore.

That is one aspect of it. The second thing that I actually learned from one of the sessions that I had taken, this was by, how can I forget his name, which is key point I forgot. And there's one very key advertising person who was taking this session. And he talked about it very simply.

He said, when you're talking about differentiation, right? You need to, the simplest aspect is in the world of content that you are in today, right? You are no longer fighting against, you are no longer fighting against your own competitors. You are fighting against cat memes, you are fighting against cat memes, you are fighting against dog videos, you are fighting against like the video about the unrest in Sri Lanka, you are fighting against all of that stuff.

So what he's saying is, if you can define a certain attention set in which you want to be, right? So he said, let's take the old school example of there is an ad break, right? An ad break has six ads in it, right? Out of that five ads are Xs.

You have to make sure that your ad is in a circle, right? If your ad is in a circle in that Xs, well, I ad break, you have one. In perspective of what the other ads are, who they everything else is. And it's definitely the ad break metaphor to the online world.

That is the differentiation aspect that how well can you be that X, how relevant that Xs to your product also, we have to draw that connection and all that stuff. But that's the future of where writing has to be that the other day, when those attention sets are going to keep shrinking. And now instead of six, there are probably 16 that particular set, right? And in that against the 60, how do I continue to be an X?

Where there are all these different sets of people who are trying to be different there? How do I win in that particular thing? So the competition has gone incredibly high. And so therefore you have to just make sure that differentiation becomes that much more impactful attention grabbing and relevant.

Yeah. Wow. This is actually, I'm going to send this episode to like any anybody who asks for free advice again on LinkedIn. Hey, can I take your brain for 10 minutes on Randy?

Here we go. I was just saying to this episode, I'll just answer your questions and talk to me. Then after that, I'd have to pay them. Okay.

So have we answered all your questions? Yeah. So I didn't have any to begin with. I didn't have any, I read a lot of font a song, which goes now.

It was clear as mud, but it covered the ground. The confusion made me brain go round. So this is basically. That's a nice way to end the whole thing.

I don't have any final points to add because you were the silent one who comes in with the fine good coffee. He's the client with the skepticism on branding. No, no. So I mean, it's not a, so the problem is that agencies for the longest time have been self-serving as have been marketing managers.

And it just goes back to the fundamental point of why does marketing exist and it is to sort of drive profits in this initiative. Yeah. And there needs to be realistic accountability for that. And if that means in some senses being less creative than 30 years ago by all of the states.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well spoken by the man who is representing India's greatest brand, I think, which is, I'm just extrapolating. I mean, without any, anyway, I think this was interesting episode.

I'm not necessarily, I'm not sure whether it would call it fun, but hopefully this taught you a little bit about branding, advertising, et cetera, et cetera. So why don't you do the honors and take this away? So it's been a terrific episode for me as well. So I'm differentiated.

Yeah. Safe. Safe. Yeah.

I was going to say differentiated. I say differentiated. I'm differentiated. Sure.

And stay simplified. Yeah. Yeah.