What Pankaj Duhan teaches about brand purpose

So I think every country and culture is very unique. So nobody is behind anybody in that sense. I know you've been a tennis player and I know you're a cricket fan. What is the learning from sports that you bring back to work or is that too cliched a question? No, I think the couple of things that I've learned from sports that I bring back to business every day is I started off in sports because of passion. Because I love the sport, nobody forced me to get into sports.

So I bring that passion into work. So if you're passionate about work, work does not seem like work. So that's the first thing. And the second is there is a lot of winning and losing that happens in sports. So you need to learn to live with it, but at the same time never give up. So you figure out a way to win. So you get into many tough situations in business, but you need to figure out a way to win. So that's the second thing that I bring from sports into business.

Fantastic. Big company, great brands, some of them decades into their life cycle, maybe more than decades. How does a company with brands like that actually stay modern and contemporary? I think you need to move at times. And you need to be super consumer focused. So the Indian woman is evolving and she's evolved a lot over the last 10 years, especially over the last five years, lots of information, lots of avenues for her to shape her opinion, give her opinion. And the brands need to evolve, evolve with that.

And if you're laser focused on the consumers, you tend to actually do very well. So we tend to move at times. So there are aspects like predictive analytics, opportunities, like how do you drive the character of the brand as a purchasing behavior, etc. So these are many of the things that even the old world brands, when you actually do for them, they tend to have a new age appearance. Are there some learnings you brought back from the rest of the world that has served as a good lead indicator for brand building now in India?

Absolutely. So I think every country and culture is very unique. So nobody's behind anybody in that sense. I'll just talk from a digital context. There are some countries like China and stuff, which are a little bit ahead from a curve on digital adoption and stuff. So there is a convergence that is happening cross-channel to omni-channel. Percentage of business on e-commerce, the amount of money that you spend on digital, that's at a different level. The second bit, which is very interesting, is where are the trendsetters?

Where do you take the inspirations from? So beauty care, I think the world is changing to go to Korea. So Korea and Japan is where you get the beauty care trends from, not from the West. Food, I believe like South America, like will be very big. So trends, digital e-commerce, omni-channel, content, less brand to consumer, more peer to peer. I think these are all aspects that will shape India. And India is already doing very well, but it will become better. And what does the rest of the world learn from your work in India?

No, I think India is a net exporter of ideas as far as Reket is concerned. So, Dettol is one of the really big brands and the campaigns, the work that we are doing there gets exported outside. So consumer focus, passion, hard work, the Indians, nobody can beat that when you actually go outside. So what's the two or three or four things that are sort of key to building those brands? I think I'll go back to my first point again, which is to be true to the consumers.

Know her so well, know the Indian woman so well that you should actually know her better than she knows herself. If you can actually get to that stage, you'll develop great propositions. The second is to use leveraged data and technology for predictive behavior. And sometimes that can lead to insights that are really good. I'll just give a couple of short examples. I won't elaborate more. Wheat is one of the hair depilatory products that we have in India. It's the number one in-home hair removal product which is sold in India.

A lot of the conversations related to salons or going to salons, etc. Search trends for salons happens on Thursdays and Fridays. So it peaks on Thursdays and Fridays. Why? Because you need to do it on the weekend and so on and so forth. So your marketing effort and everything can actually get focused on Thursdays and Fridays. It's just a very small example of the thing. But once you know your consumers really well, you can tailor every aspect of your program to delight her. Once she's delighted, you're in.

So what Durex tends to do is Durex tends to focus a lot more on it's a premium brand, but it respects women. Never, never, never objectifies women. It never, ever goes to the cliched route. It actually has a lot of marketing message is a lot about humor, but intelligent humor. So you take premium, safe, durable, reliable, intelligent humor and give equal space to the woman. Okay. And these, this is the character of the brand. And that is what is translated into the marketing activity.

And surprisingly, like women tend to use it a lot as compared to a lot of the other brands. And then I was thinking back and thinking about it. It's actually a form of a character marketing because people or women are no longer buying just benefits. They're buying the character or the purpose that the brand espouses. And this, I think, is one great example of that. It's a fantastic category to work on.