What Rajshree Bakshi teaches about brand purpose

Everything being equal, it'll be great to have women take certain positions and that's how organizations are thinking and it's how it needs to be but yes there is much more that one can do in organizations right now. Today with this evolving digital scenario and content marketing landscape, how do you still keep the consumer at the center of everything you do as a brand? So I think there's no moving away from that. Even more so today, you know, the customer is absolutely the center of whatever that we are doing.

What is happening is that you know with all the changes that one is seeing and most importantly with the outset of, I don't want to keep calling it millennial but with the outset of a mindset which is completely different from what we had seen maybe about 10 years back, it's very important that the brand is even more conscious of the purpose that it brings to the table. Right. I think it's important for brands to have a very strong governance. It's important for brands to have very very strong frameworks.

And most importantly, I think brands have to stay relevant. So what is your story? What is your purpose? How do you repurpose it depending on the kind of platforms that you have? That's what is making all the brands stand out. The only other thought that you know one as marketer one must always keep in mind is that some of those very very traditional brand codes actually no longer hold true. There is a level of fluidity that one has to keep bringing into the brand. We have to understand that today's audience is very different.

In five years time, the kind of audiences that we're going to be speaking to is going to be completely different. And I think the marketers do have a challenge and that challenge is of keeping up with the customers. The customers actually change faster. They think maybe five years ahead of what the marketers can bring to the table. So are we equipping ourselves to ensure that our brand is speaking to an audience which is going to be a consumer five years later?

Do we have enough robustness in what we are building our brands for? Those are the things that you know one has to really start getting into more of details than ever before to ensure that your brand stays relevant. This also leads me to my next question which is how do you ensure your organization is future ready? I think the very critical role that you know in the future readiness of an organization is the talent that you hire.

I do remember that five years back there was somebody who put up a whole structure and he had certain positions and certain roles which actually one had not even heard of. So how are you going to stay ahead of curve and how do you keep identifying the need and how therefore are you going to ensure that the right talent has actually been hired? Right. Till five years back I think we didn't even you know what these data scientists were all about. Right. And today I don't think any one of us can operate without them.

So the point I'm trying to make is that how much in the future can you look into? How much are you preparing your people for that? So as long as you have great talent, you will be able to make your organization ready for future. The second thing which I keep you know I strongly and very firmly believe is that build not for today, but build for maybe five years or 10 years down the line. Right. So when you are talking about either a campaign or you're putting up a you know organizational structure,

or even when you start thinking of what role marketing has to play, you have to think five years down the line. Five years back if the CMO had not figured out that her role or his role was going to be very very closely integrated with the CTO. You know the marketeers and the CMOs would be out of business. So today if you think that you don't have to work with the technology partner or you don't have to work with you know certain new age talent and certain new age job profiles, you're not building for the future.

So it's very important that you can imagine what's going to happen five years down the line, six years down the line. That you can imagine where the trends and the patterns are going to take you to. And that's where you should be spending a lot of time as a CMO of a company and investing in building for the future. So how does an organization today kind of make the workplace more conducive to have more women as leaders? Well, that's a great question. And I don't think we have all the answers yet.

It's been 21 years for me and I can't say that I've had it easy all the time. One of the things that all of us needs to understand is there is a point in time like you have a customer journey, you have an employee journey and in the journey of a woman. There is a particular point in time when they kind of, you know, fall out. That could either be because they get married or it could be because they have, you know, having children.

I'm a firm believer that what is it that you are doing as an organization to ensure that they're able to come back to work, you know, faster, far more seamlessly. So they don't need support through the entire life cycle. But there are certain times in your career graph. And it's quite ironical actually that when your career is really climbing up, that's also the time when your family life is equally important. Because that's the time when you're having children, your children are growing up, you have pressures from your kids, from your spouse.

How do you ensure that you balance them out? By the time you reach a middle management, I think, you know, it's a bit of a stability. But again, in leadership positions, how are you ensuring that you have given them the right capability or you've trained them? Again, it comes back to my earlier question to say, future readiness. If you are your pipeline has not been robust enough today, let's look around and understand why is it that you don't have enough women in leadership position is because the pipeline was never huge.

If today we are going to concentrate and ensure that we have recruited enough women, we have trained them enough, we've given them the ecosystem, which they needed at the time of, you know, when they're going to fall out and when they want to come back, you would have created that pipeline, which will ensure that in the leadership position, you have enough and more women. So I think some of those things we need to do. But at the same time, I feel very strongly that after a point, it has to be on merit.

It has to be there, everything being equal, it will be great to have women take certain positions. And that's how organizations are thinking and it's how it needs to be. But yes, there is much more that one can do in organizations right now. One last question is, how do you unwind and how do you kind of stay, keep your sanity? By following some very, very simple rules. I'm very disciplined about just one thing in my life, which is my me time in the morning for my gym.

Come what may, I don't miss that. I think that's a joke in the family because I go down and I do my cardio and I go with my, you know, tablet because I'm actually watching, you know, a new series or I'm watching something. You're consuming content. I'm consuming content. So that's my, you know, me time when I work out as well as I consume content. And I really don't, you know, kind of compromise on that. So that's, you know, one thing that I follow. And of course, when you have a growing up daughter, I think they really let you unwind quite a bit.

Because when you go home, there are different set of things that you have to worry about. So that is a natural, you know, unwind process that happens at home.