What Sandeep Singh teaches about brand purpose

Since I pretty much joined a very young company at an early stage of my career, the first challenge which I had to face was to manage people older than me. So coming from a digital e-commerce background, what were some of the learnings you were able to apply at Beera? So when I joined Beera, when I was evaluating, I think the biggest advantage we saw with Beera was a new age brand. Right. It connects with millennials and the brand which I built before Beera within e-commerce. I've always been a digital native, digital native marketeer.

But I found there was still a big gap between how digital marketeers were actually using channels to position the brand. So the hardcore basics of marketing were not getting followed. And I always thought that reaching out to consumers directly, talking to them one to one, it's a great sort of space to build a brand because you are one, cutting down the intermediary in between. You can create your own channel, own content. And after spending so much time in digital, I'm doing it for a lot of brands

while I was in my digital agency or a digital marketing services. I thought why not do it myself? And that's where my previous company, Free Culture, was born, where it was essentially the first digital native vertical brand which was integrated end to end. We were making our own product. We were making our own brand. But I think it was a little early in its day where the consumers were very new to e-commerce. Myntra was just launched. So that journey taught me that the time of building brands on digital will come

and the lines between digital and traditional will really blur. So kind of given the space you are in and given the things you can do and the things you can't do, what are the kind of filters in terms of parameters when you spoke about associations? How do you choose associations and how has that worked out? Can you share some examples? Sure. So for us, we look at the brand pillars in terms of what the brand really authentically stands for. And we identified four broad pillars for our brand. One is, you know, music,

which again if you look at from a brand's usage standpoint, consumption, you know, points, people will consume beer and our products when they are listening to music at an event or they are eating food, right? So those are the two consumption points, right? So we thought, now if you have to build some authentic content or connect in these two, what will it be? So in music, we chose hip-hop, which again if you look at hip-hop as a genre, hip-hop is also a lifestyle, it's not just about a music genre, right? There's a whole angle of graffiti,

there is, you know, street art, there is, you know, It's expression. Boxing, it's an expression. So now within that space, we did a partnership with Savan where we, you know, sponsor their hip-hop channel. So we are kind of a presenter for that channel for almost two and a half, two years now. So again, that's a very native integration which is not advertising, right? It's a very, very native integration within the application. Right. Then on food, again, we sort of looked at spicy food as a pillar for us where we realized that again,

when you eat spicy food, that brings out your emotions, right? It's also very, very playful. So as a brand, we are a playful brand. So, you know, eating spicy food will bring all of your emotions out. It's also very, very playful. People do challenges with spicy food. So we took spicy food as one of our pillars and within that, we launched a physical product which is a hot sauce which again, you know, is something very, very interesting for us because that enables us to, you know, sort of be in the consumer's kitchen, consumer's dining table,

be at the restaurant's table, right, which is a great point of recall for consumers. How has your leadership style evolved over the years given your turning points and your career graph? So, because you're dealing constantly with a lot of young people as well from where we come. So, how would you define your leadership style and how has that changed? So I think my leadership style has always been empowering people. So I believe in, you know, people will not learn swimming unless you push them in the pool. Okay. So, so unless they do it themselves,

they'll not learn. So I think I, I prefer making a framework which is more of a guidebook or of, you know, structure where I get to review at a certain interval but I still give them enough liberty, enough, you know, space to think on their own. How it has evolved over the period of time is that, I mean, since I pretty much joined a very young company at an early stage of my career, I, the first challenge which I had to face was to manage people older than me. so I think that. And? Taught me a lot in terms of, you know, just different, you know,

managing people's ego, right, and managing, getting that acceptance that, you know, you're a younger guy who's leading them is something which you learn on the job, right, so that taught me a lot and then over a period of time obviously I have, there's still, learning is a continuous, you know, endeavor so you keep on learning and I think today also it's the more and more I manage people, it's not one size fits all, I mean, every personality is a different human personality, right, so you need to have a different approach for everyone,

but I think the overall style still remains to empower and grow people. music music music music music music music music