Saugata Bagchi: the idea worth carrying forward

As a leader, as a leader, what the pandemic actually did, it helped me build up what we call as a serendipity mindset, which is basically dealing with things as they come. And what it taught me was enabling me to give a sense of direction to my teams, while at the same time preparing for uncertainty. I'll be wrong if I say that the uncertainty wasn't at both the levels, both professional and personal, but I think that's what the whole situation taught me to deal with. And like you said, it's a new learning altogether. And I think we just rolled with what came our way and we kept on moving ahead. COVID is a black swan event. And when we started, it was a very cautiously optimistic period. The mind said, let's get on with it.

Let's create a business continuity process plan for the office, for our customers, for ourselves. Somewhere the heart, the eternal optimist heart was confident that this was a short-term phenomenon and that it'll go away in a few months. But then reality hit. We knew that it's not going away anytime soon. It's going to be, it's here to stay. And as the reality dawned, the focus actually shifted professionally to making my team comfortable in the work from home scenario. At the same time, focusing on business priorities. As a company, we were growing and we, I personally had a lot of people joining my team remotely in this scenario. So that required a different kind of mindset, a different kind of onboarding process,

and different kind of requirements to settle, for them to settle down and hit the ground running. Was what also happened, right? That the focus towards digital brand, brand building increased at this point in time, as well as for digital demand gen, especially in the absence of in-person meetings and business events. So the focus moved towards delivering superior customer experiences across all the digital touch points. And honestly, if you ask me, it was a good problem to solve for. What we did was we quickly pivoted our outreach strategies. We re-looked at how we were messaging to our customers, how we were delivering content to our customers, as close to mirroring our in-person discussions.

We also evaluated new media channels, which helped us drive effective reach and also deliver conversion. So it was, it was optimizing a few things that we were doing. It was continuing what was working for us and also scaling up certain things, which initially we were probably, you know, in two minds of whether to do it now or hold it for a little more time. But those things actually got accelerated. And I think that's something that has happened across the board, across different industries, across different organizations. Having said that, right, every cloud is a silver lining. Having said that, the biggest win as a digital practitioner was the fact that I got a chance

to test my theories about creating personalized digital journeys, power of segment of one. That is something, you know, that I was able to bring in those personalized digital journeys to deliver customer value and business outcomes, just the way you talk to them one on one. So that segmentation, that personalization, that creating stories and custom journeys, which are mirrored to what the customer requires or the audience requires. That is something I think was a silver lining in this entire period for me. The times have changed. People are calling it new normal or various other names. The fact is that this is how life is going to be going ahead. The need of the hour today for anybody,

irrespective of whichever discipline he or she is in, is to be business focused. Whatever you are doing, whether it's on the agency side, whether it's on the brand side or any other side, which are whatever you're doing, keep in mind, what is the business value that you're delivering as an outcome of the task of the action or the activity that you're doing? Because accountabilities have increased significantly. The cost pressures, the business pressures are going up significantly. And it will be some time before we are able to get back to a comfortable space, if I may call it. So till that time, and it's a good learning round. I think people who are just coming into the business, coming into

their professions, it's a good time because it will help them stay business focused, outcome focused, and that will help them in the long run. So whatever you do, keep the business outcome, keep the organization outcome in mind, irrespective of how big or small the task that you're doing is. And I think as a community, as marketeers, I believe that all of us have become more intuitive. We are even more value focused and have become more service oriented in this testing end. We are even more value focused and have become more value focused and have become more value focused.