Jitender Dabas on brand trust and social media

It's a great privilege to have G2 from McCann with us. Welcome to the show G2. Thank you Jesper, thank you for inviting me. I did a bit of background on you yesterday and I stumbled upon, you write really interesting pieces right, deep interesting pieces so I want to get into this. I stumbled on a piece where you'd suddenly fallen in love with Iceland because someone you knew had been there or posting pictures and you coined this term, citizen marketeer, is that right? Yes, so you know, and this is again in the context of, I was scrolling through and suddenly like social media you end up seeing, and I found that I was discussing with my wife, should we go to Iceland? And the question was, did Iceland ever approach me or market itself to me? Never.

I never come across a brochure, you know, or a campaign from Iceland. Who did the job for me? That friend of mine who went there with the family and posted pictures and wrote glowing things about what they experienced there looking at the Northern Lights. And then that set me thinking of the amount of marketing that consumers themselves are doing for brands when unpaid in the process of trying to project the lives that they live or whatever the emotional benefit that they get of being social media. So the, if you were to try and put together the amount of marketing that citizens do, so, you know, and actually borrowed from citizen journalism. So from certain journalists we've come to the age of citizen marketers.

It's very intriguing and we haven't really touched on this but I'm sure we could have done because is it the case you think that the essence of social media is not, it's not the content, it's the people and the trust is the people that you trust, right? And all the corporates and brand are kind of getting a free ride on this. Do you buy that? Yes, you're right. The fact is that social media per se is, I mean, it's an ether that pervades all around us. And if you go back to that, what's, what hasn't, so what's changed this technology, what's changes, you know, our media from a particular kind to a particular kind that we consume around. What hasn't changed broadly is what you go back to Maslow's need hierarchy.

The need hierarchy remains the same, you know, from a, from a, you know, physiological needs to safety needs to then belonging and love to self-esteem to self-actualization. What delivers those to those needs has changed. So now when I want to belong or when I want to feel a little better as a self-esteem, the devices that I used 20 years back versus what social media does is it replaces all that. Hence, I'm connecting to my social circle or network of friends or families or the people, you know, strangers in a certain sense, and I'm creating that equity for myself. And often brands are leveraging that. Well, it's an interesting thought, isn't it? Because, you know, we had Rakesh from a previous show on talking about live pure and water, right?

He's like entry level Maslow. And what's clever about these guys is they've come in right at the top of the pyramid in, in the social side of it. But so they've kind of gate crashed something that is a really deep need of the people, of people at the highest end. But GC, when you, and often on behalf of your clients, kind of survey social media, just give us, it's hard to do this in a word, just give us in a word, how you see it, how you see it evolving, what you like, what you don't like, simple things like that. So, you know, if you look at that, and from a, from a, from a marketer's perspective, you know, Nikhil talked about there is relationships that are human relationships. And I,

you know, brand is a living and thriving identity by itself, entity by itself. So there are relationships that I want to form with people. And I, it's, it's, it's changed the way I'm forming those relationships. But does a relationship require trust or credibility? Yes, of course it does. The medium has changed. In a crowd of 1000 people, I would require the attention of you. How I get that attention has changed, but the need to get attention remains the same. What's, what's though, what's changed is, and you know, you know, when, when social media came about and they said power to the people, now, you know, the power is in the hand of the consumers, and it is true. Now it is in the hand of consumers.

It also has a bit of a pitfall of saying the ability of certain people to command more attention than others. So therefore, we are in the attention economy. Now, the point is, if attention is the currency that everybody is after, it's not necessary that you get attention for the right reasons always. Yeah, there's a, there's a misalignment, isn't, isn't there? Because you see these fellow, we talked about this before, you see these fellows have massive followings, trying to tell you about stuff they know nothing about. Their only credentials is they've got a big following. So the, so the thing is, it's, so, so the, the, the, the stepping stones have changed. I need, I have the largest number of followers first, and then I start to build.

So therefore, I might have built credibility cracking jokes. I'm a, I'm a standup comedian. I might have, uh, gotten credibility doing something else. But now that have x million followers who are young people or old people or the cohorts that are any brands you want to go after. Now I'm using that credibility to then peddle you something else. Which I have no credibility. But the credibility is, but your power comes from having attention of more number of people than someone else. Well, and I suppose the nice thing about social media is that, that even if, um, your financial services guy is teaching you how to do fitness, which is a bit unlikely, it will self-regulate because after time the consumers will figure out he has no real credibility,

he has lots of numbers. So then eventually it will come, it will even out. So the fact is, but it gives a head, you know, advantage to somebody who might be a fitness trainer, but has about 300 followers and nobody knows him, which is somebody who's not a fitness, this thing, but actually is a very well known image in somebody else's, some other field. But the fact that you have 10 million followers, his fitness advice will reach more number of people than somebody who's got 300. Eventually it will even out, but then eventuality is, you know, is a function of time and, you know, resources as well. It's a bit like what Lalitendri was saying, which is we're sort of in the

stage of mass expansion and now there'll be a sort of synthesis where things are plugged in. We'll, we'll see it develop because I guess it's a medium that develops like anything else. And we're only, what are we 20 years into this? It's probably in its infancy. So it's, it's currently in this sense of what we're still hit and trial. Nobody knows. I mean, most of us know very less about where it'll go. I mean, the things that were hot trends about 24 or 12 months back are not there anymore. So it's rapidly evolving and it's a rapidly evolving medium. So we don't know where it'll head. So I guess, yes, it'll eventually even out. But I go back to the fundamental principles of how human beings live. I mean, we are a physical being.

Now I would replace that physical being digital experiences, but at the end of it and what we were having a conversation, I am like at one level, I'm spending more time in a digital environment, but then I'm traveling out massively. And I mean, you know, Nicole will tell you the number of people traveling out to holidays to have physical experiences at the same time growing. So it's not, you know, the world is headed in only one way. And I mean, Lala Tendri, free market, free marketeer champion. I mean, do you get a sense that in some ways there's a bit of a backlash and that people are kind of going full circle back to themselves and you and me sitting here? So I mean, that's the, that's the truth of the world. It is cyclical.

I mean, I'm not being a philosopher here, but the point is it all comes back to the same thing. It's the yin and yang. Sometimes you swing in one way and sometimes you swing the other way. So there is this thing of, and you know, what you talked about, will the social media survive? I mean, there is a principle of kitchen sink in social media and technology. When the kitchen sink is full, you don't clean it up, you move to another one. So, you know, when there were too many followers and everybody was no quote, everybody moved junked and moved to something else. You see some bit of that trend happening to probably Facebook. People are saying, oh, I mean, too many of them. And then you keep evolving, moving forward.

But I guess that's the, but then you would come back in some form or the other is the reality of the world. And just, I mean, I like you being a philosopher. Comment on a fellow philosopher, Edward de Bono, when he says it basically stops you thinking. What's your take on that? Well, there is, there is a sense of, well, human brain has infinite power. And apparently somebody says in our living life, we use less than five or 10% of that brain, whatever infinite capacity in certain sense. But yes, there is a fact that overload of information would create some blocks to your processing abilities, because I'm dealing with too much of an information. You know, the brain would require that. And therefore there is, there is a part

truth in that of what he's saying and saying, look, there is, and you know, the whole behaviors are controlled by think, feel, do. You give me information, I think, then I give me a title to, it leads to certain feelings and that leads to certain actions. But if I am, if I'm going to have too much of information, it would have an impact of, and you're seeing the impact all around. I mean, okay. We're in, we're basically on, on, in, in the last couple of overs here, um, G2. Cast your mind forward a bit here. Um, I mean, the metaverse, we, we've touched on that. How, how do you see that evolving? Are you a buyer that's a whole separate world or is, or is it still linked to this world? Uh, you know, I come from the Star Trek generation,

you know, you know, so, you know, beam up Scotty is the world, you know, and that's the closest we thought probably the metaverse is going to go. Uh, I mean, the verdict is out in the open, probably it will evolve. I mean, there was second life, you know, I mean, somebody, when metaverse came, somebody says, this was, it didn't work, then what's what would work and all that. I don't have another work yet. I'm not an expert. I would not claim to an expert on that. Uh, there is, uh, there is this hugely human trait of wanting to transport ourselves in imaginary world. That's what writers and poets have done for centuries. And my metaverse comes close to doing that, to being able to, you know, transport is somewhere else.

So it does sit on some bit of a, you know, very core human need. Have we reached there? Will it reach there? Is something that that's open, but yes, there is, there is a possibility because we always wanted to, as human beings always wanted to do that. Well, we will, um, GT, we will book you in for trailblazers 2032 or whenever we think this comes to fruition. And, uh, separately, Nikhil, I'll explain what Star Trek is because the rest of us might know, but I think we're, we're showing our age. GT, thank you so much for coming on trailblazers. Sorry, last question. Number of LinkedIn followers. So I don't compete with any of them. I am much lower. I'm probably closer to, you know, where you would be. We're sort of the tier, the tier three cities.

But there's an interesting thing. I just want to add to that. There is, there is often a temptation to saying, look, if I put this, you know, being in being a practitioner of, uh, how to get people to follow brands or create attention, there is a temptation often, but then there it comes to the thing. And once you ask somebody about the personal brand, so what's your social media brand at a certain level, you want to be consistent with that. And therefore you, if you write some things, you have to think through a few number of times, because, uh, there is a mix of audience that would be there on a platform and tomorrow you don't want that kind of thing. So that sort of is another thing. There's no, there's no shortcuts, G2.

And, uh, and actually when I think about it, the coolest dudes I know are not on social media. Who knows? Thank you so much for being on the show. We're delighted to have you. Thank you, Jasper. Really enjoyed the conversation.