The months of February and March have been hectic on work and personal commitments hence my 26 Weeks Inspiration Journey has been slower than plan. Amongst the interesting events that I have enjoyed learning from are the ASU GSV India Summit (the biggest Education/Edtech gathering in India) and the recent release of the Indus Valley Report by Blume Ventures. But those are stories for another day. Today, I will talk about what I have learnt from Harit Nagpal, one of the sharpest minds in business and marketing in India and the author of the recently released book, ADAPT.
Flashback to my Eklavya moment with Harit. Two of the most loved icons in Indian advertising have been the Hutch/Vodafone pug and the Vodafone ZooZoos. Both icons were created when Ogilvy (the designated creative agency) found a bold client in Harit, who used to head marketing for Vodafone back in the day. Hence, many years later when I had an opportunity to work on the Vodafone brand, I got the privilege of harnessing both icons (the pug to launch Vodafone 4G in India and the ZooZoos to become Ninja ZooZoos to talk about Vodafone’s Customer Service offerings) as well as building the third “brand asset” in the Vodafone stable – the Asha-Bala “second honeymoon” campaign which captured hearts (and market share) in IPL 2017.
As luck would have it, the irrepressible (late) Anant Rangaswami organised a panel for Zee Melt 2017 (picture courtesy bestmediainfo) and he wanted to have both Harit and me for a discussion on “How Marketing Has Changed in the Digital Century” and that is where I first spent time with Harit. The reason I share this story is that part of the courage to launch an (unlikely) campaign featuring an old couple played by unknown actors – in the heat of young celebrity-heavy IPL – came from the path that Harit had carved in his own journey at Vodafone. Harit did not know at that time, about how he inspired me but those learnings helped me work with our Vodafone-Ogilvy combine to craft and execute one of the most iconic campaigns of 2017. The other part of courage came from my boss & mentor, Sandeep Kataria (now Global CEO at Bata), but that again, is a story for another day.
Hence, when I read Harit’s recently launched book, ADAPT – based on his nearly four decades of building businesses and brands across Unilever (Lakme), Shoppers Stop, Hutch/Vodafone and Tata Play (earlier Tata Sky), three key lessons stand out. First, here were some fundamental building blocks of business (from segmentation and targeting to consumer intimacy and leadership) told in an refreshing format of fictional stories set around the world (and one in Jupiter’s moon for good measure!). Hence, business lessons told through human stories which is more evocative for me than some theory and frameworks put together into a narrative. Second lesson from Adapt is the importance of connecting the fundamentals of business to a continuous learning loop of how to keep your radar open to consumers, category and competition – and the checklist of 100 questions to ponder, which Harit provides at the end of each of the 10 chapters is certainly a useful tool-kit for this journey whether one is a corporate leader or an entrepreneur. And lesson three is the value of diverse experiences.
From brand building to culture building, the 10 business stories in Adapt are replete with lessons distilled from a variety of challenging situations while highlighting some of the constants which do not change, when you are putting in the building blocks of business.
For example, in real life, we do know of Harit, as the CEO of Tata Sky (now Play) personally getting involved in consumer complaints resolution (“Your Subscriber Number please?”) on social media platforms, as a way to test process and TATs in his teams. The one minor grouse though that I have with Adapt, is Chapter 6 where, going by the story-flow, Addae perhaps needs a better quality VP of Marketing! That apart, I enjoyed the Adapt journey and have been constantly inspired by Harit’s life journey.
Here’s to fortnightly inspirations & distillations across 2024. Would love to have you on the journey.
Siddharth Banerjee is one of India’s leading business leaders and a well-regarded marketer across diverse industries. All views expressed are personal.