A new partnership is possible only when you open up your mind and avenues to reach out. Unless both the partners think and feel in the same way about a common in-synced business strategy, the partnership can never exist. Success will come soon if both ends work on a similar pattern but different ideas & out of the box approaches towards the success of their common goal.
1. Tell us about your upbringing, background & journey.
I was born into a middle-class family and grown up in a sleepy suburb in a joint family of 30 people living under the same roof. Both of my parents were working and I lost my father at a pretty early age. I was always a perpetually creative mind and an admirable artist inside but hardly could start my career with anything to do directly with art.
I finished my studies in pure science and took a diploma in Computer integrated Marketing Mgmt. and started my career in Visual Merchandising since I was just 21. It gradually progressed to being a professional in Event management and I got the opportunity to work with some of the best brands and corporates of the country like Zee TV, Amway Enterprise, Media Creations, Intus, and Radio Mirchi, etc.
Within 5 years I started gaining momentum for my effort and started working with ABP, the biggest media conglomerate of the east. Hold credentials of steering brand Promotional Events for different Brands (e.g.: Anandabazar Patrika, The Telegraph, Desh, Anandalok, Sananda, Unish-Kuri, etc.); instrumental in promotional AV/ Film making & as well as Documentary direction for several Brands. Having momentum feels good.
Those days when you feel propelled by an invisible force and everything falls into place can seem like a coincidence when that happens. After the happy stint with the company for 6 years I moved on to the Travel industry for a shorter period and gradually within a year I moved on to Hospitality.
It was DAIWIK Hotels, (previously the owners of INOX cinema) who has developed a spiritually aligned Hotel brand, a star hotel group with its business acumen spread for all the major pilgrimages of the country. It’s been 10 years I have been working with them as the Deputy Manager of Brands and Programming.
I have a total of 21 years of experience in Marketing Management, Brand Management, Publishing, Advertising, New Product Launches, Consumer promotions, Digital Marketing, etc. It has been fantastic so far to create engaging content for several websites and different Brands for a robust SMO (Social Media Operations), Managing and curating daily content for Brand engagements. Managing the Brand pages for SM, Digital Marketing & designing the campaigns through many creative platforms like graphics/illustration/doodles/ cartoons and photography. Presently I am pursuing to develop my own cloud kitchen brand and since it’s opened last year it’s getting rave reviews!
2. How did you choose this field & what led you to rise to the highest echelons?
I started developing brands not under any direct influence rather intuitively. It just happened over the years when I got the understanding that developing a brand is a strategic process of creating engaging content using multiple platforms and purposely aligning the brand image with its deliverables. The vision and mission have to be distinguishingly different from similar brands and this takes one brand to its desired TG gradually.
I don’t think I have reached a platform yet but yes as they say the journey is much important than the destination thus I started appreciating the platform of Marketing Communication and learning through it daily.
3. What advice do you have for people who want to rise in a corporate environment?
It’s difficult to rise in a corporate setup if your individual goal doesn’t match the footsteps of your role and goal in the company because total sync always helps. The in-depth knowledge about the products/services that the organization is offering is very very important for the individual, as well as the know-how, ’s about how all the other departments work.
If the ground knowledge and experience of an individual goes hand in hand with the organization’s strategy then soon it creates a niche curve for the growth of the company that always leads to a beneficial and win-win situation for both.
4. How has branding changed over the years?
Majorly. We as a generation belongs to the late seventies have seen and experienced a drastic change that took place in between. The evolution of Branding has achieved some major milestones over the last 10 years, where it had to adapt and welcome a major change (if not a complete makeover) to suit new mediums and adjust to newer audiences constantly.
From the age of a pager to an iPhone-driven, digitally enthusiastic generation where a wireless telecommunications device at its intelligent best, we have seen the changing face of Indian brandings and had to adapt the algorithms slowly because there weren’t any alternatives.
Since 2006 when Facebook started appearing in the Social media circuit it has been a tumultuous roller coaster ride for connecting people across the planet and gradually connecting brands as well. So a significant change in the approach of advertising was slowly emerged and took a visible shape in all these 15 years of Timeline.
We can divide this into the Pre-Social Media period where branding meant spending a fortune through Print media, radio advertisements, or the extravagant spent on Billboards and the Post-Social media resurgence of personalized advertisements, subtle brandings, guerilla marketing, and a lot more advanced new tools. It’s possible now for a Brand to personally reach and approach their target group of people or vice versa, segregating them topographically and reaching to them personally over a call/chat/AI or through other social media platforms which started a revolutionary change in the idiom of Branding.
5. How should one approach a new partnership for success?
A new partnership is possible only when you open up your mind and avenues to reach out. Unless both the partners think and feel in the same way about a common in-synced business strategy, the partnership can never exist. Success will come soon if both ends work on a similar pattern but different ideas & out of the box approaches towards the success of their common goal.
6. What are your future plans?
I have mentioned earlier, I have started two things seriously since the last idle year of lockdown. First, I have started positioning myself as a Brand influencer and worked towards developing different brands on a freelance model of work, and Second, I have started my own cloud kitchen Brand which unfolded its wings to different avenues within a quick span of time. The year of the pandemic has given all of us the opportunity to rethink and reschedule our priorities and work on attaining new horizons.
7. Which is your favorite book and why?
Ans. It’s not one and many for me actually. Because there are plenty of extremely well-written books across the world which teaches us the value of life and times, which shows us the guiding light or which simply works like the message of God as we often been hunting for an answer and a sudden excerpt of a chapter shows you the appropriate reply we have been looking for. A few favorites of mine are as follows, “One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia”, “Gitanjali – The Song Offerings by Tagore”, “Wise and Otherwise by Sudha Murthy” and there are lots like these.
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