Marketing with Purpose with Karthi Marshan
Do you have the courage of your convictions? If you couldn’t do what you knew was right for your customers – would you walk?
Marketing a brand for strong social impact requires a nuanced approach, according to Karthi Marshan, consultant and former CMO at India’s Kotak Mahindra Bank.
Balancing the need for ethical responsibility with business objectives means understanding and prioritising consumer interests, societal trends, and brand integrity.
Viewing your customer through the lens of social impact
With the skills to change behaviour and the channels to do it at scale, what responsibilities do marketers to weild their power wisely? According to Karthi, who in turn references industry legends like Rosser Reeves and Bill Bernbach, anyone who has the ability and the resources to be able to impact society in any meaningful way has a responsibility to do so. “We have to stand up and be counted. We have to attempt to make a difference at all points in time...and people like me, who have had the privilege of having massive resources of marketing monies at their disposal... have the added responsibility to use it not just to sell product, but also to embed forward-moving ideas for society,” said Karthi. According to Karthi, the customer comes first – but great marketers are only upholding this tenet if they’re acting ethically while they do it. “For a marketeer, I believe your first god is your consumer. So, you have to protect her and look out for her interests first. Your business and your brand actually comes second,” he said.
Understanding and leveraging social trends
Strong brands have the ability to participate in social conversations in ways that enhance their mission, in increasingly, consumers are demanding they do. Marketers need to be attuned to the zeitgeist and societal undercurrents, in order to create meaningful work that respects the consumer and elevates positive impact. Karthi shared an example from his time at Kotak Mahindra Bank, where he used a merger campaign to address societal concerns about diversity and inclusion. During a period of rising majoritarianism in India, Karthi's campaign celebrated the country's diversity, subtly standing up for minority communities. "I used that opportunity to celebrate India's diversity and to embrace India's diversity, while proudly telling the story of Kotak now being available in every single corner of India," Karthi said. Results from the campaign saw enhanced brand image and awareness, while also contributing positively to a national conversation.
The detail driving change-making campaigns
Creating impactful, change-making campaigns required a blend of strategic thinking and bravery. Karthi advocated for a model that integrated consumer truth, category truth, brand truth, and societal truth. "You need to find a big consumer truth, a big category truth, and a big brand truth. And you need to find a triangulation, you need to find a vertex where they all can potentially meet," he said. Karthi uses this approach to deliver campaigns that are relevant and effective, and also socially responsible. Karthi also emphasised the importance of courage in marketing. He encouraged CMOs to stand up for their convictions, even if it meant risking their job. "Parting advice is to be brave, to carry your resignation in your pocket, and to stand up for the brand and the consumer both, at all points in time," he said.
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Credits:
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The CMO Show Production Team
Producers – Kate Elks Zadel & Kirsten Bables
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones:
My mother used to say, "If everybody jumps off the Harbour Bridge, are you going to do it too?". It's such an oldie and a goldie, but for marketers, it's a great reminder that quite often we find ourselves doing marketing strategies, we're getting into the weeds of digital, maybe we're on a transformation project, and we are doing things just because that's what everybody else is doing. But what if you didn't have to do it at all? Hello, and thanks for joining us on the CMO Show. My guest today is Karthi Marshan. He is a consultant and the former CMO at Kotak Mahindra Bank in India. We wanted to have a chat with him because he has incredible experience over many decades and has really got his head around how do I understand communities, how do I understand a brand, in his case, a bank and other brands that he's worked for, and then, how do I get a sense of the zeitgeist, the big picture, what's society on about? How do I bring all these different component parts together? He's got really interesting insights in how to just think strategically in a way that we often don't see in the sort of conversations that we have here on The CMO Show, so I'm really excited about this interview. Let's get stuck into it. Thank you so much for joining us.
Karthi Marshan:
Thank you, Mark. It's my pleasure.
Mark Jones:
We're going to get into a lot of great stuff around some big ideas actually, some big creative questions around conscience-driven marketing. But before we do that, give us a little part of history. What's been your through line, the golden thread in your career?
Karthi Marshan:
Wow. Okay, I'll try to keep it brief. I think I started life wanting to change the world, save the world, like all young people do. The closest I got to it was to start by writing copy in advertising as well as in journalism, so writing press releases by day and ad copy by night. I was lucky enough to be able to work in television. I conceived and produced a few shows for the Foxtel equivalent in India for some time. But as you probably know, all of this doesn't pay very well. And once I decided to have family, I crossed over to the dark side. Me and my batch mates at business school co-founded one of India's slightly more interesting brokerage brands called Sharekhan. We had some fun with it, but this was startup 1.2, circa '99, 2000. As expected, didn't go very well, so we all ran for cover. I went into banking. I started at a smaller bank, a government-owned bank called IDBI Bank first. And after some time, I got the opportunity to lead marketing for Kotak, which was already a very promising challenger brand. And it was also... It's a pompous word... conglomerate, but what it really means in Kotak's context is that we were in many financial services business, not just banking, so mutual funds and brokerage and insurance and investment banking and so on and so forth. That's where I spent the bulk of the last 20 years. A year and a half ago, I hung up my boots, feeling that I had done pretty much the same thing for too damn long, and therefore decided to pull back and look for other more interesting things to do in this which I see as act three of my life.
Mark Jones:
Wow, I love that. And well done on a nice summary in a very short period of time. I think if you look at the storytelling component of those early days in copywriting and PR, there's actually a nice storytelling thread through all of it. That idea of being able to understand a brand, its story, its narratives, and then now into act three, which I can relate to myself. That's a very natural journey. Tell me then about this idea of conscience-driven marketing. What is that and why are you so passionate about that?
Karthi Marshan:
I think there are two or three ways I think about that. I think the first thing is that for a marketeer, I believe your first God is your consumer. So, you have to protect her and look out for her interests first. Your business and your brand actually comes second. Your brand comes second, and the business and profitability and shareholders and all of them are in that third basket. Because I believe strongly that if you look after the consumer, everything else falls into place. The next thing, the other layer is society. This is not me, this is great people like Rosser Reeves and Bill Bernbach, and Drucker as well who said this, "Anyone who has the ability and the resources to be able to impact society in any meaningful way has a responsibility to do so.". I think it's Rosser Reeves, and I'm not quoting him perfectly, but he did say that, "Marketeers particularly have the ability not to exploit attitudes, but to mould them.". In that sense also, I believe our conscience needs to be in play at all points in time. We need to be examining, am I taking society forward with what I'm doing? So, even while I am making an ad, for example, about my product, I do have the opportunity. And this, I have been lucky enough to be able to leverage largely at Kotak, but also in some of the occasions before, where while selling product, there is something else, the undercurrent, the subtext or whatever, which is also doing something about making a ripple, getting people to be more mindful and thoughtful about their own roles in society and how we all are interconnected, et cetera, et cetera.
Mark Jones:
The probably most interesting aspect of this conversation that we've already tapped into is how you think about your work in the context of capitalism, the moral good, the social aspect of your work. And if I'm to reflect more broadly on one of the biggest trends at the moment is, particularly in the US, the shutting down of DEI and other initiatives that really are quite vocally saying, Money matters first. And we are really going to downplay conscience, we're going to downplay ethics, and we're going to downplay social impact.". That's a very broad statement. But you've outlined here quite a different approach.
Karthi Marshan:
All this obviously is in a pre-Trump world, whatever I got to do, in some sense of the word, not that I'm suggesting that in a post-Trump world or in a new Trump world, that we all need tow the line with whatever is being signalled at the moment from the US at all. I would say that whether or not we have these labels of DEI and equity and ethics and so on, at all points in time, there have been players who have acted with a conscience, at all points in time, and there have also been rubber barons. So, the two kinds of people, and obviously I'm oversimplifying when I say two, but nevertheless, the two kinds of people and institutions have coexisted from time immemorial. What's the role that people with a conscience have to play? We have to stand up and be counted. We have to attempt to make a difference at all points in time. We have to make our voice heard. And people like me, who have had the privilege of having massive resources of marketing monies at their disposal, I believe have the added responsibility to use it not just to sell product, but also to embed forward-moving ideas for society. I don't think that'll go out of fashion at any time soon. I concede that there is a risk that more people will be more afraid to do these kinds of things going forward. It's a possibility. But all these things, honestly, also, Mark, are cyclical. They all come and go. I think we all need to be both effortful, but also patient.
Mark Jones:
What's interesting about your role now is that as a consultant, you're a little bit free from the constraints of working for a big brand and a conglomerate. Which I would also acknowledge is a pretty normal thing. In India...there's dozens of conglomerates everywhere, right?
Karthi Marshan:
Sure, sure.
Mark Jones:
But you have this perspective over 20 years or more where you've seen these things come and go. I'm interested to know about the role of culture and values, so in a family-centric culture such as India, where there really is a very strong emphasis on how your work contributes to family and community life. I feel that's something that perhaps in other countries we're really forgetting about. Would that be a thing that you've seen over time? Because of course, it's not just India you've had exposure to, you've seen these trends across Asia Pacific.
Karthi Marshan:
Mm-hmm. I think you're spot on. Particularly India, large parts of Asia have a over-index on prioritising family. Some of the simplest ways in which this is manifest is obviously while Netflix and Prime Video can get away with risqué content, we advertisers have to always be mindful that it's the family that's watching television together, so our advertising is being seen by the toddler and the grandparent at the same time. That doesn't mean, of course, that we don't do adventurous or brave things. But I think needing to do them in a scatological fashion, completely unnecessary. May I use an example? In circa 2015, Kotak Bank merged with another medium-sized bank in India, ING Vysya Bank, and together we became much more significant in some sense of the word. Coincidentally around that time, there had started to be a political narrative in India about majoritarianism. The minority religious communities in India had started to express their insecurity about being in this country where the voice of the majority community was starting to become more strident, a little more aggressive, et cetera. In fact, a gentleman who used to be police commissioner, who is a Christian by faith, specifically said, "I feel like a foreigner in my own country. It's exactly at that time that I had the opportunity to create a communication campaign about the merger of our bank with another bank. I used that opportunity to celebrate India's diversity and to embrace India's diversity, while proudly telling the story of Kotak now being available in every single corner of India. It did both things. If someone wanted to be provoked, the material was available there. But the idea was not to poke the bear or to stick a finger in someone's eye. But at the same time, to quietly stand up and be counted, and I know it's super pompous of me to say this, but in a Gandhian way or a Martin Luther King way, in a very non-violent, in a non-aggressive way. There was an opportunity and we took it and we took it consciously. I won't say that we changed minds. I won't say that the country was suddenly this Kumbaya place, because all these things are journeys. But if I have the chance to throw a pebble in the pond and know that ripples will spread, and if I don't take that chance, that's when I've been derelict in my duties, the way I see it.
Mark Jones:
What impact did your campaign have in terms of engagement with customers maybe internally as well?
Karthi Marshan:
The campaign ticked all the boxes that the business needed ticked, so we were suddenly far more salient as a bank. Let me tell you a little secret about that. Before we merged, we were 600 branches across India. After we merged, we were 1,200. That sounds like a big number, but India's biggest bank, which is a state-owned bank or State Bank of India, at that time would've had 15,000 branches. So, we were less than a 10th of them, even post-merger. Having said that, the intent and the idea was for us to appear far more significant. Because in my category in banking, consumers do want to, not that they necessarily come to the branch, but they do want to see branches. They want to feel a sense of bigness, because that's where they derive signals of trust from, that my money is safe there, it won't evaporate overnight. How do I do that with only 1,200 branches while the leaders have thousands or tens of thousands? That's the lens from which we told the story that we are in. The Indian expression, the Hindi expression for it that we came up with, it will loosely translate to, and the idea was, in English, something like, "I'm in your corner." Literally as well as figuratively. That's how it played out.
Mark Jones:
So, to look and feel like a bigger bank, you've got to speak- to the bigger narrative that bigger storyline about being a bank for everybody... speaking to that diversity. Right? So that worked very well in your context. I think this is an interesting reminder that as marketers, we are very much part of the community that we're serving. We know the narratives, we know what's going on, we know how people are feeling because we're feeling it ourselves. We see these conversations. You've referred to some religious conversations that were going on at the time when you were doing that work. We actually don't speak about that very much on this programme. It's very much at the tactical, strategic, how we get things done. You are talking about a mindset, an approach to leadership that's very much before you develop a campaign strategy. It's part of the thinking and the process. What I'm interested to know is, what can we learn from how you have interpreted the times and applied them to the banking strategy? What's the best approach, the best practise, the most healthy mindset? Because you might, for example, find yourself wanting to advocate in ways that are far more stronger than your brand will allow. Tell me about what you've learned. What's been your biggest lessons in this space?
Karthi Marshan:
Sure. I'll start with a listicle or a headline. I distil at some point in time a model for myself, which essentially is that you need to find a big consumer truth, a big category truth, and a big brand truth. And you need to find a triangulation, you need to find a vertex where they all can potentially meet. Doesn't mean that all of them need to be aligned. In fact, sometimes the consumer truth may be in violent disagreement with the category truth or the brand truth. But so long as there is a conversation to be had by putting them all in the same pot and boiling it, something beautiful can and will emerge of relatively recent vintage, which means the last decade, decade and a half. The societal truth has also become an important ingredient in that mix from my lens. I feel when you put these three or four things together and look at them together, what happens is, the opportunity for being distinctive in your own category emerges fairly easily and beautifully. Let me quote the cliche first, Apple's launch ad. That whole 1984 vibe was responding to a societal concern and a mindset at that point in time, right, that we were all talking about-
Mark Jones:
Sorry, you're speaking about the Think Different ad?
Karthi Marshan:
Absolutely, absolutely.
Mark Jones:
Right. You referenced Gandhi earlier. I recall he was... in that ad, yes.
Karthi Marshan:
That's right. And Martin Luther King as well, yes. Yes. What Steve Jobs was doing there was also tapping into the zeitgeist of the moment, that there was this undercurrent in society where people were bristling and people were uncomfortable and people were dealing with an issue. He layered his communication about his brand's ethos and his point of view on top of that without... How shall I say?... putting the product bang in the centre of all this, but leaving an implication that this is my product's philosophy. And we all know how that went. I think when we try to do these things in this mindful way, the opportunity that not only does your product and your business succeed, but also that you've attempted to drag society forward by an inch or two is available to all of us, and we should take it. Did I answer your question?
Mark Jones:
You did, in a beautiful way. I would say that that approach you're speaking about, I would imagine really just can work any year, any time, any era...
Karthi Marshan:
Absolutely.
Mark Jones:
Where it's outside of cultural... In fact, it's inclusive of cultural and moments-in-time boundaries. Translate that thinking into the modern context for performance-driven, AI-worried marketers. You are speaking about a mindset of CMOs and leaders that is given permission to think strategically and mindfully, as you put it, and then execute. I see a lot of reactionary marketing. I see a lot of pressure-driven, quarterly sales-driven, moment-in-time-driven marketing. There is a tension there, because you have to hit your numbers. And there are times when you actually need to drive leads to make this thing work. And then there's other times when you need to invest in brand. Or in fact, people would also say you should always invest in brand. Tell me about your approach to navigating that. Because if you're in the trenches, what do you say to people who are day in, day out, got to make these campaigns work?
Karthi Marshan:
I would say marketeers for this problem need to play Jekyll and Hyde both. There is a business problem. You need to deliver leads and sales and profits, and you are a key driver and a player in that game, and that's the marketeer's job. But I think you need to do that job dutifully, and you need to do it as a responsibility as the grunge work that needs to be done. Because what that gives you is, gives you the licence to do God's work for the brand, which is really building a narrative and a point of view and a philosophy for the brand, so that people over time grow to love this brand, even especially when you screw up as well. And all brands do and will screw up sometime or the other. To be able to buy the licence that people forgive you when you screw up, you need to build a brand narrative, which is an overarching, much bigger story. But you get that licence in the boardroom and from the CFO only if you have ticked the boxes of delivering, helping them sell. So, you have to see that as that's the hygiene and you have to do it. But I think the mistake we frequently make is believing that because there is so much pressure to do that, that is marketing. That is absolutely not marketing. And I have the luxury to say it, now that there's no one with a gun to my head. But I've also said it in the boardrooms, quite vocally, not necessarily always believed or bought, but I'm clear about that, that is not marketing. That is to be done, it's a subset of marketing, but it's not be-all and end-all. And performance marketing, frankly, I think we have sexed up what is really lead generation, by adding the word "marketing" to it and by using this super, very adrenaline- and testosterone-fueled word "performance". I'm not meaning to diminish sales. Sales is where we all get our bread and butter from and we all get paid, so sales is super important. But to pretend that sales and marketing are the same thing or to even believe that and work like that, I think is quite dangerous for brands long term.
Mark Jones:
Let's pick up on that because many would disagree. In fact, there has been a long, quite storied narrative around the interconnect between those. I know a number of people who are heads of sales and marketing, particularly at smaller organisations, so I'm inclined to believe you, but I'm just playing devil's advocate for the moment.
Karthi Marshan:
No, no, please bring it on.
Mark Jones:
Yeah. What do you say to those who are like, "You are bucking the trend there."?
Karthi Marshan:
Yes, I am bucking a trend. You're right about that. To run sales and marketing as partners or together, again, I have no objection to that whatsoever. Like I'm saying, I'm not diminishing the importance of sales at any point in time. But to make sales the god, and therefore, to let all your brand decisions and your business decisions be driven... Because we know this, right? The easiest way to get sales is the... The right price to get maximum sales is $0. Any idiot can do that. Many idiots have done that many times over, as we've seen with every wave of the dot-com boom, and then even now in the performance marketing era, et cetera. Discounting is the easiest way to get sales. Is that right for the business? Forget about the brand. Is that right for the business? It's never right, right? We deserve to command a premium, but we need to earn the right to command that premium. And the premium is not about profiteering also. The premium is as much about delivering value to the shareholders invested their money in this business as it is about delivering value to the consumers who've dipped into their wallets and paid extra because they're buying into something which is much more than the commodity aspect of the product that they're using and owning. They're buying it both in the head and the heart, apart from for the body or whatever it is. And we have a responsibility to both.
Mark Jones:
So for the marketer, what you're saying is, they need to believe that value too, otherwise we run to the discount.
Karthi Marshan:
Oh, at the very minimum the marketeer does. Because if the marketeer caves, then there's nobody else left in the room to fight for this.
Mark Jones:
I think you are a great person to ask this next question as it relates to AI. The interesting aspect of agentic AI, to go there for a moment, is that we are now moving into an era that I don't think many marketers and CMOs yet understand completely. Which is that many aspects of the marketing function, the storytelling function, the strategic research, creative component of what we do is very quickly becoming commoditized. Whether or not it will work well in the end, we don't yet know. I'd be interested in your take on that, because I think as a consultant, this has got to be perfectly fertile ground for you.
Karthi Marshan:
Thank you, Mark. There's a lot to unpack in there, but let me take a shot at it. I'll first say that in the context of AI, one of the big narratives that we are hearing a lot about, including by a leader of one of the big banks from Singapore recently about saying that jobs will shrink and very vocally so, which I was quite surprised by, is that this is, again, not new, right? Even when the first computers came, we talked about jobs shrinking. Jobs changed, and for a brief point in time, jobs did shrink, but new jobs got created and so on and so forth. What I think we all are missing the wood for the trees frequently about, and in the context of marketing, I'll bring it back to that immediately, is that a lot of the grunge work in marketing, we have the luxury of being able to now abdicate to AI. A lot of the stuff that the human brain is physically incapable of doing, which is tease patterns out of large volumes of data very quickly, AI absolutely can do. We should welcome and embrace both those things. Where I'm a little more skeptical, and of course jury is out and never say never, and I know that who the hell am I to crystal-ball gaze, but I believe that what we are seeing in terms of creative renditions from AI so far, the analogy that comes to mind is stock photography. There was a time when we all spent big bucks on fresh photography, and then for all our performance-driven work and digital and internet work, we all found that that was super expensive, so we all quickly segued to stock photography. At the bottom end of this massive pyramid, and I'll say a big bottom end, AI can do that. Certainly, it can generate high volume, low cost, creative digital assets, which we will be able to use for those kinds of things. But at the heart of it, what is creativity? Creativity is about the brain. And perhaps an AI brain will also do that at some point in time. But today, to me, it is about the human brain making connections between two apparently disconnected things in a new way, new to the world itself, which makes us all go, "Aha.". That, I think is still in the human domain.
Mark Jones:
What's your take on how we ensure that marketers in this next generation embrace the idea of critical thinking?
Karthi Marshan:
I think it'll have to get worse before it gets better. I think a lot of rubbish will have to happen. We will have to endure that. And it will have to be a cycle, pretty much like we are seeing with performance marketing right now. Just because it is possible to measure the cost of a lead and the cost of a sale, and therefore many of us have started to believe that that is only marketing and I should throw all my bucks at it, and not listen to Les Binet and say 60:40. Exactly like that, I think there is a grave risk that many of us will move this way now and put all our money behind AI-created assets. If Coca-Cola is happy to create a Christmas film fully on AI, which is really just a very glossed-up but super cheap copy of their live action film of a few years ago, the risk that the rest of us who are much less resourced will say, "Hey, even I can do this, let me.". The risk that we will go down that path, I think is super great, so it's very likely to happen. I think we'll have to sit it out. Like Warren Buffet sat out all of technology stocks and continued to believe in insurance and Coke, I think many of us will have to sit out. The criticism I get levelled, of course, is the typical one that, "Even a broken watch is right twice a day.", but we will have to wait to be right again, I suspect.
Mark Jones:
I love your-
Karthi Marshan:
Sorry to be a doomsday...
Mark Jones: No, no, no. I just love the... I guess the harsh truth about it is, wait for it to get messy and then we'll suddenly realise, oh, maybe there's a better way. There's a shiny side to what you're talking about. We've covered quite a few different topics, and I wanted to just maybe round out by thinking about your take on different emerging trends. We've touched on AI and we've looked at ethics. I think the other one that really is top of mind for many marketers and CMOs is this idea of personalization, getting to know our customers better... You've touched on this a couple of times... but also at scale. I think it's an interesting question for you because, again, India is the home of scale. There's more than three people in India, right?
Karthi Marshan:
Right. Most of them were at the Kumbh Mela recently, but yes.
Mark Jones:
What's your take on our journey as marketers towards getting better personalization? What does it take?
Karthi Marshan:
It takes a lot. The amount of resources and energy it seems to take, sometimes I'm a bit skeptical of the value it gives after that. But I also think that the right answer more responsibly is that I think there is a point in the brand and the business and the country's life cycle when personalization becomes both relevant and potentially profitable. I think for really a emerging and a growing country like India, at the country level, we are practically juvenile. So, our real job right now is really brand awareness. For most businesses it's as simple and as raw as that. And again, here I'm quoting your Neighbour, Byron Sharp, where I believe that, "Mental availability is the most important and dominant thing.". Of course, physical availability first, but mental and physical, there's no personalization necessary for either of those things... for the bulk of the life of the brand. There will come a point when all these things are saturated, when you're 100% mentally available, 100% physically available. At that point in time, there may be value in personalization. But I think we overhype things like loyalty and personalization too much. Just because all these shiny objects are available, we try to say, "Let's have a bit of this and a bit of that.", and we spread our resources too damn thin. Whereas most of us marketeers, particularly in contexts like mine, would do far better to take all their money and prioritise plain, simple awareness.
Mark Jones:
Right. But to your point, when it does come to an opportunity for personalization, get it right.
Karthi Marshan:
Absolutely. No doubt about that, yes. But it's super hard and super expensive and super exhausting, so be ready for all of that as well.
Mark Jones:
Okay. Are there any stories that come to mind from your experiences as to maybe one example of it working well and an example of it not working well?
Karthi Marshan:
Sure. I'll take a Kotak example if I may, because those are most recent in memory, two decades' worth of work. We have fixed deposits as a product to sell. Do you guys have that in Australia?
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Karthi Marshan:
Yes? Higher interest paying deposits.
Mark Jones:
Correct.
Karthi Marshan:
Now, most of our customers only use what we call savings accounts in India, what are called checking accounts in most of the Western world. They use it as a parking space. They get little bit of interest. Some of them will buy the fixed deposits with their spare cash. What we did was to look into their savings accounts to see how many people were sitting around with lots of spare cash which nothing was happening with and they were earning a poor interest on it. We predictably, in hindsight, identified that homemakers and senior citizens overindexed in these, having lots of money lying around. I ran an experimental email campaign targeting the homemakers and the senior citizens only, saying, "Why don't you move some of the spare cash into fixed deposits? You'll get better money...", et cetera. It worked. And this is the customization story. It worked to an extent. I think about 15% redemption happened. Which was, for us, breakthrough in email, because most emails actually delivered next to nothing. When we looked at the data, I noticed and realised that the creative had a nudge in it, which was a specific amount. It said, "If you have more than 200,000 rupees in your account, you should do this.". And what I noticed was, the bulk, about 70% of the people who had moved money had moved exactly that number... that 200,000. What I did with that was, I did a follow-up campaign now, where the subject line of the email actually contexted almost exactly the amount of extra cash we had seen in that person's account. So, it said, "You can get higher interest on your 500,000 sitting in your account.". When we did that, it just broke all records. This wasn't even hard to do this. This was very simple data to leverage, but it really, in a good way, broke the bank.
Mark Jones:
What was the human insight there in terms of that number?
Karthi Marshan:
The insight was that people will do what you tell them to do, so long as your interest and theirs are aligned. Frequently, people need to be told almost in a prescriptive way. Because people are applying their mind very, very little to most things that advertisers tell them, especially when it comes to financial things. Because as soon as the word "finance" comes, most of us bring our shutters down because this is too hard to do, the hell with it, let me plan my next... holiday to Ibiza or whatever. So, help people along, but help them in a conscientious way, obviously.
Mark Jones:
That's fabulous. And just very briefly, a time that it failed?
Karthi Marshan:
You know what the IPL is, right?
Mark Jones:
No. What's that?
Karthi Marshan:
The Indian Premier League. We have a cricket-
Mark Jones:
Oh. Forgive me. Yes, yes. IPL, yes.
Karthi Marshan:
It's super massive in India. After three years of badgering the board, I got permission to tie up with most of the IPL teams in India to do co-branded cards with them. If you were a fan of the Mumbai team, you could get an account with Kotak and then get a card which had the Mumbai team's logo and some of the players on it. It seemed like a slam dunk of an idea that it's targeting a passion of yours, and so you'll gladly put up the money for it. And some numbers did. I had projected, I think, in the millions, and we barely got to a million. Of course, there was a timing issue which was, the year that this got approved is exactly the year that COVID happened. While IPL continued to happen for two years, there were no physical audiences, so there were no people going to the games. I have an excuse and an out, but the level of fervour and passion for cricket in India, it should have worked a lot better. And it was segmented, because I marketed the Mumbai card to the people in Mumbai and the state we are in, Maharashtra, and the Bangalore card to people there, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't work anywhere near as well as I thought it would have worked. And in hindsight, there's a lot for me to learn from that.
Mark Jones:
Okay, that's a great story. You've certainly enjoyed incredible experiences over the years, and no doubt you're going to have more exciting adventures as a consultant in this space.
Karthi Marshan:
I hope so.
Mark Jones:
I really appreciate your time. Just one final question as you think about... Again, back to this notion of the human truth, the brand truth, and what we think about going on in society, what's your parting advice for CMOs?
Karthi Marshan:
It's a cliche, I'm sorry. Parting advice is to be brave, to carry your resignation in your pocket, and to stand up for the brand and the consumer both, at all points in time. Because no job is more important than the opportunity to do breakthrough things, which can only happen if you have the courage to say, "Either I get to do this because I believe I have great conviction and it is the right thing to do.", or, "I'll do this somewhere else.".
Mark Jones:
"Carry your resignation in your pocket.", I have never heard that. You don't mind if I bank that one? Pun intended.
Karthi Marshan:
No, go for it.
Mark Jones:
All right. Thank you very much. Karthi Marshan, thank you so much for being my guest on The CMO Show today, an absolute delight to meet you and to have this conversation.
Karthi Marshan:
Thank you, Mark. Thank you so much for having me. Real pleasure for me as well to relive and remember all the stuff that I got to, all the mischief I got to in the past two decades. Yeah, super.
Mark Jones:
When I reflect on the conversation that we've had, there's actually lots of things to talk about. But I wanted to just pick up on one aspect of this conversation, which again, is not a frequent thing that we discuss on The CMO Show, and that's advertising, so brand awareness, that really long-term investment in the growth of a brand. For some organisations, for some brands, like yours perhaps, it's a good reminder that we've got to keep it up. The shortcut in our brain that goes on when you see an idea, like you see the Nike Swoosh, you see the Apple logo, all these sorts of things that we see day in, day out, there's a value, there's a role, and there's a really strategic importance of being reminded of these brands. Something that I've said in the past which is, that they really don't exist anywhere else except for in our hearts and minds. Of course, they come through the different channels, but they live in our heads. As marketers, we have to constantly remind people that we need to apply that mass-marketing approach, as well as really focusing on some of the pointy end around digital and driving sales at the bottom end of the traditional funnel. A great reminder there and a really great conversation. I hope you enjoyed it. You've been on The CMO Show with Mark Jones, brought to you by ImpactInstitute and our partner, Adobe. This show is produced by marketers for marketers. It is absolutely our pleasure to bring the show to you every couple of weeks. Look forward to seeing you next time.