Marketers must focus on process-rooted sustainable differentiators, not just activities: Harit Nagpal

Harit Nagpal, CEO and MD, Tata Play, delivered the annual Nitin Puri Memorial Lecture at Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) Delhi over the weekend. Over 400 students and faculty attended.

The lecture was sponsored and organised by Sandeep Goyal of Rediffusion. Last year the lecture was delivered by Sanjay Gupta of Google.

Nagpal started his talk on ‘Disruption, an obstacle or an opportunity?’ by saying that he’d lived his four-decade long career as an optimist by treating every disruption as an opportunity and using it as a stepping stone to get to the next level.

He also referred to historical disruptive inventions like fire, wheel, aircraft, penicillin, internal combustion engine and plastic followed by recent tech inventions like the internet, e-mail, search engines and artificial intelligence to prove the point that humans feel that disruptions are a new phenomenon because they are occurring with a higher frequency and every new disruption is having a larger impact than the one before.

His experience across six industries revealed to him that every business felt that it was unique with a unique set of customers.

He questioned that notion by arguing that if the same customer was buying a cola, a candy, a home, a life insurance policy and opening a bank account, how could the customer’s decision-making criteria vary across product and service categories?  He had a similar argument for marketeers who treated Gen X, Y & Z customers differently from the rest and said that humans make decisions based on their basic instincts which are primal and at best tempered, though not a lot, by their circumstances.

He believed business basics were basic and that’s why they were called basic. He then went on to explore with the help of 10 stories from his book, which are fictionalised accounts of his business experiences, set in 10 different geographies and industries, to list the ways in which practitioners could harness disruption.

A very detailed account concluded that marketers need to know who their customers are and who aren’t by identifying the segments they wish to target and listening to the voice of their customers to identify their pains and design solutions for these in the shape of products and services. Listening to the voice of the customer should not end at the design stage and must be continued to make modifications and discover new segments that emerge as manufacturing costs drop with rising scale and customer incomes rise.

In a fast-commoditising world, marketeers need to find sustainable differentiators which are rooted in the process instead of being activity based which could be replicated quickly by competitors.

Regarding branding, he was clear that brands needed to connect with and endear their prospects before attempting to sell to them with feature laden advertising. He felt that the current advertisers had a short span and got to selling before telling.

He closed by saying that he was confident that the 42nd Nitin Puri lecture, four decades from now, which a student from the audience would deliver, would define business basics just as he had defined today.

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