Bidisha Nagaraj
Group President- Marketing
Café Coffee Day
What makes a good marketer
In my view a good marketer needs to think ahead of the market and the consumer. Marketing is a business of weaving dreams so you need to have the ability to dream big and translate the vision to internal stakeholders and the consumers, in the same largesse as your dream itself. A good marketer needs to be able to create the right balance between fulfilling the current wants of consumers as well as creating unique needs with a focus on category and brand growth. A good marketer doesn’t assume and have tailor-made ready solutions to every problem – they do a lot of insight hunting, root cause analysis before recommending solutions.
3 things you do to prepare for a meeting?
a) Keep the data handy. It always comes to your rescue when you want others to see things your way.
b) Be clear about why you are attending the meeting and what you want to get out of it.
c) If you are running the meeting then be clear about the agenda and communicate hard stops. Remember that everybody’s time is valuable.
3 things you look for when you hire a person?
-A streak of irrationality
- Passion and energy
-Good communicator and voracious reader
-Crazy curiosity
Where do you think Marketing is headed?
From being a pure support function I am seeing that marketing is coming to the forefront and leading many important and strategic decisions and initiatives in companies. This is a great trend because the Marketing function is the most powerful function in any organisation to create and nurture consumer dreams and belief. What is refreshing to note that the function is increasingly being measured on ROI both at a short term and long term time frame? With the wide array of tools available to a marketer (read mass media, digital, mobile etc.) the marketing function is becoming increasingly challenging as well exciting. Gone are the days where you have Annual Marketing Plans. Today we talk about Quarterly plans and sometimes even Monthly plans, with an appetite towards constant re-invention and modifications. Remember there are no silver bullets that’s going to give you instant results!
What would you say to someone who aspires to be in marketing?
When you were young you loved listening to stories, well it’s time for you to start narrating stories yourself now because Marketing is about story telling. Just like the way a good story teller does enough research and finds facts and data before starting the narration even the astute Marketing needs to follow similar principles .So here’s an opportunity to become a modern day dream weaver!
What are a few activities you do at your leisure?
I love working out and experimenting in the kitchen.
Do you love/hate data?
I think the word data is over-abused these days! Data by itself can be interpreted in the way you want your story to flow. Which then defeats the purpose of data integrity. What is important is to agree on the type of decisions data needs to be used for. I love looking at qualitative and quantitative data for decision making. Data is extremely important to lead decisions but so is intuition and foresight. There is a function emerging called the Marketing technologist who essentially is responsible for generating actionable data for decision making. I am still watching the space on this.
One app that you cannot do without?
Uber and Ola.
Profile:
Bidisha Nagaraj is the Group President- Marketing at Café Coffee Day. A Postgraduate in Mass Communication, her experience spans across Consumer & Retail Marketing for established brands as well as Start Ups, Advertising, Product and Segment Development and Entrepreneurship in segments such as Consumer Non-Durable Products and Information Technology. In the last many years she has been engaged in formulating and executing marketing strategy, setting up business infrastructure & processes, identifying and developing new consumer segments.
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