In the marketing space I see two-three things happening. Traditionally a brand manager came up with a brief and passed it on to a creative agency which created a holistic integrated marketing campaign with it. With the proliferation of media, we are also seeking innovative solutions such as democratisation of ideas, crowdsourcing and leveraging the collective strength to make our brands stronger.

The challenge is to provide a platform that can capture these ideas that are coming from a cross-section of consumers.

For example, to celebrate 100 years of the Coca-Cola contour bottle, we engaged in a campus connect programme, Showcase, where students from top-ranking business schools sent in their ideas. We were really impressed and amazed at the kind of ideas that this exercise generated.

The second is harnessing the power of big data. This has generated so much conversation. The challenge here is distilling the data in a manner that it translates into meaningful action on the ground.

That means the CTO and the CMO have to become the best of friends and work in tandem to be able to synthesise big data and harness technology to win for tomorrow.

The third is the power of the long tail. While most of us do fantastic work on our brands, we are tapping only 70 per cent of our mainstream audience.

But how do you leverage technology and create media platforms to find relevance for your brand amongst the 30 per cent? That is a huge challenge.

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