Life and times of a marketer

It’s the stuff of novels, really. You know, that one phone call which can change the course of your life. But Vinita Bali believes it did. There she was, firmly ensconced as marketing director of Cadbury in South Africa in 1994, in the first flush of optimism and hope following the election of Nelson Mandela as President.

And, then she gets this mysterious phone call asking her to meet the people from The Coca-Cola Company. She jumped at it, flew to London for a straight eight-hour interview where the six who were called were interviewed in separate rooms with the Coke head honchos shuttling around asking probing questions.

“I flew to India later. My brother picked me up and said someone from Coke called Sergio Zyman had called! Next thing I knew, they had offered me the job of global brand director, a newly-created position,” she recalls. Bali then spent ten years in Coke, oversaw an Olympics at home base Atlanta, worked in Santiago, Chile as President of the Andean Division. Long before it became de rigueur for Indian managers to take up senior, global roles, she was among the early Indians to secure a foothold in corporate America.

Bali, who signed off a 37-year career as a marketer and later MD with Britannia in March-end, spoke to cat.a.lyst about her experiences as a marketer with some top companies around the world. Her peripatetic ways have seen her work in the UK, Nigeria, South Africa and South America and, of course, a long stint in the US before she returned in 2005 to take up the MD’s role in Britannia.

An MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj, Mumbai, she cut her marketing teeth on Voltas, working on brand Rasna, at a time when Voltas marketed brands produced by various entrepreneurs. One asks Bali what’s changed in marketing over her long career. “Well, 25 years ago, I would perhaps have told you that it’s all about brands and their equity and how if you nurture them, people will come and buy. Over the years I have distilled this to say that marketing is about commerce — the ability to spot opportunities and develop a business model to commercialise those opportunities, profitably,” elaborates Bali, one of the few marketers to become a CEO.

But, unfortunately, in India, “People look at marketing with a myopic view. It’s not about more promotions to sell more cars, scooters or biscuits; it is fundamentally about how you are shaping and meeting the expectation of customers. I don’t think board rooms are spending enough time on what our customers are telling us.”

A lot of the marketing, she explains, is short-term, driven by activity, not by outcome, driven by the latest buzz and not by fundamental insights about the consumer. Signing on celebrities where the brand does not get pre-eminence is lazy marketing, she declares.

The favourite model of marketers to snare consumers is to reduce prices. “But,” she questions, “how does this help the business model? Airlines are doing this all the time. We are still talking about only about 60 million people flying but everybody is reducing fares and this reduces the profitability of the entire industry; it’s probably the same travellers availing of cheaper fares, and you don’t expand the base. You can make a case that if I reduce the price, then I am going to exponentially increase the base, more people will consume the product and in the absolute we will make more money. But, neither in the absolute nor relative to anything else has that happened.”

It’s about time marketers look at giving more for more, which is the difficult part. Apple is a brand which did that wonderfully, charging a premium but offered many outstanding features.

In her time, Britannia moved to being a multi-category company from being a uni-dimensional biscuit maker, while it registered a CAGR of 18 per cent over eight years. Its latent equity was ‘dimensionalised’ in many ways, from biscuits to cakes, bread and dairy. The Britannia Nutrition Foundation was created as well. “The insight was that you can be a responsible business and deliver good business results while you do something for society. A lot is being written about conscious capitalism, Michael Porter has talked about creating shared value. I believe that if you can take a social issue and make it part of your business model then that’s a great way of running your business. It has to be corporate sustainable responsibility.”

Biscuits, she says, are an excellent carrier of micro nutrients and with almost 90 per cent of households consuming biscuits in some form or another, they can help alleviate micro-nutrient deficiencies. From time to time Britannia has made calorie- and nutrition-dense biscuits for the UN world food programme and learnt from that experience.

Today, almost 50 per cent of its products, including bread and dahi , are fortified.

She frets about the fact that not many home-grown Indian brands are striding the world stage. There are a few, she says, such as Titan, whose board she is on, and a Mahindra and a Hero. “But, none of our brands have that gravitas outside of India. Many brands don’t even serve the market well in India, leave alone abroad. The other argument is that there is a huge market in India anyways, which we are under-serving.”

It’s a time in life when she wants to do other things. Bali’s moved from a full-time operational role to pursue other interests, though her corporate career will continue to run on a parallel track. She remains on the boards of Titan, Piramal Glass, the global board of Syngenta and Wadia Group companies, except Britannia. Recently, she was inducted on to the boards of Crisil, the advisory board of the World Gold Council and will continue on the board of Lady Shri Ram College, her alma mater. “What is most gratifying is that I’ve been on the lead group of the UN to scale up nutrition and that has been renewed for two years, so my involvement will intensify.”She plays an advisory role in GAIN, Global Alliance for Nutrition, and Cornell University’s department of nutrition science.

Bali will continue to reside in Bangalore and not relocate to Delhi, a city she left in 1975. “I will be travelling 15 to 20 days a month, so it doesn’t matter where my base is. I’ve been in Bangalore for nine years, so now it’s pretty much home for me.”

Life promises to be just as hectic.