Every marketer deserves a shot at becoming a marketing great: Bharat Bambawale

Bharat Bambawale’s recently launched his book Nine Timeless Nuggets – Essential Marketing for the Young and Ambitiousis a knowledge accelerator for young marketers and an absorbing update for experienced ones. It is a 2020’s perspective on timeless marketing ideas. Arranged in three sections the book covers on -How to Think of People, How to Craft your Brand and How to Go to Market - the book brings a fresh perspective to eternal marketing questions. Who are we talking to? Why do they buy? Where do brands come from? Where are brands going? How can marketers talk to people? How can they create strong customer connections? How can they build thriving customer relationships? 

Bharat Bambawale is considered one of India’s leading marketing practitioners. He has spent 36 years in marketing and advertising, 18 of which were as a global executive with marketing communication companies Lowe & Partners (formerly Lintas) and J Walter Thompson (now Wunderman Thompson). 

Adgully in an exclusive conversation spoke to Bharat Bhambawale, Founder, Bharat Bambawale & Associates and Author, about the launch of his new marketing book Nine Timeless Nuggets – Essential Marketingfor the Young and Ambitious. 

Writing a book needs lot of patience and time. What was your core objective and what inspired you to write this insightful book Nine Timeless Nuggets?

I believe every marketer deserves a shot at becoming a marketing great. To have a shot at greatness, a marketer needs rock solid fundamentals. In the last ten years since my return to India (after eighteen years abroad), many marketers I came into contact with asked me for guidance on marketing principles, revealing their development needs in this area weren't being met. This inspired me to write Nine Timeless Nuggets as a 2020s handbook of timeless marketing principles. While my book is written with those in the first decade of their careers in mind, experienced marketers are finding the ideas in it refreshing and useful in their work. 

Behavioral changes keep happening and in the last 8 to 10 months and we saw some behavioral shift due to the pandemic. In today’s world what way brands and marketers should address these changes?

The pandemic has touched pretty much every aspect of life - in some ways profoundly and in others less so. But it is premature - and perhaps inaccurate - to conclude that people have irrevocably changed. We may have temporarily limited some aspects of our lives, but we haven't abandoned, let alone evolved beyond, the needs and aspirations that make us who we are. Of course we need to be safe, healthy and fed, but that doesn't remotely satisfy what we want from life. We are biologically engineered to respond to touch, smell and taste. We have developed to be social, live in tribes, in large villages, towns and cities. We want love, sex, intimacy, conversation, competition, stimulation of the mind and lightness of the soul. And we want these ever better, ever more refined, ever more exclusive. 

What has changed is how we gratify our needs and motivations. This is creating new companies, products and brands. Regardless of their date of birth, brands will have to make themselves magnetic to draw people to them. And to get this right, brand owners have to return to the fundamental principles of marketing - those I describe in my book - to create, or recreate, brands. 

Can you explain to us the kind of thinking and process that went behind in putting this book and make it very relevant and useful?

I wanted my book to be about ideas on the one hand, but practical on the other. That's why I've structured it into three sections. 

Section 1 - How to Think of People - leads the marketer away from the historical convenience of single-identity customers to today's multi-identity customers, and introduces them to my Customer Motivation Model. 

Section 2 - How to Craft Your Brand - presents my brand model for the 2020s The Brand Octagon, a tool to craft brands that respond to customers who have multiple motivations simultaneously guiding their purchase behaviour. 

Section 3 - How to Go to Market - provides several useful models through which brands can partner customers at every step of their brand journey while creating strong connections and relationships. 

In your book you have touched upon several new models to build a sound marketing strategy. Can you briefly touch upon one of them with a small example?

The Customer Motivation Model in my book has seven outward-directed motivators and seven inward-directed motivators. The seven outward-directed motivators are one-upmanship, FOMO (fear of missing out), attention, connection, vanity, social credit and public legacy. The seven inward-directed motivators are good sense, self-love, hedonism, joy of ownership, personal reinvention, value-added experiences and private legacy. These motivators are in constant churn within each of us, singly or in conjunction with one another, creating the impulse to buy. The motivators have four influencers: money, values, personality and time.

Here's a small example. Let's take the example of motorcycle enthusiasts. Attention combined with joy of ownership might lead one customer to a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy. The same motivator—attention—combined with good sense might take another customer to a Bajaj Pulsar. Both brands fulfil the Attention need, with the second motivator pulling each customer towards a different brand choice. The influencer of money - obviously plays a big part too. 

This book is addressed to the young and ambitious marketing executives. With your immense knowledge and experience in field of Brand Marketing and Communication what would be your valuable advice for the budding marketing leaders?

I have two pieces of advice to budding leaders. The first is: there are no shortcuts to success. You have to put in the hours, do the grind, earn the success - for your brand, for your business, for yourself. The second: do not rush into implementation. Do the reading and analysis, absorb and understand the fundamentals, build a strategy on strong foundations. Then execute - powerfully, yet nimbly.