Anand Kripalu, MD of Cadbury India, shares the marketing mantras that years of being an ace marketer have taught him
Man of success. Man of value. Call Anand Kripalu, Managing Director of Cadbury India, either. Building Cadbury’s business in India and delivering in his own words an “industry-leading performance” for years in a row have given him rare insights into the core of successful marketing. While he is proud of the achievements of the extended teams that have worked for Cadbury’s success, what he really believes is that it is not just about great advertising or a great media plan, but about creating an enabling environment where great work can happen.
Towards that end, Kripalu has a definite strategy in the form of five big lessons picked up along the way in the course of his illustrious marketing career. He spoke about these lessons while delivering the keynote address at the unveiling of the Pitch Madison Media Advertising Outlook 2013 – jointly brought out by the exchange4media Group and Madison World - in Mumbai on February 8.
LIFE OF A LEADER
Anand Kripalu has been the Managing Director of Cadbury India since 2005. He served as President of Asian Operations at Cadbury plc since October 2008, and President of South Asia and Indo-China at Cadbury India Ltd. since 2010. Prior to Cadbury, he was Managing Director, Unilever, East Africa. He joined Unilever (then Ponds) in 1983 as a management trainee and worked in a variety of sales, marketing, category management and customer development roles in the oral care and detergent market segments in India. He serves as Executive Director of Cadbury India Ltd, and has been a non-executive & independent director of Marico Limited since 2007. Kripalu is a Bachelor in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. As custodian of Brand Cadbury, he enjoys the status of most awarded advertiser of the year 2012.
Here are Kripalu’s five lessons, in his own words:
Set the right ambition:
The first lesson is the importance of setting the right ambition. Everything starts with an ambition. If you aspire to grow 20%, then you start putting plans in place to grow 20%. If you plan to grow 5%, then your plans will be such that it will deliver a growth of 5%. So what’s the big deal about setting the right ambition? The big deal is, it is one of the hardest things to do and I can tell you as the person responsible for setting ambition for the business. Ambition-setting is not just a science… if it was pure science, then you could extract data from the past and set your targets. It’s a marriage of a science and a dream. The thing about ambition is, if you set it too low, then you need money on the table, because there’s nothing else that will deliver. If you set it too high, then you run the risk of failure in your organization. We believed in our business… that inspired great work to happen because we changed the ambition of the business... we have people starting to believe that you have to go even higher, and once people start believing that, many, many other things follow.
Make growth happen:
The second lesson is, we make growth happen and nobody else does. In a lot of categories that I have operated in, we have done a lot of analyzing past data. About two-thirds of the performance is explained by the kind of ads we have made, what kind of distribution improvements we have made, the spends behind the ads, the kind of innovation… Only one-third is because of external factors. One thing that I always tell my team is ‘never be a victim’ and sit there and say that I am where I am because of circumstances. Take control. And start making things happen. Importantly, one has to keep track of the S curve. It is the category development curve, which is really the GDP per capita on the X axis and per capita consumption on the Y axis. In India, we are at the bottom of the vertical. We are dealing with non-consumption in the market; it is the biggest opportunity - the moment you say these are the products in my categories, you start finding opportunities. I’d say there are no mature brands, only mature brand managers. When I go back to Cadbury Dairy Milk in our company 10 years ago, the conversation in the boardroom was that this brand has been in the country for half a century; it has been growing in single digits, it has reached the end of the road... where is the opportunity to grow this brand? In the last 6-7 years, Dairy Milk has grown more than 30% per annum. It was about the ability to reframe the opportunity, to reframe the market. Look at non-consumption as the opportunity...put more brands in the mouths of people who are not consuming enough chocolates… Simple as that!
The other learning which emerges here is that big brands are the big growth drivers of the country... very often, we see big brands can’t grow much because their base is that much... now let’s launch new things... our belief is in percentages. But the most powerful driver of growth are big brands because they have the opportunity to change attitudes and make people consume things which they never consumed earlier. Make growth happen.
The third lesson is the power of focus... it’s ironic that in the last 6-7 years, when we started cutting the number of brands in our company... killing brands which existed... pulling the lifeline from them and just focusing on the few... when we halved the number of innovations in the business, the growth doubled. That’s something that’s against the dominant logic very often. Clearly, the belief in the game is that less is more... more is actually less...
It’s another thing that drives people to deliver great work... your belief in how you spend your money. Every quarter, we have to run consumer promotions for brands where we have to give something free with them, and the marketing team goes around looking for freebies. That’s how they spent their time, rather than thinking about how to create great advertising that’s going to move the market. But I am not for de-valuing the brand by giving something free all the time... spend all your time and money to think how to drive the right quality of advertisement to attitude change... then the quality of advertisement started going up… Because 100% of people’s minds were consumed thinking how to create great advertising, rather than looking for a plastic from China (to give away). Of, course the trips to China also stopped as a result! The belief here is that spends drive categories rather than promotions beyond strategic values.
Focus and only focus brings the power and the ability to persist. I am a great believer that many ideas in this country fail, not because the ideas were bad but the companies behind it didn’t have the power to persist... you kept money aside for the first year, you didn’t even get your distribution and awareness right, and at the end of the first year, you went weak in the knees and pulled the plug. The idea never saw the light of day... when you have just a few things to chase, you have the power to persist, power to stay the course, power to invest at least three years if not more... and the power to make many more big ideas succeed out there in the market.
Power of leveraging glocal:
The fourth lesson is true for a multi-national company, but as true for a home-grown company which has set its eye on the world and is willing to learn from the world at large. That is the power of leveraging glocal... Global+local. The lesson we have learnt is that it never pays to be mindlessly global - the world is one place to stay and whatever works in Cincinnati will work in Chennai - or to be hopelessly local - Chennai is different from Madurai, I have got to do it differently there. But getting the best from global and marrying it with local insights is what creates magic. When you look at our biscuit category with the launch of Oreo just two years back, we had the opportunity, we had the global technology and knowhow to make biscuits, we actually had no idea... but to marry that is what worked in this market. For many global brands in global markets, it will be sacrilege to change the master brand as you enter different markets. But through facts and data, our team was able to convince the global brand that Cadbury was the right master brand for Oreo in India… the first country in the world where Cadbury went as the master brand. In many ways, that was the one thing that reduced the barriers to talking with trade and barriers in trials with consumers... That was the power of marrying global with local. Obviously, we also used global brand ideas but married that with local insights to get what works for Indian moms and families in that communication.
The other thing that we have learnt from global people is that it’s not about the 30-second ad, but the power of integrated marketing communication. Truly, how to make 1+1+1+1 = 10. So it’s not just saying that I will do a little bit of everything, but how to make it a virtual cycle, so that one feeds off the other and you deliver great results on the brand. It’s certainly not just about the 30-second ad in categories like ours. It’s about the last yard. What’s the point in selling tooth-paste when there’s already a tube of tooth-paste full lying on the bathroom shelf? What’s the power of advertising tooth-paste when the person is in the store trying to buy a toothpaste? If I could only accost the shopkeeper with the right media vehicles, then my media spends are really targeted and my propensity to convert is very high. Maybe at some point, in-store media will also be counted as media. Because at the end of the day, that is what you are doing and a lot of thematic communication happens. In-store is not only about putting up displays and posters, as it always was.
Build a star team, not a team of stars:
The fifth lesson is don’t build a team of stars… build a star team. We as a company do very little ourselves… research agencies go to consumers and come back with insights that are used to create a brief that goes off to an advertising agency, which hopefully will make a great film. We run to Sam (Balsara) and others to say ‘please give us a robust media plan’. There is a film producer who is again outside our company… So what do we really do? And how good are we without the power of everything else around us? To me, in this entire system, we don’t need bright sparks… we need a bright team. What I believe is over years, people have come and gone… both on the client and advertising side, but great work has sustained. The best people have gone, but greater work has come after that. What is it that has really created an eco-system? An eco-system which is bigger than an individual? In advertising and stuff, sometimes an individual becomes bigger than clients… That is not a sustainable model. What is sustainable is an eco-system which is independent of individuals, but collectively does great work. Some of the things that we have tried to do to create that eco-system is to first make the extended team feel like the owners of the brand. It’s not that the company alone is the owner of the brand… everyone associated with the brand must feel like an owner, where you build a culture of trust and people are committed to the brand. Importantly, take mistakes in the right spirit because that keeps people trying and ensures that people don’t become riskhoppers. Make everyone part of the business… also in terms of accountability. We all succeed when the results are good and we all fail when they are not. In terms of engagement, many members of the team at Madison know what exactly is happening in our company, like any other employee. I also believe that we need to pay fairly and pay well… and that’s not an invitation for negotiation. You can’t be penny wise and pound foolish in this game. This is not a people’s sport and our ambition is that the best people should be working on our brands… and you can’t have that by chucking peanuts at them. You’ve got to believe in marriage and not in speed dating… we worked with Ogilvy for 50 years, Contract for 15 years, Madison for a decade now. These are not one-night stands, but a marriage… you stick it out through thick and thin.
With these five lessons in place, any business should succeed. Once you have created the right enabling environment and that star team, you have to let them handle it… five people can’t evaluate a great ad… it will be a mess. The ultimate lesson for me is just to get out of the way and let them get on with it.
