At the Pitch CMO Summit Mumbai held on March 24, top industry leaders came together for a panel discussion on how to build an agile brand. The panelists were Anuj Arora, Chief Marketing Officer, Symphony; Dippak Khurana, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer, VServ; Kavitha Ganeshan; General Manager- of Marketing TVS Eurogrip; Vijay Kumar Pampana, Director & Head of Marketing, P & G Health India; Virat Khullar, AVP & Group Head- Marketing, Hyundai Motor India Limited; Yannick Colaco, Co-founder, FanCode. The session was chaired by Nikhil Kumar, Vice President, India, and SEA & ME, media smart.

The leaders discussed the topic, The Playbook for Building Agile Brands.

With the increasing demand for consumer attention, brands need to enhance their consumer journeys as consumers have a plethora of options to choose from. Creating and deploying fresh content regularly is the key to keeping your audience engaged.

Citing how conscious marketing has become essentially important for sustainable brands, Arora mentioned that Symphony is a 35-year-old brand that launched the whole branded coolers category. ‘Thinking of tomorrow’ is the brand’s tagline, which represents a sustainable future.

Khurana shared, “Brand agility is what we immensely follow as we are in the business where we democratise intelligence to cater to stakeholders, publishers, CMOs and digital marketing managers.” 

Elaborating on brand sustainability, Ganeshan said, “It is no longer about 360-degree campaigns, it is more about 365 days of marketing. Also, how the brand builds its communication and designs its playbook to build effective and efficient mechanism will make it stand out in the clutter.”

Pampana added, “The most definite elements of the playbook are brand purpose, brand equity, and character of the brand. We prefer to evolve based on the market trends and latest learning.”

Ganeshan mentioned that delivering empathy to the customer as a part of brand communication makes the brand more agile. Yannick said, “Brand agility is not an option, it is survival as we have to segregate the audience demands to cater to their needs.” 

Furthermore, panellists described how their brands meet their customers’ expectations.

Pampana was requested to share how P&G Health India's brand campaigns made them successful in the market. Answering the question, he shared, “Simplification and articulation of personalised experiences to understand the customer and market, made our brand campaigns successful.”

Ganeshan shared how market research helps in understanding consumer demands. She mentioned that TVS Eurogrip is relatively new in the category and the brand tries to engage more with the right influencers which include auto journalists, reviewers, and the mechanic community to build a better system for advertising and marketing.

In addition, Khullar mentioned that the average price at which the Hyundai sells its car has doubled in the last four years and it is possible because the brand kept on innovating and evolving with time. In the concluding remarks, Yannick shared how Fancode uses cloud services to comprehend the audience's demand.