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At a recent media roundtable, Harshdeep Chhabra, Global Media Head of Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL), shared an in-depth look at how the company has reshaped its advertising and media strategies, driving it to the fifth largest advertiser position across all categories in India. Chhabra’s insights reveal a brand on the rise - leveraging data, technology, hyper-local understanding, and a clear focus on long-term brand building to fuel growth even as overall ad expenditure sees nuanced shifts.
In the latest quarter, GCPL’s ad spend declined by 5.15 percent to Rs 313.83 crore, down from Rs 330.82 crore in the same period last year.
“This aligns with our approach of maximizing reach at the lowest possible cost,” Chhabra explained. “Our goal is to invest where we see a healthy awareness-to-trial ratio. Earlier, we corrected our 8:20 ratio, and now we are investing at the right level.”
The company’s advertising remains robust, with GCPL ranking as the third-largest advertiser on television and among the top five advertisers across all media categories in India. “We continue to invest behind our brands, focusing on the lowest cost per attentive reach,” he said.
GCPL’s rise in advertiser rankings has been remarkable. In 2021, the company ranked 17th among Indian advertisers across all media; by 2023, it jumped to 5th. Over two years, GCPL’s ad spends increased 2.5 times, matching its business growth.
On linear TV, GCPL is now the third-largest advertiser with a 5 percent share of Gross Rating Points (GRPs), standing out as the only Indian-origin brand in the top five advertisers.
Addressing questions about ad spend increases and soft performance, Chhabra reiterated that GCPL’s objective remains maximizing reach at minimum cost, focusing investments in markets with healthy awareness-to-trial conversion.
“As MASH (Media Allocation and Spends Harmonization) - in-house agency at GCPL - evolves and more functions move in-house, we better control costs. Strategic partnerships and negotiations have improved our media buying power,” he noted.
Importantly, “Our reach has not dropped compared to last year. For the same GRPs, we deliver more reach than competitors and more than we did months ago. That’s the metric that matters.”
Transition from Madison to Essencemediacom
On the transition from Madison to Essence Media Company, Chhabra explained the rationale behind the shift.
Chhabra acknowledged Madison’s valuable partnership with GCPL over many years, praising their senior management involvement and commitment across brands. However, after a rigorous pitch process, GCPL chose Essence Media to gain a broader global perspective from India.
“Larger organisations like Essence can deliver scale and global insight better than independents, which was key for us,” he said. Madison continues to be an important partner for several group companies, with GCPL respecting the legacy and value they have provided.
GCPL balances in-housing with external collaboration to protect proprietary insights while working with partners like Essence in India, WTP Media in Indonesia, and Kara in South Africa. Chhabra emphasized finding the right mix to support cost efficiency and strategy rather than favoring in-housing or outsourcing exclusively.
Essence Media is GCPL’s primary partner across 20 countries, providing expertise in trading, troubleshooting, talent, and technology to enhance media buying, insights, talent development, and proprietary tools.
Media Mix
Chhabra emphasized that print remains vital in India despite global predictions of its decline. He noted print’s reinvention through performance-linked models and its unique role in building credible, fast reach. Although print has high production costs passed to advertisers, its editorial content adds trust and authenticity that resonates with consumers.
“For us, print is used in very specific formats. The main challenge is its high entry and production costs. Newspapers incur significant expenses in printing, which naturally get passed on to advertisers,” he explained. In contrast, producing the same content online is far cheaper, making print comparatively expensive.
Despite the cost, Chhabra believes print offers unique advantages, particularly in building fast reach with strong credibility. “Editorial content in print is vital for education and authenticity. The original influencer in this country is the newspaper editor. Being part of print adds a layer of trust and legitimacy.” When a newspaper covers issues such as a dengue outbreak and highlights a product as a solution, that messaging tends to resonate more deeply, backed by the credibility of the medium.
Chhabra acknowledged that TV and digital offer more cost-efficient consumer reach, with internet-based media growing rapidly. Linear TV still holds a significant share due to its mass reach at reasonable costs. GCPL uses a unified budget, dynamically shifting spend across platforms to achieve the lowest cost per consumer reach, rather than allocating fixed amounts to digital or traditional media.
Addressing shifting media consumption trends, Chhabra noted, “Most of the growth today is happening in internet-based media. We’re seeing significant investment flowing into linear TV content on digital platforms like YouTube and OTT services.” Yet, linear TV remains a consistent part of their media mix, still accounting for a substantial share of their investments. “We haven’t seen a sudden drop from 70 percent to 10 percent in six months. Linear TV continues to provide mass reach at a very reasonable cost.”
When asked whether GCPL has separate budgets for connected TV or digital, Chhabra emphasized the company’s unified approach. “Our budget is focused solely on reaching consumers at the lowest cost possible. Our MASH ecosystem continually optimizes media spend, reallocating funds across platforms based on who can deliver the cheapest consumer reach at any given time.”
Brand Building
A key driver behind GCPL’s success, Chhabra emphasized, is the company’s renewed focus on brand building over the last three to four years, especially since the arrival of CEO Sudhir Sitapati.
“We believe anyone can make a product, but it takes branding to create enduring consumer love, as we have seen with Godrej No. 1—India’s third-largest soap brand,” said Chhabra. This philosophy underpins investments in innovations like the Godrej Fab liquid detergent priced at Rs 99 and strategic acquisitions including Park Avenue and KamaSutra, broadening GCPL’s market reach.
GCPL operates in 80 countries with flagship operations in seven. For this discussion, Chhabra focused on India, where the company has not only scaled up but also refined its media strategy to address the country’s complex diversity.
Historically, Indian-origin companies favoured direct-to-line (DTL) spends, prioritising sales promotions and below-the-line marketing over above-the-line (ATL) brand building. Multinationals typically led in ATL investment.
“We consciously broke that pattern,” said Chhabra. GCPL has significantly increased investments in ATL media, balancing short-term sales growth with the strengthening of long-term brand equity.
GCPL’s marketing approach is rooted in Byron Sharp’s seminal book How Brands Grow.
One of GCPL’s standout strategies involves spending 10 days each quarter visiting consumers’ homes, retailers, and local media owners. These immersive field visits have unearthed valuable local insights missing from syndicated data.
“For example, Oriya channels often outperform Hindi channels in Odisha, even in markets where Hindi is spoken. In Maharashtra, the south prefers Marathi content, while the north leans toward Hindi,” Chhabra shared.
Such granular understanding informs hyper-local media investments that are first tested in smaller markets and scaled once proven successful, allowing GCPL to efficiently allocate budgets for maximum impact.
When asked about how much GCPL relies on BARC data, Chhabra explained that while BARC is an important input, the company does not depend on it exclusively. “We rely on multiple data sources. BARC is certainly a critical part of that mix, but what matters most to us is how the data translates into actual business impact.”
BARC helps GCPL understand competitive dynamics as well, and the company is keen to collaborate with BARC for more advanced cross-team management and better reporting. “We want to be part of that journey, which is why we’re actively working with them through the ICB,” he said.
Besides BARC, GCPL also uses data from TAM and other sources, including audio beacon technology, to get a more complete picture of viewership and consumer behavior. “It’s about combining multiple reliable currencies to get the fullest insight,” Chhabra noted.
He emphasised that if BARC continues to evolve and improve its measurement capabilities, it could become the definitive solution for the industry. “10 to 15 years ago, concerns about private interests in measurement led to BARC’s formation. For us, if BARC can deliver robust and recent data, it’s the right way forward, especially since it involves all stakeholders.”
Still, GCPL remains open to working with other agencies and exploring additional data sources to gain competitive advantage or fill gaps. “But honestly, if BARC is as robust as it can be, it simplifies our work and helps us make better decisions.”
Tech-Driven Media Planning
GCPL has transformed media planning with an in-house proprietary tool named MASH. This innovation has tripled the number of campaigns the company runs annually, reduced dependence on agencies, and sped up campaign planning from days to minutes.
“MASH enables us to fully align media plans with business priorities,” Chhabra explained. “It was already in place when I joined, but we continue to evolve it with dedicated resources and SaaS partners such as EssenceMediacom.”
GCPL’s proprietary MASH platform has tripled campaign output and shortened planning from days to minutes. Additionally, an insourced programmatic team manages campaigns across 20 countries, reducing costs and boosting transparency.
Key Trends
Chhabra outlined ten key trends GCPL is preparing for, moving from broad macro shifts to tactical execution. A major change is the move from traditional reach metrics to “attentive reach,” where AI and in-home attention studies measure actual eyes-on-screen during ads. This approach integrates data from BARC, Meta, YouTube, OTT platforms, and print to better assess real engagement.
Another significant shift is from mass reach to hyper-local and hyper-personalized targeting. Using the “GAGA” framework—Geography, Affluence, Gender, and Age—GCPL focuses on high-value consumer segments while ensuring cost efficiency.
He also pointed to the consolidation of media ecosystems, which he predicts will be dominated by a “3+1” platform structure, alongside the potential revival of Doordarshan and the rise of an Indian equivalent to TikTok.
Additional trends include moving from Hindi-first to local dialects to better address micro-markets, and shifting from traditional media buying to programmatic reservation, enabled by technology that allows cross-platform inventory procurement.
AI-Led Content Factory
To counter the high cost and inefficiency of influencer marketing, GCPL is pioneering an AI-driven content factory, currently piloted in South Africa with plans for a global rollout.
Chhabra explained, “We collect raw content inspiration from public platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, which we then filter through our brand guidelines and trending formats to ensure relevance and consistency.” He added, “Using advanced AI tools, including JSON automation, we transform this material into coherent storytelling designed to capture attention within an eight-second window.”
The outcome, Chhabra noted, is “high-quality, brand-safe, and repeatable videos produced rapidly and cost-effectively — achieving in one hour what used to take 15 days.”
He emphasised the innovation’s personalisation potential, saying, “This system allows us to offer one-to-one personalisation, where consumers can opt in to see product visuals tailored specifically to them, combining the benefits of scale with highly individualised engagement.”
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