Carat has made an industry-first move and will be the first media agency to adopt design thinking in the form of ‘Designing for People’, a human-centric approach to brand building and problem-solving.
Anita Kotwani, CEO, Carat India.
The advent of the year 2021 takes us into a future none of us could have imagined till last year. Luckily for us, at Dentsu International and Carat, we were already in preparation for foundational changes even before the pandemic hit us. With reality having leapfrogged us into newer challenges, the future thinking steps are now in full action and will help us strengthen our offering to our clients.
We have further moved to keep the human approach at the centre of how we deliver business. This has led to significant restructuring with keeping the ‘humane’ concerns and challenges of our clients at the centre. This will help us deliver better to the people – be it our clients, their end consumers, or people in our workforces.
Our North Star at Dentsu is clear in our new positioning of ‘an invitation to the never before’. On the ground, it means deeper and more seamless collaboration, innovations, and sustainable solutions for our clients. We want to assist clients to navigate, progress, and thrive in a world of change. Our promise to clients is to be ‘champions for meaningful progress’ through human-centric solutions.
Carat has made an industry-first move and will be the first media agency to adopt design thinking in the form of ‘Designing for People’, a human-centric approach to brand building and problem-solving. Designing for people brings forward our commitment to building a ‘value exchange’ between brands and their consumers, leading to a win-win situation for all involved. Our commitment to every client is to be their partners to know ‘people’ better than their competitors, proactively advocating ‘for’ the people and hence, finding the value exchange in experience, led by media.
With the year 2021, Carat is now more passionately committed to understanding people – our clients and their customers – and deeply humbled by the responsibility that comes with it. Following are the areas of focus for 2021 to deliver Designing for People in the Indian market.
Integrated Services by Design: Keeping a step ahead of the market, we read the needs of marketers for truly integrative offerings of services. We have moved to a T-model, where we seamlessly bring in the core people on business along with area specialists as one task force. In this offering as specialist services integration, we will have the best talent pool across data, digital, content, creative, social, and commerce working collaboratively for our clients to drive their business goals. The focus is to pioneer integrated solutions driven by powerful consumer knowledge.
Designing the right talent pool: To be able to deliver the integrated solutions, we are furiously shaping our talent pool into integrated solution providers. Be it client leads, strategists & planners, we have set in a model of constant cross learning’s&up skilling. Talent transformation is being done keeping the needs of our ‘people’ at centre i.e. our task force. They need to move from the T-model to a ∏model where they need to widen their expertise in the new and emerging areas beyond their conventional expertise. Laying a path of high growth for them is top of our concerns in terms of delivering designing for people internally.
Designing for Growth: We are ambitious to grow our client roster and are confident that with our differentiated service offering and strong talent pool, we will be able to create media lead innovative solutions. At the heart of our offer, is our commitment to helping clients manage the ever-increasing complexities of media, data, customer advocacy, and privacy while maximising business outcomes.
Designing best in class service delivery: The bedrock for a successful client relationship too lies in our guiding star i.e. understanding the humans at the centre of businesses. This will lead to robust streamlining of systems, processes, and discipline to stronger service delivery. As Carat, we are charged up to be the leads that are as invested in the client’s business as they are themselves. We all prosper together in this.
