The second day of 31st MRSI Annual Market Research Seminar saw Shuvadip Banerjee, Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, ITC, open proceedings in conversation with Vinay Singh, Co-founder & Partner, Fireside Ventures. The theme was: ‘Start-up state-of-mind learnings.’
Talking about his big learnings from failures, Singh reflected, “For most founders, it is important to have a deep insight and not sell a product, but sell a purpose. And what is also very important for them is to very early on think about why is it they are doing what they are doing, and why is it that this brand needs to exist among so many other stories out there. Another big learning is about the drug of performance marketing. It gets you started for sure – the first few thousand customers you feel very happy about. And then suddenly the equation doesn’t make sense any more.”
“In fact, one of the biggest cribs that we, on the boards of all these companies have is, why don’t we have brand tracks in our process early enough? Because by the time they realise that they have started hitting a ceiling, then putting all the machinery into not only tracking but also creating a proposition, functional differentiation etc. could be a bit too late. In the start-up world you always have a runway, and that’s a ticking time-bomb because you don’t have unlimited amounts of capital and time to tick a lot of boxes.”
Singh also explained to the audience how all purpose does not need to be a planet-saving option. He elaborated, “If your brand naturally lends itself to it, fair enough, but most importantly your consumer has to resonate with it. Today’s younger consumers, the Gen-Z and even the Gen Alpha, are not okay with brushing topics under the carpet. They want to talk about it. As long as the consumer resonates with it, it works well. I think it’s important for brands to recognise who you are selling to.”
Asked about how he sees the battle of startups versus large brands or legacy organisations, Singh noted, “There’s so much commerce happening on Amazon, Flipkart, Big Basket but the big brands which have a right to win are not merchandising it well. Therefore, there’s a land grab opportunity. At the same time, digital media beyond YouTube was not being understood very well and people said that there’s a land grab opportunity of the audiences on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, etc. I think that was wave one of D2C startups and what they did really well was understanding how to play these channels well. Then the pandemic came and suddenly offline got shut and the pendulum swung the other way. Suddenly everybody over-optimised on online channels, discovery platforms, media houses.”
He added, “Today we are seeing the new set of entrepreneurs who are actually being more bold with their choices and saying that we are going to play all channels depending on the merit of the channel. They will launch things, figure out what is working, what has retention, what has good renew rates and then scale that up – and what doesn’t work, kill that very fast or reformulate.”
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