Chapter 2: The Making of a Marketing Man

An extract from my unpublished 'memoirs' titled 'The Adventures of an Itinerant Executive' . This one describes my experience in three disciplines critical to Marketing in the space of five years - Advertising, Market Research and Brand Management - in some of the best companies in these fields.

After passing out of IIM Ahmedabad, I started working with Hindustan Thompson Associates Ltd (HTA), the largest advertising agency in India at the time, in their Madras (now Chennai) office as a Trainee ‘Account Executive’ with the princely sum of Rs. 1000 per month as a salary. Karti, with whom I was, by now, ‘going steady’ had joined Citibank at twice this salary. So much for gender equality!

My first boss was the late Ram Ray – a corpulent gentleman with a keen eye for good advertising and a wicked sense of humor. The visitors’ chairs in his office opposite his desk were designed to be extremely uncomfortable and were several inches shorter than his own. These were intended to place his visitors or his clients at a psychological disadvantage during negotiations. He and I got along famously and he forgave me most of my trespasses. On one occasion I had worked through the night to release a print advertising campaign for the Kudremukh Mining company in the newspapers which began with a full-page ad for which the client had paid an enormous sum of money. Having proof read the ad dozens of times I cleared it for production. To my horror I saw the ad in next day’s newspaper with a glaring spelling mistake. Ram noticed it as well but did not say a word till I went to him and apologised. That taught me about the need for attention to detail, which I have preached about to my co-workers ad nauseam, over the years. 

My first major project was a competitive pitch against other ad agencies for the TI Diamond Chain company account – a manufacturer of automotive timing chains. Armed with knowledge fresh from my MBA, I decided to conduct my own market survey on the product in order to recommend a campaign strategy to the client. I went around Madras meeting car mechanics, retailers of automotive spare parts and taxi and bus drivers which provided me with some interesting insights into an otherwise dry subject. I put together a campaign strategy presentation to the Client which by all accounts went well.  

Life in Madras was tough. On a salary of Rs. 1000 in 1976, one could make ends meet but just barely. Three classmates from IIMA and I shared a flat on Spurtank Road which ran along the Cooum River canal that was little more than a sewage disposal area. The perfume permeated the entire atmosphere. However, we could not afford to live in a better locality. We had a cook called Perumal who spoke only Tamil and made the most appalling food. His comprehension was also weak. When asked to buy bananas he went out and came back with Panama cigarettes. I had to walk almost five kilometres to work and back each day in the suffocatingly hot Madras summer since no public transport was available and I could not afford to buy a scooter or motorcycle. The bank manager at Indian Overseas Bank informed me that unless I had an unblemished one year employment record I could not apply for a loan for Rs.3000 to buy a motorcycle. I was barely four weeks into my new job so this looked like a distant possibility. The one redeeming feature of my time in Madras was a visit from Karti. She came to see me on her return from Athens bearing gifts and chocolates. It was during this visit that we spoke about marriage. In my usual analytical and clinical way, I discussed the pros and cons of getting married, with her. She has, of course, never forgiven me for having this conversation. In the end we decided that marriage would be a good idea.

When I heard that Karti was returning from Athens and would be posted in Bombay and would be given a flat of her own in Colaba, my heart leapt! ‘Why not ask for a transfer to Bombay?’ - I thought. So, I did and Ram agreed without hesitation knowing that would be unhappy if I continued to live in Madras. He even threw a farewell party for me at his home at which I was given ‘The Man Most Likely to Succeed ‘award.

I moved to Bombay in November 1976 and went to share a flat in Colaba, not far from Karti’s place with another classmate from IIMA – Anil Bhatia and two other friends, Jojo Kanjirath and DG Singh. Their flat was done up in the minimalist style. This means there was no furniture at all and we slept on mattresses on the floor! This was even worse than Spurtank Road and I vowed to get out of there as quickly as possible. A few days later I visited Karti’s new flat. My jaw dropped when I entered since she had done it up beautifully aided by a generous furnishing allowance from Citibank. The flat was on the first floor of a building called Shangrila in Colaba and had a stunning view of the Arabian Sea. The furnishings were brightly coloured and even the stodgy furniture rented from the B.E.S.T. company looked inviting. 

The next day, I received a telegram from Ram Ray which read ‘Congratulations! We have won the TI Diamond Chain account.’ This was my first big win in advertising. I still have the telegram.

I needed a strategy to move to better accommodation. During a conversation with Karti’s father I innocuously suggested that Bombay was a dangerous city for women and it would be better if I moved in with her – for her own good, of course.  I was surprised that he agreed readily and gave us permission to live in sin till such time as we were married. At that point the date had been fixed for December 13. 

At the office, I was assigned to work on the Hindustan Lever (now Unilever), Roche and Hindustan Petroleum accounts. My boss was a dour, middle aged gentleman whom we called Hari. His attitude to most things was ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ and he hated to be disturbed about anything unless it was an absolute crisis. I therefore learned to be very independent and went about my own business. 

On the Lever account, I worked on the advertising for an interesting detergent brand called ‘ALA’ which was intended to persuade rural consumers to switch from using soap to detergents for washing their clothes We intended to accomplish this by dressing up an HTA employee – a mustachioed Maharashtrian fellow called Khanvilkar – in a sparking white Superman like costume with a wheel with coloured stripes on his chest. This was intended to signify the whirling action of the detergent at work. As the brand’s mascot, we paraded him through various villages in Rural Maharashtra while he extolled the virtues of the brand over a loudspeaker. We also shot a one minute commercial showing the magical Mr. Khanvilkar in action and showed the film in rural cinema halls. The brand remained in test market in Maharashtra for several months and was later withdrawn. I suppose Mr Khanvilkar had failed to impress the rural womenfolk of the state. My client – the Ala Brand Manager at Levers was a smart young man called Nadir Yar Khan who had a clipped British accent and was an absolute tyrant. He once called me at home when I had a raging 104 degree fever to enquire about the status of his various projects when he knew quite well that I was in no position to respond.

Another interesting client was Roche – the pharmaceutical company which made Saridon and Vitaminets Forte, their two over the counter (OTC) products. The company was run by an eccentric Irishman called Mr. Callaghan who was rumoured to call for advertising meetings at his residence and suddenly enter the room completely nude. I never had the privilege of attending one of those.

It was customary for a meeting to be held at the beginning of each financial year when the top brass of Roche and HTA would line up facing each other across a large conference table to hammer out the advertising plan and budget for the next year. This would be preceded by a presentation by the agency on the specific advertising proposals. In 1977, I was chosen to present the proposals. The big day arrived. All the big wigs from both companies were lined up across the table at 8 am sharp – all except the CEO of HTA– the legendary Mr. Subhash Ghoshal. Callaghan waited a few minutes and whispered something to his Secretary who returned with a bouquet of roses. I was sweating nervously wondering if this was the end of a prized account. When a flustered Mr Ghoshal walked in a few minutes later, Callaghan stood up, shook his hand and handed him the bouquet with the words ‘For the Late Mr. Ghoshal!’ Fortunately, the presentation went well and we retained the client.

One of the activities on the Roche account was the production of Callaghan’s Christmas Card, which he sent with a different message each year to all his contacts. The entire marketing department of Roche and the account team in the agency were involved in this exercise. The choice of visual and the text to be used in the message took up a lot of time. In 1976, Callaghan chose to befriend a pavement artist in Bombay whose skills were quite extraordinary and commissioned him to do a painting specially for the card. The artist was fond of his alcohol and was most unreliable when it came to deadlines. The agency’s job was to get the painting completed and agree the text for the card directly with Callaghan who would go through umpteen drafts before it could be finalised. He would fax messages from wherever he happened to be traveling to ensure that the agency was not sleeping on the job. These onerous duties fell to me as the Account Executive and it was a nerve wracking experience.

My paternal grandfather passed away in late November 1976 and following the thirteen-day mourning period, our wedding had to be postponed to the only free day that Karti and I had the following month – Saturday, December 25th. Invitations to the wedding had already been printed and there was no time to get them reprinted. We spent a couple of days scratching out the old date and replacing it with the new one before sending them out.

 We were married in the traditional Kerala style which is perhaps the most efficient Indian wedding format. Seven rounds around the fire, a few rapid-fire questions about horoscopes from the priest conducting the ceremony (to which none of us had sensible answers), a quick blessing or two, and we were done. I had donned the traditional ‘lungi’ for the ceremony and was fearful of tripping over it and falling headlong into the fire – or worse still having it unravel before a large crowd of misty-eyed relatives and have my skinny frame (I weighed only 60 kg then) exposed to all and sundry. Karti looked beautiful and composed in a cream silk sari. I was just 21 years old and probably in violation of the Marriage Act.

Karti was the ‘vault officer’ at the bank on duty the following week. She and one of her colleagues jointly had keys that provided access to the bank’s vault and both had to be present to open the vault. I had a presentation to make to my clients at Hindustan Lever the following Monday. Hence there was no question that our honeymoon would have to wait.

In May 1977 we decided to celebrate our honeymoon in Srinagar, Kashmir. This turned out be a disaster of epic proportions. Ajay Relan was a friend and batchmate from IIMA. His father was the Regional Manager at Hindustan Lever in charge of the North. Through his good offices, hotels had been booked through one of his ‘reliable’ distributors in Srinagar. We were travelling in the peak tourist season when hotels were booked solid months in advance. We were to catch the Jammu Tawi Express train from Delhi to Jammu, just in time to catch a flight from Jammu to Srinagar. As luck would have it, the train left Delhi several hours late and we missed our flight. Jammu was quite hot and a group of Tamilians from Madras were heard complaining about the weather and saying that they felt let down by the State of J&K where they expected cold weather. They were scantily attired in lungis and vests.

The only option was to take an uncomfortable bus from Jammu to Srinagar – a fifteen-hour journey. As we climbed the mountains it became bitterly cold outside. Since the windows of the bus were shut we did not realise how cold it was. Upon reaching Patni Top, we stopped for a cup of tea and the doors of the bus were thrown open. Our fellow passengers from Madras were seen with their teeth chattering violently still wearing their somewhat inappropriate clothing. We reached Srinagar’s Tourist Reception Centre at midnight. It was drizzling and bitterly cold. We managed to get an auto rickshaw in the dead of night to take us to the hotel in Srinagar’s deserted City Centre, where we thought we had a booking. After knocking for several minutes on the hotel door a grumpy fellow shouted from the upstairs window “Go Away – No Rooms Available”. After getting a similar response from a few other hotels, we spent a miserable night on hard wooden benches at the Tourist Reception Centre. The next day was spent trying to locate the Distributor who had made our hotel bookings. It soon became clear that he had done no such thing and was adroitly avoiding us. 

We began the hunt for a hotel. We also considered houseboats. In the first houseboat we visited the owners showed us the ‘bedroom’. It was quite apparent that the entire family had just vacated the room and had been sent to hide in the rear of the boat. After many attempts we found a hotel on the banks of the Dal Lake. The owner offered us the attic that had a tin roof and no insulation, for an exorbitant price. We had no option but to take it. To our horror we discovered that the attached bathroom had no drainage of any consequence. While taking a shower I discovered soap suds coming in to the bathroom from the adjacent bathroom and rising rapidly requiring a quick abandonment of said shower!

The next day we booked a bus trip with other tourists to the Sonmarg Glacier. It was a three hour trip each way. The bus driver warned us that we would have a maximum of one hour at the glacier since he was loth to travel on winding mountain roads after sunset on the return trip and threatened to leave any passenger who delayed him, behind. We set out from Srinagar at the appointed time. The bus broke down just outside Srinagar and refused to start. It took an hour to get a replacement bus. Since we had all paid for the trip we insisted on continuing to Sonmarg. On arrival there, the driver reminded us of his earlier threat and gave us ten minutes to look around before setting off for Srinagar. 

After this experience we had had enough and decided to return to Bombay. We managing to get seats on an Indian Airlines plane two days later. Having a day to kill we decided to go shopping. At the local handicrafts emporium, Karti spotted an item that she liked and when asked where it was made was informed that it was ‘imported from India’.

So ended our ill-fated honeymoon.

After a year in advertising I concluded that the business was less glamorous than I had hoped. The job of an Account Executive was essentially that of a postman who shuttled between the creative, media and production departments and the client trying to get each of them to do his bidding. Somehow the job lacked the intellectual stimulation that I was after and I yearned to do something more cerebral.  

I went to see KMS (Titoo) Ahluwalia, the young personable head of IMRB, the market research division of HTA (who had also interviewed me at IIMA) and asked him whether he would be interested in my services. Titoo agreed readily and I was soon ensconced in the rickety Esplanade Mansions ( next door to Elphinstone College) in the Kalaghoda area of Bombay with the title of ‘Research Executive’. Seeing that I had an MBA and seemed not too frightened of statistics, Titoo handed me a project from Vazir Sultan Tobacco (VST) the client for which was a pedantic Bengali gentleman called Shyamal Ghosh. Shyamal was happiest when indulging in obscure research experiments on which he was willing to spend large sums of money. My first project for him involved dragging hundreds of people to cinema halls all over the city and showing them different combinations of advertising films, packaging and print advertising for a new cigarette brand called Kingston. This was a logistical nightmare but the idea was to understand which of these elements had the greatest impact on the image and ultimately sales of the brand. All this was done by putting truckloads of data through the laboriously slow computers of the day and using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) technique to interpret it. Shyamal was a demanding client and one had to know one’s onions to deal with him. I was forced therefore to brush up on my knowledge of research techniques and statistics.

Television was just beginning to take off in India and measurement of viewership of the few channels there were, was a challenge. Few households owned television sets and most people would watch popular programmes such as Test Cricket matches, by going across to a friendly neighbour who had one. It was therefore necessary to measure the amount of ‘guest viewership’ to get an accurate picture of the reach of the different programmes. One of the tasks of our field staff was to count the number of pairs of footwear placed outside the front doors of television owning homes categorised by male and female footwear to estimate the number of guests watching a programme

 Dorab Sopariwala, an excitable Parsi gentleman was the second in command at IMRB. (Dorab is now frequently seen on NDTV commenting on election opinion polls). He spoke at a rapid-fire rate and was passionate about most things. During a meeting in his office one morning a chair fell through the old wooden floorboards of the office above his and came crashing into Dorab’s office narrowly missing some IMRB staff. This was a signal that the time had come to move out of Esplanade Mansions but IMRB was still there several years later.

I was asked to conduct a few ‘focus groups’ to understand consumers’ views about Eno Fruit Salt, the digestive remedy. The groups were observed by our clients Pran Choudhury and Kirit Vaidya, the Marketing Director and Marketing Manager respectively of HMM Ltd. the Delhi based company that made Horlicks and a subsidiary of Smith Kline Beecham (The company later became GSK Consumer Healthcare). We were discussing digestive problems and some of the sound effects released by participants to describe their ailments were fairly graphic. Apparently, I did a stand -up job on the focus groups since Kirit took me out for a cup of coffee on his next visit to Bombay and offered me a job as the Brand Manager for Horlicks, the company’s largest brand. This was an offer that was hard to refuse as it was the pathway to becoming a well rounded Marketing Man.

While discussions with HMM were in progress, I had also been interviewed by Boots, the pharmaceutical and consumer products company whose Marketing Head was Anil Kapoor (later chief of FCB Ulka – the advertising agency). Anil offered me a Product Manager’s position based in Bombay. I now had two offers in hand and had to choose.

The prospect of moving out of Bombay was alluring since even in the 1970’s it was a grim city with few open spaces and muggy weather throughout the year. Karti persuaded Citibank to transfer her to their Delhi branch and I joined HMM in November 1978.

We rented a two- bedroom ground floor flat in the tony Greater Kailash colony in South Delhi. By then we had acquired an Indian made Yezdi 250cc motorcycle and a dilapidated second -hand Ambassador car using loans from Citibank at concessional staff rates. After returning home one winter night after dinner, we noticed a strange odour from the car and discovered that a small fire had started in the engine that was hastily put out.

Within a week of joining HMM, I attended my first training programme, taught by the ebullient Ricky Elliot, a Beecham manager, on the topic of Promotions. It was held in the Claridges hotel in Delhi and the sessions would run on late into the night after which I had to get on my motorcycle and ride home in the freezing winter nights. With about four hours sleep, I drove back for the next day’s classes. During these sessions, I learnt the valuable lesson that there are basically three types of consumer promotions – those that encourage TRIAL of a product, those that encourage LOYALTY to the product and LOADING promotions or those that encourage more consumption. This was a framework that proved to be very useful while designing promotions for my brand.

The job of a brand manager is often described as one with a great deal of responsibility and no authority. Philip Kotler, the marketing guru also says that one of the skill requirements of the job is to keep several balls in the air simultaneously. Both these statements are true. The brand manager has to keep a variety of departments and their managers in the organisation happy to get his work done. This includes the factories, quality control, sales, purchase, legal and finance departments. He also has to work closely with his research, advertising and promotions agencies and get them to do his bidding. He also has to keep his boss happy and deliver profitable results. 

During my time at HMM I traveled extensively in the South and East of India since Horlicks was consumed in massive quantities in these regions as a milk substitute. These regions have traditionally been milk starved and a significant proportion of the population is lactose intolerant. Several days a month were spent visiting Horlicks stockists and dealers with our sales staff, consuming umpteen cups of sickly sweet and milky tea and making small talk. In the process I did see a great deal of small-town India having visited places like Burdwan, Asansol , Palghat and Madurai.

Our research showed that we were losing ground in Calcutta, an important market for Horlicks. I came up with the idea of doing a large ‘liquid sampling’ campaign in 250 schools in the city. The idea was to serve hot Horlicks to over 200,000 children and hand them a voucher which extolled the virtues of the product and encouraged their mothers to rush off and buy a bottle immediately at a 25 % discount. During this two -month long campaign, I saw the innards of a large number of schools some of which caused me to despair about the state of primary education in the city. My team and I entered the precincts of a municipal school one morning to find that all the children were running amuck. No teachers were in sight and no children were in their classrooms. The school Principal was found sleeping on the conference table with his shirt wide open with a ceiling fan twirling lazily above in the muggy Calcutta weather. We woke him up and sought his permission to serve Horlicks to his wards, proceeded to round them up and began our campaign.

Each year, the brand managers at HMM were asked to produce their Annual Marketing Strategy and Plan, a voluminous document which required many hours of analysis and typing. In the absence of computers, this work was very time consuming. The plan was presented to the Global Marketing Director during his annual India visit and once approved became the blue print for activities for the rest of the year. Horlicks was a fairly mature brand even in the 1970’s and required numerous promotions to boost its sales from time to time. One of the most successful promotions involved putting a stainless -steel tea spoon into the Horlicks bottle as a free gift. Since hundreds of thousands of these bottles were sold, I soon became known as the largest buyer of steel spoons in the city in the by-lanes of old Delhi from where these were sourced. 

Before the age of e- mail, messages were sent by telex. On one occasion, a detailed plan of action involving the launch of a new HMM brand was sent by telex by mistake from one of our Regional Sales Managers to the Bombay HQ of our arch rival, Cadbury Ltd. This happened because the telex numbers of the Delhi office of HMM and the Bombay office of Cadbury were identical. The only difference was the city code preceding the telex number. Our telex operator had typed the Bombay code in error. We received a telex message from the Cadbury marketing team thanking us for sharing this vital information with them.

Before television became the primary visual advertising medium, large national brands used cinema advertising to get their message across to national audiences. This meant , however, that prints had to be struck in 16 different languages and shipped across to obscure cinema theatres all over the country, including to mobile rural theatres, where we hoped, the owners would show them to their audiences. The Blaze Agency was well known for arranging the dispatch of the prints and conducted an audit to ensure that they were actually used. However, since we had to depend on the same organisation for both the dispatch and the audit, we were never quite sure whether the prints were ever used.

The ORG (now Nielsen) Retail Audit was the bible by which to this day, brand managers swear , as far as details of their brand’s market shares go. In the 1970s, this arrived each month in a form of an unwieldy computer printout. I spend several hours each month often working late into the night at home to convert this information into a more readable format used by HMM to analyse whether our brand managers and sales force were doing their jobs well. A computer would have achieved this task which required several hundred calculations to be done, in a jiffy.

Karti was pregnant with our first child. She would visit her gynaecologist (a retired Army Brigadier who was in his late seventies) every month for a review . On her penultimate visit before the due date he looked her up and down and asked “Have we met before?” Needless to say, as the good Brigadier was to deliver the baby, we waited for the birth with some trepidation.

Our son, Arjun was born on August 1, 1979 at the Sharma Nursing Home in South Delhi. He was a healthy seven pounder and as tradition demanded, I distributed Indian sweets in the office, to celebrate. After a few months , we decided to move in with my parents . My father was by then a Rear Admiral and lived in a sprawling government owned mansion – no 6 Rajaji Marg, that was located between the homes of the Indian Army and Navy Chiefs. He also had a naval cook and valet, our own milkman with his own buffaloes and a laundryman all of whom lived in the small stucco rooms at the rear of the estate. Since Karti and I both spent long hours at work, the support on the domestic front was more than welcome.  

During my time at HMM, I was frequently in touch with my old employer, IMRB, since they were the research agency we used. In November 1980, Titoo Ahluwalia, rang and asked if I would like to go to Sri Lanka and set up a market research agency there where the three joint- venture partners would be the MRB Group ( part of J Walter Thompson, London), IMRB and a major local Tamil business house – the Maharaja Group .This would be Sri Lanka’s first market research company. I was intrigued. This would mean travelling overseas, which I had never done before and setting up an organisation from scratch which seemed even more exciting. It would also mean giving up a relatively comfortable job and taking a huge career risk. Titoo promised that I would be financially relatively well compensated and would have all the trappings of an ‘expatriate’ in Sri Lanka such as a company paid house, car and chauffeur, a club membership and air tickets to visit India once a year. I decided to take the plunge and went to see Pran Choudhury our Marketing Director, with the news. He was disappointed and told me that I should focus on ‘Learning – the Earning Can Come Later’. These were wise words but my mind was made up. I left for Colombo in early January 1981 at the age of 25, on an Air Lanka flight with Karti and young Arjun in tow. Karti willingly gave up her strenuous Citibank job in order to spend more time with our young son.