A Marketer Who Relishes Brand Building, History and Writing
When I stumbled on Sandeep Nair’s personal website, I was intrigued. He was as fascinated by the manner in which an illiterate, Irish lad became the Maharajah of Tipperary (in Haryana, in the 1700s) as he was in P&G’s advertising failures or in Zepto’s speedy deliveries. Swivelling between the intricacies of consumer behaviour and snippets about the nation’s past, Nair seemed to epitomize a certain self-assurance and curiosity that marks Indian millennials. Of people who might have been grown up in relatively spartan circumstances but have consciously acquired the élan to work anywhere. And who can interrogate the past and present with an incisiveness that can build brands and market products; or help revisit our history in refreshing ways.
Here are some takeaways from a Zoom conversation, of forces and stories that have shaped Nair’s life.
Childhood: Dwelling Among Books
Sandeep Nair recalls a childhood spent mostly with books. His family hardly travelled out of Thiruvananthapuram, where he grew up. “It was 17 years spent within a 2-kilometer radius,” Sandeep says. As employees of Government-owned enterprises, his parents sought stability more than anything else. As soon as he was old enough to make that kind of choice, Nair yearned for the opposite. For the thrill and trepidation of forays into the unfamiliar. He wished to encounter the kind of people he had encountered only in books or movies. Folks who spoke obscure languages, or who stemmed from vastly different cultures.
But as it were, inhabiting a circumscribed bookish life had its payoffs. When it came to his ICSE Board exams, he not only stood first in his school, he also topped his district and ranked second in South India. But his reading did something else too. It accorded a sense of how fascinating subjects like history could be, especially if you ignored the dry, factual textbooks and explored imaginatively-penned stories. For instance, he was beguiled by a Malayalam book called Aithihyamala, a compendium of legends about poets and magicians, rulers and courtiers.
Becoming A Hands-on Engineer at Tata Motors
Despite his entry into an Engineering program for his Bachelor’s degree, he never quite forgot his attraction to history, and particularly to the stories that were threaded into the sea-fringed, river-licked Kerala that he had been raised in. In the meanwhile, though, he needed to build a pragmatic career. Most of his peers treated their degrees as passports into MBA programs or into Master’s Admissions in the U.S. But Sandeep wanted to use his four-year education in Nagpur at a hands-on electrical engineering job.
At his first stint with Tata Motors, his career plans were to undergo an unforeseen shift. The first problem assigned to him was not exactly electrical in nature. He realizes, in retrospect, that the organization had a somewhat intractable issue that was waiting to be offloaded on an unwitting entrant. The plant had invested in a high-end robotics system based on RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. The thrust was for each step of the engine manufacturing process to be inscribed on a chip, so that if customers called in later with complaints, the chip would reveal the exact steps that the engine had been through. For some reason, many steps were not being captured as intended.
Despite googling his way through the workings of RFID and that particular system, Nair was baffled. There didn’t seem to be any discernible problem with the robotics system. Besides, the original German engineers had also visited the site, and had been equally flummoxed by the plant’s complaints. After all, when the Germans had flown down and observed the site, the data capture was 100%. But after they had returned, data capture again fell to about 60%, implying a worrisome loss.
After a couple of months on the project, after examining every aspect of the complex system, Nair himself was ready to give up. At that stage, Tata Motors was almost willing to mothball the system. Around then, Sandeep started chatting with one of the line workers. When the worker discovered what Sandeep was grappling with, the former had a sense of what was happening. Since workers were still being incentivized on throughput – the number of engines completed over a time period – they were manually braking the RFID system and pushing the engine forward, as they were unwilling to forgo the extra 10 seconds for the system to inscribe the step. In the presence of the German engineers, they did not manually disrupt the process. But once the foreigners had departed, they returned to shaving off what felt like a wasteful 10 seconds and a potential reduction in incentives.
Sandeep himself was struck by how a so-called Engineering problem was in reality a human problem. He realized too that he was more intrigued by the nuances of human behaviour than by the makeup of machines. So he applied himself to cracking the competitive CAT exam and gaining admission to IIM-Bangalore, steering his move into a Marketing role.
Consumer Insights Fuel Marketing Breakthroughs
Fulfilling a long-term hankering to work abroad, his first Marketing job was with Head and Shoulders at Singapore. In 2012, their team was among the first to launch a male grooming line. He also worked on a comprehensive rebranding of Head and Shoulders. Even today, he says that if we walk into any retail outlet in Bangalore, Delhi or London, and pick up a Head and Shoulders bottle, we are likely to choose a product that was formulated and designed by Nair’s team.
In 2015, he moved to London to work at Reckitt Benckiser. During that period, Dettol – a brand owned by the company – was attempting to sell an automated hand wash system. Intended to replace pump-based liquid hand washes, the new device was powered by a sensor to recognize your hand and dispense dollops of soap. The automated device was priced at about 10 pounds, and the refills at 2.49 pounds were at least a pound more than other refills. Sandeep observes that the Dettol marketers had been inspired by the Gillette model – wherein, the original device was reasonably priced, but the refills were “freakishly expensive. The idea is that once you’ve bought a razor, you feel like you might as well buy the blades.”
Unfortunately, in this case, the refills weren’t moving off the shelves. In retailing terms, the “rotation was extremely slow.” It reached a point when the trade folks said they would be pulling the product off their shelves. At that stage, Nair was inducted into the team to resuscitate the idea. Like most experienced marketers, Sandeep knew that merely talking to consumers was unlikely to offer telling insights. As he points out, particularly in Asian cultures, interviewees often resort to responses that please interviewers. And mask their real feelings about the product or service.
Instead, the team shadowed shoppers inside grocery store aisles and in other spaces. And realized that women, and in particular mothers, were price sensitive when it came to refills. Unlike the Gillette model, in this case, they seemed attuned to the sunk cost fallacy – which refers to our irrational reluctance to abandon a bad investment, since one has already poured money into it. The team also sprung on another finding: that mothers wanted their kids to wash their hands frequently, but were wary of becoming “nags”.
So the Dettol team decided to infuse a child-centred appeal into the dispenser. The soap, when dispensed by the automated sensor, would emerge as colourful foam. This relatively simple change made handwashing more magical or fun, inducing children to use the system without parental reminders. Parents were now willing to pay more for the original device, and refills were priced competitively. The revised strategy worked and the product started moving off the shelf.
Marketing Fundamentals Still Count
In general, Nair believes that any marketing challenge can be tackled by reverting to fundamentals. Firstly, the product has to address a tangible customer pain point. Secondly, it has to be priced right and be easy to operate or understand. Thirdly, the communication has to reach the consumer with clarity. Sandeep believes that many marketers, who are educated at pedigree institutes like IIM, and live in Tier-1 or Tier-2 cities might fail to connect with those in smaller towns or lower-tier cities.
As he puts it, “you have to walk a mile in their shoes.” So if you are a Netflix-watching, Rolex-wearing member of the Indian uppercrust, you also have to watch Bigg Boss or Yeh Rista Kya Kehlata Hain, without being patronizing towards those belonging to other strata. More significantly, you have to speak to consumers in their language – whether that be Bhojpuri, Kannada or Oriya. He also warns that clever, snarky or subtle ads that win Red Carpet awards and peer accolades may not always work with audiences.
After a few more marketing stints in India – including one as the Marketing Director for Private Brands at Swiggy – Nair currently helps startups and legacy brands with forging marketing strategies. While he distills his own marketing insights on various platforms like Tealfeed and LinkedIn, he has also revived his interest in history, and is working on a slew of articles and a historical novel set in Kerala.
Writing To Change His Life
He also dwells on the manner in which writing helped him in other ways. An earlier blog titled The Domesticated Kid was accepted by the Singapore Government as part of their competitive memory project. In that blog, he had sardonically referred to the manner in which Indian parents urged their kids to get married. A reader forwarded that piece to a friend, who acknowledged that she liked it. The reader then connected the “friend” with the “blogger” – resulting in the two of them eventually getting married. So Nair quips that writing has already landed him a life partner, and perhaps it can help him in other ways: in remaking this world and in making new ones.
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