Building your Brand, Simplifying Growth and Curating your GTM strategy

In the next few weeks, I will try to demystify what Marketing has evolved to, and how you can adapt your current strategy to Do More with Marketing.

In more than 13 years, I have encountered various marketing problems and various consumer personalities, and although a lot remains to be imagined, but I seem to have hit a realisation.

I have had many opportunities to cipher the complex egos of our users, super users, early believers, fence sitters and more, but, deciphering your users is not enough — You have to know not just them but also their spouses, parents, lovers, neighbours and others who colour their specific buying preferences. I have tried to come in contact with their phases of discovery, usage and eventually boredom (before disdain), just like you come across the 5 stages of grief. And, it won’t be an understatement to assume that these stages do represent grief for a marketer when a user ultimately falls off the grid and stops believing in your brand.

What I haven’t experienced myself, I have observed. Because of the amount of research and data you can expose yourself to, it becomes a high opportunity area to learn from and learn with! If you spend enough time on reading and making sense of the data you have, you will learn to virtually decode people and their eccentricities. If you position it along with the softer, palpable attributes of the community in the offline and online world, you will note how your brain will start to form some early connections with the culture, theory and philosophy over time!

This may sound like a leap from the idea that i’ve just begun to share, but from experience and observation, you can learn to curate your own arsenal to demystify the concepts of not just effective marketing but also selling, negotiating, starting →building→ running a business, managing people and personalities, getting ahead and getting things done!

But in a way, don’t let this breakdown be misleading, because what I write is really about developing the ‘street smarts’ about effective marketing. Effective marketing is all about making use of your information, instincts and insights, and the learnings I share with you must prepare you to get where you want to go.

Can you really learn to apply observations and gut reactions and instincts to marketing? Perhaps not totally but you can learn to think instinctively and creatively, perhaps you can learn to judiciously use the power of observation to shape preferences and hence impact your approach to marketing. Maybe the biggest flex you can have after reading this series of articles, is to apply what ‘street smarts’ really is — an applied people sense!

Great SAT scores, the tag of your esteemed college degree, intellect and intelligence- I have nothing against them but they cannot substitute for common sense in life and in solving for real life business problems. I hope that you will benefit from the various facets of common sense that I will urge you to invoke in your daily life and approach. Let the games begin!