Inspiring Stories - Connecting the Dots: A Journey of Curiosity, Consumer Centricity, and Leadership

I must admit that I was a little surprised when MRSI asked me to write about my journey for the newsletter. Writing about insights and their impact on business is easier (I wrote a whole book on it), but writing about your journey is much harder. Why would your journey be interesting to others and where do you even begin?

So let me start reflecting from the very beginning. Born and brought up in Ulhasnagar, studying in a very basic government Sindhi medium school, neither offered much of intellectual stimulation nor avenues for physical sports. My parents, immigrants from Pakistan, were teachers and while we lived in a modest one room house, six siblings and books on psychology, philosophy and Hindi/ Sindhi literature offered enough food for thought and fun! I topped the school through the years and found myself at VJTI for engineering (known to be one of the best in India outside of IITs), which made everyone in my family incredibly proud.

Engineering college initially was a struggle - moving from Sindhi medium school to a college where everyone spoke better English, seemed more knowledgeable and played a lot more sports was intimidating! But finding a group of friends (who I still meet every couple of months) and spending four formative years being a back bencher, for a change, was a blast. Campus placement ensured I landed a good job at Blue Star, but it also made me realise how disconnected I was - to engineering, to the job and from self-realisation of what I really wanted in life.

Growing up in school, one thing that had really interested me was advertising (and Hindi movies). I often found myself wondering why some advertisements were made better than others and back then I thought Doordarshan made the ads for the brands that approached them. Eventually it dawned on me that better ads must have briefed DD better - the importance of a great brief became apparent to me even as a teenager. When I was lost at Blue Star, my interest in advertising started coming back and on the advice of a friend and an HR woman at a leading ad agency, I decided to do MBA just to get into advertising. And that's how I found myself at NMIMS which had good placement record of ad agencies.

Those two years at NM were completely transformational for me - I was a lot more serious about my academics (and got back into being one of the toppers again), I enjoyed every subject thoroughly and my interest in advertising and psychology developed into a passion for marketing and market research. After a lot of soul searching and talking to seniors working in advertising I decided to get into market research because I thought it combined marketing, psychology and statistics (subjects I loved) into one. The trouble was that research agencies didn’t recruit from NM - they hadn't found interested candidates there in the past. So, I got myself in the placement cell and took the task of pitching to agencies - everyone thought I was pitching just to ad agencies, but on the side, I started pitching to research agencies too. I still remember pitching to Praveen Tripathi (ORG-MARG) and Nikhil Rawal (IMRB) - I didn’t know then that I was talking to industry legends and how we would stay connected for decades to come. I joined ORG-MARG post the interviews and thus began my lifelong career in research.

For next seven and half years I worked at ORG-MARG, Nielsen, Starcom (doing media planning and strategy and see the life in an ad agency), NFO (now Kantar) and Synovate (now Ipsos). I learnt the ropes of research in these agencies and would forever remain grateful for fantastic training and support they provided in all aspects of research. A little secret: I was interested in Qualitative research when I first applied to ORG-MARG and IMRB, but given my background, I thought it would be easier for me to clear the written test for Quant; and once in, I would subsequently find my way into Qual. That never happened, but I used Qual extensively at Unilever and learnt how to use it effectively.

Then came along the job at Unilever - HLL as it was called then. I was doing well at agencies, so I wasn’t sure about moving but trying something new and different every few years has always been my thing - so I took the plunge. Besides, I had to crack a three hour long technical interview with BV Pradeep to get the job, so I was really curious to see how much of that knowledge people actually used at Unilever. And boy, did the decision change my life! I worked across categories, brands, countries; got to live in three different countries and travel the world. When I joined, Unilever was changing from being a very local country organisation to being a unified globally connected one and as a result, the regional and global roles were being created.

One of the things that attracted me to HUL was the idea of being the global head of insights for one category - I thought it would be so cool to know the category and consumer dynamics of that category across the world and influence the business strategy with that! It took me eight years to get to that role (I was global insights head for Foods in London for more than three years). Along the way I worked on insights in India for oral care, Lux for Asia region, Global Pond's (working in Thailand) skin care and cleansing categories for Asia/Africa/Middle East region (working in Singapore) and then global Foods head in UK.

At Unilever, I not only learnt to translate data to insights, I learnt that the job was fundamentally different from the ones I did at the agencies. Our job in insights started when the agency's work got over - we had to translate loads of data and charts from agencies to insights that brands could use, find ways of not just landing it in the business, but also integrating them with the decision making, ensure actions are decided based on it and track the impact of those actions so that this entire process could be improved continuously. And that meant understanding the business imperatives fully and bringing in the consumer perspective. I often said to my teams that insights is perhaps one of the hardest jobs in the organisation because we really had to balance what the business needed to do vs what consumers wanted - and we weren't always popular for voicing the unpopular opinions.

I grew quite fast in my career at Unilever, and I was changing my role every 2.5/3 years which was thrilling and in less than four years of joining, I became part of the Asia leadership team for skin care + cleansing categories and thereafter remained in the LT of whatever categories I moved to. And that was a whole different ball game - LT consisted of all the function heads who worked as a team with the head of the business to run it. And suddenly I could see the perspectives of finance, supply chain, legal…and most importantly work with the business head to see how they were thinking and running the business. Because of my sheer curiosity, which has always driven me, I spent time with other functions to understand how they were working and the role they played in running the business. That gave me a much broader perspective on the business and is helping me immensely in my CEO role now.

After being Global Head of insights for foods, I thought I had reached the position that originally attracted me to Unilever, and I wasn’t sure what lay ahead. But then I got offered the role of Insights Head at HUL; which was not just a prestigious and coveted role internally and externally, it was also part of HUL leadership team, and I had never even dreamt of landing a role like that! It was hard to refuse that role, and I found myself back in India after being abroad for nearly a decade.

After nearly two decades at Unilever, the bug to try something new bit me again, because by then I had worked on almost all categories and several markets and the roles therefore started to feel repetitive. So, I left Unilever and started my own consulting company (Sequitur Consultants) to help marketers take more consumer-centric decisions. To my pleasant surprise, lots of assignments came my way immediately - from being a fractional CMO to doing varianting strategy to performance marketing to skill enhancement... The assignments were rich and varied and were from leading organisations like Reckitt, ITC, Coke, etc. RSPL also offered me an interesting project and during that assignment they offered me the CEO role. I didn’t know of any other insights professional who had become a CEO of a large FMCG business (unless they have moved from CMI to marketing within the business along the way) so it felt like another thrilling first. Several discussions with them over the next few weeks and with my wife Savy helped me take another plunge and I accepted the role. So here I am, sitting in Gurgaon, running the RSPL business of hygiene care and reminiscing my journey.

Reflecting on my journey, here are the few perspectives I have gained that I want to share:

1. Market research is a process that's very important to master. But insights is an outcome and working with the business to take the right decision based on insights is consumer-centricity. And that is what insight managers in the organisations should do.
2. Insights managers don’t carry around a bank of insights to be given to the business when they need it (well they do tend to be more insightful than others!). Their role is to make everyone in the organisation insightful by providing them with information, helping them connect the dots (and training them on it) and bringing consumers to the center of every decision-making. They are pivotal therefore in making the organizations consumer centric
3. I often see people at research agencies underestimating the importance and role of insights managers in the organisation - because they think that the real work is done by them while insights managers just pass the findings on. That is naïve, to say the least! The more they understand the role of insights managers (be 'customer centric' for their clients), the better they would deliver.
4. With the explosion of data available for analysis, I sometimes think that we should all get trained like Qual researchers. They are trained to pick up millions of data points in a few conversations and pull-out meaningful insights - from what people say to their body language to their relationships to personal ambitions... So Qual research is not going away anywhere, and in fact is going to be lot more useful to make sense of the data deluge.
5. Technology, particularly AI, is all pervasive and ubiquitous. How do we best work with it is a more pertinent question than asking if it can do a better job - it is truly helpful in crunching large data sets, giving some direction to thinking and reducing timelines. But if you want real consumer insights, a human in the loop (preferably with Qual skills) would be a great investment you would make.
6. Analytics, while being a completely different science and skill, is just another medium for insights managers to understand consumers and drive business decisions. Therefore, keeping it separate from insights is not meaningful. It has to be part of the total solution.
7. As insights or research managers, the more you understand the business and its nuances, the more value you would be able to bring. So don't think your job is limited to consumer understanding only.
8. On a personal note: "Life doesn’t give you anything on a platter to enjoy. Everything you get is a direct function of the efforts you put in (with a tiny bit of luck maybe once or twice in your life). I always ask myself before starting any project or job: how much effort am I willing to put? And the answer already tells me how good the project/job would turn out."

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