S2E7 | On Storytelling, Community, And Making Marketing Beautiful

Have you ever struggled to articulate what your brand stands for? Or wondered how to not just be, but also sound authentic online? In this episode of Damn Good Marketing Podcast Hasita and Kushal Menghrajani, Chief Creative Officer at The Experience Co, walk you through a quick exercise on how to do it right. They also discuss community, storytelling, and content creation, with fun aside from how Kush won the Bira account from amongst hundreds of contenders!

Discussion Topics: On storytelling, community, and making marketing beautiful

• What is storytelling.
• Community vs tribes and social media.
• Standout brands.
• Self-branding and overcoming imposter syndrome.
• A short exercise in describing your own brand.
• Establishing a perpetual content cycle.
• Micro-content and ‘chasing’ algorithms vs long form content.
• How Kush won the Bira marketing account.
• How the Ragini MMS movie script was pitched.

Transcript: On storytelling, community, and making marketing beautiful

Hasita: Community, is something that I think we all strive so hard to be a part of. And if we are striving hard to be part of something can marketing be far behind? This is where I think a lot of enthusiasm today comes in the form of being part of a community or building a community. My community on Slack has 1000 members, it’s a bit of a flex almost, isn’t it? But really, what sustains the community? When does the community become valuable?

Many years ago, I had a chance to go and be part of the Beachhouse Project. And somehow, every time I think of community, that’s the one experience that I always look back to because it was a place where the whole situation the entirety of those seven days was about me coming out on the other side as a better person. I’d ever considered myself extremely lucky that Kush, the chief creative for The Experience Co, agreed to come do this podcast episode with us. Welcome, Kush, welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast. Are you excited?

Kushal Menghrajani: I’m extremely excited, firstly, because I think storytelling just stitches the narratives of anything that you want to like bullshit out there. And marketing itself is the art of bullshitting.

Hasita: So we have a bit of an interesting segment today, which is about communities and Kush, you guys have hosted 65 editions of The Beachhouse project, both in India and overseas. And may I just say how jealous I am of all the people who have been attending your sessions outside of India?

Kushal Menghrajani: I completely agree with it because I think there’s an exchange of cultures. So if anything, we are trying to bridge communities across the world. We aren’t changing the world or any of that. But honestly, just the right people need to be in the right rooms.

Hasita: Well, thank you. No expectations, then. It’s just we’re here to basically tell people how to tell stories. And in fact, the interesting thing is for our holiday special Subha and I had spoken about storytelling, but let me ask you this. What really is storytelling?

Kushal Menghrajani: Very interesting and a very recent realisation itself. I think it was a couple of days before New Year’s and somebody who’s an acting coach, Vijay Sethupathi, asked me what is acting or what is storytelling. And after a lot of deliberation, and a lot of filtration of answers, we came down to breathing, and breathing in itself is storytelling. You’re constantly telling a story out there to the people around you, it could be an action, it could be a word, it could be brief, it could be a story you want to put out there into the world.

So all of that, at the end of the day is storytelling, but it begins with breathing. So even the little things like us expressing disgust, be it like chi thu you’re constantly like, exhaling air, and every time you put surprise out there, you’re inhaling air. So at the end of the day, those aha moments that our clients ask us for surprise moments, and that comes down to breathing also.

Hasita: Wow, that is supremely profound. And I’m a little lost at this point because you’re right when I think back to some of the campaigns that we resonate so much with, I think it does come down to how they made us feel, and therefore we remember them for so many years since they’ve been released. Kush, you’ve been in the business of storytelling for quite some time.

So let’s get started in terms of just understanding your perspective on the world of marketing, and telling stories and communication and this thing that brings us all together. And maybe we can delve a little bit into communities. I know that you’re here today on behalf of the community as well. So before we confuse the listeners, I think let me just set a little bit of context on who we are and why we’re here today.

Kushal Menghrajani: Five years, yes.

Hasita: So we’ve known each other for five years, which is actually not a lot if you think about it. But the kind of impact that The Experience Co. and some of their work has had on me, has been extremely profound.

I was part of the fifth edition of The Beachhouse Project, which had taken place at Nainital in 2018 if I remember correctly, and it was quite interesting for me to be able to step out of a conference room setting where everyone’s dressed up in coats and dinner jackets, and sharing breakfasts and lunches and conversations and insights with you giving their all and just being there because they liked the idea of being there. So that was quite eye-opening.

And the idea of community is something that is so vague and abstract in today’s time, you know, every investor after a start-up saying, Hey, build a community for XYZ, whichever is your industry and domain. But what really is a community and I think the Beachhouse Project showed me what true community could be. So thank you, Kush, for being here with us today. And I know that you guys have been up to some very exciting stuff. The fifth edition is probably a memory of the past at this point. So very excited to know a little bit more about who you guys are today. What’s that story, Kush?

Kushal Menghrajani: Thank you so much for inviting me to this Hasita. I think content and storytelling is something that’s at the core of our hearts, and the right people should be putting that core out there. But this interesting aspect of communities that you’ve touched upon, I think, every single time, somebody who’s wanted to start a brand or wanted to start something of their own, we always ask them to like start a collective of their own, we do not say community, because community is such a broad term.

And we ourselves, collectively name it as the tribe. And the reason why we call it the tribe also is because when you think about the intersections of a tribe, they aren’t transactional. They delve into the intangibles, also, you know, for a fact that they’ve got your back and you can go out there and take the risks that you want to be. And there are a bunch of people or a creative army that will ensure that you can be the superhero.

And they won’t let your cape slip off. And when you have a community like that backing you for every dream that you put out there or every risk that you want to take, especially post-pandemic, it is super critical to identify which community you’re a part of, or which collective you belong to. The sooner you realise that I think you can go out there and be that superhero you want to be. And there’ll be that creative army that will ensure that the cape doesn’t slip off your shoulders.

Hasita: That’s a beautiful way of putting it and I never did think of it as a superhero so I feel very special right now. So thank you for making me feel that way. I wanted to ask you, though, because social media was supposed to be the OG community right? When Facebook was launched, I think we were also excited. Maybe even awkward before that, like I’m really giving away my age at this point. But I think the idea was that we would be able to connect with people that we’ve not connected with in a while and B that we’d be able to connect with people who we wouldn’t have connected with outside of those platforms.

But today, definitely, there’s a certain amount of load that we all experience in terms of showing up and being part of these places, these online communities. So how has a collective experience I know that a lot of, in fact, all of your additions, the road trip project, the F of X Festival all of these are offline channels, essentially. So do you see that there’s a difference between how we interact with each other online versus how we interact with each other offline? Or do you think both can be engineered in creative ways?

Kushal Menghrajani: That’s a supremely cool question. A lot of people think about developing a community online first, and then taking it offline. I think our biggest advantage was that we cracked offline first and then went online. And there is a huge difference, I think, because I think we live in a space or a world where there aren’t many places where you can form meaningful human connections.

And in a world where we are swiping right and left to meet new people, I think you need to break the code of nature to make something authentic happen. And this little line that I said, which is breaking the code of nature, was actually sent to us by one of the residents at Beachhouse eight, we’ve done 65 so far, but this was back in Kashmir at the Beachhouse project, the eighth edition. And he, after a couple of beers pulled us aside and told us you know what you guys are doing? And we shook our heads saying no. And he said that you’re breaking the code of nature.

We were people who were never meant to meet each other. We weren’t people who are supposed to spend time in a room together or a week together because we don’t belong to each other’s worlds. We come from completely different professional backgrounds. But as soon as you break the code of nature, something magical happens. And that’s intangible too.

You can’t sell intangibles. And as a marketing podcast as a content podcast, you can think how difficult a challenge it is when you know the intangibles are so high in a space like that. And keeping that in mind I think when you think of community and you crack offline first, the magic that has to happen online will happen because the strength in word of mouth is a lot stronger.

The way people perceive you is because after you’ve lived with somebody for seven days, you know them inside out. And if you have a community that can identify what your strongest skill sets are, they know exactly where you hit the highest highs and the lowest lows they form that little arch of your heart line where you know, for a fact, that you can bring in consistency. And for that offline before online would always be like a stilt out.

Hasita: Yeah, sometimes also, just reading cues is so much easier, I think in a physical environment, especially because we are all signing up for a certain degree of openness and honesty. We’re saying, Hey, I’m going to be eating three meals with you, I’m probably going to be sharing a room with one of you, and therefore let me just put myself out there in the most real way as I could be at that point in time. And I experienced that as well.

Because there was a presentation that we did, I’m not sure if the format has changed between then and now. But the idea was that we all gather and solve a problem for one of the local communities of businesses. And while doing that, after the presentation, I remember some of my peers coming up and telling me, that was so amazing. We had no idea that you could bring this much energy at 10:30 in the night. And that was honestly a revelation to me as well. It was the first time I realised that I was so excited about it and it was showing.

So definitely every time I’ve done a presentation since then, I’ve kind of tried to stand in front of the mirror and ask myself, Am I bringing my best to this? And is the other person really able to see that I want to be here? And I think those transformations probably can only happen in a physical space. You’re absolutely right. Online communities, of course, serve their own purpose, the most important among them being connecting us, I think, with people that are in other time zones, and other geographies, and therefore we can’t really access them on a daily basis. But if you can meet, you should probably meet in person, I agree with you.

Kushal Menghrajani: Absolutely and it builds on to the fact that I think we live in a world where self-validation trumps everything else, and as soon as you have some sort of validation coming in from an ordinate source, you know your skill set is strong in that area. If someone wrote you a testimonial, at max, you’re going to go there and like that testimonial, or say thank you to it, and forget about it, but if someone comes to your face and tells you exactly those words, it’s going to hit you so much harder. So, keeping that in mind, I think we’ll always switch back to offline before online.

Hasita: So we’ve discussed communities Kush, and I have a lot of things that I want to discuss with you because you followed a very similar journey. I understand you have some questions. And maybe this is as good a platform as any to kind of discuss marketing questions, content questions, and exchange ideas, I guess. So what else is on your mind Kush, what’s happening really?

Kushal Menghrajani: Who are some of the people, artists, or brands that stood out for you and 2022 when it comes to content or marketing as a game player?

Hasita: Whoa. I think everybody is going to have a different answer to this. And I feel like in taking some names, I may invariably skip some. But that’s not because I don’t appreciate them. It’s just that it’s not coming to me right now. I think in terms of brands 2022 was also the year when I started being able to independently handle a lot of brand strategy workshops.

And therefore there was always that keen sense of not trying to repeat or replicate what someone else is doing because one of the foundational tenets of brand strategy is that you do what you can to stand out as who you are and how you can be different from whoever else is in the market. But I definitely appreciated one D2C brand because they did something really cool. I think they had their highest number of sales during the pandemic. And the reason why it’s interesting is that it’s a travel accessories company.

And I’m talking about Mokobara, of course, and I think their overall presentation, how they show up, how they get excited about the idea of travel is definitely a case study in direct-to-consumer retail and branding. I am also going to go out and admit that I bought one of their extremely expensive suitcases, which I’m not taking anywhere because I’m scared of spoiling how it looks.

That kind of defeats the purpose of the suitcase I get that but it’s just I felt very special when that was my birthday present I felt like somebody had understood the fact that I liked traveling and had therefore put some thought into it and had gifted me that so I think in terms of brands, yes, the bigger folk are always going to kind of be featured in the award seasons and all of that but I think the small guys are doing an equally phenomenal job and huge shout out, I think to Mokobara. Kush, what do you think what brands have you really enjoyed experiencing and looking at in the last year?

Kushal Menghrajani: Before I answer that question, you can make use of that suitcase Hasita. You can travel with the experience, because they do some really cool projects in India and overseas, plugging in marketing gameplay, but post that some of the brands that stood out for me, I have always been an Android first person. But 2022 was the year where I think the religious conversion actually happened. And it went from Android to iOS.

And the reason is, I think, the way Apple goes about their marketing has always been like a really strong suit. Apple lot of brands have used the Don’t Blink ad as a testament to creating ad junctures for themselves. But ever since then, I think, don’t Blink came out in 2016. And we are in 2022, right now. And a lot of brands still use that as a marketing gimmick for their own, like a visual identity of sorts.

But this conversion happened because I think, when I think easy navigation, when I think about the direct approach to how you should be speaking to consumers today, when it comes to professionalism and making work easy professionally also, I think Apple makes it an easy giveaway. And I’m not an easy person to convince to be moving into a new direction if I’ve been a constant user of something. But if Apple made that happen, I think it was their marketing team. So like full kudos to that.

Hasita: So I will go out and say that, after having been a religious, iOS, and Mac user for the longest time, I’m having second thoughts about the whole thing, but I will not corrupt your conversion at this point. And also, I was wondering, will we get through this segment without talking about Apple? And that’s the beauty of that brand as well, right?

Like, it’s impossible to have a conversation about brands without mentioning Apple somewhere. And as you rightly said, if an ad from six years ago, if a campaign from that time is still doing what it’s supposed to do, then why not learn from that rule book in that sense? But I just want to tell you, Kush, there’s no going back, you may hate Apple, but you will still continue buying Apple products for the rest of your life.

Kushal Menghrajani: True that consumerism at its best, capitalism at its best.

Hasita: And branding at its best, let’s not forget.

Kushal Menghrajani: Yes, then the next question is something that’s been a pain point or the biggest challenge that creators have been facing over the last four years. And that’s self-brand. Self-branding, because they also go through this impostor syndrome of I know I am doing good work, but there are people who are doing better than I am.

Should I be vocal and put myself out there to get more clients? I’m an independent brand owner. And I know for a fact that my product is really cool. But if the competition is so high today, and that’s something that puts a hiccup or like a little bit of a lump in my throat, on whether I should be branding myself right now or just speaking about the company itself. One of the biggest challenge statements, just cutting this short is how do I overcome self-branding as a challenge?

Hasita: Yeah, and it’s a big one. I want to be a little mindful in how I answer this question because it’s got a lot of different dimensions, the individual and their comfort, obviously being a top priority in my mind, because one of the conversations that we don’t have enough of when talking about branding yourself, or personal branding, is the conversation on mental health and the impact that sometimes putting yourself out there constantly over and over again, has a tendency to have a bit of an impact one way or another.

But that said, I think in today’s world, there is no such thing as being creative without being a distributor. This is a lesson that we’ve had to learn the hard way as well, in the context of this podcast, plus a little bit of other work we do. And one of the things that I always tell people who are standing at that threshold of being ready to take a step in that direction, but not really knowing what that step or what the direction even is, is to show up as one persona. And this is, I think, something that all human beings struggle with because we are integrated individuals, you cannot take the baker out of me or the traveler out of you. And those are all very much part of who we are.

So when we wake up in the morning, we are X and Y and Z and then A and B and C as well. But what happens when you kind of try to translate that to an online medium is that you end up scattering firstly, your own energy. And secondly, you end up confusing people. So today, if I post pictures of me baking, and tomorrow, I’m talking about marketing, then people are going to be confused, especially when they’ve not met me, or they don’t know who I am.

So sometimes just contextualising yourself, is a great way to solve both these issues at the same time. One is the issue of mental health, and how you kind of preserve and have your own boundaries, and at the same time, how you show up. So in fact, just yesterday, we were talking to somebody who was having a very similar challenge. And after hearing them out, one of the recommendations that we shared is that they show up as, for example, Kush, the storytelling guy. So no longer will there be a Kush, the agency guy, no longer will there be Kush the copywriting guy because that takes time to layer on to who you are as a person.

Kushal Menghrajani: And when it comes to their own, like self-branding image, I think they have two filters there and not just one because that’s putting yourself out there. And while this is one touch point that I speak about, there’s a fun activity of how we actually go about asking people to define themselves or their brand. And I came across this little question while I was listening to the CMO of Netflix during one of his podcasts, during the pandemic.

And he asked somebody, if you met your own brand, at a party, how would you describe them? And if I had to ask you, now Hasita, just building onto this question, if you had to introduce your own self-brand, or independent profile of Hasita, at a party, how would you describe Hasita?

Hasita: So I’m the person who’s probably not qualified to be at the party, to begin with, but we’ll do everything in her power to become more than qualified.

Kushal Menghrajani: Perfect. And if I were to ask you five adjectives on how you wanted to describe that person at the party, how would you do that? You can speak about appearance, you can speak about whether they’d be the life of the party, or the one who silently brewed and observed all of these are adjectives, but five adjectives on how you’d go about describing this person.

Hasita: So I would definitely not be the life of the party to open with, let’s just be very clear on that. I’m the person who will look for the window and I stand there until I can figure out what’s happening. So I’m just going to put it out there that I’m not a very social person. It’s one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do. But I’m definitely learning so five things. cultured, opinionated, practical, kind, and easy to be with.

Kushal Menghrajani: That is beautiful. And from these five, if I had to ask you to choose the top three, which would those be?

Hasita: I think, practical, for sure because it’s a value that I hold very dear to myself. I like being no-nonsense, it makes me very happy to be that person. And then I’m building on the culture bit. So I will definitely pick that because that’s something that I see as an ongoing journey. And kind, I want to practice more of that.

Kushal Menghrajani: Perfect. And now that you have these three words, I follow this one person called Chris Do as my marketing guru. If you look at his website, the future of Co, I think what he’s done there brilliantly is he says, identify the three words that define you the best, and put that out in one single statement on your landing page as soon as somebody enters it.

And if you don’t have these three words there, then you’re doing something wrong because you have three seconds to convince someone to be there on that landing page for more than a minute.

Hasita: You know, the funny thing is, I think you’ve just given us a copywriting masterclass Kush because I had not thought about it this way. Not at all. I have not come across this podcast episode that you mentioned before. But if you go to the Motleycrew website right now, the homepage has three lines of copy. And it’s been picked for a very specific reason.

I know it’s not the most SEO-friendly website in the world. But that was intentional. We just tell people what we do, we tell people who we work with, and we tell people who we are and that’s it. And each of those is one sentence at a time. So I obviously hadn’t thought about it this way. But I see the practical aspect of me kind of emerging already when we first built the website, which was almost a year and a half ago. So, so cool. I think this is a beautiful exercise for all of us to try.

Kushal Menghrajani: If there’s like a second question I can ask, you told me five words that describe you the best. Can you also tell me like seven words, which are your value belief systems, and there’s a reason why I am asking seven?

Hasita: So I’ve never thought about seven. So I will do my best. To do good, to speak the truth, to listen more than I speak, to put myself out there, to be sure of who I am, care that’s six.

Kushal Menghrajani: Okay, six also works. Once you have your value belief systems out there, and you have those six or seven words that describe you or your brand the most, people are looking for authentic stories and a little more originality in content today. It’s not just that you put out a really cool picture, and you have any caption that goes about and people might like it, but there’s no relevance then, there is no relationship that you’re building with that person.

I think on one of your recent podcasts, you spoke about Samantha Prabhu, being completely authentic about his story and seeing it as is, another person who does that, very frequently is Deepika Padukone, because she’s unafraid of like, accepting the mental taboos that she’s been going through. And when you have something like that, those are your value belief systems itself.

The biggest standpoint is how you make your content consistent while you are on Instagram day in and day out. And by the time you find what you have to put out there, you come down to this term called content buckets. So now that Hasita has this self-brand of active listening, and being out there, you spoke about being sure which also means being completely authentic and caring.

You have four content buckets already. And you spoke about six. So you know for a fact that you can dive into each of these six buckets on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and you have content buckets ready for a week.

So you know Mondays are for active listening, Tuesdays are for putting yourself out there, and Wednesdays are for authentic stories that you want to like put out there. And then care wherever you go, I think what you define for your brand or your own self-identity the most become your content buckets itself.

Hasita: You know, Kush, it’s so interesting, because the funny thing is to care kind of came up quite unexpectedly, even for me. And then I could see where it was coming from because I do want to be remembered for having paid attention to the pain point that people were going through. And somehow that’s also extended into a conversation on conservation, which is something that I’m also very passionately pursuing.

The idea of conserving the planet, so people see it the way it is, is also something that’s on my mind. And in some ways, I see this podcast as an expression of that, because we’ve been so very honest with everything that we’ve put out there. And we’ve gotten that feedback as well, people have come back and told us that, hey, it’s really refreshing to see that someone’s finally not mincing words about the world of marketing. And that’s how I think I’m able to express that value system.

So thank you for calling it out because it definitely feels so nice because we do sometimes wonder, as you rightly said, when you’re doing four things, you know, where are you, and who are you half the time, you don’t know. But it’s also very kind of nice to acknowledge that we are already expressing our values and our belief systems in so many different ways. Sometimes maybe we just need to hit that pause button and pay attention to what that is.

Kushal Menghrajani: True. And that brings me to the next question because we are speaking about content and consistency. Is there a golden cycle that exists for creating content on all platforms and staying relevant on each of them?

Hasita: Kush why shouldn’t I ask you this? I think you guys have cracked that code so much better than anyone else I know.

Kushal Menghrajani: A golden cycle for me I’ll come back to the example of Chris Do itself on what he does because I think it’s genius. Every single time he has a ramble in his head, a thought that comes to his mind he keeps his phone handy and tweets them out rambles are out there now you have five rambles on Twitter and you identify that there’s one ramble that people are creating a thread out of, and people are diving a lot deeper into it.

He takes that little ramble and converts that into an Instagram post. And now we have five Instagram posts that he’s put out there and he’s identifying which one is performing the best out of those five and then he identifies one that is garnering the most attention. He takes that Instagram post and does a LinkedIn article on it.

And now once he’s on LinkedIn, there are thought leaders in that space, because it’s not limited to just your followers seeing the content you’re putting out there, but the world on LinkedIn itself, who’s interested in that content piece, and once a thought leader comments on one of his LinkedIn articles, he reaches out to them and he says, I’d love to do a podcast with you.

How about we schedule a date, both of us have linearity about this topic. And I think there’s something to be explored. He schedules a podcast. Get onto it. And as they are doing the podcast, he keeps one of his EAs to constantly put out the rambles that come out of that podcast, and those rambles go out his tweets again. That’s how a cycle comes out of it. But again, this is one cycle that I’m attracted to. But is there a cycle that exists beyond it?

Hasita: So one of the things that’s worked for me is to always sit in any conversation with a pen and a paper. And the irony is that despite being a writer, it’s been hard for me to do because I feel like somewhere I’m missing context and nuance when I’m also trying to take notes parallel. Of course, that problem is now solved, especially if you’re doing Zoom meetings, because you do have transcription tools and software, which can capture pretty much everything, and then you can filter through.

But what I’m really kind of intrigued by is some of the not-so-obvious things that come out of conversations. So last season, when we recorded a podcast episode with a guest both Subha and I remember coming out of it feeling very refreshed, as though we just had one of the most pleasant chats of our lives. And this is not a person we’d known before.

This is not someone who came from our immediate networks. And I do remember messaging her and saying something about recording, that podcast felt so wholesome, it felt like finally, we were speaking the truth that we were supposed to. And that became the context for some of the posts that I then wrote out on LinkedIn.

And I still kind of try to apply that filter, every time I write, in terms of saying, is this going to be valuable to the person reading? Or is this just me talking to myself, or rather addressing myself in a mirror? So that filter, when you apply, I think, in tandem with a process like this, because I am a little weary of being tweet happy if I could put it that way.

And that is the one thing that I kind of challenge Christos process on, is that I don’t think a lot of us are A comfortable and B we should be in the business of tweeting everything that comes to our minds. That’s not my ideal approach to content creation at all. But some form of journaling, some form of keeping track of some of these aha moments that emerge from every conversation we have that could become a content engine in itself when the right kind of filter is applied is how I would put it.

Kushal Menghrajani: So we have understood how the social game or the social marketing aspect works, but there’s a world of email marketing, and emails, again, come down to the fact that it has long-form content. And today, while everybody is moving to like, micro over macro, is it true that micro has trumped macro? If so, why?

Hasita: No, firstly, I don’t think I think I fall in that small club of people who don’t think that micro over macro is the trend of the day, I really don’t. I think podcasts are proof. The way they took off in just the past year alone should show us that there are people who are willing to tune in for the nuance to get to know the people behind, you know, whatever is happening.

I mean, Kush, both of us are talking here right now, maybe we’re talking for a while, and I’m sure there are people willing to listen, and we ourselves have heard episodes going in two to three hours. We pay attention to movies, and we binge-watch series, so I don’t see it as a problem of micro over macro at all. Surely there’s an audience for both, and that’s really going to be my answer as far as email marketing is concerned as well. There will always be audiences for all kinds of content. And I don’t see that consolidation as a bad thing.

If I am somebody who likes to kind of dive deep into something, some topics, some subjects, it’s good to know that there are other people who also enjoy deep dives of that nature. In fact, there was a very ill-fated newsletter attempt of mine from 2021 called the newsletter with no agenda. It literally stopped because of no other reason, except that I had run out of the ability to write it, but every time it was sent out, the response was very good. It was a clean text email, with very few links if there ever were. But that just showed me that, if you have something to say, and if it’s fun, and it’s worthwhile and it enriches somebody’s life, I think every platform has the potential to survive. So I don’t see that as a challenge at all. Do you?

Kushal Menghrajani: I was hoping you would give this answer itself because I think long-form content will always stay out there. The only thing that will refine it or make it a little better are algorithms that can come into it. And the reason why I say algorithms is not because of the way Instagram does it or any other platform, does it because that’ll bring me to the next question also, where I really want to address whether chasing algorithms and falling trapped into doing what everyone else is asked to do, is making our content irrelevant also?

But again, that’s a micro-content fiasco. When it comes to macro, as long as your story is authentic, you can keep people glued from start to go and you have the right things to say people will consume it. And you only need to find the right platform and the right audiences for it.

Hasita: Yeah, I had not considered that long-form content may actually end up building more trust as well because you’re putting so much more of yourself out there so it’s not just that you’re relevant topically in that one moment. But what you have to say has influenced somebody’s life. So yeah, I mean, I hadn’t thought of that. So thank you for sharing.

Kushal Menghrajani: Perfect. And that brings me to the next question of understanding whether we’re all chasing algorithms and falling into the trap of doing what everyone else is asked to do because we are doing exactly what everybody else is doing to like up themselves on that algorithm how are we standing out? And are we being relevant for our own audiences by standing through the testament of an algorithm and not our own brand? And that brings us to like this fiasco of what 2023 has to offer, because in 2022, Instagram, as a marketing funnel, went the TikTok route, and made themselves video.

Hasita: No, I mean, honestly, can we chase the algorithm? Is that even possible? I think we’ve all learned that I hope you’ve learned that lesson. We’ve seen it a lot of brands that we work with have seen it, that things can change overnight. And in fact, I had a bit of a micro experience, not so much the algorithm, but the platform itself had changed its approach.

When I first moved to Bangalore almost a decade ago, I started writing reviews for all the restaurants we went to on Zomato and I became a bit of a food influencer. I only know this because sometimes when I Google my name, some of those things still show up like it’s so far away in the past that it is no longer relevant. But at that time, I was invited to food communities as a critic and I was asked to dine at some of the nicest places in Bangalore.

And you won’t believe the reason why it changed overnight is that Zomato decided that they would prioritise their reviews, not by chronology, but by the number of followers that you already had. And I had nothing. So overnight, I went from being a food critic of whatever, you know, form and nature that you could kind of consider to be nobody, and that’s kind of what happens when we go in search of an algorithm, and we’ve said this in some episodes, in fact, very specifically, episode two of season one, wherein we have talked about the fact that a lot of us don’t actually need the kind of numbers that sometimes we think will make us happy.

It’s very easy for me to say, Hey, if only I had 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, but what purpose is that really going to serve? And in chasing the algorithm, the only thing that we’re going to be able to buffer up is probably those vanity metrics. It’s probably not going to help you build any deep connections with anybody of any kind of relevance, either to you as a professional or as a person.

So does that mean you don’t make reels? Of course, you have to, I mean, somewhere you have to play the game. But do it because you enjoy it and not because the algorithm is telling you to do that, and the quality of work that you put out when you make that clarification between one and the other it’s just leaps and bounds different. I mean, do the reels, but do it because you like them. Don’t do them because Instagram has changed your mind.

That said, it has been my experience, probably because also what we run as a service, business, and in service businesses, the choices are made based on trust. So in that context, I found that putting myself out there and pitching is sometimes the best way to close conversations faster because I do know that when I go and speak, that same no-nonsense practical approach does tend to kind of come through and people appreciate that is what I’ve kind of come to understand.

So my preferred method of marketing for Motleycrew is actually to have one on ones in as physical a space as possible. But I have also seen people do a similar job very successfully using their online presence as well. So it’s not that one or the other is relevant or not, it’s just a question of today we have all these opportunities so where can we really shine and just make that choice and stick to it?

Kushal Menghrajani: And I completely like to comply with it, where you say that convergence of these conversations is a lot faster. And pitching comes down to pitching for a brand and knowing that you want them on board. So, I’m going to throw an example out here, when Bira came into the market, everybody wanted to work with Bira because it was such a cool brand, it had a really cool philosophy, and still has a very cool philosophy.

I’m not going to use it in the past tense, but everybody wanted to work with Bira. And they were seeing 80 people coming in and presenting to them every single day. How do you stand out when 80 people are coming and pitching to you about working with them or creating a partnership and the elk? Usually, when you walk into a room, there’s one decision maker and two juniors who are right there to address what those senior people or the decision maker want out of it.

It’s not only a segment of sorts because there’s one person who is addressing the queries that you’re asking them. And there are two people who are either creating minutes of the meeting or just accepting what the decision maker is saying, but we wanted to raise that gap, and we walked into this room with three cans of Bira’s, one, the blonde one, the strong and one, the white. And we had about 20 ideas to pitch to them.

And we kept three of these cans in front of each of these three people and told them that we’re going to run you through a bunch of ideas. If you resonate strongly with it, take a sip of the strong. If you resonate with it, and you think that can be worked upon it has potential, take a sip of the blonde. And if you don’t resonate with it, take a sip of the white.

And now that they’re forced to take a decision looking at a screen and not at each other they want to play it safe too, because the decision maker can’t take a sip of a strong while the junior person in the room takes a sip of the white, and in order to become safe players, we got zero slips of the white, nobody took us over the white because they said maybe this idea has potential or maybe this is something that works out. We got nine sips of the strong, eleven sips of the blonde and we said we’ve been actually monitoring the responses that we’ve got while pitching our ideas.

You have like nine of them and we’re going to like to work deeply into that 11 high potential. And we’re going to work a lot more deeply on that for the next presentation. And we’ll see you on the next date. We just wanted a foot into the door to come again and see them.

Hasita: You’ve been remembered; you’ve gotten validation for what’s going to work. And essentially one way or another, you’re winning this game, like there’s no way you can lose when people are telling you that this is what’s working for us and this is what’s not.

Kushal Menghrajani: Exactly. If you stand out in a room full of strangers, they will want to see you again. And now that we are bagged a second presentation with Bira, we had to stand out again, we had set up a benchmark high for ourselves. And the next time we went there, if you know Bira’s mascot is that monkey head.

And the next time we walked into this presentation, I forced my then creative director to wear a monkey head cap himself and wear one myself and we walked into the office, a lot of people thought that Bira as an organisation itself has sent the two of us for some sort of like employee engagement and we were getting high fives from people as we were walking through. And then we went straight into the meeting room and sat there and people were like, who are these guys?

They aren’t from Bira clearly. And when we put our monkey heads off it was when they realised that we came here for another pitch presentation for round two. And even before that person walked in, he said I don’t want to look at the pitch. I think we need to work together because the play was their motto at that point. And if you try to target any of that, maybe something bags into your favour.

Hasita: Yeah, and the worst thing you’ve done is taken a chance. Like there’s really very little to lose. So yeah, give it your best shot. This reminds me of one of the participants in Beachhouse Five who had spoken about sending a certain coffin to a certain producer’s office because he wanted to pitch a ghost story.

Kushal Menghrajani: I’m going to bring up the example of Siddharth Jain Executive Head of Hotstar had written the script of Ragini MMS and wanted Balaji Telefilms to do this, because Balaji had until then played it safe with very family-oriented dramas going out there. And Ragini MMS was completely different. It was Alt Balaji. It’s completely alternative.

And he wrote the script put it into a coffin and delivered it to Ekta Kapoor. I think a lot of the security people walked in to check if everything was safe inside the coffin and found a script there. I don’t think she even read it. She loved that he had taken the intent of doing so much to just like grab her attention and Ragini MMS happened.

Hasita: Yeah, and that’s proof that good pitches always work. So, I always think of that example like how cold do you have to be to pull off something like that.

Kushal Menghrajani: And on the last note, I have one last question. I think a lot of people today are looking for validation, through an alternative source Mado Marketing does that it validates really cold marketing campaigns or case studies for that.

So is it true that certain case studies of marketing campaigns, drive results only through the validation that it brings out some text? Pieces that are on Mado marketing I try to Google after it’s come out on Mado Marketing. So is validation as much important as marketing as the campaign itself?

Hasita: You know, that kind of reminds me, I’ve been watching a bit of Shark Tank season two, on which I have seven thoughts, which we will kind of not discuss right now. But I feel like a lot of companies, they’re not really coming to be funded necessarily, they’re coming so that people start Googling them up and start finding out who they are.

So I do think that sometimes the very idea of a campaign is amplification. We don’t see a lot of that in B2B though, because they’re the decision-making process is slightly different. And your end result is only whether you made a sale or not. But for industries, where impressions do matter, and even in the context of B2B, there are contexts.

For example, if you’re attending an event, and you want to make sure that people know that you’re attending that event and that itself means something, we do have to orchestrate that, you know, an extra amount of PR push, we do have to reach out and tell people, hey, this cool thing is happening.

So I do think that it’s just another form and format of distribution on steroids, probably, if I could put it that way. But I don’t think there would be any campaign whose only purpose is amplification. I mean, let’s just take the example of some campaigns that have failed, because all they were trying to do is get amplified.

Vim Black is, I mean, we’ve spoken so much about it on this podcast, and my LinkedIn as well. There are ways for these things to go wrong when all you’re trying to do is become famous. So the meat has to still be there. It has to be relevant, it has to resonate with the people that you’re marketing slash advertising to, and then by all means, you know, amplification, and push and distribution have kind of their own role to play.

Kushal Menghrajani: I think that answers all the questions that I had in mind. And when you speak about driving results, where validation, honestly, is only to help people identify what you’re doing, or your authentic story, or the brand’s authentic story, there’s nothing wrong with it. So, let that validation come through, and don’t shy away from it. I think one of the biggest drawbacks is when somebody compliments you, you do not know what to do after that. So just say thank you, like at the end of this podcast.

Hasita: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Kush, this is actually very, very exciting. It’s so much fun because it’s very rare that I find myself being put on the spot. And I did feel a little uncomfortable when we were doing the whole personal brand and self-branding segment, I felt that discomfort come up, which I think honestly, we all need to kind of embrace and become a little more comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes because that’s where true growth does happen.

So thank you for pulling me out of the rabbit hole of my own creation and for being here and doing this very exciting episode. And guys, I truly didn’t know what questions he was going to come up with. And while we were preparing, we made it very clear that I didn’t want to know as well. So I was as surprised by the questions as you folks might have been.

Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode of The Damn Good Marketing Podcast with Kush, creative chief at The Experience Co. We hope you get to travel a lot more this year. And if you’re going to travel, then do it with The Experience Co. because you’re going to come out on the other side, a very different person. Thank you, Kush, thanks so much for being here today.

Kushal Menghrajani: Thank you so much. And I’m going to agree with everything that Hasita said because you should shamelessly market yourself. That will be like my mic drop moment. Thank you so much Hasita.

Our Guest : Kushal (Kush) Menghrajani

Kushal (Kush) Menghrajani is the Chief Creative Officer at The Experience Co and Director and Curator at The Beachhouse Project. Prior to this, he’s been a writer, brand filmmaker, social media strategist, and content specialist.