Holistic brand building: Mktg guru Raj Sisodia’s mantra

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He is recognised as one of the worlds best guru's of marketing. Rajendra Sisodia, Chairman, Conscious Capitalism Institute is a professor of marketing and founding director of the Center for Marketing Technology at Bentley University.

Equipped with a Ph.D. in Marketing and Business Policy from Columbia University, almost 100 articles have been published by him in some of the best journals including Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Strategy, and Journal of Business Research, with frequent writings for the Wall Street Journal.

In 2003, he was referred to as one of '50 Leading Marketing Thinkers' by UK-based Chartered Institute of Marketing. Sisodia consults with and provides executive seminars for a wide range of companies across various industries. Some of his clients have included IBM, Volvo, Nokia and AT&T, to name a few. He is also an author of a number of books with the latest being Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18, the acclaimed guru of marketing speaks not about marketing but about his other passion: Conscious Capitalism.

Here is a verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: In a sense, Conscious Capitalism is almost the antithesis of marketing. You found out in your studies and you've pointed out in your book that companies that do very well need not necessarily spend money on marketing. In fact most of the companies that you have written about in this book don't spend as much on marketing. So how the shift?

A: This project started as we were calling it as search of marketing excellence because we had studied marketing productivity for about ten years and we had documented the fact that companies especially in the US but really worldwide were spending a lot more on their resources on marketing over time.

Yet if you look at customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and most importantly customer trust, those indicators were actually flat or declining in many cases. So there seems to be not a positive correlation but actually a negative correlation between the amount of money spent in marketing and the actual customer based outcome results that you are looking for.

So we set out to find the opposite examples of companies that spent relatively little and yet had outstanding customer satisfaction and loyalty and most importantly trust. And when we found these companies, we really couldn't explain their superior performance in marketing terms alone. It really had to do with business itself and how it was defined and how it was led and how it was managed.