Storyboard18 | 'We don’t think of performance and branding as two different channels': Meesho's Vidit Aatrey

Raja Rajamannar, global chief marketing and communications officer and president - health care business, Mastercard, and Meesho founder CEO Vidit Aatrey (right) on 'Build to Last'.

The pandemic and the chaos it has unleashed is certainly not the last global crisis we’ll see. Given the increasingly complex and uncertain times, our greatest test will be endurance. Businesses and brands face the same challenge today. Storyboard18’s special series—Build To Last—hosted by Raja Rajamannar, global chief marketing and communications officer and president - health care business, Mastercard, helps us decode the power of Brand in building lasting and legendary companies. In the first part of the series, Rajamannar speaks to fast-growing ecommerce startup Meesho’s founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey. Edited excerpts:

Raja Rajamannar: Vidit, you have succeeded extraordinarily in terms of the growth of the business, and I will not be surprised if you go to an IPO pretty soon... But brand building and business building are two different things, and one impacts the other significantly. Can you share your perspective on brand building?

Vidit Aatrey: A lot of our growth and momentum comes from the brand. The brand is building that strong relationship with our customers and that trust that people come back to us for all the needs they have. We want to become the single ecommerce destination for the next billion consumers in the country. There are a lot of products where people don’t have to put in any money, for example, a social media platform. But, in a business like ours, people trust us with their money. The expectation of that trust is much higher. So we think of it holistically rather than just doing marketing or doing ads. That’s how we think about the brand in our business. And we keep expanding from that.

Rajamannar: It is so mature in terms of the thinking and thought process behind it. That the brand is the sum total of every single experience the consumer has at every touch point and something which embodies the value and the character of your company. But as much as this is known in theory, and understood as a philosophy, even large companies really struggle to embrace it fully. So, for example, even in large companies, which typically have a very good balance sheet and the cash flows are pretty good, what happens is whenever there is a bit of any kind of crisis, they typically deprioritize marketing. Marketing investment is always sort of a last resort investment, so to speak, and I'm saying it with knowledge. Because I constantly interact with all my peers at the World Federation of Advertisers and the AMA. Now, when you transpose this problem to startups, where your needs for investment are so intense, how do you balance your investment between marketing and the rest of the company.

Aatrey: Earlier, branding was considered something that you have to do, but if you ask people can you attribute what are the benefits to the business from doing these brand investments, most people won’t have a good answer. Because of technology, a lot of these problems are now solved with attribution. Once you are able to create some kind of return on investment (RoI) model around branding, some of these conversations go away.

We have tried to put as much science as we can behind this. You can check every single investment that you do, how does that translate into RoI and because of that we are able to have a conversation inside the company, saying branding is an investment rather than a cost of business.

Rajamannar: Do you think of investing specifically for brand building because it is good for your company in the years to come?

Aatrey: To be frank, for the first few years when you have limited money, you invest only in performance marketing because the attribution is almost 100 percent correct. But now we don’t think of performance and branding as two different channels. We have evolved to a point where we say that all of them combined together become more powerful. Sometimes we just keep doing performance marketing, and a customer who does not know about the brand looks at that ad 10 times a day, but does not trust that brand because we haven’t spent enough around building the narrative. People just won’t click on the ad.

But if you start to invest towards brand building, you start to see a performance campaign start to become better. That’s why we are such strong believers in brand building and sometimes people who haven’t seen that are not.

Rajamannar: Let’s switch gears a bit. You cannot have 40% new users or first time users of ecommerce unless your experience is seamless, smooth and simple. I always say that what appears so simple and elegant upfront, is so complex, intricate and incredibly sophisticated on the backend. I don't know what it would entail for a company to give that kind of a simple interface, the complexity and the sophistication that has to go behind it. I think it's a phenomenal solution.

Aatrey: A lot of work that we have done is around virality. That’s what we call it internally. And the reason I’m talking about this is the kind of customers we serve. A lot of these people come from lower-income segments, and whatever you do, the LTV (lifetime value) sometimes could be limited in the kind of categories you’re operating in. So you have to figure out a way to basically access them without spending a lot of money. We invested in increasing the virality of the product. How do we make sure the product goes from one customer to the other at different points in time? We invested around technology on our app and leveraged WhatsApp. We created these beautiful nudges at different points in the app so that people refer to their friends, family, and everyone. It became very natural.

Everything that we do is customer-first rather than what we have. The kind of customer we serve wants simple things because they’re new to online, new to ecommerce, and they’re overwhelmed. They want a simple path to getting to what they want. Now how do you kind of build that out? It happens when you start to understand your customer better than anyone else.

A brand is not just in your business, a brand is built around how you treat your people.

- Aatrey

Aatrey: The core of everything that we have done around people comes from a strong belief that we are where we are today because of all the people we have in the company. And I think we will get to where we want to be also because of the kind of people we have. Our goal is to build a people-centric workplace. A brand is not just in your business, a brand is built around how you treat your people. Do you think of them as resources to get some work done or do you think of them as people who are essentially going to grow the organisation. They evolve and the organisation evolves with them. That core belief about how important people are to the company drives a lot of this and we will keep reinventing a lot of these policies. We will keep marching towards building the most people-centric workplace, not just in India but also in the world.

Rajamannar: In summary, What does it take to build brands that are endearing and enduring?

Aatrey: To me, building an enduring brand is every single time you interact with your customers feeling that you have to earn that trust again. And never take your customer for granted. A lot of legacy products (companies) that we see… you just start to feel that someone takes you for granted and that’s when disruption happens. We have to keep working towards earning the customer’s trust in every single interaction every single time and if you do that for years, then you have a chance of building an enduring brand.

Rajamannar: When I look at brand building, there is a distinction between building a brand and sustaining a brand. An enduring brand is adaptive and adjusts constantly. It is also consistent. Many brands can lose their way with some shiny new pennies and toys, but having that single-minded focus is important. You need to have your Northstar. Yet you're not so rigid that if there is a waterfall in front of you, you just don't keep marching straight, but you find a way around it with your eyes firmly on the North Star.

This article first appeared in Forbes India's print edition. Read and watch Storyboard18's Built To Last series on CNBC-TV18, Moneycontrol and Forbes India.