One of the peculiar aspects of my life is that if any of my parents, in-laws or close relatives is asked what I do for a living, you will get as many answers as there are people. At best, the commonality in their answers would be that it’s got something to do with advertising. Advertising itself would have been an unusual choice for them but within that broad realm when I carved out a space called Organizatio Brand Consulting, the specialization is probably too much to comprehend.
I just thought I will retrace back on how these choices got made and I happened to show up in this domain.
During my engineering days (which is normally what above average students in small towns end up doing) it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t up to it. It just did not excite me and today I cannot recall a single concept of electrical engineering that I spent 4 years doing. Incidentally, I graduated with 78% marks which says something about the way that system works.
However, I was one of those who really enjoyed taking part in most of the creative endeavors like theatre, singing, organizing events etc. And somewhere it all added up for me into the seductive world of showbiz. But that looked too much of a wild west from the safe traditional environs of Bhopal so I chose a reasonable middle ground of advertising- reasonably creative and adequately organized as a career option.
Someone mentioned MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications) and besides the IIMs, that was the only institute I applied to as a part of my post grad pursuits. Would probably have ended up in IT if that had not come through as I had a offer from TCS as a part of my campus placement. I really enjoyed the MICA entrance test which tapped into all my jack-of-all-trades creative capability.
Expecting a course in ad-making I land up at MICA and discover that there is something called client servicing and media planning and market research… but strangely nothing to do with actual making of advertising. Anyway, the fees was paid, and a job in an agency was assured so one had no option but to persist. Fortunately, I landed up with a really inspiring bunch of friends, all immensely creatively gifted and in an indirect sort of way one got the experience one was seeking. We all dreamt of starting our own agency together which would reinvent the profession and hopefully do a Bernbach-II.
In my summer placements I was exposed to an actual ad- agency and saw its inner workings. I was quite disappointed with what I saw of servicing, which I was veering towards as a year two specialization before the summers. Once back on campus, market research looked a better option and having had enough of the left brained stuff in my engineering, was clear that qualitative, and not quantitative research, would give me both status and joy.
Then a two day session conducted by Santosh Desai altered the course of my life. I still remember that workshop called – Nailing the Monster- Insightful Strategy Made Easy. And two days and many Hoffstedes (a model used by Santosh based on Geert Hoffstede’s work on mapping organizational cultures) later I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Not the Hoffstedes, but Account Planning!
It was a mesmerizing two days which took us into the world of Hindi movies, music, popular culture, social psychology, anthropology and everything that makes life worth living. I broke-off from my reclusive backbencher past for the first time and participated like crazy in every discussion bringing my own life into it.
Subsequently, we had another day long session with Rahul Kansal (ex-Mudra and now ToI) and it took the subject matter a few steps further. I hit it off personally with Rahul and he offered me the opportunity to work with him post graduating, which I grabbed with both hands. That first year at Mudra was great fun- working closely with Rahul on a lot of new business work and exposure to a new category every fortnight. I was extremely fortunate to have a peek into the CEO’s world right from the start and the opportunity to look at many businesses strategically. I think that exposure had the most profound impact on my orientation towards turning a full fledged consultant rather than an in-house strategic planning person.
Due to a set of circumstances to do with life in Mumbai, I moved to Bangalore and joined Orchard Advertising hoping to further my account planning exposure but things never took off the way I had hoped. There was always a sense of not understanding what strategic account planning was really about besides writing good power-points and better-than-others creative briefs. I was actually considering giving up hopes of doing account planning the way it looked in those class romm sessions at MICA and move into either the client side or quail research.
But again through some strange coincidences , my quest for a guru in this field took me to the doorstep of Momentum, a firm founded by Dharen Chadha a few years back after quitting at one of the Global Planning Directors of JWT…and this where I found my bliss!
More on that in another post, but the moral of this story being that while there was no intentional plan to be here, it was no series of happy accidents either. I was lucky to have discovered broadly what I wanted to do in my B-school itself and got exposed to practitioners of highest caliber and integrity. But in the absence of a conventional well-designed training/exposure, one had to go through some trial and error to make this ambition workable.
I do wonder though if that Santosh Desai session had not happened, what course life might have taken...
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