Abhishek Pinninti: Hello everyone, today we have Forum with us, a fellow marketeer and you know let us hear us ⁓ from stories of her in marketing and what she has been doing all this while and let us hear some insights about marketing. Hello Forum, how are you doing? Forum: Yes. ⁓ I'm good Abhishek, thank you so much for calling me on this. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, let us take, take us through your journey into marketing. When did you, you know, want to get into it? Why did you choose marketing as your, you know, thing and, you know, just take us through that journey. Forum: Okay, so my name is Forum and I basically like to call myself as a marketing public. See, I have an obsession with brands and ads. So I converted this obsession into a career. ⁓ Abhishek Pinninti: Mm-hmm. Okay. Forum: I am a founder of an agency known as Newsome where we help the businesses with growth marketing. ⁓ So I started my journey in my own family's real estate business. I was a second generation ⁓ entrepreneur in the family business. Post working with my father, launched my own D2C brand. While I launched my D2C brand, was doing six to seven figures monthly MRR. Then COVID hit and I realized that there a lot of other founders who didn't know how to scale up online businesses or they were struggling to find the right kind of market fit for the products. That's how I started helping the brands with everything which is into growth marketing. So what we basically do is we don't just do ads and everything. We look at numbers. We understand the consumer's behavior. We build creatives and campaigns that actually helps bring growth for the brand. So I act as an extended growth officer for the brands and the businesses today. Abhishek Pinninti: I mean, when you said that you, real estate story, it was the same. I got into my dad's business first, then started my own thing later. A marketing agency as well. So now, yeah, now we have pivoted into an AI tool, you know, to optimize meta and Google Ads and detect leaks, you know, how they work. There are a lot of algorithm changes and all of that. To optimize that, you know, we are building a tool called bit.lyspark.ai. Forum: ⁓ wow. Okay. Okay. Abhishek Pinninti: I I've been, I related to that when you said you have a real estate story. So yeah, I have a question to you. What is the biggest marketing mistake everyone do thinking that it is marketing and it doesn't work out? Forum: see, one... ⁓ thing that I see that the brands are making today is that everyone is just chasing new customers. Instead of building a very strong repeat customers base. So I was interacting with a food brand. They are doing roughly around 70 lakhs a month in revenue. Now this number is very impressive, right? But when I looked at the backend data, 87 % of the revenue was coming from new customers. Only 13 % was the repeat. So basically, the says that either the brand's product was not good enough that people wanted to buy again and again. Or the product was good, but the brand was not reaching out to the customers repeatedly, reminding them to buy the product again and again. A solid business or solid brand is of two things. One is very strong distribution and the other is very strong customer repeat rates. Abhishek Pinninti: Good Forum: If you ⁓ are spending money to acquire new customers, you are just burning money. Repeat customers is what will make you move towards positive unit economics. And I see most brands ignoring these things. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. Okay. Understood. So what is that, you know, in AI evolving and what changes have you seen with AI coming into marketing? And if let's say there are a lot of founders who are watching this, if you tell them what, you know, how can they evolve AI in the business and how can AI help them? What do you suggest? What tools do you recommend while you you are exploring AI? Forum: Okay, so see for years now, growing brand and businesses was always people's game. You needed people, right? If you a brand seriously, you a media buyer, a creative strategist, a data analyst. Now with AI coming into picture, is All these three layers are getting collapsed into one, right? AI is not replacing them, but it is just consolidating everything. You know, can hire one very smart marketer, give them the right AI tools and he alone or she alone can do the work with, you know, earlier five to six people were doing it and it also happens faster. So AI today can tell you, why is your creative not working? Yeah. Which creative is working and why? Right. But even after, you know, using AI alone, AI is not, is going to be useless. Right. Today. I see brands and businesses treating AI like a magic button. They just want to plug in and they expect that money and revenue should just come like this. But it does not work like that. AI cannot help you understand why a mother sitting in Surat is not trying your skincare brand. AI cannot still understand your customers' insecurities. That is still a marketer's job. But with AI, definitely you can understand and realize why certain things are not working. So the data analytics becomes much easier, much faster, reading data, testing data, doubling down on what is working and what is not working. Everything can get simplified with AI because AI just puts every loop into a steroid mode. So businesses feel that AI will so its job is danger, Abhishek Pinninti: Hmm. Forum: marketers feel that, you know, this will replace me. That is not the case with AI. You have to grow along with AI and only brands and businesses that are going to use AI will be surviving. So personally, I use ⁓ a lot of AI tools. ⁓ The recent favorite of mine is the Claude Opus because you know, it thinks well, it writes well, it gives you a lot of logical reasoning to be done. So I think one tool that I cannot live without is the cloud. Abhishek Pinninti: Another question I have is, you know, you've seen a lot of AI production tools which have come in, the video production or the static images and all of that for content on the social pages. So what do you suggest to a brand to go with AI content or go with organic content for paid advertisements or like for the page for organic reach or growth? Forum: So, okay, again, ⁓ I would want to answer this in a very different manner and I think my answer is going to offend a lot of marketing people, right? What happens is today every brand that I almost interact with now, everybody wants to sound very intelligent. know, the marketing team wants to have very fancy taglines, very complicated sentences. They want multiple creative elements and everything, but... Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: They forget that it is all about being very raw, very authentic, being to a true self because that is what the consumers want to see. They don't want to see anything very super polished or they don't want to see very perfect kind of an ad creators. So even if you're using AI, see definitely AI is making things very fast, right? Earlier you could churn out 5-10 creative content a week, now this can go to 100-150. But the moment people start to feel that this is an AI content, you are gone. So with AI, you also have to make sure that you have that human element, you have that human touch in it. Now AI will you super complicated jargon headlines. But is that something that the consumer can understand? They cannot understand, right? So the AI that you the data, you have to polish it or have to make it as raw so that the humans can understand. So definitely AI brings fast execution, but it misses that human touch. So a marriage between these two things will work in the favour of the brands and the businesses. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. I relate to that, know being authentic and raw could help the consumer to relate to the brand rather than you know it will take him closer to the brand and relate to him you know that's what I feel and also this personal founder led brand which is coming through personal branding of every founder is helping them to grow. What is your view on personal branding for founders and kids? Now I see all founders are leading the brands rather than brands page. take me your view on it because I am believing ⁓ in my view I am stopping my brand's page rather than building my own page and telling people that hey I am doing this. Please follow me or take my insights a lot of that. Forum: So I, if you know me and if people who know me, they will say that I'm a... Abhishek Pinninti: That's how I've seen you, I've approached you through Instagram. Yeah, from your branding. Forum: So that's the power of personal branding. You can connect with good people. So I am a huge fan of personal branding. I'll just give you one example and I think this will give you the answer for it. Zerodha today is the Zerodha because Nikhil built a personal brand so strong that he became the marketing for the brand. know, the podcast. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: the conversations with the founders, the creators, his opinions about entrepreneurship, investing, business, life. People follow him because they start trusting him. And because they trust Nikhil, they also trust that whatever Nikhil is doing is trustworthy. That is zero. Right. So he has built that authenticity for his business that no ad campaign would ever be able to do. And that's personal branding power. One more example or two more examples is Shashank from the Whole Truth Foods. The brand is beautifully out there in the market because Shashank is the face for the brand. Bombay Shaving Company's founder Shantanu, he is an amazing person and a real life example of how personal branding can have a huge impact on your brands and your businesses. Abhishek Pinninti: Hmm. Yeah. Forum: for every founder or every business owner today, think personal branding is the cheapest, the fastest and the most powerful marketing channel that you can invest into. I think nothing can beat the amount of efforts that you put in building your personal brand. Just nothing. Abhishek Pinninti: I really appreciate the way you took Nikhil Kamath as an example because I have been you know taking him as an inspiration see, Groww today is the market leader in India for stock market but whereas this guy is not targeting Groww's audience but is targeting the future audience who will invest into stock market that is Gen Z's. So Nikhil has started targeting them as a future market, started creating content around them to inspire them. and at end of the day when they want to enter into the stock market the first guy or the first platform they choose is Zerother because they know nickel, carmet rather than grow founders. So I mean that is a really good example that you have to go. So yeah. Forum: I am personally very, very ⁓ interested in Nikhil's journey because he's doing a fabulous work. Abhishek Pinninti: No. I mean, he's bringing down everyone in his podcast. I don't know, next he'll bring down Israel's president or I don't know. yeah. So ⁓ let's say I am a D2C ⁓ startup founder. ⁓ I just want to enter into a product. Let's say my grandmother makes good homemade sweets or something like that. I want to take that brand Forum: Yeah. you Abhishek Pinninti: into public. I am a new maybe I am in my college. So what do you suggest to him to take his brand in a minimal you know because he doesn't have capital though he's just exploring the space. So what is that perfect way that he can channelize his you know grandmother's taste to everyone if he wants to all through all. Forum: Okay. So again, ⁓ you first need to have very good product, right? No amount of, you know, marketing, no amount of money, no amount of anything will help you if the product is not good. Now, I'm trusting that this person's product is amazing, right? First and the foremost thing that he needs to do is attach a very good story to this brand or to product, right? If it's a grandmother recipe, right? It's already a very strong storytelling that he can do play around for his brand and the product, right? Second is he has to invest because he does not have too much of money to spend organic content. This is the way forward for it. Probably you, you you start creating a lot of contradicting content on internet saying that you are wearing a suit boot and saying that Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: You know, I am a professional, but this brand of mine is for the, you know, the, nannies favorite boy out there, right? People relate to it, right? People want to relate back to their roots. So, you know, create a lot of content as to what problems you faced, why you started with this brand, what is so special about this brand. If you know, the person can bring in their own grandmother or grandparents into the content. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: that gels really well because this way people can easily relate to the brand and the product. ⁓ So I think storytelling, investing in good content, picking out and showing all the raw and the messy things of the business that I tried, you know, making multiple formulations, but I failed because making something for two, three days at home is still easier, but packing it in a package format probably you'll fail, right? Giving it a shelf life. Abhishek Pinninti: Right. We end this. Yeah. Forum: So you call out that journey, call out your show that how your first 100 customers were your neighbors and the people in your college who were supporting you. So all this is what people like to read, people like to think, people like to see on the ⁓ social media. They want to feel the brand is as human as possible. So I read a quote today. The only things that are going to win is Brands becoming more human and humans becoming more like brands, right? So this sums up I think everything if you are a brand you have to start becoming Human as much as possible and if you're a human position yourself as a brand in the minds of the people So I think this will work well Abhishek Pinninti: Right. Sounds interesting. So let us take marketing spend for many brands. They spend a lot of money but they didn't see the return on ad spend and people see a lot of turn in their ads and all of that. 80 % of the brands face this. What do you think the major problem for them for facing that? ⁓ Is there any major problem that you have seen particularly that brands can induce to reduce that? Forum: Okay, so two things that I see very frequently while I consult the branches. ⁓ One is that their ad funnel is leaking, right? When I tell about ad funnel is leaking, is they do a lot of creative testing but without any data analysis. So with AI again, the brands can churn out 40-50 creatives a month. But what they do is they throw all those creatives into meta and they feel that the algorithm will decide what is working and what is not working. This is not testing. This is actually a form of gambling. Data can tell you that why a certain creative worked. But have to use that data. You have to make sure that you do not repeat the same mistake that you've done with the earlier set. using that data, you have to churn out content. Most brands are not doing this. They are randomly shooting content. And what they feel is that that creative is made for everyone. You have to have different set of creatives for different persona of your customer. Somebody who's facing a hair loss will not want to see a ad about beard right he probably will be having a full beard but if him that you are losing out that customer so you have to have creative testing done using proper data analysis first of all what is that the attribution is broken now meta and google in both these platforms constant war is on Both the platforms want to take credit for the same customer. METTA says this customer is of me. Google says this customer because of me. So what happens with is most of the times you can see double revenue numbers on these platforms. the brand marketing team does what? In Meta, my ROAS 3. Google, my ROAS 2. So let me just take this platform specific ROAS and then plan my strategies. But that is not true because double revenue is attributed here. So you have to into consideration the blended ROAS or the blended ROI. Walk on increasing how organic revenue is increasing which will your dependency on the platform. Because earlier, what was customer sees an ad, they click on it, they convert. Now it's not the same. It's more like a marketing web. Customer sees your ad, clicks on it, but does not buy. Then they probably saw you on a podcast or they saw an Instagram influencer talking about your brand or your product. They went to Google, they searched for the reviews, they went to Amazon, they searched the reviews. Then they again saw your ad and then they got converted. So it's not a funnel, it's a marketing web, right? You never know where your customer is coming from. So just focusing on one ad part is not going to give you that revenue that you want. So plan on the marketing web and then you will see that the numbers are increasing. Abhishek Pinninti: I would definitely ask you to check us out is because when I meant we are trying to optimize Google and Meta as we are trying to solve this particular problem. Yeah, multi-channel is except Google and Meta, whereas US brands also use TikTok as a biggest channelized platform. So we're trying to optimize multi-channel marketing to scrape that out their marketing spend as a proper way and channelize their marketing spend as than wasting leaking revenue. Forum: Wow. ⁓ wow, that's I think gonna help a lot to the grinds. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Yes, we are in the beta phase right now. are planning to launch the product in a month or so. But yeah, I'll definitely share it to you. Just look it out and I am open for your inputs for that. Forum: I would love to try it. Definitely would love to try this. Abhishek Pinninti: And another, know, when I talk to a lot of gen Z's and startup enthusiasts who want to get into entrepreneurship in India, let's say they are ⁓ keeping an eye on D2C space. What is that particular space that there is a gap that they can create a brand in it and you know, a product which is not there and they can improve that space. What did you suggest them if someone comes up and asks you, hey I want to build a brand, can you help me out with the product and take us into the market? Forum: So, a couple of weeks back, I was at an investor founder meet and this purely comes after speaking with a lot of investors out there. One space that you see in the D2C ecosystem that is growing is the personal health, wellness space, personal care, health and wellness space. The reason is more and more people are moving towards taking care of their body. Up till now, we were neglecting our own personal well-being. Right. But the Gen Z's, you know, have completely changed the entire dynamics. They have come and probably, you know, taught us multiple times that, you know, burning out is not a good thing. You have to take care of your body. You cannot work beyond your limits. Right. So people today post COVID also people today want to focus on their own personal health. Right. So anything to do with personal health, wellness. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: is something which is picking up really good and I think there are quite a few brands who are already doing good but you can always find a space you know in that and you will be able to build a good brand if you yourself are going through that problem right I cannot build a brand if Abhishek is going through that problem because at one point of time I can only understand or I can empathize with you but I have not lived that problem right so I think look around you Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. Forum: look within yourself what problems you are facing on a daily basis see if that's a problem that is you know a problem with other people also if more people are facing a problem bang on you have an idea just launch it Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, yeah, I think that's the better way to launch a brand, you know, when you personally face a problem and you were trying to find a solution for it, that's the best way you can give you a hundred percent for the brand and you know, take the product in a better way to the market. Yeah. Forum: The way I was telling you, Shashank from the whole group, he faced this problem, right? He was not fit. He was a chubby guy, right? He used to eat a lot of things that used to just degrade his health more. He found that problem himself and that's why he launched something, right? Similarly, find a problem within you and then launch. It will be much easier and customers will trust you more in this. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah. I those are very deep insights for me. ⁓ I generally keep the discussion very short, but I have a lot of questions in mind, but I think let's do a part two later for sure. I mean, I've been relating with whatever you're saying because yeah, I think we are in the same industry and follow the same, I would say trends happening in the industry. And thanks for your time and ⁓ let's do a part two for sure in the future. Forum: Sure, sure. Thank you so much Abhishek for this. It's really lovely speaking to you and looking forward to checking out your AI too. Abhishek Pinninti: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'll stay in touch with you and yeah, I'll see you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day. Forum: Thank you so much. Thank you.