99% Of Disruption To Happen In Next 10 Years: CEO, Raymond

“Today is an era where we need marketers to evolve, to transform, to enhance their roles not just doing brand marketing, but take mantle of leadership in inclusion of technology,” said Sanjay Behl, CEO, Raymond, as part of his keynote address at the BW Businessworld Marketing Whitebook Summit in Bengaluru. Behl addressed a room full of audience on the topic ‘Marketing with Leadership, Inclusion, and Technology’.

In his opening remark, Behl said, “Things are changing yet they are the same. Customisation, personalisation, uniqueness - these used to be there 50 years ago and it is there even today, may be the ‘how’ of that has changed, but the ‘what’ of that is pretty much the same. If we could decode the change then it’s possible we can ride on the change. In a very meaningful way to create disruptive value for our brands.”

Behl’s keynote address was focussed on how a marketer is going to calibrate itself differently into leadership, how they are going to calibrate themselves to inclusion and dimension, and the role of technology in the life of the consumer and how the marketer or brands need to embrace this technology?

“Television became the first real mode of revolution in mode of entertainment not just in India but across the world, starting in 60s, 70s it became the household mode of entertainment, to an extent that India became the most television consuming countries in the world. Even today India is No. 2 to Brazil which consumes three and half hours of television viewing time every day,” said Behl.

Behl said that, today we have over supply of products and choices have gone up. In order to substantiate the fact, he elaborated with examples of apparels and shampoo brands in the country. He continued, “In an oversupply situation you can never make money on maturity of any brand because there is going to be commoditisation and glut. Product life cycle are compressing.”

Explaining on today’s marketer’s job, Behl said, “Fundamentally the basic model of creating value today is shifted dramatically because consumer has evolved rapidly and betting on that has changed the whole paradigm of how we market with brand effectively. At core level a marketer job is to identify needs and fulfil them.”

“Since time immemorial, in recorded history, human productivity has always been linear. Machines gave dramatic rise to productivity in the last 200 years, but again very linear. Fundamental change happened when Information Technology got integrated. That was the crux which took away the linear ability of a cognitive human mind. The whole paradigm of management changed, the best of the company which was built on the linear industrial revolution failed because they couldn’t comprehend,” said Behl.

“Exponential growth is a paradigm of compounding which a human brain does not understand,” added Behl.

Talking on digitisation Behl said, “The problem with digitisation is that it’s disruptive in first few years and that is the reason why human minds fail to understand the meaning of it. 99 per cent of the disruption is going to happen in the next 10 years,” said Behl.

Behl said that Scarcity is contextual, and there is going to be abundance of everything. Everything will be virtual and de-centralised, and the world is going to be a better place.