Before Air India became a cautionary tale of mismanagement, it was the gold standard of global aviation. It was a flying ambassador of India’s charm, wit, and impossible flamboyance. In the 1960s and 70s, our airline was a cultural artefact; a brand that understood spectacle before Instagram and its ilk.

Here’s a story that sounds so bizarre, and made up, it will shock you.

Air India wanted an ashtray for its first-class cabins. (Yeah, smoking was allowed on flights.) This was an era when the airline’s in-flight experience was designed like a Wes Anderson movie: curated, and oddly intimate. So naturally, they approached Salvador Dalí to design one. Yes, the Salvador Dalí.

And Dalí said yes.

The story is so fantastic, it just creates its surrealistic canvas. The ashtray, the legend, and everything that comes with this are captured in Bangalore’s own, National Gallery of Modern Art. (For anyone who says Bangalore does not have much to do, please visit the Gallery)

What followed was classic Dalí: a surreal, coiled serpent motif wrapped around a dish, both menacing and glamorous. It’s supported by two elephant heads, and a swan. If you flip it over, the elephant heads become swans, and the swan becomes an elephant. It’s a delightfully over-engineered product. We stared at it for a while, and marvelled at how this whole episode came to be.

When Air India asked Dalí for his fee, he didn’t ask for money. He asked for a baby elephant.

A… what again…?

A baby goddamn elephant!

Imagine pitching that today. “We’re commissioning a surrealist icon to design an ashtray. He wants an elephant. Should we do it?” The “procurement” team would have a cardiac event.

But this was an airline that had Pierre Cardin designing crew uniforms, actual miniature paintings in passenger kits and so much more! It turned its Maharajah mascot into a global character, full of mischief and quiet satire. (all captured in the gallery in all its fantastical glory, and some very questionable ones at that)

Of course they sent Dalí the elephant. Shipped all the way from India to Spain.

I can’t even begin to articulate how insane this is. Or how cool this is. Or… what in the world are we doing as brand custodians?! This was in 1966! Where is the fantastic? Where is the bizarre? We have templatised marketing to its absolute average.

There was a time we didn’t just “target consumers,” but seduced them.

Air India gave us a blueprint to build personality. And I guess the most effective brief went something like, “Make it memorable. Make it weird.” Sounds inch-perfect to me, in a world with dwindling attention spans, and the need for quick-fix dopamine hits.

No performance metrics. No brand safety guidelines. No six-slide decks on ROI. Just one iconic artist, one audacious airline, and a shared understanding: this is going to be fun, strange, and unforgettable.

Would I want to send a baby elephant to a surrealist painter as a modern brand activation? Probably not. But would I trade ten polished influencer campaigns for a fantastical story like this?

Every single time.

ok, this is a piece I’ve been meaning to write for 5+ years. About darn time. And the time is right. Because… I’m sick of the word, “Orwellian”. We’re nowhere close to being in an Orwellian world.

With that, here goes…

Orwell feared a future where books would be banned, truth would be erased, and the state would crush dissent. Huxley feared something far more pernicious and encompassing: a world where no one wanted to read, because they were too busy chasing dopamine.

Where do you think we stand?

Orwellian: Information is withheld. Truth is controlled. Fear is weaponized.

Huxelian: Information is abundant. Truth is drowned. Pleasure is weaponized.

How about now?

We’re in the thick and thin of Huxley’s universe.

And most of us don’t know it. We will chase the next news cycle, “trend-jack” the next meme and life will go on… because nuance is dead, and so are passionate logical debates and thinking. Hot takes ftw, as the Gen-Zs, say.

soma: a prompt away, stronger, more potent

Huxley feared that a society wouldn’t need a dictator, because it would be too entertained to care about freedom. He was right. We have normalised political dictatorship. And creating a polarised faction was the first step in realising that dream.

In Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, soma is a drug used by the state to suppress dissent. It’s a hallucinogen to escape from reality and only feel happiness. Sounds scarily familiar?

AI is the new soma, albeit more potent, a bit different. But it gets the job done.

There was a time when we had to think before we spoke. Now autocomplete does it for us.

We don’t remember. We Google.
We don’t argue. We repost.
We don’t seek truth. We scan headlines, then outrage.
We don’t write as much. We prompt.

The biggest trick AI ever pulled is to replace all creative friction. Friction gave us moment to pause, reminisce, think, search the inner conners of our brain to find meaning, unlock patterns and force new ideas. That’s… well… done with. Now, we want to ‘ship’ a piece, a thought, an idea. Fast.

Muzzle Velocity: flood and kill the signal

There’s a term from the Trump camp called, “muzzle velocity.” It’s the one thought-provoking piece they’ve managed to weaponise and use to full effect.

The idea is simple: flood the media with so much chaos, so many stories, so much outrage, that no one knows what to focus on. Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s meme.

Silencing the truth is a poor strategy, one simply needs to outrun it because news happens in cycles, and you prey on someone’s attention spans. And with polarising news channels, you can waltz your way to the ‘truth’ that you think matters. It’s what Trump has mastered — and because his message is so simple, it finds resonance.

Silicon Valley has productized this notion of simple and clear. And that’s precisely what tech algorithms now weaponize at scale.

You’ve felt it. Something breaks, something burns, someone lies — and just as it begins to matter, something shinier appears. Rinse, repeat. The problem isn’t that we don’t know, we just can’t care.

This is Huxley’s world. Overstimulation is the new censorship.

Voluntary Dystopia

This isn’t authoritarianism in the classical sense, because it has takers and backers in equal measure. The majority across the world have voted for fundamentalism, closing borders and looking inwards.

The modern dystopia need not be enforced, unsuprisingly it’s embraced, willingly and passionately. The father of Public Relations and the original propagandist (Ed Bernays) would’ve been stunned by the mass submission of people, were he alive. (i’m sure he’d be proud, in that twisted way of his) How did so many kowtow to mediocrity so easily?

Voluntary dystopia is the well we find ourselves in, and as we drown, we’re a herd that lumbers on because algorithms own us. So, here’s a template to stand out for your own sanity:

• Reclaiming ‘thought’. Spend time thinking and writing.
• Take time to pause, reflect, and journal aimlessly — there will always be method in madness.
• Practice boredom, and seek out friction.
• Read longform — Feynman technique what you read with friends, provoke conversations in your friends’ whatsapp groups
• Your time is valuable, choose to spend it wisely

At the risk of making this post any longer, i shall end this rant, because… well… how many of us read anyway 😉

Satisficing:
A cognitive heuristic to explain the behavior of decision-makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined.

When consumers can’t determine the optimal solution, they give a brand the power of their decisions. It’s why many choose Apple, because they’ve abrogated the rationality of choice. This has to be viewed with care though. The corollary of it is valid too. Think about the below statement:

“It’s surely better to fund satisfactory solutions for a realistic world, than perfect solutions for an unrealistic world.”

You can have the ideal product, but it’s probably not satiated the lethargic status quo to choose your over an incumbent. We understand this by saying, “It was ahead of its time,” and bemoan the end of a good product. The onus of the product’s capabilities lies in packaging its marketing efficacy.

In the satsificing world, the non-discerning customer (most folks) buy X over Y not because X is better, but because they’re more certain that it’s probably good. Another heuristic in this decision-making process: Insuring the downside of a bad product is far far important than buying a good product.

Again, the devil’s advocate for this in a hyper-informative world:

A satificing product is also bound to be disrupted. That is precisely why organizations want to be brands. Brands enjoy a certain luxury others seldom can. This argument works both ways. But when you want to build a brand without the base layer of product, you get disrupted.

After all, there’s an entire market dedicated in China to showing the middle finger to your ‘brand’, by producing significantly cheaper alternatives. Over time, these cost arbitrage companies become brands BECAUSE they have product prowess. Xiaomi is a classic example.

When selling SaaS products, marketing teams obsess over the different ‘personas’ to be targeted. I categorize these under four buckets:

1. Buyer Persona — The person who controls budgets and decisions to buy a product or reject it.
2. User Persona — The one who actually uses the product, and experiences its boon and banes.
3. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — The types of people in an org who best suit your solution.
4. The evangelist — The one who understands your roadmap, and evangelizes the product for you in an org.

These are the 4 personas as I understand them. The first 3 are routine, and have been spoken about in length. The 4th is ignored mostly because once the sale is done, folks move on.

The 4th persona is critical product retention and gives data-driven direction to companies to build great products. More on this later.

Buyer Personas

To me, the Buyer persona is a: ‘good to know, great to articulate, terrible to break your head over’. Because these folks aren’t good for product retention. They’re merely influenced by the User persona. They don’t use the product much, and care for outcomes. Those outcomes are driven by User personas.

A good product naturally stands the test of time, and builds resilience as you focus on points 2 & 3.

The Buyer persona focuses on the brand they want to be associated with. They focus on costs. For these personas, marketing teams should focus on events, roundtables, and talks. Influence Don’t do the major chunk of your bidding here. A layer of brand marketing rubs off on this persona.

Sidenote: The buyer persona has the illusion of power in startups. In most startups, the ‘doer’, the one who faces problems routinely exercises more power than the ‘manager’. The Users influence the buyers, and if marketing can convince enough User personas, they’ve won the battle to make the sale.

The problem is the lack of ‘product-oriented’ marketing around User personas, and converting them into evangelists. This is the gaping hole for marketers, because it involves understanding the ambitions and beliefs of a niche persona. More below 👇

User Personas

User personas are hard to sell to. They want documentation, proofs, case studies, and a track record of efficacy. This is the org that sales can’t penetrate. They’re developers who want to talk to developers.

Any attempt to make a sale is met with disdain. Only one layer plays a role in this space — Marketing. (Apart from time from leadership — which is not something marketing should consistently rely on)

Your job as a marketer is therefore three-fold:

• To bring awareness of your product.
• To build the brand perception of a product your persona wants to be associated with.
• Use the lever of product marketing to showcase differentiation, comparisons, and how superior your product is from the rest.

The first two points are driven by brand and performance. The last is driven by an engineer in conjunction with a product marketer. If the product marketer is dictating the tempo of conversations, you will fail. This is an engineering conversation, and therefore, needs to be driven and seeded by an engineer.

A product marketer facilitates and packages this intent. For example: An engineer can enunciate that developers hate spending time writing PromQL queries. A product marketer packages how one saves time using a solution that helps automate writing these queries.

SaaS orgs don’t take this persona seriously enough, and end up giving marketing too much control to steer the messaging of the product. This is the primary reason products don’t get enough traction.

A marketer cannot influence an engineer. A perception can be built over time, but the mainstay is always driven by engineers for engineers.

Orgs that don’t hire engineers to influence product marketing narratives will fail.

Ideal Customer Profile

The ICP has a lot of definitions on the internet, and folks have different takes on it. The simple way I understand the ICP — The archetypical customer you want the product to be used by, in a way that helps the problem you’re solving.

Let’s understand this with an example:
I use Notion to write down random thoughts.
My friend uses Notion to document dish recipes.
Both are user personas, both find value in using Notion.

For a marketer working with Notion, the ICP would be someone who uses Notion to…
Publish websites, evangelize the product in an organization, plan sprint tasks, use the calendar for meetings, track progress of work with multiple teams, etc…

Notice how the ICP differs from the User persona?

The ICP is important because it helps marketers direct marketing messaging to existing, and potentially new users. It signals how you want folks to behave in your ecosystem of products. This is critical if you want to improve retention and support the product team in feature velocity.

At some point, orgs eventually start obsessing over this:
- What is our Ideal Customer Profile?
- How can we target them correctly?
- What should we do to nail them?

The answer to all of this is fairly binary imo: Explain the problem you’re solving from the prism of the persona who uses your product, or from the organization that stands to benefit from using your product.

Yet, orgs chase some mysterious fact they’ve left out while targeting these personas. A pet peeve is how we also fail to understand how people make irrational and whimsical decisions. This quote from Taleb explains how people think, act, and make decisions:

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. And with my dog, I’m a Marxist”

And yet, we want to nail down the traits of an Ideal Customer Profile. This is an exercise in futility. If anything, a reasonably good product does not fit into the box of an ICP. Your audience is varied, talented, and demands more from a good product. Anyway, that’s a story for another day.

What you should be doing as a marketer: serve your audience with crisp meaningful problem statements, and how you product solves them.

The evangelist

Marketers don’t focus on the evangelist really. Mostly because they don’t talk enough to users who use the product. (Colour me guilty AF) Uncovering an evangelist is the flywheel marketers dream of.

The evangelist is an advocate for the product. They help with stickiness across teams after a sale is already closed. They improve adoption, demand features, and capabilities.

The evangelist is the real unpaid marketer you dream of.

Usually, the Customer Support teams deal with the evangelist and marketers seldom hear about them. As a marketer, talk to your Customer-facing teams. They have tonnes of stories — mostly bad, but every once in a while you’ll hear a gem you can sell. 😛

If you unleash an engineer on the evangelist, you can chalk out dozens of stories that will help your product marketing efforts. If it were to me, I’d coerce the product marketer to squat in the office of the customers who use the product. It’s the surest way to unearth stories on how your product solves a problem.

These personas need to be harvested, and once you do, they will do your bidding.

Invite the evangelists for talks, get them on community meetups, get your product teams to converse with them, and build close relationships with these folks. Every quarter, the marketing team should have a ‘meet-and-greet’ style event for these evangelists.

There are tonnes of ideas here, and marketing should drive these initiatives to win people over as evangelists.

Wrote this after a loooong conversation discussing user personas. Wrote down a few thoughts here. Hopefully, it’s handy to steer marketing initiatives for SaaS orgs. It’s not as exhaustive as I intended it, but hopefully has enough fodder to think. Good luck!

Determining the sex of a newborn chick has been a problem that has plagued the poultry industry for centuries.

For a poultry farmer, the male chicken is useless. They don’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy and farmers ideally want to get rid of them as soon as they are born. The problem is, it’s impossible to determine the sex of a chick when it’s born. It takes 4–6 weeks, and by this time, the farmer has wasted enough food and resources to grow them.

This was an age-old problem, until 1920.

A group of Japanese veterinary scientists discovered that the rear end of a chick could be used to determine the sex of a chick. This discovery was announced in 1927, and instantly revolutionized the global hatchery industry.

It birthed a unique job — A professional chicken sexer.

These were hot-shot jobs — the most valuable in the agricultural industry. The best graduates were from the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School; whose standards were so rigorous, only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. (yes, there is a school!) But if you graduated from this school, you could earn as much as $500 a day and were flown across the world to… ascertain the sex of chicks.

Chicken sexers were the “AI engineers” of then. 😉

But you see, Chicken sexing is a delicate art. It requires a certain, “Zen-like” concentration, and a “and a brain surgeon’s dexterity”. Why, you ask?

Without getting into the intricacies, turns out, even for the most well-trained folks, ascertaining the sex of a day-old chick was hard. The chick’s rear end had a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that revealed the sex of a chick. But, these were extremely hard to read.

By some estimates, there are as many as a thousand different vent configurations that a sexer has to learn to become competent at their job. And given that they have to make these decisions in seconds, it became even harder to understand how they do what they do.

Soon, academic philosophers and cognitive psychologists were fascinated with how Chicken sexers did their jobs. Reams of dissertations and papers have been written about what they do, and how they do their jobs.

Turns out, even the most professional sexers were unable to explain how they did their job. It was just… an inexplicable art 😮. Within 3 seconds, they just “know” the sex of a chick. They saw things that a common person simply does not see. Turns out, tt’s a unique art, as much as skill.

THEY JUST KNOW.

That line, resonated.
You hear it often from marketers, designers and… engineers.

“That code is… beautiful”
“That illustration looks… beautiful”
“Her writing… damn… beautiful”

THEY JUST KNOW.

As someone who has dabbled in ‘brand’ marketing for a while now, so much of what I’ve done is… inexplicable.

It’s hard to explain why sentences are constructed as such. It’s hard to explain why we need to take outlandish bets that don’t immediately translate into money. It’s hard to explain why a random game, a campaign, or an activity translates into brand quotient. These are matters of taste, and just… knowing.

And to be fair, a lot of this taste is NOT subjective. When you’re in the job for long enough, you just know what it takes to differentiate a brand. This taste is tangible for a brand marketer. And equally inexplicable, I must add.

Paul Graham explains this rather well from the perspective of a designer 👇

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and another way to articulate this:

Most marketing work (b2b companies especially) falls into this trap. You follow a kind of Jakob’s Law to bring parity by determining what ‘others are doing’. The more you gauge competition, the deeper the trap. Radical work is doing uncomfortable things — that’s the very essence of brand marketing.

To be different, you need to do different.

In the context of the death knell that’s AI, there’s a lesson to learn from Chicken sexers. A marketer’s job is enunciating differentiation. If AI is a learning model trained on what exists, it’s at best the top 10% of what’s out there. That is the arbitrage for a marketer. If you want to foolproof your job, you have to beat the top 10% of an AI model. Good odds, if you ask me 😜

This comes with studying, learning and internalizing to understand what will work for an organization. Then, hopefully, you get the space to experiment and run radical ideas.

The more you learn, study and understand, the better you will get at marketing. After all, Marketing is about… taste. It’s about… knowing.

The story of chicken sexers, and a lot of the language is borrowed from a fascinating book — Moonwalking with Einstein. I highly recommend you read this towering work.

Writing is the single biggest force multiplier you will ever learn. The more you write, the clearer your thoughts get over time. You learn to articulate better. You think better. You visualize every task at hand. If reading is learning, writing is studying.

Writing helps you professionally.

You’re able to paint a picture for your colleagues on what you’re thinking. Ideas spill over paper, folks across teams, locations, understand what you’re thinking. You leave zero margin for error because words mean things, and are actionable. Writing helps sell an idea.

As a Founder, writing helps you percolate the bigger picture to the organisation. It helps you convey the North Star. As a leader, it helps rally the troops. As an employee, it helps you execute on goals. Ambiguity goes out of the window when you write.

Writing helps you personally.

A handwritten letter is more valuable than a thousand flowers. Words have the unique ability to convey emotion, when others fail. It gives you the power to emote better, build relationships. It acts as a reassurance mechanism. It helps you manage conflict. It helps you deconstruct misunderstandings, because words are powerful.

Writing for yourself gives you a peek into how you’re evolving as a person. Writing gives you a window into the dusty corners of the mind. It unearths ideas, creates a memory palace for your thoughts. It helps you talk better with people.

The more you write, the better you get. The better you get at writing, the easier it gets to convey your thoughts. When it gets easier to convey what you truly mean, you’re able to eke out the best from people; professionally and personally. Folks who write well have a disproportionate advantage over the rest. Writing is… the single biggest force multiplier you will ever learn 😊

John Kennedy Toole committed suicide at 32. He got depressed after multiple publishers rejected, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’. His mother managed to find an eminent author who gave her a hearing. That singular event gave us a bewilderingly bewitching Ignatius Reilly — a character that deserves as much recognition as a Mr. Holmes, Atticus Finch or Mr. Gatbsy. Mr. Toole was posthumously awarded the 1981 Pulitzer prize for fiction. And what a deserved award it is.

It’s hard to describe books like, ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’. I suspect in a year or two, I would struggle to recall the ‘storyline’, if you could even call it one. What it is, is fine literature. It’s a book woven with rich language, and tugs at a reader’s intrigue to understand how Mr. Toole manages to keep a plot alive with his spectacular prose. To be clear, there is a storyline. This is not quite your typical meandering Murakami where words spill over a page without rationale, or a linear set of events. You follow a path Mr. Toole has laid out, just that it simply does not matter.

What does count is his language, his use of prose, his era of writers that we don’t produce anymore. His command over the language, his daring challenge to readers to love a misanthrope, an anti-hero who is repulsive, and yet, you want to prod on. That’s what makes this book such a delight.

Through his characters, Mr. Toole implores you to read more, but also, he’s being cunning about it — do you really want to know more about De Consolatione Philosophiae, from a deranged man who struggles with conventional society? He’s having his share of fun, probing the reader.

Mr. Toole must’ve thought:

‘I’m going to use a lunatic character to tell you about Boethius, the late Roman who had written Consolatione. I’m going to walk my reader through rota Fortunae — a wheel of Fortune, a blind goddess who spins humans on a wheel, so luck comes in cycles.’

Mr. Toole would’ve been a fantastic man to converse with, one who trolls you without knowing you’re being trolled. Like the one moment one of his characters says, “Her body had always amazed her. She received it free of charge, yet she had never bought anything that had helped her as much as that body had.” Or this gem of a line, when a character looks at his tablets and calls it, “gems of nihilism”. Or maybe, this line — “Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mynra was still around to offend.” What an inventive, fiendishly brilliant troll, Mr Toole would’ve made ;)

And there are enough gems in this book to be sure.

💡 “Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.”

💡 “You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”

💡 “I refuse to “look up.” Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

Who is the dunce really? His brilliantly conjured character, or the reader assimilating this tour de force of a book? Good satire, like any art form, makes you think, debate, and has many interpretations. The sheer audacity of this book made me smile. It’s been a pleasure reading Mr. Toole’s work, and I’m terribly sad we’ll never get to know what wonders he would’ve made had he persisted.

Read A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s biting prose, ingenious dialogue, unlike anything you’ll read. After all, one could always contend, with the proliferation of social media, and a large mike with people who probably should never wield one, we’re at the peak of… well… ‘A confederacy of dunces’ 😉

Some books make you so uncomfortable, they’re almost palpable. Your skin crawls as you read. You want to turn to the next page, wanting to know ‘what happens next’. But you also don’t want to know more —you’re in this weird quagmire of where the author is taking you, and feel supremely uneasy.

Good prose can do that. Because readers have this innate ability to vividly paint a picture, conjure the world the author commands; it’s an eerie feeling to read uncomfortable realities.

The Vegetarian is that cultural powerhouse. It’s a Korean book. It’s culture. It’s about women, representation, and choice; rather, the illusion of choice. Funny thing; there’s no word for vegans in Korean, and that sums up the book.

The main character does not have much of a say in the book, and that’s deliberate. A review for the book quotes Jean-Paul Sarte — “Existence precedes essence.” You exist, then create the essence of your existence. What if your essence is stripped though?

The stifling of choice, words, power to communicate, express — when someone snatches that away, what does that make you? Who are you? What do you stand for? What’s your voice?

The Vegetarian is Kafakesque, with a splash of wandering Murakami, and strong cultural undertones of women and representation.

It’s irritating, it’s annoying, it’s powerful, it’s frustrating, and when you have this concoction of emotions while reading prose; the author has succeeded. You, as a reader, have lived through that writing; and that’s good literature.

Read it. It’s rare to be so jolted reading prose, and Han Kang has done exactly that.

I get a lot of queries around how one can do brand marketing when budgets are scarce. In most cases, you will be able to do a fantastic job at branding if the focus is on quality content. No compromises here 😏. This alone will be a huge competitive advantage against orgs with budgets.

Considering this is a repetitive question, this post should help. This entire post was originally published as a tweetstorm — https://twitter.com/adadithya/status/1511934037010485251

In no particular:

1. Get your leadership to be vocal on social — this is non-negotiable. People want to work with smart people. 🙏🏻
   (Add a performance marketing layer to increase reach.) This is to increase reach of each piece of content posted on social so it reaches your TA.
2. Showcase interesting features, initiatives you’re undertaking — underscore challenges in what you’re building. Have a blog that becomes the bedrock of your proposition. (Quality content is hard, and investing in the right person here can help grow your brand manifold)
3. Highlight employee-friendly policies. When you’re small, you have the liberty to do a lot more — this is a major competitive advantage against the biggies. Flex. (Large orgs are driven by chaotic processes, and rigid policies to focus on the collective. This is a strong lever to market when you’re a small org)
4. Have one session for all new joinees to help pitch your org:
   - What is the vision/mission?
   - What are the differentiators from competition?
   - What’s the industry landscape?
   - Key milestones worthy of mention
   The more folks bat for you, the larger visibility you get.
5. Nurture ambassadors within the team — get more folks to help you brand, pitch. Activate PR for product announcements — get wide reach from digital publications. (start here)
6. Speak to micro-influencers (5k+ followers) to get the word out for your brand. Do this earnestly with full disclosures. Else, a slippery-slope. (This is super easy to do when you’re a small org. Also helps you get the word out and win some early allies)
7. If you’re in dire need for visibility, crunch your budgets, follow blitzkrieg marketing. Detailed understanding of ‘why’, & ‘how’ to go about this is in this tweetstorm — https://twitter.com/adadithya/status/1346047865315946498?s=20&t=94sTYWfksH2sSiRNIySXtA
8. Memes are not branding. 😔
   This is being done to death now. 😖
   At best, this an attention grab. Your core base has to be long-form, deeply researched, well edited/reported posts on how a Founder/leader thinks about challenges, problems your org is trying to solve.
9. Closely monitor every Job Description (easier to do when you’re small) — it’s an advertisement for your org. Avoid copy+paste sentences like, ‘looking for strong communication skills’. Instead, talk about the fun things the team is doing, throw in colour about people.
10. All work, no play is bloody dull. People want to see personalities. What’s your Founder like outside of work? What’s your CTOs favourite book/whisky/movie? Showcasing this on social helps build individual brand personalities that help you hire senior talent. 😍
11. Add some flavour to your leadership on social channels. Pick a theme. Hunker down. For example: If you’re a fintech player, then your leadership should be talking about UPI, infrastructure, the growth of credit in India, et al. There’s so much to educate your audience and own a particular theme. This is highly contextual for your org — but owning a niche makes you the go-to person in a particular field.

Fin.

Any other thoughts? Please do leave a comment :)

This entire ‘article’ was originally a tweetstorm. I thought it prudent to post it here since it’s easier to share my Medium profile link for those interested in brand-building activities.

While my past articles tackle how to structure a branding team, how to hire content marketers, the 101s of what Employer Branding constitutes, this piece gives a macro overview on ‘things I did’ for Gojek.

Adithya Venkatesan on Twitter: "The @gojektech branding playbook.Lessons in building brand. 🖖🏻 / Twitter"

The @gojektech branding playbook.Lessons in building brand. 🖖🏻

I’ve done over 100+ calls explaining how Gojek went from being an obscure, unknown org to a popular brand among our primary TA: Engineers, Product Managers, Designers. Here are some takeaways, in no particular order.

Building a brand is a long-term compounding game. If you don’t have the right talent, and don’t look at long-term (2 years minimum) goals, you’re likely to fail. (by virtue, hiring is hard)

When I joined in 2018, by the end of the year, it seemed like we did NOTHING. It took an entire year for us to focus on hygiene — the absolute basics. It’s boring, tedious and typical janitorial work. Ignore this at your peril.

1. What is hygiene?
The org should know how to pitch your brand. As a collective, we were stronger. Screenshot below of the note i sent. Importantly, we got key folks to rally around our objectives.

2. High bar for content on our blogs
3. Revamped content on our website
4. Obsessive about quality of content across external channels
5. Activate Public Relations and build narrative

Slapping conventional marketing metrics (likes, shares, impressions) is setting up the role for failure. Hiring a person to be the custodian for the brand and giving a seat at the table defines success or failure.

You can’t window-dress an org if it’s inherently poor. All brand-building initiatives will fail. Cleaning up dirty laundry is essential — have proper principles on how the engineering/product org functions, what does it stand for.

A marketer’s job is to narrate what already exists. It would be preposterous for a marketer to shape policy of the org. 😝
If this happens, there are bigger problems to solve before a marketer can ‘market’ and build a brand. 😂

Reporting structure: If you want to market to Engineers, Designers and Product Managers, then that’s where this role should sit. No point forcing this into a marketing function, or HR — recipe for disaster when you don’t think and act like how your target audience does.

All this is easy to tell, super difficult to implement. It requires leadership to open doors, but also have tonnes of patience. Without these, nothing will move. It’s an execution game — and that’s where the majority fail.

Finding an org’s ‘voice’ trickles down from the Founders, how critical teams inside operate, and manifests in ‘culture’. Getting this tone right was critical. The below video summarises how Gojek operates, underscores its tone. 👇🏻

Some more nuances captured by Sajith during a fireside-style chat 👇🏻

sajithpai.eth on Twitter: "At our recent @BlumeVentures meetup for marketers in our portfolio, I spoke to @adadithya who leads marketing @gojektech abt B2B mktg, PR & talent branding. Some useful inputs for b2b marketers + founders keen to hire better etc. A thread on our convo & what I found useful. 1/ pic.twitter.com/MaSvWw2NLz / Twitter"

At our recent @BlumeVentures meetup for marketers in our portfolio, I spoke to @adadithya who leads marketing @gojektech abt B2B mktg, PR & talent branding. Some useful inputs for b2b marketers + founders keen to hire better etc. A thread on our convo & what I found useful. 1/ pic.twitter.com/MaSvWw2NLz

I know, short piece, but captures a few things not present in my previous posts.

Edit: Content marketing is the key to crack it all. Without this base cemented, it’s impossible to showcase ‘brand’ to your TA.