afaqs! CMO Dialogues with Anoop Manohar, CMO, Axis Bank 

Anoop Manohar, chief marketing officer at Axis Bank, has over 22 years of experience in sales and marketing and has worked at companies like Hindustan Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company in the past. A marketer with deep experience in the FMCG space across categories like laundry and household care, dairy, coffee and even premium water, he brings a fresh perspective to marketing in the BFSI category. 

Excerpts from the interview:

On changes in marketing and sales function over the last 20 years

I think the first thing that has changed is that audiences can talk back to the brand — it is a two-way communication now. They can actually let you know what they think about your campaign and if you're not being authentic, they will call you out. If they've had a bad service experience or a good service experience, they will tell you what happened.

The other big change in the business of marketing is that because of precise data we can now target customers in a much more nuanced manner. There are now debates on “whether marketing is still the same; is performance marketing real marketing, or is there a space for above-the-line marketing”. But in my view, marketing is still marketing, it's just that we have new tools. 

A memorable campaign

A campaign I am really proud of is a recent campaign for our mobile banking app. We have a philosophy of Dil Se Open and this is our single biggest differentiator in the BFSI category which is a logical, left-brained category. 

The first thing that we had to do is name the app. A lot of the apps in the category have names that are actually very different from the parent brand. So we went the other way, and we decided to integrate the app into our ecosystem of brands and therefore we call it Open by Axis Bank - a name that is in line with our philosophy. 

The bank’s digital team created an app that is intuitive. For example, the app will remind you to order a new cheque book saying when it knows you are at the end of your book or it will suggest investment options when you receive a bonus. This is not classical marketing. This is something our digital team is doing, but it is marketing at the end of the day. 

Lessons from failures

In a previous organisation, we had launched an energy drink, which was a glucose-based drink. When we went to advertise it we realised that Indian consumers called several kinds of products energy drinks. Whether it's a hydration drink or a glucose-based drink or a caffeine-based drink, it was just clumped together as energy drinks. All these drinks do the same thing — they give you a lift that enables you to do more things. 

So we put a message that said: this gives you a boost, and therefore you should buy it right. Once we put out the communication, we realised that this was the most generic communication we could have created. We were saying essentially what the consumer already knew of the category, and therefore we were not standing out in the market.

We went back to the drawing board and instead of the communication being focused on the individual, we made the community the hero. We said: sometimes you get energy from each other and sometimes you get it from this drink. Now we stood out because it became a community-based communication in a category where it was all about individual need for energy.

And that's how we changed the story around but we learned from the first experience of trying to copy the category and finding out that we were not differentiated. 

Unconventional media-mix?

A lot of the money in this category is spent on print and outdoor. For somebody coming from a different industry, I found that quite bizarre. The other interesting thing about our category is that the number of advertisers is actually very high — the top five or six players do not contribute to more than 12% to 13% of the traditional advertising pie for the category. 

We opt for a mix that can give us mass scale. Therefore, the two most important mediums for us are television and digital. We have a very strong performance team that's based out of our digital unit that drives intent marketing. 

Including our performance marketing spends on digital we allocate about 60% of our media budget on digital and 30-35% on TV. The ratios between above-the-line and performance need to be healthy, because if you do too much above the line, and don't do enough performance, then you're not capturing the demand that you created at the top of the funnel.

And if you're doing too much at the bottom of the funnel then over a period of time, you will see that your cost of acquisition starts going up. Maintaining that balance is important.

Is the CFO sympathetic to the CMO’s needs?

First, I want to put it out there that I love our CFO - so he gives me more money next time :-) 

I don’t know a 100% if the CFO is the CMO’s best friend today. Because the business of marketing has changed. If you are in a data-based company like I am where we have first-party data, and we have the means to drive a lot of our journeys digitally as compared to, let's say, my previous experience where the products are not digital. 

Therefore, the ROI at the base of the funnel is very much visible to the CFO. Make data your best friend; with data, you can convince the CFO or the CEO that you're adding value. 

However, I believe that marketers are currently grappling with traditional mindsets, struggling to pitch what we are doing. You need to have the ability to connect the dots and show how marketing spend on brand awareness is translating into middle-of-the-funnel metrics, bottom-of-the-funnel and here is the business I delivered. If you cannot show that, then there is a lot less sympathy for marketers from CFOs than more. 

For more nuggets from the interview, watch the video.