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Like any person, a brand has a physical ‘body’: in P&G’s case, the products and/or services it provides. Also, like a person, a brand has a name, a personality, character and a reputation. Like a person, you can respect, like and even love a brand. You can think of it as a deep personal friend, or merely an acquaintance. You can view it as dependable or undependable; principled or opportunistic; caring or capricious. Just as you like to be around certain people and not others, so also do you like to be with certain brands and not others. Also, like a person, a brand must mature and change its product over time. But, its character, and core beliefs shouldn’t change. Neither should its fundamental personality and outlook on life. People have character … so do brands. A person’s character flows from his or her integrity: the ability to deliver under pressure, the willingness to do what is right rather than what is expedient. You judge a person’s character by his/her past performance and the way he/she thinks and acts in both good times, and especially bad. The same is true of brands.”

“Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen.” – Friedrich HayekAustrian thinker and Nobel laureate In programming, there is a saying that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The same goes for a society. The more eyeballs that are allowed to look at the accumulated knowledge of mankind and our problems, and the more brains that are allowed to add to that knowledge with their own creativity, the greater the chance that bugs will be fixed. The most important institutions in culture, economics and technology were not planned centrally but were consequences of cooperation and competition, experiments and trial and error. The groups that embraced the best solutions – sometimes by coincidence – succeeded, expanded and were imitated, whereas failed experiments were put out of their misery. When people don’t need permission from a central authority to experiment with new ideas, technologies and business models, but are free to create and compete (even though it might hurt sensitivities and dominant groups), we see greater human progress. The world is big; the potential number of insights, combinations of ideas and solutions are limitless. The only way to use all the knowledge and test all ideas is to let everybody have a go, and to give them freedom to cooperate and exchange freely. Innovation always faces resistance from groups that think they stand to lose from it, be they old political or religious elites, businesses with old technologies, workers with outmoded skills, nostalgic romantics or old folks who feel anxious because people just don’t do things the way they used to. They have an incentive to stop changes with bans, regulations, monopolies, the burning of boats or the building of walls. And when the rest of us panic about the world we let them have their way. And this is how every period of openness and innovation in history was ended, except one: the one that we are in right now. An open world, only if we can keep it !!

I have read a lot of Shakespeare. Though I have a retentive memory, whenever I quote Shakespeare it’s almost as if I am going back to the time I first read/heard the words and how it was explained to me by teachers, parents, family. Tough to follow at first and then tough to forget. Shakespeare’s works offer timeless lessons ever relevant across generations, blending complex characters, universal themes, and profound reflections on the human experience. Wherever I encounter researched works on planning, perseverance, managing in uncertainty, risk-reward and human failing, I am always reminded of the empathy and understanding displayed by Shakespeare in his work. I am getting enough Gen Z reactions to Shakespeare as I read ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ along with my son Arihan (it’s part of his IGCSE curriculum!) Here are a few for a Sunday afternoon: “What’s in a name? A rose by any name would smell as sweet”– Romeo and Juliet(For my University Fest, I had made a team and called it by this name : WIN – What’s In a Name !) “Better three hours too soon Than a minute too late.”-The Merry Wives Of Windsor. “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”-Hamlet. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”– Hamlet.(My grandfather often emphasised this. Easier said than done! An inspired précis would be “Brevity is wit” ) “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”– Hamlet “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”– All’s Well That Ends Well “All that glitters is not gold.”-The Merchant Of Venice. “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”– All’s Well That Ends Well. (A sound philosophy for a happy professional life) “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”– Twelfth Night “To be or not to be: that is the question”– Hamlet. “All the world’s a stage”– As You Like It. “If music be the food of love, play on”– Twelfth night “A Horse! A Horse! My kingdom for a horse!”– Richard III “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”– Hamlet “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”– Julius Caesar “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”– Julius Caesar(My eldest Uncle’s rejoinder to anyone who believed in astrology etc) “There is no darkness but ignorance.”– Twelfth Night “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”– Macbeth(My Father’s favourite ) “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”– As You Like It And one of my favourites : “We know what we are, but no, not what we may be.”– Hamlet

The history of cinema is one of innovation, artistic expression, and cultural impact. From its humble beginnings in the late 19th century, cinema quickly rose to become one of the most influential art forms of the 20th century, shaping societal norms, whilst providing entertainment. Cinema’s rise can be traced to the early 1900s with the advent of silent films and the pioneering work of figures like the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison. By the 1920s, Hollywood had emerged as the world’s filmmaking hub, and the advent of sound in the late 1920s marked the beginning of what many refer to as cinema’s Golden Age. During the mid-20th century, film became the dominant form of mass entertainment, especially with the rise of glamorous movie stars and the influence of major studios like MGM, Warner Bros., and Paramount. Films were not just entertainment but cultural events, with directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Ingmar Bergman exploring new artistic boundaries. Cinema shaped the way people dressed, spoke, and thought. It was a vehicle to address issues like race, gender, war, and class. Technological advancements fueled cinema’s rise. Color films, widescreen formats, and eventually CGI allowed for bigger spectacles and richer storytelling experiences, attracting audiences in droves. Derek Thompson wrote in his hitmakers that when the blockbuster Ben-Hur premiered on November 18, 1959, before a celebrity audience of more than 1,800 at Loew’s State Theatre in New York City, the movie industry was the third-largest retail business in the United States, after groceries and cars. But by then, the Americans’ monogamous relationship with the silver screen was already ending. Television proved irresistible. By 1965, more than 90 percent of US households had a television set, and they were spending more than five hours watching it every day. The number of movie tickets bought per adult fell from about twenty-five in 1950 to four in 2015. Television replaced film as the most popular medium of visual storytelling, whose cable bills supported a vast ecosystem of live sports, dramas, and endless reality shows. Now television is merely the largest screen in a glittering world of glass. With the advent of high-quality home entertainment systems, DVDs, and later, streaming platforms media changed dramatically. Streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ revolutionized the industry, offering viewers access to an endless library of content from the comfort of their homes. Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Crown began to dominate the cultural conversation. Cinema did not die, it mutated to TV and now to phone screens. The theatre experience has become a voluntary indulgence not a mandatory requirement for cinematic enjoyment.

As of 2024, over 5 billion people, more than 65% of the world’s population, have access to the internet. This has created unprecedented access to information through websites, digital libraries, educational platforms, and social media. Mobile Technology- facilitating a power law distribution Around 6.6 billion people globally use smartphones. In the last 2 decades 4 billion new phone users have come into being. This accessibility means people can access information anytime and anywhere, increasing the reach of education, news, and global events. Open Access to Knowledge – Free courseware Initiatives like Wikipedia, which contains over 60 million collaboratively contributed articles in various languages, and Google Scholar, a freely accessible web search engine for academic papers, have made reliable information easily available. Many scientific journals, government publications, and even some university-level courses (via MOOCs like Coursera, edX, and Khan Academy) are accessible for free. Social Media Platforms – sharing is caring Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), and YouTube have created a global information-sharing space where over 4.8 billion people can consume and distribute content. These platforms serve not only as social networks but also as tools for news, education, and commerce. You can argue the merits of it but it’s accessible and free. Search Engines- from search engines to answer engines Tools like Google handle more than 8.5 billion searches per day, putting vast amounts of information at users’ fingertips with just a few keystrokes. This rapid retrieval system has radically changed the way people access knowledge. Data Explosion – more is merrier The amount of digital data produced is growing exponentially, with an estimated 175 zettabytes of data expected to exist by 2025. This vast reservoir of information includes everything from scientific research and government statistics to personal blogs and entertainment content. Increased Literacy Rates- misery to hope to triumph Global literacy rates have increased dramatically in the last century. In 1900, only 21% of the global population could read and write, compared to over 86% in 2020. More literate populations can engage with and contribute to the vast amount of information available online. Language Translation Tools- Parlez-vous francais? Translation technology, such as Google Translate and AI-driven services, has made information more accessible across languages, bridging gaps between speakers of different tongues and making global content more universally available. The barriers of geography, affluence, access to education are going down.

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery,” wrote James Joyce in “Ulysses”. In 1888 Lee Kum Sheung, a young cook in a coastal province in southern China, forgot the oyster soup he was boiling on the stove until it simmered down to a thick, sticky gravy. Once he discovered how tasty it was, he decided to sell his “oyster sauce” in jars. That lucky mistake would make him and his heirs rich. According to Forbes, the Lee siblings—his great-grandchildren—are worth $17.7bn, making them the fourth-richest family in Hong Kong. Occasional failure may be the price of innovation. Within months of the Amazon Fire smartphone being introduced in 2014 it was clear to all that the device was a resounding flop, with Amazon forced to write off $83m of unsold inventory. The device was late to the market and had limited features, but was nonetheless priced in the same range as the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy. Jeff Bezos, the tech giant’s chief executive at the time, would later argue that such misfires were the cost of an organisation relentlessly focused on continual innovation. “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now,” he said two years after the fiasco. Amazon’s market value today is around 15 times what it was when it made its disastrous foray into phones. In “Right Kind of Wrong”, Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, explores how to build a healthy relationship with failure. In a complex world, she argues, excellence requires taking risks. The important thing is to establish what needs to be done differently next time. In her book Ms Edmondson argues that neither people nor organisations can learn if they deny that an error has happened. Instead, failures need to be carefully and dispassionately examined. That may mean having a process in place to signal when things have gone awry. Drugmakers, too, have processes in place to learn from failures. Ms Edmondson describes the example of Eli Lilly, today the world’s most valuable drugmaker. After the firm discovered that a chemotherapy drug called Alimta it had spent vast sums developing was unsuccessful, the physician who conducted the trials pored over the results to understand what had gone wrong. He spotted that although some patients had benefited from the drug, those with a folic-acid deficiency had not. Simply adding supplements to the drug in subsequent trials made Alimta go on to be a blockbuster. You cannot error-proof a career or a company. And if all else fails, a bit of perspective might help. Although it may not feel like it at the time, your error will probably not make the list of history’s most notorious howlers. In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to America for $7.2m, around $160m in today’s money, handing 1.5m square kilometres of oil-rich territory with access to the northern rim of the Pacific. Few blunders in business are quite as dunderheaded.

Traditional media, such as television, radio, print, and billboards, historically played a key role in brand building, offering several advantages for creating broad awareness and establishing brand identity. Traditional media allowed companies to reach large, diverse audiences, which was essential for building widespread brand awareness. Credibility and Trust: Traditional media outlets were often seen as more credible and trustworthy compared to newer, digital platforms. Consumers tended to believe that brands advertising through established media had more legitimacy. Emotional Connection: Television and radio ads offered the ability to tell compelling, emotional stories and create memorable experiences and stronger emotional bonds with audiences. Consistent Messaging: Traditional media allowed for consistent, repetitive messaging. This repetition helped reinforce brand recall and loyalty over time. Premium Associations: Only well-established or financially strong brands could afford to advertise on prime-time TV or national print publications. The journey of media can be viewed as an evolution: from traditional channels like TV, print, radio, and OOH, to the dynamic world of digital and social media. Traditional media focused on reaching large audiences with probabilistic targeting. It worked. Audiences were not divided into numerous segments; instead, joined a bigger pool and that’s what power brands are meant to be – something experienced, cherished and desired by maximum number of people. This cohesion and collectivism – its simplicity, limited options, and low clutter allowed such campaigns to succeed despite the broad targeting approach. Digital media, with its promise of engagement and interactivity, ushered in a two-way conversation. It attempted to bring both probabilistic and deterministic targeting into play, enhancing accuracy. Web 1.0 (1996-2004): The era of static, basic web pages. Ads were simple, and user interaction was minimal. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator dominated,a read-only, decentralized web. Web 2.0 (2004-2016): The participatory web, where two-way communication flourished. This period saw the rise of social media and centralized platforms where users created accounts, shared data, and joined a vast ecosystem. This marked the rise of cohort-based targeting—segmenting users into categories. This rigid bucketing often resulted in duplication or missed opportunities. Over-segmentation risked excluding potential users who didn’t fit neatly into predefined cohorts. Web 3.0: We’ve now entered a new phase—the portable, personal, and semantic web, all about content consolidation, behavior-driven experiences, and the rise of AI to fine-tune performance. The promise is massive, aiming to reach billions of users with greater personalization & precision. A balance between precision and broad reach remains key.

The heart of innovation is to decide early -in the middle of the period of ambiguity Most folks say the power to harness information has become the highest competitive advantage. The McKinsey Global Institute called big data the “next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.” Most business case studies have emphasized business analytics and big data as keys to success. There is tremendous force multiplication presumed on account of AI tools. A contrarian view stated by Julian Birkinshaw and Jonas Ridderstråle is that this is overstated. As information becomes ever more ubiquitous and search costs trend to zero, their capacity to provide any modern organization with a leading edge is diminishing. Information overload at the individual level leads to distractedness, confusion, and poor decision making. At a corporate level, it ends up in analysis paralysis, endless debate, and a bias toward rational, scientific evidence at the expense of intuition or gut feel. This can lessen the quality and speed of decision making, delay action, and engender a sterile operating environment in which insightful thinking is quashed unless it is quantifiable. And even once quantified , you are stumped qualitatively anyway. As a result, many companies end up standing still, even as the world around them is speeding up.

Remembering #JohnleCarré ( David Cornwell), English novelist who was #BOTD 19 October 1931. He was a literary genius in the very English sense – understanding mixed with understatement. He redefined the spy novel by infusing it with profound psychological depth and moral ambiguity. Unlike the glamour and heroics (think Fleming and 007!) typical of the genre, le Carré’s works presented espionage as a cold, often morally compromised world where loyalty, betrayal, and personal identity were constantly in a deliberate entropy. His characters, like the iconic George Smiley, were complex, flawed, and human (it needed another genius Sir Alex Guinness to live the character) John le Carré did not write about spies. He wrote about human emotions and the fracture lines of doubt, distrust, and disillusionment, revealing the subtle cracks in both personal and political loyalties.

In a podcast recorded recently, I was asked about the role of judgement in being a marketing leader. Good judgement is key to being a good leader. But what is the relationship between judgement, intelligence, intellectual curiosity, emotional bearing and experience ? Firstly, Intelligence is a capability, whereas intellectual curiosity is a temperament However : – Does the judgement that goes into decision-making come from experience (including that of many failures) ? Or – Is judgement independent of experience, and dependent on raw intelligence which in many ways, trumps experience ? And – How is judgement related to intellectual ability and emotional ability ? These are important questions. In my view, judgement emerges from a combination of IQ, EQ and experience. The obvious combinations are: 1. High IQ, low EQ: Can dissect issues, but can’t rally a team to a creative solution. 2. Low IQ, high EQ: Intellectually shallow but able to build a team’s creative energy. 3. High IQ, high EQ: great combination! The value of experience is also dependent on your IQ and EQ. Your intelligence dictates what you are able to derive from your experience and EQ enables what you do with it thereafter. For marketers, I would argue with conviction that intellectual curiosity is more important than plain intelligence. A marketer must always look for new information, perspective and anecdotes. A marketing ship run with an excel sheet as a navigator heads to no port. If you do objectively disciplined “decision-making by hunch” you are far better off than purely relying on numerical facts. Therefore – in my understanding – judgement is developed by EQ followed by IQ followed by experience in that order . I have seen leaders who have solid experience but no “tuning“. As a result, their experience has only perfected a certain “standard operating procedure“. They are very good with the issues that are from within a bandwidth of the type of problems they have solved in the past. Leadership requires inner security and an ability to reach out to others, to listen to them rather than think you have all the answers. IQ simply refers to knowing what. It is not possible to raise IQ and it cannot be learned. IQ is the brain EQ refers to knowing how and why. It is possible to raise your EQ and it can be learned. EQ is the heart.