Transform Businesses with Technology

Abhinav Kumar, an award-winning Global Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at TCS.

Abhinav Kumar stands as an award-winning Global Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at one of the world’s foremost technology service giants, overseeing operations across 55 countries and steering a workforce of over 626,000 employees. His visionary leadership has propelled the firm to unparalleled heights, boasting a staggering revenue of US$ 29 billion.

Experience-Focused Leaders Podcast’s #2 episode discusses the founding story of the TCS brand and its keys to success. It covers how to communicate your mission to a global team and customers worldwide, navigate marketing tools, and cut through the noise to convey your message.

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Introduction to the episode

AS: Welcome to the Experience-Focused Leaders Podcast! I am delighted to introduce to you Abhinav Kumar. He is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at TCS — Tata Consultancy Services. One of the brand and global leaders in the IT services industry. And really, you know, one of the most remarkable success stories to have come from India and spread around the world. Abhinav, tell us a little bit about TCS and your role so that the users understand how excited I am to have you on our podcast.

About Abhinav Kumar at Tata Consultancy Services

(00:01 - 03:24)

AK: Well, thanks for your warm words. Let me just be very brief about it. We're a technology company. We do everything in terms of the latest digital technology for our clients. We're a fairly large company. We have 630,000 colleagues in 46 countries across the world, working for some of the most prominent businesses in every region of the world. I like’d to say if you take a fortune thousand list and put it on a wall as a dartboard and throw a dart at it, you will likely hit one of our clients. So we're helping banks, we're helping telecom companies, we're helping retail companies, manufacturing, and the public sector in using technology to improve customer experience. To move up in cycles of technology and utilize it to the maximum to keep becoming better businesses. Like I said, we're one of the largest companies in this field and it's always a pride and privilege to represent this great set of engineers who are doing terrific work all around the world for us.

As for my role, I'm privileged to look at the brand of the company in all of our international markets. Out of the 46 countries we are presenting, 45 of those countries, with the exception of India, come under the responsibility of me and my team. So we're responsible for the brand, for everything we do to activate the brand and its experience, whether it's events, customer oriented activities, communications, the work we do with the government in terms of public affairs, all of it. And it's always a privilege to represent a brand which has come out of very humble origins to almost at the top of its industry.

Brand Finance valued our brand for us, and about a decade ago, in 2010, they had valued our brand at $2.3 billion. This year, that's gone up to more than $17 billion. So that's almost more than sevenfold growth in about 13 years.

What makes the TCS story and the brand evolution work

(03:24 - 06:21)

AS: That's an amazing outcome. And I'm familiar with some of the activities that you're doing, such as sponsoring amazing marathons in all the world's cities. But when you go back to the fundamental purpose and the founding story of TCS. What do you think makes this TCS story and the brand evolution work? What's the secret sauce? Because it is remarkable what you've been able to accomplish.

AK: Yeah. Thanks, Alex. I think when we reflect on it, of course, you were talking about the marathons, we'll talk a little bit more about that because that's a key part of how we bring our brand. But if you look back at how the brand has transformed itself over the years, I think there have been many elements which have gone together towards it. The first and the most important part of the brand always is, and I say this every time, is whatever we do in the marketing department to spruce up our brand.

What is even more important is the millions of moments of truth with us being a ‘very people’ business. As I said, we have 630,000 engineers working on a daily basis with our customers. Many of them are based inside the customers headquarters and their buildings. Some of them are operating software delivery centers, but they work hand in glove very closely with their customers. There are millions of conversations and experiences taking place. And how we deliver our services to our customers is what most defines our brand more than anything else.

And we've been fortunate in the sense we've had tremendous colleagues and we've had a great culture in the company of customer-centricity, which has allowed us to grow the way we've grown. If you take an account team, we start with a new customer, we do a good project for them and do really great work on it, which earns us the right to get other projects with them.

AS: If I pinpoint, it's almost like a customer-led growth strategy. So when you start, you go to a customer, you work your behinds off to make sure that they have an amazing experience, everything's delivered on time and on budget. And then you build from that relationship as a founding principle of how the success has occurred.

What is 'Experience Certainty'

The point you said about the customer, it's not just the service line delivery, but it's the full experience that the customer gets. It's from the marketing touchpoints, it's from when you're selling to customers and how that whole conversation and experience is curated. It's definitely, once we start working with them, their experience with us, and then what we do with our customers, even outside of work, to keep strengthening that relationship. That I think is absolutely key.

(06:21 - 08:35)

AK: In fact, our previous tagline used to be something called ‘Experience Certainty’, which encapsulated the promise that we would deliver the work which we promised to our customers on time, on budget, and with the best quality which is possible in this industry, which has been crucial behind our growth. But the point you said about the customer, it's not just the service line delivery, but it's the full experience that the customer gets. It's from the marketing touchpoints, it's from when you're selling to customers and how that whole conversation and experience is curated. It's definitely, once we start working with them, their experience with us, and then what we do with our customers, even outside of work, to keep strengthening that relationship. That I think is absolutely key.

We've been very strong on the customer satisfaction part. Our product and service speak for itself, in terms of how analysts evaluate us. For example, in Europe, for over ten years in a row, we've been rated as number one in customer satisfaction in the IT industry by research. That's an amazing accolade for the European team to do it consistently for over ten years, to rank number one in customer satisfaction.

But how we shape the customer experience is a crucial part of everything we do in the company. Like any decision we make in the company, you're sitting in a meeting room and talking about, I don't know, entering a new country or setting up a new software center. The number one question which comes up as part of our culture in any such meeting is which customer does this benefit? If you're making this move, how does this benefit our customers? I think that is something which has been the North Star for the company. If we select an event to go to, the question always is which customers can we engage with? What's the value we can provide to them? What's the experience we can bring to them?

How to address the problem of complexity as a global team

(08:35 - 13:11)

AS: How do you make that? It sounds great in principle and obviously then you get into huge matrix organizations with the complexity that you have, where there are a lot of customers, lots of possibilities. Sometimes people are motivated to succeed with their internal customers, which is important. If they don't have the direct touch, how do you connect those dots?

And I'll tell you, even for us, as a tiny business compared to you, we had to remind for some folks that are not directly interfacing with the customer every day. Let's say on the development side, although we engage with them not on a day-to-day basis. We literally have an extra person entering every Zoom meeting. Their title is ‘RELAYTO Customer in Search of Wow.’ We actually have one of our team members animate them and when somebody says something that sort of serves the customers, their heart goes up and it's sort of funny, but it's really important as well as a physical, virtual, everyday reminder how we need to stay focused on that.

I mean, we are also very mission-driven, as you are, so that we also say, “Well, how can this mission that we're pursuing help?” Ultimately, it helps our customers. But I think it's hand in hand. It's not like the customers are the only main driver. I think that we're helping our customers to think differently. To do that, you need to be mission driven. How do you guys address this, given the complexity, the size, and even for your internal marketing team that you're managing across so many geographies?

AK: Yeah, Alex. I think we tend to underestimate the role of culture and the success or the failure of any organization. I think a few weeks ago I was in Zurich and I met this friend of mine. Like me, this person had a successful career in the technology industry at another company. One of the things he said stayed with me. He said, “You know, when we were starting our career, we had just gone through MBA school, and done all those classes on culture and other things, I used to discount all this as fluff.” This is not important. This is just what people like to say. Whatever he says 20 years hence, I now believe that culture defines 99% of what success means in the company at a senior leadership level.

I think culture is not easy. What you said earlier about the fact that as you grow as an enterprise, you become larger and more complex as a matrix organization. You bring in new people. The original culture which you had as a startup — as I'm sure you're thinking about RELAYTO — coming from a small start to a scaling stage, you're adding new people. How do you imbibe the same passion in employee X as you go ahead? Not easy. It's something you need to consistently work on, but culture always needs reinforcement, right?

The example you gave in your call of constantly reinforcing culture, that's important. Reinforcement is not a poster on the wall saying, “This is our culture.’” Reinforcement is the behaviors of the leadership team. Who do you promote? Who do you reward? What kind of activity do you incentivize? What do you celebrate? What do you call out and say, “This is not us and we should not be doing this”, and things like that.

I think consistently this needs to be done. For me, one of the important considerations always is whenever I'm making a leadership choice inside my own teams, either somebody hiring somebody from outside or giving someone a chance to grow inside the organization, their ability to project the culture of the company further, inspire and help other people imbibe. It is an important constituent there. They are getting that role. Right, but we need to keep working on it. As we grow, we are adding a lot of new people in partnership with our HR team, which does a fantastic job. That's one of the key things that the leadership team puts its time towards.

Navigating cultural layers within marketing and organizations

(13:11 - 17:00)

AS: That's great. One of the things that you bring up is the tension between culture and then the complexity, right? Let's just take marketers and marketing organizations as complexity, right? People outside of marketing think marketing is simple and it's just like some advertising thing. And then people inside a leading B2B marketing organizations like yours probably are taxed by the complexity of having different teams. Not just geography, but specialty within marketing, right?

Folks focused on top of the funnel demand generation, the branding. The branding links up with advertising, the product marketing and solution marketing that you're developing for very specific things, such as customer marketing and so on. They require different specialties, different expertise. But yet culturally they're this mainstream for the company culture. But are you finding different cultures within even segments of the marketing team? Because the performance-driven, data-driven folks probably have a slightly different DNA than the hyper-creative folks focusing on the copy.

AK: Yeah, I'm not a culture expert, but I think once you start to unravel culture, there are multiple layers to it. What I'm talking about more was the core culture in the company. There are certain strands of DNA which everyone needs to have. But beyond that, there are many other different layers to it.

You were talking about how functionally data scientists have a certain subculture regarding how they deal with each other. How does a team work? I don't know. A high performance sales team would have a very different culture, perhaps. But then there's also a regional layer. I think the culture of a team which is operating in Brazil would be very different from a culture of a team in Japan simply by nature of the people in that country and what their customs are, how they communicate, what the informal and formal norms are, and things like that. Which is all fine, because if you're a global company, you need to understand those differences and assimilate them.

If you're, let's say, an American company and you're like, “We are going to have exactly this culture in whatever in Australia, Chile, Norway”, you're going to struggle because you need to be able to be flexible enough to absorb and include different cultures.

What is also important is to know what is the core of your DNA and not compromise that. I think that core is really important too. So it's a mix of that, I think. I don't know, it's almost like a Federated model of culture in that sense, which is important.

AS: That's really fascinating. Kind of a culture of culture. And I think we even relate to it, no matter how tiny we are. We're building a company of founders. This is the way that I like to refer to this, where we are looking for people who are entrepreneurs, who know how hard it is to do the zero to one. And so they're like, “Okay, well, can I go do 1 to 10 and 1 to 100 but still be a founder in the mindset of somethings have been de-risked, but I want to be core definer of the culture that we're building.”

Complexities of Marketing and the Introduction of Chief Martech

An average company uses something like 80 or 92 different tools. But if you ask anyone in the marketing team, a CM of a company, they wouldn't know they were using 40 of them.

(17:00 - 19:35)

AK: I also liked what you said at the start of your previous point. You said from the outside, that marketing looks really easy. Yeah, I like to joke about it. The newest business inside the Tata Group is that we've gone into aviation because we acquired Air India, which is a major global airline. It started off as Tata Airlines many years back. Then it was nationalized by the government and finally, when it was privatized, the Tata Group bought it.

So whenever I meet with colleagues at Air India, I joke about the fact that they have the same challenge as us, which is that everyone believes they know how to run an airline. Right? It's so easy. What's there to it? There are these planes and you put passengers on them and feed them and they arrive, right?

You have no idea of the complexity which it takes to maintain the airlines; to do route planning, to do the revenue management, right? The pricing and the ticketing people management, fuel purchase — which is such a big part of the cost and the financial equation in the industry.

Similarly, marketing is more and more complex every day as it has become more and more digital, there are more and more tools available. I think one data point, Alex, and you've contributed to it with RELAYTO, is so there's this block called Chief Martech which tracks the number of marketing tools which are available to the marketing function. And in 2010, there were about 150 tools which were available to us from CRM to help with SEO and advertising, content management, etc.

They've done the update for this year, 2023 and now there are more than 11,000 such tools available and growing every day. Even just last month, there were 1000 new tools launched in terms of generative AI.

So the complexity of one way, this is fantastic because there's some fantastic new capabilities available to the marketing team which it can use to add value to the business. An average company uses something like 80 or 92 different tools. But if you ask anyone in the marketing team, a CM of a company, they wouldn't know they were using 40 of them.

Democratization of Marketing: understanding influence and seizing opportunities

I think that is a tremendous opportunity where marketing is like the foreign affairs department of a company. If a company was a government, marketing would play a huge role in breaking a lot of silos and bringing advanced market opportunities, but also risks and challenges.

Yes, there is a price point, but as the price points have been coming down, even very small businesses have access to the same power tools that the big businesses, the fortune hundred companies of the past have had. And that is a tremendous opportunity for smaller businesses because today you can build an ad, run a global campaign, target someone across the world with your products which you wouldn't have been able to do 20 years ago because of the sheer amount of investment it would have required.

(19:35 - 24:05)

AS: Let's add to this, right? Because what we see as a trend, and we are probably a bigger contributor to that than even the broader Martech stack, is democratization of marketing, right?

Fundamentally, what we see, and you probably picked up on this, is somebody doing internal communications. PR historically was more focused on text and things that are not very visual, right? And now all of a sudden because the bar has gone so high in terms of getting people's attention, maintaining that attention, and converting that attention and time into some sort of behavioral change, that's becoming a global problem, right? And so we believe that bringing in marketing grade experiences is going to be essential for many other functions that need to influence the rest of the organization, customers or some other external stakeholders.

The question to you is how can you even control that population of users who are bringing in consumer that marketing has influence on but can't execute every content piece inside an organization with 600 000+ people?

AK: I think one of the casualties of our times is that the word “control” has gone out of the vocabulary. I don't think anyone has control. What you need to do is to experiment and collaborate with your ecosystems. I think there are a lot of new possibilities. The marketing function is the most outward looking in most organizations: you understand the customer, the market, you understand competition through social media, which has become so important.

The average human on Earth today is spending about three and a half hours a day on social media, right? And about seven and a half hours a day on some sort of a screen or the other. As they're spending time on social media, they're posting content, they're posting their preferences. What are they talking about? What are they debating about? The ability to garner information and provide insights to your business has probably never been the way it is today.

You spoke about democratization of marketing. I think one of the things which the Internet and then what has followed since in terms of social media, Web3 coming up in a big way, it has led to a democratization of many things, thanks to the access to information. As long as we can bridge the digital divide which is still there, by the way, in many parts of the world, the digital divide is still something which we are looking to bridge. But it's going away slowly. I think about 70% of the world now uses the Internet and all of these people have equal access to information tools.

And for the large businesses, it's also good because competition always keeps you on your toes. So if now there is a higher level of competition even from smaller businesses who can outmaneuver you in terms of their content strategies or their engagement strategies, you need to do a lot better than you've done in the past.

How to stay competitive despite the noise

I firmly believe that what really makes a difference is if you take the time to know and understand your customers.

If you look at consumers today and often this is ascribed to younger consumers, Gen Z, and all of those labels. They're more likely to buy from you if the social values that you project are in line with what is important to them.

(24:05 - 27:28)

AS: So how do you get an edge, right? As a new company, we're obsessed with giving our customers an edge over their competitors. What do you think about that? What would be advice for a vendor that wants to help this large organization compete with all the noise out there, all the tools out there? How do you break through that and really, A, deliver the value, but then B, communicate that in a way that it doesn't get lost in the cacophony of 50 other tools that somebody cares about and has achieved some sort of tactical goals, let's say in marketing. It seems like that's something that even large organizations need to figure out. So what's your advice on kind of getting all the noise?

AK: So let's be clear, there's no magic bullet to it, right? There's no secret formula of doing ABC and here you go and your business succeeds. There may be a philosophy towards it and I firmly believe that what really makes a difference is if you take the time to know and understand your customer. And historically for product companies or retail companies, it's been through surveys, going door to door and understanding their consumers. Today a lot of them, even those traditional companies, are not doing it. Consumer product companies are actually studying consumer behavior, attitudes and preferences by mining the data which they get from not just social media, but also the multi-channels of touch which they have with the consumers, right?

I think you need to really understand your consumers and what their preferences are. And those preferences are also changing as time goes along, right? In terms of just one facet of it, if you look at consumers today and often this is ascribed to younger consumers, Gen Z, and all of those labels. They're more likely to buy from you if the social values which you project are in line with what is important to them.

For example, it could be the climate side of things. Companies which are being part of the solution in taking climate action have a higher chance of success with a lot of customers and you need to understand that and you need to then maybe engage with them using that, right? So for example, if you're a business which is catering to that category of customers who are really keen on seeing climate action and more likely to then engage with you or do business with you, then your brand experience and products need to reflect that. Your company's behavior needs to reflect that.

How to deliver a consistent marketing campaign regarding audience expectations and business value proposition

(27:28 - 33:08)

AS: So what you're saying, if I hear this correctly, is to make sure that you're congruent with what your audience expects of you, then your messaging and your business value proposition, then market yourself as a marketer. How do you deliver it? If you're delivering a marketing campaign and you're all about green tech and green this and green that, then don't show up with a bunch of paper-first content. This is sort of our story, right?

AK: In a sense, this is all table stakes now, right? I think the way to do it is you have to know your customers but you also need to consistently experiment. Maybe experiment first on a small scale and see the response of that before you scale your campaign into a global one. But it's always good to talk with your customers. We're fortunate in the sense that we are an enterprise business. So the customers we work with aren't millions of customers who buy at a retail level but they are business executives who work in companies. So we have good access to them.

For example, if you're going to roll out something new or participate in something, it's always good for us and we always make sure we have a conversation with our customers first. So we're doing marathons. It's like, okay, there's marathon X now available and we want to do it. But we'll talk to customers in the country, say, “Hey, we are thinking of sponsoring this. What do you think of it and what's your feedback to us, what should we be doing? How should we be activating it?”

I think often, just those conversations, even if you do it with four customers or five customers, you don't have to go into hundreds, gives you a very good ideas of it. It'll, give you some new ideas, but it'll also tell you, with what you're trying to do, how it is going to be received. So I think that that is really critical to do.

AS: And when you say customers, right? Like, yeah, you and I, we went a few years back, so I know you're kind of jetting to Davos and you're meeting…

AK: I try to take the train inside. You need to go across the continent. There's no choice but to take the flight, yeah.

AS: In a sustainable way. And then at the same time, you're delivering very concrete projects for some of your customers. So the CEO of that Global 2000 does not know necessarily about the -ins and -out of that project delivery. You have those types of customers who are working with you day in and day out. How do you align your communications from the very senior executives to those folks that are kind of your direct champions and daily interaction points?

AK: You got to communicate in a different way to each persona. And what has happened in our industry, Alex, is that historically we used to deal with a finite set of personas inside any organization. Normally, we would deal with the Chief Information Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, and their departments, perhaps with the Procurement department a little bit, and primarily work with those sort of departments inside a company. And as a consequence of which we had very high brand recall. We had an excellent sort of relationship. And that does continue till today.

But what's happened with technology becoming more and more strategic in any business? I think you take Mastercard. They don't call themselves a financial business or a credit card company. They call themselves a technology company. Right? Retail businesses are very tech-heavy now, telecom companies are huge. Everything is about technology inside It. You take almost any industry. I think the technology part has become so crucial that it's no longer something which just the IT department does, but everyone has a stake in it.

There was a survey which was done a couple of years ago by ITSMA, the IT Services Marketing Association, which showed who gets involved in a digital transformation buying decision. And what it showed was that almost every persona in the company gets involved in IT. In many companies, the CEO gets involved and the executive committee, even board members get involved at times. But definitely the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Marketing Officer today is spending more on technology than the IT department itself.

So what we've needed to do as a business is, while we keep our strong relationship with the CIOs, we also pivot and create relationships with every layer of the executive suite. And of course, with each of these people you have to communicate differently because they have different needs, different language.

You go to different places to meet different people. For example, we've been a strategic partner to the World Economic Forum for now, well, 13 or 14 years. And that's a great place to meet with CEOs and chairpersons and it's great to be there. But if you're going to meet CIOs, it's great to be at a Gartner Expo or if you want to meet CMOs, then the Cannes Lion is coming up a little to the south of you in Cannes in three weeks from now.

So I think you need to make all those choices in terms of your marketing portfolio, both in terms of content and how you outlay it, but also the choice of which events you need to be, what are the experiences which you want to unfold and all of that.

Trends in terms of technology spending or capital investments

Obviously, with the pandemic, travel and contact coming to a close, everything became online and digital, and I think that created a new capability in many marketing departments, some of which they've continued on and today offering hybrid experiences.

Your marketing dollars go where your audiences are. And if the average human on this planet is spending 7,5 hours in front of a screen and 3,5 hours on social media, then that's where you need to go to find them.

(33:08 - 36:12)

AS: So let's double click on, you mentioned CMOs, spend a lot of money on technology and obviously you're more B2B CMO, but you have some of your customers who are more consumer-driven business CMOs, and they're typically the ones that historically have gone to Cannes Lions, although that's changing.

So tell us a little bit about where do you see, what are some trends in terms of that spending, whether it's technology or human capital investments? And especially right now, obviously, as there are some constraints in the market, historically, marketing has not done super well in the tougher economic environment as some other functions, especially like awareness type of work, which has a longer time to pay off.

So what do you see in general and then as the crisis is evolving and entering many companies, how do you see that changing over the next year or two?

AK: Yeah, well, I think the big dominant trend in recent times has been really the shift towards digital in every aspect, right? Whether it is advertising or content or, for example, I think we were forced to deal with the pandemic, which we had not that long ago, even events all move towards digital. I mean, as a company, we do somewhere around 700 physical events every year because we are at major trade shows, we are at Davos, we hold our own events. There's a TCS Summit, which is our flagship customer event.

But I would say the events have come back in a big way. On the advertising side and the content side, there's a decided shift and every year it keeps shifting more and more on the digital side. But there's a reason for it. As I was saying earlier, your marketing dollars go where your audiences are. And if the average human on this planet is spending 7,5 hours in front of a screen and 3,5 hours on social media, then that's where you need to go to find them. Right?

And whatever strategy you use, for us, the platform which is probably the most important is LinkedIn because we sell to business executives. LinkedIn has and I've lost count of it, I think somewhere around 800 million active users currently, and probably about 85% to 90% of our target consumers are on it. And it's a useful tool in many ways.

How to adjust the ways to communicate facing different channels

It's really important to keep the balance in the marketing craft between measurement, which is important and it's great that we are getting stronger and better at it and let's do that, but not to lose that gut instinct of what you know is right to do for your brand.

So there are about 4000 of our customers and about 11,000 of our own employees who run in these races every year. Inside our customer accounts, a lot of running teams have come together with clients. And our own employees who practice together go for runs on the weekend, get nutrition advice, and then they wear their co-branded T-shirts and they run these marathons. It's created this relationship outside of work, which is so important in that brand.

(36:12 - 45:20)

AS: Building on that. This is a channel conversation, right? But the channel and the medium that comes with the channel has connections. First, we create new communication tools and then those tools tend to shape us and how we expect information to be presented, influence us, and talk to our customers and various audiences. And folks on this podcast have definitely seen that the human capacity to process complex information is challenged, right?

Because in fact we are spoiled by some of the social media and instant gratification around that. So we've become trained to process easier messages and we need more help in making complex information more digestible. We are using AI to simplify some of that complexity, but it's still not sufficient to do that overall. You guys are delivering very complex, sophisticated solutions to the market. So how do you adjust the way you communicate as well as the channels in tandem, right? Because it doesn't feel like you can just say, “Hey, I'm going to put through a new channel the same old stuff that we've been doing.”

AK: Every channel has a different way [of communicating], even social media. How you communicate on LinkedIn is very different from TikTok, right? We've not yet gone into TikTok. I think some businesses have, and they're benefiting from it. But you have to make a clear channel choice on where you can play and where your content plays out. The content you'll see from us on LinkedIn is very different from the content you'll see on our Facebook channels and of course, different on Twitter and other things. So that's definitely a given.

But what I was leading to in my point is while the shift has definitely taken place on the marketing side, it's also adding an element of risk to the actual ability to succeed for the profession. And the risk which is adding is this: You spoke a little earlier about the pressure which marketing departments are under worldwide to showcase immediate results, return on investment, etc. So the risk which has happened with digital platforms, digital platforms are very easy to measure, right? You put a post out there and you know how many eyeballs it's had, how many shares it's had, how many people like it, how many people have commented on it, what's the sentiment behind the things which you're putting out? If you can measure it, you can easily pull out a report and say, “Okay, we spent so much on this, and here are all the outcomes.”

If you go to an event, for example, it may not be that easy to capture the same thing. So let's say you go to Mobile World Congress, you put up a grand, fantastic stall there. A lot of people notice your brand. Some may walk into your stall, but many will just look at it and notice it and put it away in their head. You'll never be able to capture that. You'll have meetings there, you'll have a few cups of coffee, potential clients and things like that.

Some parts you can measure, some parts you won't know because, as you said, there's a long-term return to building that brand presence and other things. Now, the risk is if there's a marketing manager who's then given a choice saying, “Okay, here's your budget and where do you want to spend it,” there is a tendency to gravitate more towards digital simply because you can measure it, right? So the question is, are you investing behind what you can measure, or are you investing behind what will actually get the most returns to your business in the long term?

And I think in that sense, it's really important to keep the balance in the marketing craft between measurement, which is important and it's great that we are getting stronger and better at it and let's do that, but not to lose that gut instinct of what you know is right to do for your brand. Right?

You mentioned it earlier. I'll get into that topic now. We got into a big way into sports sponsorships. And originally we started by experimenting in different sports. We went to Formula One, we had a partnership with Ferrari, we used to be in cricket, we used to be in pro cycling. We had a team which participated in the Tour de France, etc. And ultimately we folded all that in and took a decision to go on running platforms on marathons. Today we have a pretty dominant portfolio on the marathon side. There are about 14 properties worldwide which we are a partner to.

At the top of the food chain is the TCS New York City Marathon, the TCS London Marathon, TCS Hamstring Marathon. We are partners to Boston and Chicago, Sweden, Singapore, a couple of races in Australia, India with the Tata Mumbai Marathon and a race in Bangalore as well. It was a gut call by ICO at that point of time saying that this is going to be great for my business, right? And there was no way of knowing what it's going to look like five years, six years, eight years from now. But now that we are about twelve years into this strategy, I can tell you it's paying immense dividends for us.

So being part of these properties has done a lot of good for us. In one sense, it brings our brand down to a city level. In all these cities where we have a hub of our employees and our customers and our partners, the brand gets noticed in a very physical way in these mega cities. We got a lot of goodwill there because we are supporting the major sporting event in that city. From the city officials and the local government and even just the whole ecosystem there. Whenever I go to Amsterdam or New York and I'm having a conversation with someone, maybe on the tube or whatever, and we talk about TCS, I'm still surprised to say how many people know us because of the marathon. So that brand part is amazing. What's even greater is what it's done for our ecosystem.

It's also been a great place for us to showcase our technology. We built the official marathon mobile app for all of these races. But we've also been showcasing many things, including data analytics, augmented reality and other things around these. The value to us of these platforms has been phenomenal. But when we took the first decision to go with our first partnership TCS Amsterdam Marathon, there wasn't a lot of historical data and numbers available saying, “Hey, this is a great investment to make.” It was a gut call saying, “This is a fantastic sport, it's a participative sport, and we can do great things with it.” Of course, credit to all the teams who worked on this over the years, because of how they've activated it in a very engaging way, creating great experiences, bringing these communities in, also doing well for the communities, because part of this is charity activation in each of these places.

So we do things like fundraise for a children's cancer hospital in Amsterdam and many other such things in each of these places. That's actually been phenomenal for us.

AS: So that's actually to bring back to the core theme of the podcast. It sounds like a leadership decision to create a memorable, very visceral, physical experience in a company that's historically you'd say intellectual. And it sounds like this has been a resounding success.

AK: And in a sense, it's been counterintuitive. I think in the early days, people used to ask us, what are you doing here in a marathon because normally you see apparel companies, you see Nikes, Adidas and New Balance, etc, here or Gatorade and things around that. So it was a bit counterintuitive. But as we've built it today, I think we are part of the ecosystem or actually one of the key pillars inside it.

About 'trust-building experiences'

Even between B2B and B2C, things have been blurring. Every business wants to connect more and more with their customers, and they're using digital experiences to do so.

There's a big world out there with people who think differently, come from different cultures. And the more appreciation you build for this diversity, I think the better you become as a leader, whether you're doing marketing or actually it's true for any other function.

(45:20 - 1:10:00)

AS: And that's been really fascinating. We see similar parallels in the digital experience universe. I think there are some companies where you expect that they show up with great digital experiences. TCS people expect that you guys would do that, your peers, technology companies like Salesforce that's in the customer experience world and so on. So historically, naturally, we gravitate to folks that are expected to be already leaders, and that's been great for us.

But what I'm noticing is that now there's industries that are not known for digital experience or customer experience, and let's just say insurance as an example. But they have a lot of content, a lot of information, and a lot of important dense messaging. So whether they're a reinsurer or carrier or a broker, we're seeing this movement to say, “Okay, well, we're going to get an edge on our competition. We're going to get an edge on customer intimacy with digital experiences.” Because again, that's just a core part of the information heavy industry.

We're finding this in the very scientific industries where evidence is really important, like life sciences. But because there's so much information, so much evidence, you want to remove the friction for accessing that, and you want to build trust. I think I want to come back to the topic of trust because I feel like that's an underlying theme of a lot of what we're discussing.

We're seeing an industry where you do not expect that experience matters, because it's either a competitive advantage or it is a way to overcome some of the limitations of the more traditional approaches in that industry. You've been observing probably similar patterns in your customers as well. What's your take on clear innovators vs. surprises?

AK: The lines have blurred, Alex, a lot, right? I mean, even between B2B and B2C, things have been blurring. Every business wants to connect more and more with their customers, and they're using digital experiences to do so. You talk about the non obvious examples in insurance. I'll give you another one. As we were talking, I got this alert on my phone from Bpost, right, the Belgian post. So they have an app which incidentally was built by TCS for them, which has given them new capability. So if the parcel comes to me, they give me advance notice that it is going to arrive tomorrow. Are you going to be home or do you want to deposit somewhere? And I can say I'm not home, but I'll take a photo of some part of the house or I say, “Okay, leave it at the back door here, and you have the photo of it,” and things like that. If I don't like what I get, I can print out a return format from it. This has given so many other services an ability for a postal service to directly connect with the consumer and do many, many things. They get a lot of data out of this which helps them optimize their routes and other things.

Now, for even a very old and legacy business like Post, they're getting modernized and looking to connect with the consumers, right? More and more so. And you see that in consumer good companies. Example, a consumer-good company would traditionally sell through retail stores, right? So if you're buying a product from PNG or Unilever, you're never buying from PNG Unilever. You would go to Carrefour here or you'd go to Walmart in the US.

Today, a lot of these brands are looking at directly engaging with consumers, and the best way to do it is through experiences or contests and providing things. I think that's great because anything which helps you understand your consumers better and build better products and services for them, is beneficial both ways to the business.

For us, yes, experiences are hugely important because of that word you used, trust. Because at the end of the day, the next customer we're going to get, they're a bunch of executives sitting somewhere and deciding to award us a project. It could be a big 150 million or 100 million euro project. And in awarding us this project, they're, in a sense, almost betting on their company. In digital transformation, the move which you make is either going to take your business forward or if it fails, it can actually bring your business down. Today, that era where in the 1990s and early 2000s, where you used to have these big ERP implementations, would go on for eight or nine years, and at the end of it, many of them would fail, and the business would still keep carrying on without any impact to it. That's over. Because literally now the core business model of the company or technology is embedded into it.

So whenever somebody makes a decision to give that business to us, we operate in a crowded environment. There are a lot of companies in the technology space. All companies are good. They have some strengths, they have the products and capabilities. But the one factor which is so important is trust, because I'm trusting you with the future of your company. I'm trusting on the fact that you're going to deliver what you said you're going to deliver. You're going to work with me. If we have problems, you're committed to me, and you will make it happen.

Now to create trust, Alex, the digital channels are great in creating content and brand reinforcement, or even at times connecting with new people. I think that's what LinkedIn and other things do. But trust comes from what? Trust comes from familiarity, but it comes from shared experiences. And in a sense, a lot of our marketing portfolio is oriented towards creating that right.

These experiences grow you. They build an appreciation for the fact that we all grow up in these bubbles and cocoons, that there's a big world out there with people who think differently, and come from different cultures. And the more appreciation you build for this diversity, I think the better you become as a leader, whether you're doing marketing or actually it's true for any other function.

Potential guest for the podcast

(1:10:00 - 1:11:30)

AS: Great answer. Last question, you mentioned great marketing leaders or business leaders. Who do you think would be a great guest for the podcast? And along those lines, those are the people that you look up to or you work with or you learned a lot from, either directly or indirectly, that are sort of driving the thought leadership and execution in marketing and communications and connecting with customers broadly through experiences and human touch points. Who inspires you and who should we think about for our next guest?

AK: Yeah, I'm happy to get you a list of people. I can recommend some people to talk about it. I think in terms of shaping experiences, as you said earlier. Both the companies you don't expect who've been more traditional have really embraced digital channels and are doing some great things at the same time. As you said, technology companies and others are looking to create real life experiences. So I'll be happy to share a list with you. They're fantastic

AS: Off the top of your head.

AK: Okay, you forced me to a name. Why don't you go for Fernando Machado who used to be the CMO for Burger King and has been leading Activision. So jumping from burgers to video games is a pretty interesting thing to talk about.

Parting words: Ending the episode

(01:11:30 - 01:12:40)

AS: Amazing. Well, Abhinav, I can't thank you enough for this insightful discussion. So many topics, so great to just hear what you're getting inspired by, what you're paying attention to. And huge congratulations again on your own journey, the success of TCS and building such a powerhouse brand and IT services, helping the world run better, at least in all the major cities where TCS is based for your marathons. So thank you again and hope to see you soon on the podcast.

AK: Thanks, Alex. Such a pleasure. I always enjoy the conversation with you, whether it's in Paris or virtually like this. And congrats to you as well. I think it's phenomenal what the RELAYTO team has done over the past few years, the platform which you built and how it's evolved. And I have no doubt we'll be hearing and seeing a lot more of not just RELAYTO, but how your ecosystem uses the platform to create some really interesting experiences as well.

AS: Amazing. From your mouth to customers' ears. There you go. Thanks. Take care.

Check the the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.

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