IMT at GSK: Interview with Mr. Prashant Pandey

Prashant Pandey , Executive Vice President Marketing GSK CH

Brands play a significant role in choosing a product in our daily life. Same is also the case with companies who more often than not gauge the brand value of an institute based on its alumni network and how it is doing in the market. The performance of professionals who are doing exceptionally well in the market reflects the quality of their Alma matter. It’s a testimony to brand IMT that 3 of its alumni are making significant inroads and contributing to the growth of GSK Consumer Healthcare Limited.

Following is the 1st part of a 3-part interview series which the team from Sampark of the Alumni Relationship Committee of IMT, Ghaziabad conducted with 3 different alumni – Prashant Pandey (batch of 1995), Sudeep Ralhan (batch of 2001) and Rohan Arora (batch of 2008), holding office in various capacities at GSK Consumer Healthcare Limited.

Prashant Pandey is Executive Vice President Marketing for GSK CH Indian Sub-Continent. He is currently leading Marketing for Nutrition & Digestive Health category, along with Marketing Excellence and Expert Sales & Marketing for India Sub Continent which includes Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as the other key markets besides India.

An alumnus of IMT, Ghaziabad from the batch of 1995, Mr Pandey has over 20 years of experience in Marketing & Advertising. The first part of his career was with JWT in various capacities in Account Management & Strategic Planning on a diverse set of businesses including Pepsi (Soft drinks, Juice, Water), Nestle (Maggi Noodles, KitKat, Munch), Reckitt Benckiser (Dettol Liquid and Soaps, Lizol), Airtel (Direct-To-Home TV) and ESPN. He then joined GSKCH in 2008 as Marketing Manager, Horlicks. In 2010, he moved on to lead the Nutrition category for India, accelerating innovation on Horlicks and extending the brand through new launches in HFDs, adjacent categories and through geographic expansion in North West region, helping ISC achieve its vision of doubling the business in four years between 2007-11. In 2013, he became the Category Development Director, Family Nutrition ISC where he set up and expanded the Category team and drove innovation across the portfolio. In 2015, he took up his current role.

1. It’s been 2 decades now since you stepped out of the gates of IMT Ghaziabad and into the corporate world. Did you ever get a chance to reflect back on your corporate journey? How instrumental do you think were your days at IMT in shaping up the same?

IMT has had a big influence…you can call it a formative influence. In many ways IMT made us stand on our feet and made us fully responsible for ourselves. More than text book learning it was the whole experience that nurtured qualities that have come in handy. For instance, aptitude for problem solving and being a good team player and being able to work well with diverse teams. Multiple student forums at IMT helped instil leadership qualities from an early age. The foundation was definitely laid at IMT.

2. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see fellow IMTians walking through the corridors of GSK, making inroads in their respective verticals?

I feel very proud. The more the merrier. There is definitely an emotional connection when you meet or even hear of someone from IMT. Even if there is a difference of 10 years or 12 years, it doesn’t make a difference. There is an automatic sense of pride and a sense of enjoying each other’s success. It feels good.

3. Given the cultural and demographic diversity present in India, what are some of the major factors that are kept in mind while designing a marketing strategy for mass appeal products like say Horlicks?

India is complex and diverse. If you see carefully how people interact with different categories and brands, you will find clear differences between parts of the country. Food habits vary significantly for instance. Horlicks is a brand that is a market leader in both South and East India, yet consumers are loyal to it for slightly different reasons, they make their cup of Horlicks in a slightly different way. Sometimes these differences are found within a region itself, between Kerala and Tamil Nadu for instance. And if you deep dive further, you will also get city level differences.

The way to get your head around is to focus on common traits of consumers and cluster the market into segments. Within a segment, there are lots of ways to build local appeal. Festivals offer one such way since quite a few of them are local and regional like Chhath Puja in Bihar and Onam in Kerala. So you can make your brand locally relevant by structuring your marketing program to cater to the local preferences. But that again has to be done carefully without fracturing the core equity of the brand.

4. E- commerce has burst onto the seen in the past decade, opening up a completely new distribution channel for company to reach out to its consumers. Even for an industry like FMCG which relies significantly on brick and mortar stores, how has that changed the business landscape?

E-commerce has come thick and fast. Even though food & grocery is a laggard category on E-com, it is already influencing decision making in categories. A lot of information is available on the net – both in traditional forms as well as new forms like videos, apps, social media etc. A whole new set of influencers are readily accessible – friends, bloggers, travel writers, experts etc to influence what, when, how and how much one buys. This is just the beginning though, a lot of change is travelling towards us in the near future.

5. A lot of the times, companies tend to be in a situation wherein one particular brand becomes their chief revenue driver. As a marketer, how do you then strategize to ensure the visibility of other brands?

That depends on the growth strategy of the company – which brands are the ones which you are going to aggressively grow, which are the ones which you are going to defend and which are the ones that you want to maximize for profit. You have to articulate and define a clear growth strategy so that in the portfolio, a brand can maximise value for the company. Based on role of each brand you can then decide what growth and innovation to aim for in your plans.

6. How do you change your marketing strategy when all of a sudden you find market disruptors like Patanjali making headways among the consumers?

Ideally you should be having a mechanism in place which doesn’t make developments like these a surprise. If you are watching trends, looking at the data on sector, consumers and competition closely, you are bound to have a sense of where consumers are moving, what are their likely future preferences and where is buying power going to get concentrated. This should take the surprise element away. Having said that, when faced with disruptions in the market, you have to quickly assess how much of a threat they are going to be to your business. In case it is significant, then you obviously have to design a specific plan that makes best use of your own competitive strengths and can be put in place across various dimensions like say pricing, distribution or product innovation.

7. FMCG as an industry is supremely dynamic in nature. It relies heavily on customer tastes and trends. What might the ‘flavour of the season’ in the last cycle might not find any takers in the next one! What are the major activities you do as a marketer to ensure that you never let go of the customer’s pulse?

Again, the answer is to have the right mechanism in place which gives you lead indicators of change that is going to come. Change is happening fast and its everywhere – in what people are spending their time and money on, where and how they are buying and whose advise they are taking. Formal processes like market research and staying updated with how other companies are functioning and what strategies they are using can help. Personally what I also do is to visit consumer homes regularly and see what brands and categories they are using, what is the effect of things they have heard, how their decisions and aspirations are changing. You have to construct a picture of the future by joining dots from various data sources and layering your judgment, experience and most importantly instinct on top of that. And do this continuously…without ever a dull moment.

8. For a marketing aspirant, FMCG presents the ultimate challenge of wits. However, a lot of the experts stress on the importance of beginning with sales and gradually moving on to marketing and brand management. Your comments on the same.

It is not a hard and fast rule but I would advise people who want to build a career in FMCG, to get some sales experience which gives a fuller view of the business. When you build a long term career anywhere, the diversity of roles is important because it accelerates the learning curve. If you keep doing same thing for 10 years, then the learning will be less than doing 5 roles in the span of 10 years. It is important to get learning from different functions, work cultures, locations to build a holistic view and a long term career.