Most brand managers I meet today remind me of… well, myself when I started out. Confused. Overwhelmed. Trying to look smart in meetings. And making the same mistakes on repeat.
Tell me if this sounds like you.
- Sitting in a meeting between your boss and the creative director, nodding along but not understanding a word of the 20-minute debate on the ‘new brand positioning’.
- Thinking you know your brand’s positioning—until someone asks you to explain it. Then you fumble.
- Calling up advertising agencies with genius briefs like: “We need to do something…”
- Hearing jargon like: ‘Is the benefit payoff zero to positive or negative to zero?’ And wishing you had subtitles.
- Being asked to write a creative brief and you draw a flowchart.
- In agency meetings, secretly praying: “Please don’t ask me first.” Then, sighing with relief when you get to go last… so you can just rephrase what others have said.
- Hoarding work because you don’t know how to delegate. Then, you feel burnt out and hate your job.
- Spending more time on blame-games after a failed launch rather than learning how to fix it the next time.
- Getting feedback that you’re ‘not strategic’—but not knowing what being strategic even looks like.
- Attending a 3-day training on concept writing… and forgetting everything by the time you actually have to write one.
- Passing off agency decks as your own in management meetings.
- Writing stellar annual brand plans in PowerPoint… only to execute something completely different.
- Writing long CYA (cover-your-ass) emails in convent-school English… but not spending 30 minutes with a real consumer, having a real conversation in Hindi, or Telugu.
If you saw yourself in any of these, don’t panic. You’re not alone. This is how most of us are, at the start.
Why? Our education system, companies and some managers don’t set us up for success.
Here’s how it works.
The FMCG career playbook
Most FMCG systems follow this set career playbook. From the predictable sport of sales to the chaos of brand management.
Newly minted MBAs are sent off to join the sales force. Working in sales is like playing cricket with fixed rules, a scoreboard, and clear wins and losses.
- Hit monthly targets.
- Push the distributor to buy more stock while keeping an eye on his ROI calculation.
- Run trade promotions.
- Manage forecasting to make sure you get stock on time.
Rinse, repeat.
Then one day, you get thrown into marketing. Suddenly, you’re off cricket and are playing kabaddi blindfolded. Everyone is shouting, the rules are fuzzy, and you’re not sure if you’re winning. Or just out of breath.
From a predictable job description in a relatively less ambiguous environment, you’re thrown into a complex, ambiguous workplace. You’re,
- Writing decks (while guessing what your manager wants to see) till 2 a.m.
- Chasing artworks daily while simultaneously forecasting budgets for the next 3 years.
- Negotiating with sales.
- Judging TV ads you don’t fully get.
- Tracking market share on Excel for the hundredth time.
- And trying to ‘align stakeholders’—a fancy way of saying convince ten people older than you, with bigger egos, to back your idea.
Every day feels like drinking from a firehose.
I remember my first weeks at Hindustan Unilever on Lakme, weighted by a pile of work, dealines breathing down my neck. To top that off, I did not know the company’s inner workings at all. I remember once I hid in the loo, cried for two minutes, washed my face and went back to work.
I wonder why it never occurred to me that I could ask for help?
I wonder how many marketers feel like this once in a while and don’t ask for help?
Why does this keep happening?
An inadequate MBA education and time-poor managers make matters worse.
MBA colleges teach us theory. But real life works on people, politics, and practicality.
Managers learn: 1) while fire-fighting on the job. or 2) by following orders, tasting success and then never veering off that same playbook ever again.
That’s why all marketing playbooks look the same.
Most managers simply don’t have the time to think through why things work the way they do. Since most of them didn’t get formal training or mentorship, they don’t know how to teach either.
You end up second-guessing everyone—from your 50-year-old bosses who haven’t met a consumer in years, to your agency, which has been on the brand longer than you.
And you learn by trial and error—slow and painful.
CMOs concur
In 2020, when I was first toying with the idea of building a consulting–training company, I called a few CMO friends and asked them, “What do you wish your teams could do better?” Their answers were unanimous. Their teams were:
- Great at to-do lists and follow-ups, but weak at choosing one big bet.
- Great at data analysis, but could not tell a story or figure out the consumer truth.
- Great at making marketing plans, but froze when Finance/Legal/Sales pushed back.
- Great at criticism, but waited for agencies to “bring ideas” instead of writing sharp briefs first.
- Great at writing goals, “Grow market share by 100bps”. But did not know how.
In short, their teams are great tacticians, but lack creativity, can’t manage stakeholders and lack enterprise-wide, consumer-backwards strategy.
These are thinking and judgment gaps, not effort gaps. Which is why you need a shortcut to better thinking.
What if you could ‘Benjamin Button’ knowledge?
Benjamin Button had the wisdom of an old man in a young body. What if you could Benjamin Button your thinking on Day 1 of your job?
You’d be new to the company, but your decisions would carry the weight of 25 years of pattern recognition. Fewer rookie mistakes. Faster progress.
You would still learn through trial and error as the world changed around you, but you would skip the newbie missteps and start at the mastery level.
Mental models are the answer
Mental models are rules about how the world works.
If you have driven from your house to your office for the last 2 years, you know which route to take on Tuesdays and which turns to avoid during festivals. Through personal experience, you have perfected a mental model that’s now become instinctive. Imagine if someone had told you everything you now know on day 1 itself? You would have saved yourself hours of traffic jams, frustration and inefficiency.
This is what I mean by Benjamin Buttoning your knowledge.
There are about a million mental models that other people have fine-tuned through their experience. If there were a way for you to download their instincts, you would be able to see patterns, avoid traps, and make better calls without needing a 50-slide deck each time you run into a marketing problem.
Not only would you start with an unfair advantage, you would also exponentially step-change the impact you have on brands you touch, people you meet and businesses you run.
Some examples of mental models
- Supply – demand is an economic model that helps us make sense of pricing.
Luxury brands use this model to drive up the price and create a sense of exclusivity.
- Reciprocity is a behavioural science model that says that when we are the recipients of an act of kindness by a stranger, however small, we feel obliged to reciprocate.
Marketers around the world, by giving free samples or creating special moments like wishing people on their birthdays, create situations where people feel the need to reciprocate by buying the product.
- Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias model that warns you that you’ll only see data that confirms what you already believe.
So when you look at consumer research, be watchful if you are cherry-picking insights that prove your campaign idea was right all along.
- India is rich, but Indians are poor is a market reality model that says that other than the top 20% households, the rest of India is cash poor.
When you are launching a new brand or expanding an old one, make sure you know which India you want to target.
Each Performonks newsletter here contains mental models on marketing, self-mastery and how to grow businesses in India.
Not theory. Not jargon. Just real-world wisdom, distilled into frameworks you can start using tomorrow morning.
If you are new here, start with these three – community marketing, inertia and storytelling.
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