Marketing Strategy

Deeksharambh 2026 — Guest Lecture, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata Speaker: Sampad Xavier Chaudhuri, ACIM — Marketing Manager, AVI Global Plast Pvt. Ltd. Host: Postgraduate & Research Department of Commerce, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata Audience: M.Com Semester I students (Deeksharambh — Student Induction Programme) Format: 45-minute closing special lecture, designed as an interactive discussion rather than a one-way talk Role: Invited industry speaker, distinguished alumnus 📄 Full Speech Transcript: Google Drive 🖥️ Presentation Deck: Google Drive  The Brief The Department of Commerce invited me back to my alma mater to deliver the closing session of Deeksharambh 2026, the induction programme for incoming M.Com Semester I students. The brief from the department was simple on paper and hard in practice: inspire a room of first-semester students — many of whom had just landed in a Marketing programme without necessarily choosing it as a first preference — to see marketing as a genuine, credible career path. The session had to be interactive, not a lecture, and run to a tight 45-minute window. The Challenge Most students walk into a first-semester induction session with one of two postures: polite disengagement, or a set of assumptions about “marketing” that don’t hold up — that it’s just social media and advertising, that it lacks the analytical rigor of finance or the technical depth of other fields, and that a clear, obviously-correct career path exists for everyone except them. Add to that: this was the very last session of the day, competing with fatigue after a full induction schedule. The task, essentially, was a positioning problem — the same kind I solve professionally. I had 45 minutes to reposition an entire discipline in the minds of an audience that had already formed an opinion about it, using structure, credibility, and participation instead of just claims. The Approach Rather than open with credentials, I opened with a demonstration. The session was built around a single structural device: the 4Ps of marketing, shown first at the smallest possible scale, then scaled up to global brands — used as a bookend for the entire talk. 1. The Hook — A Sabzi Mandi The session opened not with an introduction, but with a question: what’s the most practiced profession in the world? The answer — marketing — was demonstrated through the everyday behavior of a local vegetable vendor: competitive pricing, sampling, bundling, cross-selling, and deliberate stall placement. This grounded an abstract framework (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) in something every student in the room already intuitively understood, before a single technical term was introduced. 2. Personal Credibility — Not the Plan Rather than lead with a resume, the session included an honest account of a career that wasn’t linear: originally on track to become a Chartered Accountant, a Covid-cancelled exam led to an unplanned application to the M.Com Marketing programme — the same one the audience had just joined. This was a deliberate credibility choice: relatability over polish, positioning the speaker as someone who once sat exactly where the audience was sitting. 3. The Real Case — AVI Global Plast The core of the session was a real, structured case study from current work: managing global marketing across 33 countries and six continents for a manufacturing and export business. The specific problem — 8,500 SKUs being offered indiscriminately across all 33 markets, an approach nicknamed internally the “bhagwan bharose sale” (the “God-willing” sale) — was broken down into a clear decision framework: Mapping all 8,500 designs against every market using a 2×2 product-marketing mix Deliberately narrowing focus to one high-margin product per new market, rather than spreading budget thin Rebuilding go-to-market infrastructure around that focus: multilingual websites, account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, and real channel-level tracking Layering in events (6 cities globally), PR and trade-press thought leadership, targeted paid campaigns, and organic LinkedIn growth (2% to 23% engagement) The case closed on an external, verifiable outcome: recognition as one of India’s top exporters, an award presented by Piyush Goyal, India’s Commerce and Industry Minister — a business result validated outside the marketing function itself. 4. Personal Branding for Freshers The session pivoted from corporate strategy to something directly actionable: how a first-semester student markets themselves. This was framed around a personal example — eight internships across different marketing functions and roughly 195 online certifications during the speaker’s own studies — and a simple, honest pitch used with hiring managers: “I’m not an expert, but I’m resilient enough to learn.” Three concrete, semester-one-appropriate actions were given: starting accessible certifications (Udemy, LinkedIn Learning), building a portfolio of self-initiated case studies rather than relying on a transcript, and being honest about what’s genuinely difficult about the field. 5. The Close — Full Circle The session closed by returning to the opening device: the same 4Ps, now mapped against Apple — premium product design, deliberately high aspirational pricing (with a direct, audience-specific callback to waiting for Big Billion Days sales), global keynote-driven promotion, and deliberate retail placement. The structural bookend reinforced the session’s central thesis in the final minute: marketing is demand generation for a sale that hasn’t happened yet — shaping perception before a decision is ever made. 6. Open Floor The remaining time was handed entirely to the room — an unscripted Q&A covering salary expectations, whether an MBA is necessary, and what the job is actually like day to day. The Outcome The session ran as the closing lecture of the induction programme and was structured to maximize engagement over information density — a deliberate trade-off, given the audience and the time slot. Student response was strong: the open floor produced sustained, curious questions rather than the polite silence often typical of a day’s final session, and several students stayed back afterward to continue the conversation one-on-one. More broadly, the session served as a live demonstration of its own thesis — using positioning, structure, and a consistent narrative device (the 4Ps bookend) to make an abstract subject concrete for a specific, skeptical audience, exactly as described in the AVI case study

In July 2024, a bad CrowdStrike update took down Windows machines around the world. Blue screens everywhere. Flights grounded. Xbox Live down. For about a day, it was the only thing anyone in tech was talking about. Every marketer’s LinkedIn feed filled up with the same three posts: the screenshot, the “this is why cybersecurity matters” thread, the hot take about resilience. I posted something else. A challenge. I put the actual news headline next to the blue screen and asked one question: if you had to write this headline, what would you write? Short. Sweet. Relatable. Best answer wins ₹500. Deadline: midnight, same day. No brand. No product. No link to click. It pulled 30,920 impressions off a personal page with 1,356 followers — 22.8 times my own reach — and 311 comments against just 74 reactions. That ratio is the entire story, and it’s worth actually unpacking, because most people look at the impressions number and miss it. A like and a comment are not the same thing Reacting to a post costs a reader nothing. One tap, no thought required. Commenting costs something — a few seconds spent actually coming up with a line worth posting. On a normal post, reactions outnumber comments by a wide margin. That’s just how passive scrolling works. This post ran the opposite way, and not by accident. There was nothing to react to. The post didn’t work unless you answered it. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because LinkedIn’s own distribution rewards comments far more than it rewards reactions. Build a post where commenting is the only way to participate, and you’ve made the platform’s algorithm do your distribution for you. Why this beat every well-written post I’ve ever put up I’ve spent real time crafting posts that did a fraction of these numbers. The difference here wasn’t better writing. It was that this post asked for participation, not attention. Attention is passive. Someone either notices you or they don’t. Participation is active — it asks someone to produce something, even something tiny, to be part of it. A one-line headline in the comments is a low bar. But it’s still a bar. And clearing a bar, however small, is what turns a scroller into a commenter. The prize and the deadline weren’t just decoration either. ₹500 isn’t “get rich” money, but it’s enough to make the ask feel real. Midnight isn’t “sometime this week” — it’s a clock. Clocks make people write the line now, instead of bookmarking the post and forgetting about it. The wrong lesson to take from this Don’t read this as “run more giveaways” or “jump on every trending topic.” Neither is the point. A prize-and-deadline challenge does one specific job: it converts people who are already paying attention to something — a news event, a shared moment — into people who briefly act inside your comment section. It’s not a funnel. It doesn’t explain a product or move anyone toward a purchase. It builds reach and a small spike in followers, because the format itself is worth engaging with, independent of who’s posting it or what they sell. For a product marketer, that’s a distinct and useful tool — separate from, not a replacement for, content that actually moves someone through a buying decision. What I’d change if I ran it again Mostly the follow-through, not the format. I had nothing ready to catch the 145 profile visitors or the 33 new followers this pulled in. No pinned post, nothing obvious for them to look at next. And I had no second post ready to test while that same wave of attention was still moving. A spike at over 20 times normal reach is the audience telling you, specifically, what they’ll respond to. The right move is to test that again immediately — not admire it a few weeks later, which is what I actually did. The actual takeaway Reach follows participation. It doesn’t work the other way around. A post that requires the reader to produce something — even one line, even something as small as a headline — will consistently beat a post that only asks to be noticed, as long as the ask is small enough and the moment is real enough that people act on it now instead of later. If you’re deciding whether a format like this is “too gimmicky” for a professional page, don’t look at the impressions count. Look at the comment-to-reaction ratio. If comments outnumber reactions, your audience didn’t just see the post. They did something with it. You can find the original post here.

Last Christmas, we put up a post on AVI Global Plast’s LinkedIn page. No product shot. No feature list. No CTA. Just photos from our office party — Secret Santa, cake cutting, a manger scene the team built out of recycled plastic and leftover packaging material. A short caption. A few hashtags. It hit a 92.12% engagement rate. For context: LinkedIn’s own benchmark for organic B2B posts sits somewhere around 2–5%. We were at 92%. Not a typo, not a boosted post, not a giveaway. Organic, unpromoted, on a page with 6,804 followers. 3,222 impressions. 2,968 engagements. 2,878 clicks. An 89.32% click-through rate on an organic post from a rigid packaging manufacturer. I want to be honest about why, because “authenticity wins” is the kind of thing everyone says and almost nobody unpacks. We didn’t set out to make a sustainability post That’s the part I’d get wrong if I retold this too neatly. We didn’t sit down and plan “let’s demonstrate our values through employee storytelling.” Someone built a manger scene out of scrap plastic because that’s what was lying around the office. We photographed the party because it happened. The sustainability angle was already sitting inside the photo — we didn’t have to write it in. That’s a different thing from a company deciding to run a sustainability campaign and then staging a photo to fit it. Audiences on LinkedIn are unusually good at telling the difference between a value that’s being demonstrated and one that’s being performed. This one wasn’t performed. It just happened to also be true. Why this beat our product content, specifically Our product posts — PET sheet specs, thermoforming line capabilities, certification announcements — do fine. They get seen by the people already looking for a packaging vendor. That’s a narrow audience by design, and it should be. This post wasn’t talking to that audience. It was talking to anyone who’s ever worked in an office, celebrated with a team, or cared about where waste ends up. That’s a much bigger addressable audience, and it’s why the impression-to-engagement ratio looks the way it does — the content wasn’t asking for narrow relevance, it was asking for a much broader kind of recognition. The mistake would be concluding “we should post more culture content instead of product content.” That’s not the takeaway. The takeaway is that they’re doing two different jobs. Product content moves someone through a buying decision. This kind of post builds the reputation someone is relying on before they ever start that buying decision — including with people who will never buy packaging from us but might refer someone who does, or apply for a job here, or mention us to a supplier. What I’d actually change if I ran this again Not the content — the follow-through. We didn’t have anything ready to catch the attention once it arrived. No comment prompting a reply. No shorter opening line to hold people in the first two seconds. No version of this as a 20-second video, which almost certainly would have outperformed the static images given how the engagement curve looked. The bigger miss: we didn’t have a second post ready to ride the same attention. When something organic performs at 20x benchmark, that’s a signal the audience is telling you something specific about what they want to see from the page. We let that signal sit unused for a few months instead of immediately testing a follow-up. The actual lesson, stated plainly An unmeasured win teaches you nothing. We only know this post did 92% because tracking was already in place — the same tracking discipline that’s behind everything else we’ve built on the marketing side this year. A number like 92.12% is only useful because we have a baseline to compare it against, and other posts to compare it to. If you’re a B2B manufacturer wondering whether “soft” content like this is worth the slot on your content calendar next to your product posts — it is, but not because it’s more likeable. It’s worth it because it’s doing a job your product content structurally can’t: building the reputation that gets referenced long before anyone is in a buying cycle. Measure it the same way you measure everything else, and let the numbers tell you what to do next, rather than deciding in advance what kind of post you’re “supposed” to be. You can find the original post here.

A different kind of starting problem When I joined AVI Global Plast — a ₹300Cr export manufacturer operating across 33 countries and 6 continents — nobody was tracking anything. That’s worth sitting with for a second, because it’s a different problem than the one most marketers walk into. Bad numbers are fixable. A weak conversion rate, a mediocre engagement rate, a high bounce rate — all of that gives you something to work against. What we had instead was no data, no dashboards, and no one anywhere in the business responsible for what any channel was actually producing. That’s not a strategy gap. It’s a measurement gap, and it sits underneath every strategy decision a marketing function tries to make. You can’t prioritize channels you’re not measuring. You can’t prove a campaign worked if you never had a number before it ran. You can’t even have a productive argument about what “good” looks like, because there’s nothing on the table to argue about. Why no one owning tracking was the real problem Every channel — the website, email, social, event lead capture — had been operating for years with no owner attached to its output. Not underperforming against a target. Simply unmeasured, which meant there was no target to underperform against in the first place. This is a subtler problem than it sounds, because a business can run for a long time this way without anyone noticing anything is wrong. AVI had a strong reputation and 25 years of export relationships built entirely without anyone tracking marketing performance — the absence of data doesn’t necessarily show up as an obvious crisis, it just quietly caps how much any future effort can be justified, prioritized, or improved. Closing that gap had to come before any other marketing decision, because every other decision depends on it. Tracking before optimizing, not the other way around The instinct walking into a role like this is to start fixing things immediately — new website copy, a fresh campaign, a rebuilt email sequence. We deliberately didn’t start there. Before touching a single channel, we put tracking in place across all of them: website analytics, email open and click tracking, social performance measurement, and lead capture attribution from events. The reasoning is simple but easy to skip under pressure to show quick wins: you cannot know whether a change worked if you never had a number before you made it. Optimizing without a baseline isn’t optimization — it’s just activity, with no way to tell afterward whether it helped, hurt, or did nothing at all. Letting the first honest number set the baseline Once tracking existed, the first numbers weren’t always flattering, and that’s exactly as it should be. An unflattering number you can act on is infinitely more useful than no number at all. The value of a baseline isn’t in how good it looks — it’s in the fact that it exists, and that everything measured afterward can be compared against it honestly. Every optimization after that is the same mechanism, repeated Once tracking was in place, every improvement that followed across every channel wasn’t really a series of separate clever tactics. It was the same underlying mechanism doing its job, over and over: show where the gap is, take an action, measure whether the action closed the gap. Website changes, email sequence adjustments, social content shifts — different tactics, same loop. The tracking is what turned isolated efforts into a system that compounds. Why infrastructure comes after the discipline, not before it Tools don’t create the habit of measuring — they scale it once it already exists. Building the tracking discipline first meant that whatever systems came next, whenever they arrived, would reinforce a way of working the team already trusted, rather than trying to manufacture that habit from scratch around a new piece of software. Sequencing it that way is what makes infrastructure investments actually stick instead of becoming another underused tool. The takeaway The biggest constraint on a marketing function isn’t usually a bad number. It’s the absence of any number to measure against, argue with, or improve. Once that gap closes — even with numbers that aren’t flattering at first — everything that follows becomes dramatically easier to prioritize, justify, and prove. That’s the real foundation any optimization work gets built on, and it has to come first, not as an afterthought once the “real” marketing work is already underway.

Can a B2B manufacturer build a brand that customers choose for more than just price? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past few months. Working in the packaging industry, I’ve realised that marketing in B2B manufacturing is fundamentally different from many consumer-facing industries. We don’t sell products that customers browse on a supermarket shelf, and we certainly don’t compete through flashy advertising campaigns. More often than not, customers compare suppliers based on quality, service, relationships—and unfortunately, sometimes even a difference of just a few paise. As someone currently building the marketing function at AVI Global Plast, this challenge has become one of the most interesting parts of my role. So when I attended the Brands That India Trusts Summit 2026 in Mumbai, I wasn’t looking for the latest marketing trend or another AI presentation. I wanted to understand how experienced brand leaders think about trust, differentiation, and long-term brand building—and whether those lessons could be applied to B2B manufacturing. Interestingly, by the end of the event, I realised that although the speakers represented industries as diverse as insurance, fintech, media, travel, healthcare, and consumer brands, many of the principles they discussed were surprisingly relevant to the challenges we face in industrial marketing. Trust Is Built Across Every Customer Touchpoint One idea kept resurfacing throughout the day: brands don’t earn trust through a single campaign. They earn it through consistency. That sounds simple, but it completely changes the way we think about marketing. In manufacturing, trust doesn’t begin when someone sees a LinkedIn post or visits a website. It begins when they make their first enquiry. It grows through timely responses from the sales team, accurate production timelines, consistent product quality, transparent communication, reliable deliveries, and responsive after-sales support. Every department contributes to the customer’s perception of the brand. As marketers, we often think about messaging, positioning, and content. The event reminded me that these are only one part of the equation. Marketing creates expectations. The business fulfils them. When every customer interaction reflects the same level of professionalism and consistency, trust begins to compound over time. The Real Opportunity Is Creating Value Beyond the Product One of the most valuable conversations I had after the panel discussions was around a challenge I face regularly. I explained that in our domestic market, customers often compare suppliers based on extremely small price differences. If one supplier quotes ₹4.23 and another quotes ₹4.25, procurement decisions can sometimes be influenced by those few paise. It raises a difficult question for any marketer: how do you build preference in a market where products are often treated as commodities? The advice I received was both simple and powerful. Instead of asking how to make the product appear different, ask what additional value the brand can create around the product. That completely changed my perspective. Perhaps differentiation doesn’t always come from changing the product itself. Perhaps it comes from becoming a better partner. Sharing industry knowledge, educating customers, providing technical expertise, helping them understand market trends, or creating better customer experiences may ultimately become stronger competitive advantages than trying to compete purely on price. Products can often be copied. Relationships rarely can. Customer Experience Is One of Marketing’s Strongest Assets Another recurring theme throughout the summit was customer experience. Traditionally, customer experience is often associated with service teams or operations. However, several speakers emphasised that customers don’t experience departments—they experience one brand. That observation stayed with me. Every email, every production update, every delivery, every service interaction, and every problem resolved contributes to how customers remember an organisation. For B2B companies, customer experience isn’t something that happens after marketing. It is marketing. It also made me reflect on something we can continue strengthening in manufacturing businesses. Building stronger alignment between marketing, sales, production, and customer support creates a far more consistent customer journey than any campaign ever could. Communities Build Stronger Brands Than Campaigns Perhaps the most interesting idea discussed during my conversations with the panelists was creating value beyond transactions. Rather than viewing customers only as buyers, why not create opportunities for them to engage with the company in different ways? Client meet-and-greets. Knowledge-sharing sessions. Industry roundtables. Packaging innovation workshops. Plant visits. Thought leadership events. These aren’t simply marketing activities. They create conversations, strengthen relationships, and position the company as a trusted industry partner rather than another supplier competing for orders. For B2B organisations, that shift from supplier to trusted advisor can make a significant difference over time. Sometimes the Best Marketing Lessons Come From Other Industries One conversation that particularly stood out to me was with a customer experience leader from the insurance industry. On the surface, insurance and packaging appear to have very little in common. But as we discussed customer trust, I realised they face remarkably similar challenges. Neither industry succeeds purely because of advertising. Both rely heavily on credibility, consistency, relationships, and delivering on promises over time. Customers ultimately choose organisations they believe will perform when it matters most. It reminded me that some of the best ideas don’t always come from companies within your own industry. Looking outside your category often reveals principles that can be adapted in surprisingly effective ways. My Biggest Takeaway Wasn’t About Marketing Ironically, the lesson that stayed with me the most wasn’t about branding or campaigns. It was about careers. Looking around the room, I realised that many of the people sharing their experiences had spent fifteen or twenty years building their expertise before becoming Heads of Marketing, Directors, CEOs, or business leaders. As someone who became a first-time marketing leader within four years, that perspective was incredibly grounding. Like many young professionals, it’s easy to focus on titles and the next promotion. The summit reminded me that great marketers aren’t defined by how quickly they become leaders. They’re defined by how consistently they learn, adapt, solve problems, and continue improving over time. That may have been the most valuable lesson I brought home. Final Thoughts I attended Brands That