Love To Wrestle With Biz Problems That Are Without A Playbook: Ajay Dang, UltraTech Cement

An accomplished marketer, Ajay Dang, president and head of marketing at UltraTech Cement, is revered for his cross-industry experience and for delivering strong business results in tough competitive markets through strategic thinking, innovation and strong execution focus.

Currently leading the marketing mandate of India’s multinational building materials company, Dang has previously worked with Nestle, Colgate Palmolive, General Electric, HT Media, and Godrej Consumer Products.

In a quick confab with him, he speaks on his journey of becoming one of the ‘BW Top Marketers 2024’ and his approach to design the marketing agendas.

Excerpts:

In a career spanning nearly three decades, you have helmed marketing roles across multiple sectors: FMCG, media, and building and construction. What has been your mantra to stay relevant and continue to be a leading voice in the fraternity?

I spent my foundational years and gained my early grounding in consumer goods. My starting 10 years, and 15 of my 28 years have been in FMCG. I believe, three things learnt in FMCG have held me in good stead in creating value across the sectors and organisations.

First is being curious and focussing on asking the right questions, which I learnt is a really rare skill. Einstein was once asked, “How he would save the world in one hour?" To which he said, “I’d spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it." I learnt pretty early that, if you ask the right questions, the answers usually follow.

Second, I have always loved to wrestle with business problems that are without a playbook. I love the challenge, and it also keeps me excited and sharp. It often allows us to operate with first-principle thinking and ask fundamental (seemingly silly) questions. It is in reframing and looking at the problem with a new set of eyes, that often great customer and business value gets unlocked. I have also gained a great deal from learning across multiple sectors and brands, as well as the ability to identify similar patterns across seemingly disconnected domains. 

Third, irrespective of what my job title says, I don’t consider myself a marketer but a businessperson. I consider marketing not as a function, but the whole business is seen from the consumer’s point of view. As I reflect, across most of my roles, I have crossed functional boundaries, and mobilised and collaborated across the business to deliver results.

Recently, I was paid a nice compliment by a very senior industry stalwart: “I’ve talked to you for over two hours. You have passionately talked about the consumer issues that you have handled and created an impact, but not once talked about advertising.” 

You and your team have received 159+ marketing awards in just the last 4 years at various Indian and global cross-industry platforms. What do you think you are doing right that is touching the hearts of your consumers?

Isn’t that wonderful? 

That too in the cement sector, which most marketers would dread and find challenging. But together with my team, we have substantially strengthened the UltraTech brand and achieved the impossible rope trick of not only growing our market share but also substantially expanding the differentiation and premium we command.

In a time, where even the FMCG volume has struggled to keep pace with the GDP growth, we have grown nearly 2.5 x of the GDP growth over the last 7 years. This business growth is the best reward. The awards, of course, are bonuses, which are very valuable recognitions from peers of the great work that our team at UltraTech is doing. It is a testament to the sharp insights we have generated listening to our consumers and that we have not been afraid of charting our distinct path. We have steadfastly avoided the ‘Shiny Object Syndrome’ and stayed laser-sharp and focused on serving the human being who is your customer/consumer.

As we see, creativity and innovation remain core to your marketing efforts, which have also helped you win some of these accolades. What is your approach to balancing creativity with the need to deliver measurable results and achieve business goals?

You are right; they remain core to our marketing efforts.

We see creativity and innovation as central to our growth story and not a separate agenda to be followed. Our sharp insights allow us to look at the market and the consumer jobs to be done more broadly. We understand that building their first home or a large national infrastructure is the biggest project of our customers’ lives. While the need appears rational, the project is a highly emotional one, and consumers seek an empathetic advisor.

It is this insight and understanding that makes our proposition and go-to-market approach very distinct and innovative vs. most of the category. We see ourselves not just as a material supplier but as an empathetic expert, an enabler for the home builder in their journey.

Can you describe a marketing challenge where creativity and innovation helped overcome an obstacle or solved a difficult problem?

I have worked across businesses that have been underdogs and those that have been leaders. One piece of wisdom that has always worked like a charm: consumers don’t sit in corporate boardrooms. They don’t know the market share. Brands that act like leaders get treated like leaders irrespective of their size.

Be it an underdog like ‘GoodKnight’ battling competition nearly triple its size. Or like the Hindustan Times running innovative campaigns like ‘No TV Day’. Or leader brands like UltraTech, helping consumers by telling them to prioritise the structural solidity of their biggest project—home—with “Ghar Banta hai sirf ek bar." Or even defining the human importance of infrastructure in an ambitious and aspiring country, “Banega toh badhega India.” 

Brands that act like leaders listen to consumers, solve consumer conflicts, help them progress in life, act boldly, and are authentic win in the marketplace.

How do you ensure that creative and innovative campaigns maintain authenticity and resonate with your audience, rather than feeling forced or gimmicky?

Truthfully, we do not make any special attempts towards it.

The authenticity and resonance of our campaigns stem from our deep listening. We invest a very large time with our consumers and influencers, investigating not just the construction process and our product usage but the human context of our consumers-their motivations, aspirations, and anxieties.

We feed the gist of this insight into strong storytelling that aims to tell the story of the consumer’s triumph, deeply embedding the brand as an enabler, and you have something that resonates. 

This is not a post-hoc rationalisation of a single success. I have strong faith in this process and have followed it across brands and categories without worrying about the competition intensity or the outcome.

The discipline of this process is difficult, but the results are always gratifying.

You have often called marketers the ‘builders of memories’. Has storytelling become easier with technology or difficult with the clutter, or has it lost its impact in the tech-dominated world?

Storytelling is an ancient art.

It’s an art that creates value by attaching meaning to things and all human endeavour. It is what turns a shiny rock into a diamond, helps place a huge trust in a familiar symbol, and owns the most important and precious real estate—a consumer's mind.

Technology is just a tool and can aid the process of storytelling.

That said, the true power of a story lies in its ability to capture the ‘human truth’.

For a story told with authenticity, technology often gives you scale and helps deliver impact. It also adds richness by making it a two-way conversation between brands and consumers, and a conversation is always more fun than a monologue. 

A laptop or Instagram can possibly help Hemmingway tell a story better,

But everyone with a laptop or an Instagram account can’t become Hemmingway.

Soumya Sehgal Bhutani

BW Reporters Soumya is the Senior Editorial Lead at BW Marketing World. She extensively writes on the Indian media, marketing and advertising ecosystem in India.