Future Group’s Mythological Marketing

What skills does it take to be good at marketing? Some experts claim that marketing is an analytical discipline: a good marketer must possess robust left-brain capabilities and excel at quantitative reasoning. Others will counter that marketing is too fuzzy a field to be boiled down to a series of mathematical formulas and that to excel at marketing you need right-brain capabilities such as creativity and pattern-detection to unearth unarticulated market customer needs.

In my recent trip to India, I encountered the CEO of a fascinating firm that has judiciously married ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ marketing to position itself as a leader in its field. The Future Group is India’s fastest-growing retailer which several innovative business models under its belt. In a country dominated by kiranas (mom-and-pop shops), Kishore Biyani, CEO of Future Group, has successfully introduced the big-box retail model, but adapted it to fit India’s unique socio-cultural context. The company prides itself in designing innovative customer experiences that blend the best of West and East. For instance, its Big Bazaar stores offer customers the convenience of single-stop shopping in a modern retail setting, yet allow buyers to touch, feel, and smell fresh produce like vegetables and spices, which are displayed in big coconut sacks like you find in typical open markets all across India.

My colleagues and I had an insightful discussion with Kishore at Future Group’s headquarters in Mumbai. Kishore strongly believes that retailing (and retail marketing) is both an art and a science. He relies on his own creativity and his innate understanding of the Indian market to anticipate customer needs. He believes focus groups aren’t always reliable as customers may not properly articulate their latent needs. He asserted that CEOs need to: a) have a vision on how to shape new markets (Future Group’s tag-line is “India Tomorrow”) and b) execute that vision by relying on their gut feeling — not merely data.

But Kishore tempered his own statement by saying that the Future Group also employs an in-house think-thank which conducts analytical research (like sizing the retail market potential across various Indian rural areas) to help execute the firm’s strategic vision and scale it up. As Kishore puts it: “You need science to validate art. But without art, science has no meaning. As CEO, you must keep Kama (creative spirit) and Yama (control) in proper and constant balance in your firm.”

Kishore went on to explain that to gain deeper insights into Indian consumers’ mindset he also employs India’s leading sociologist — which sounded to me like a clever R&D 2.0 strategy. But then Kishore caught us totally off-guard: he said he also applies right-brain techniques for “internal marketing” purpose like employee training and has hired India’s leading mythologist to that effect! We wondered whether he was kidding or serious. Noting the doubt on our faces, he smilingly picked up his mobile phone and invited his “mythologist” — Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik — to join us.

Devdutt is one of the world’s leading experts on Indian mythology, which includes Hindu epic tales like Mahabharata and Ramayana. Once Kishore conjures up a visionary idea (say, a novel retail store for children or women), Devdutt is tasked with inspiring employees and rallying them around that vision. Devdutt explained that all employee training programs at Future Group always start with storytelling, inspired by Indian mythology. The goal is to galvanize and inspire workers — from store clerks to senior execs — to adhere to the vision by unveiling it as a story drawn from, say, the Mahabharata with well-known characters like Krishna that they can all relate to.

Devdutt pointedly noted that Greek mythology (which Western management gurus and motivational speakers heavily borrow from) won’t work in India for two reasons: first, Greek myths center on a single character and adulate individual heroism (Heracles, Odysseus, Achilles, etc). Second, they promote absolute values (good vs. bad). But Hindu myths like Ramayana are cast with multiple heroes and imbued with relative values (e.g., Hinduism considers a bad action acceptable if animated by a good intention). In the highly diverse and complex Indian society, internal and external marketing stories won’t sink in unless they embody “collective heroism” and non-Manichean values.

I see two lessons that Western corporate leaders can learn from Future Group:

1. “Whole brain” marketing and communication techniques that combine both art (gut feeling, sociology, and even mythology) and science (analytics, business processes) are key for shaping new markets and keeping employees engaged.
2. As Western companies go after global markets that are increasingly complex and diverse , US and European firms must adopt and adapt stories from Indian mythology to inspire and engage customers and employees.

Shall we rename the Chief Marketing Officer as Chief Mythology Officer?