For someone well known as a leading brand strategist, who teaches advanced courses in marketing to second-year MBA students in different parts of the world, Sudio Sudarsan is not what you would expect him to be.
Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA), as part of their Beyond Management Initiative, had recently invited Sudio (as they do every year) to speak on ‘The Strategy of Brand Perception’. But it was no typical lecture, delivered formally by someone in a crisp suit. Instead, there was Sudio, in a blue shirt, looking effortlessly cool in his grown out hair and talking about brands animatedly to the students, who were laughing uproariously!
“There is one P in marketing that is more effective than the other 4 Ps — and that is perception,” he told the audience. Peppered with wit and plenty of anecdotes, Sudio’s annual lecture is one that students really look forward to. His profile says he’s a human behaviourist who uncovers ‘non-conscious motivations’ that drive consumer behaviour and helps companies and start-ups use their ‘brand, design, digital, innovation, and marketing assets’ effectively.
Listening to Sudio, you realise that marketing is very closely associated with (surprise!) consumer behaviour, and that cracking this behavioural code is possible through the understanding of psychology, anthropology and even neurobiology. It is this interesting approach, of combining liberal arts with marketing, that Sudio tries to convey through his lectures. He himself has done anthropology-based marketing.
“In B-schools, there is a lot of left-brain orientation in education. Marketing is taught as if a consumer is a statistic. They teach mean, median and mode thoroughly, but nothing of that sort works in real life. Everything is very subjective,” he says.
The background
For all his knowledge and passion for anthropology and marketing, Sudio did not start off thinking he would pursue an MBA. Ask him about his educational journey and he explains, “Like any other South Indian, I did my share of engineering (chemical engineering). At the time, I wanted to do environment studies because it was fashionable. I have to take care of the world!”
He even worked as a pollution control engineer in India, and went to Illinois to do his masters in mechanical engineering and energy processes. And this, he says, was at a time when everyone in the world knew it was easy to get a “glittering six-figure salary if one jumped into computers”. “Yet, I was a patriot, devoted to the environment and energy. I worked as an energy engineer for Johnson Controls. Then, when I was sitting and doing all the engineering calculations, I saw there were people wearing suits and ties who came in at 10 am, talked in the conference room and left at 3 pm. And here I was, a guy in the polo shirt doing all the mathematical calculations, while these guys had the fancy cars! I got to know they were all MBAs, and I was like ‘I can also do that’.”
And so it happened that Sudio joined Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix and discovered his true passion: marketing. “Marketing was the thing that spoke to me. I was forcefully trained in mathematics and science, but naturally, I lean more towards the art and the creative. I understood that in my MBA programme. Marketing came to me very easily. Even though I had so much of engineering baggage, marketing was where my passion lay.”
He soon realised that this was what he really wanted to do. And it helped that he was so good at it. “They gave me a lot of awards and it was like Lord of the Rings , getting recognised at the graduation. It was nice for a brown guy to beat all the white people in their own land,” he says, smiling.
How it works
So, how does he come up with strategies for brands using psychology and anthropology? “I dig the cultural code in human beings, and I decipher that code. Everything has a code, and every word has a different association for people. Take coffee, for instance. For some, it may conjure up memories of home, of mom, dad, dining room and kitchen. For someone else, it may mean free WiFi and smartly-dressed people. For others, it’s something they cannot function without.
“So, coffee has different meanings for different consumer tribes, and you try to find out what that meaning is. Once you do that, boy you’ve got a brand there! Because you’re positioning it right at the cultural code for them.”
He gives another example, of a milkshake company. He talks of the time he went to the shop really early in the morning to watch the workings: an employee opens the shop at around 7 am and starts cleaning; at 7.30 am, a car comes and a guy in a suit gets out, picks up a milkshake and drives away. Some 15-16 customers repeat this behaviour from 7.30 am to 8.30 am. Then there’s a lull. After 3 pm, a lot of children and their moms come.
“You know what that tells you? That a lot of men and women going to work don’t have time for breakfast and they’re compensating for that with a milkshake. You won’t get this result in a survey! You have to be patient and observe. Then, when you glean this understanding, you realise that you can have a vending machine, so people don’t have to get off their cars to get their milkshake. You’re able to draw some insights for the business owners to position their brand appropriately.”
Sudio says he doesn’t hand out surveys. He watches people and learns the meaning from being a part of them. “Today, anthropology or psychology isn’t taught (in the MBA). Statistics and scientific marketing is taught, but these are all methods from 1960s, I think. This is not the way we do things any more,” he adds.
Underlying philosophy
If you’re doing quantitative marketing, there is no theory, no philosophy, he says. “Give me the scanner, give me panel data and I will model consumer behaviour for you. We have a lot of advanced statistics today that we are able to predict human behaviour with.”
He gives an example of an incident that happened when Target used predictive statistics to conclude that a girl in high school was pregnant even before her father knew about it! “That’s the power of predictive statistics. Today, technology has collided with marketing, and if you want to be a quantitative marketer, you need to know computer languages and statistics, says Sudio.
But science too is not 100 per cent accurate. The Target prediction model could have got it wrong — maybe the products she bought that led Target to believe she was pregnant were for someone else! “So you cannot believe science. Science itself tells you that we know only 4 per cent of the universe. Ninety six per cent we don’t know. And it says so very humbly. And because of that humbleness, we like science.”
Anthropology marketing has lots of theories. “I can go on and on if you let me talk about it,” says Sudio. His passion is visible when he talks about the anthropologists and philosophers whose theories are used in marketing. “There are some great thinkers Pierre Bourdeiu and Claude Levi Strauss — it’s their theories you apply to human behaviour in the context of consumption.”
“Thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, they’re throwing a stone at science itself, saying look! There is no objective truth. It’s all subjective. It’s based on how you’re raised and what you think,” explains Sudio.
Definition of success
Ask him what his advice for MBA students is, and there are no clichéd answers. “No advice, they can do whatever they want,” he proclaims, adding, “All advice is autobiographical. Life moves very quickly, especially for B-school students. The only thing I can say is ‘smell the roses, or the coffee. Take a chill pill now and then’.”
He thinks a bit before continuing, “It really depends on what their definition of success is. If, like everyone else, it is to make money, well, then they won’t get very far, and won’t achieve great things in life.
“But if their purpose is to create value to society, or another person, then the money will come on its own, and that will make you do great things. When students are immature, they think money and fancy cars are everything. But after life rubs off on them and they navigate the politics of business, they learn there are higher things in life,” he concludes.
(The writer can be reached at @ iSudio on Twitter )