How has your 30+ years of Asia‑Pacific marketing experience shaped your approach to full‑funnel marketing at Redmatter?
For over two decades, I was based in Singapore, gaining extensive full-funnel marketing expertise across the Asia-Pacific region. My career spanned both agency and client sides, affording me the privilege of collaborating with outstanding professionals, including Rohit Jawa, now CEO of Unilever India and working on global brands like Unilever, J&J Consumer, MasterCard, Boots Retail, and Nestlé. This dual perspective solidified my understanding of integrated marketing’s power, from both strategic and executional standpoints.
In today’s dynamic market, the inefficiency of siloed marketing approaches is increasingly apparent. While larger agencies often grapple with true integration, a full-funnel approach is native to Redmatter’s DNA, enabling a smoother, more effective implementation.
At Redmatter, I’m now channelling this rich, diverse experience to help elevate businesses in India, starting with clients in the Telugu states. Our focus is on redefining full-funnel marketing by delivering integrated strategies that maximise brand impact and drive measurable business growth across every stage of the customer journey.
Can you explain the proprietary QDR (Quick Dip Research) methodology and when and how is it used in client work?
I was fortunate to learn the Quick Dip Research (QDR) methodology directly from the legendary Alyque Padamsee, the visionary who made Lintas famous. He was a huge advocate for rapid consumer testing, a principle that underpins QDR.
The core idea of QDR is to conduct quick, often low-cost tests to get immediate feedback on concepts still in their early stages. Whether it’s creative work, new product ideas, or any initiative needing instant consumer input, QDR provides direct insights. It’s about validating ideas early in the process, ensuring our marketing campaigns resonate with the target audience before we invest significant resources into full-scale development. This efficient and effective approach allows us to test ideas, gather critical insights, and ultimately shape campaigns that truly align with consumer preferences.
How does Redmatter approach campaign ideation differently when working with a legacy brand vs. a startup?
Our process for campaign ideation at Redmatter is universal, applied equally to established legacy brands and burgeoning startups. Our ‘north star’ questions are always the same: ‘What marketing problem are we solving?’ and ‘What crucial consumer insight are we leveraging?’ The real customization often kicks in during media planning, where we fine-tune the approach to align perfectly with each brand’s market standing and precise requirements.
Redmatter aims to take 100 Indian brands to Rs 1,000 crore revenue by 2035. What specific metrics and milestones are used to track progress toward this goal?
We gauge our success by focusing on driving top-line revenue growth for our clients’ brands and their purchase intent, as these two metrics are closely intertwined. Our role as an agency is to directly influence purchase intent through rigorous testing of the marketing mix. By ensuring our marketing communications effectively drive brand preference, we elevate purchase intent, which then directly contributes to increased revenue for their brands.
What are your internal protocols or frameworks for AI integration in creative development or campaign testing?
At Redmatter, we’re not just observing the AI revolution; we’re embracing it. We’re currently experimenting with a range of AI tools, and though full integration is a process, we have a robust adoption program in motion. We’re particularly focused on leveraging AI to elevate creative development and refine our campaign testing methodologies. This proactive approach underscores our excitement for AI’s transformative power in our operations.
How does regional factors like language, media consumption habits or buyer personas change your go‑to‑market approach?
While media consumption patterns show some interesting generational nuances at a national level, we’ve found that significant differences across Indian states or regions are quite minimal when considering each age cohort. Naturally, states with higher literacy rates might show a greater preference for traditional print or digital text, but these are exceptions rather than the rule.
The real challenge, and where we differentiate ourselves, isn’t in media consumption differences, but in the adaptation of the core message essence of a national campaign for state-level resonance. Most agencies make the crucial mistake of literally translating Hindi phrases into regional languages. At Redmatter, we avoid this; we focus on capturing the spirit and cultural context of the message, ensuring it truly connects with the local audience, especially in states where Hindi isn’t the primary language.
Hyderabad is labeled a ‘backwater marketing’ market. How are you building brand maturity locally while planning expansion?
Redmatter operates as a national agency with a high level of marketing maturity, bringing a sophisticated understanding of brand building to the table. While we are well-versed in developing and executing national campaigns, our most passionate undertaking is answering the clarion call for transformation right here in the Telugu states.
Our specific mission is to uplift brands from this region, shifting their mindset from a traditional ‘trading’ approach to one that truly embraces value-added, marketing-driven growth. We are committed to guiding these ambitious businesses, helping them cultivate stronger, more mature brands that are not only ready to compete, but to truly expand pan-India.
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