The ContraMinds Podcast ContraMinds Labs

Dr. Tanvi Gupta is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur (IIMU) and a practicing semiotician. Her academic research focuses on brand language and consumer culture—and her research has been published in Journal of Consumer Research—one of the top marketing journals in the world. Tanvi co-leads the Consumer Culture Lab at IIM Udaipur, a platform to foster research on consumer culture in India. She is also a member of the Editorial Review Board at the Journal of Retailing.

Before doing a Ph.D. in Marketing from IIM Bangalore, Tanvi has worked as a marketing research professional with Kantar. During her stint in the MR industry, she has worked on semiotics, brand tracking and advertising research—integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods. Tanvi also holds a communications masters from MICA, India with the director’s award for academic excellence.

Tanvi also has a flair for creativity and aesthetic sense. Being a trained graphics designer, her passion for visual aesthetics and culture drives her interest towards visual semiotics and brand language.

In this Super CMO episode with Swami, Dr. Tanvi talk about:

- Why Prof. Tanvi Chose Marketing & Semiotics

- What is Semiotics?

- Anthropology, Sociology & Psychology in Semiotics

- How Brands Can Use Semiotics

- How Brands Can Decode Indian Culture

- Binary Opposites, Plotting and Code Trajectory in Semiotics

- Residual Vs. Emergent -Lakme Vs L’Oreal - How Brands Can Revive Themselves

- The New Code Trajectory: Role Reversal in Brand Advertisments

- Can Tech Companies Apply Semiotics in Design?

- Culture Hues Embedded Into User Experience

- The Influence of Typefaces in Brand Building

- Semiotics and the Diverse Indian Culture

- The Consumer Culture Lab @ IIM Udaipur

- Tulsi, the YouTube Village of India

- How Brands Can Tap Into Emerging Regional Digital Identities

- Advice to Brands From a Semiotician

- Advice to a Young Marketer From a Semiotician

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

Connect with Dr Tanvi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanviguptamr/

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with Vignesh: https://twitter.com/hrorq

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com

Pooja Jauhari is the former Group CEO of VMLY&R India, and former CEO of The Glitch. Over her two-decade-long career, Pooja has worked with some of the biggest brands in the country and the world, and introduced powerful campaigns to society.

Pooja has worked with some brilliant people and has held important responsibilities over the past 20 years. She is the Founder of Seat At The Table, an unbiased investment and advisory initiative to invest in companies and people that are built on a purpose.

Prior to her appointment in the VMLY&R network, Pooja was the CEO of The Glitch, a high-performance creative company that has worked hard to create a workspace that is gender blind, inclusive and progressive. The Glitch was acquired by WPP, the world’s largest marketing communications company in 2017, and integrated into the VMLY&R network within WPP in 2020.

Before The Glitch, Pooja worked with Unilever, JWT and Times of India. With two recessions & a pandemic under her belt, her work in leadership has included a variety of business models, people, challenges and marketplaces.

She has been honoured with the IMPACT 50 Most Influential Award in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022.

In conversation with Swami, Pooja talks about:

- Her formative years and how she built her foundational value systems

- How youngsters need to structure their career

- Running a company through recession and volatility

- What the marketing department of the future may look like

- Getting comfortable with being silent

- Skills today’s marketers need to equip themselves with

-Tactical Vs Strategic Frameworks

- The Creative Guy and The Data Guy

- Challenges in scaling a services company in the creative industry

- Me needs to be the servant of we

- The learnings from VP to CEO

- Strategic Thinking as a CEO

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

Connect with Pooja: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pooja-jauhari-4ab38755/

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with Vignesh: https://twitter.com/hrorq

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com

Prof. Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centres on the analysis of behavioural data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities.

He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals.

In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then cofounded (and continues to run) Theta to commercialise his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.” Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage (2020, 2012) and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook (2018) with Sarah Toms. He has won many awards for his research and teaching accomplishments.

In this episode with Swami, Prof Fader gives us a peek into the Customer-Base Audit, talking about:

- How A Math Major turned Professor of Marketing

- The Importance of Hard Skills for Marketers

- Understanding Customer Base Audit

- Can we Run Diagnostics on Customer Behaviour?

- Customer Based Audit - The Diagnostics of Marketing

- Applying the Concept of Customer Base Audit

- Customer Based Audits for Contractual Vs Non-Contractual Relationships

- Non-Contractual Businesses Need Customer Based Valuations

- Understanding the Customer at the Granular Level

- The Customer P&L Statement

- Prof. Peter’s Blueprint of Customer Centricity

- Re-engineering Companies for Customer Centric Corporate Culture

- Changing the Fundamentals of Market-Mix Modelling

- The Marketing Department of the Future

- Direct & Indirect Marketing

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

Connect with Pro. Fader: https://twitter.com/faderp | https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfader/

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with Vignesh: https://twitter.com/hrorq

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani is a pioneering IVF Specialist, Angel Investor and Social Impact Entrepreneur. Through his firm Malpani Ventures, Dr. Malpani has contributed immensely in promoting India's startup ecosystem. A strong believer in the power of entrepreneurship, Dr. Malpani funds frugal innovation in India, and is also among the leading voices seeking a transformative change that India's outdated education system needs.

In this enlightening conversation with Swaminathan & Vignesh, Dr. Malpani deep dives into:

- Social impact investing and compassionate capitalism

- The transformative power of reading books

- Why parents, teachers and students need to speak up against archaic structures

- Dr. Malpani's Social Ventures - Apni Patshala

- Why we need to break the mould of one-size-fits-all education

- Why students need to be respected and given the freedom to think

- How we can change from being a nation of answer-givers to question-askers

- The nonsensical need for social validation through degrees earned

and

- The mental tenacity, competency parents need to retrain their thinking 

Dr. Malpani has authored 4 books – 

How to Get the Best Medical Care, Successful Medical Practise, How to Have a Baby and Using Information Therapy to Put Patients First

---

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

---

Connect with Dr Malpani: https://twitter.com/malpani |www.drmalpani.com | www.malpaniventures.com

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with Vignesh: https://twitter.com/hrorq

---

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com

Prem Kumar is the founder of Kalvi40, a mobile educational technology app that is transforming the way education is imparted to over 750 Government schools across 26 districts in Tamil Nadu.

A seasoned IT delivery Manager with a career that spanned 19 years across companies like HCL and TCS, Prem Kumar took a leap of faith in creating Kalvi40 when he observed gaps in the way education was reaching school children in Tamil Nadu’s Hinterland.

With a global collaborative volunteer network which helps Kalvi40 create content for the kids, Prem Kumar today has managed to reach over 750 Government schools across 26 districts in Tamil Nadu.

Listen to Prem’s fascinating journey in this podcast where Swami delves deep into the what, why and how of Kalvi40, including:


How Prem was inspired to start Kalvi40
What made Prem take the ultimate leap of faith
Understanding what “rural India” really means
How Prem built the platform from scratch
Discovering the difference between Corporate Outsourcing and Social Outsourcing
The distinction between Purpose and Process in Social Startups
The challenges of running a social startup

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

Connect with Prem: https://twitter.com/premgkumar | https://www.linkedin.com/in/prem-kumar-gokuladasan-43105618/

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com

HUMANIZED GROWTH: A NEW BLUEPRINT FOR MARKETING

Mark de Swaan Arons is a thought leader in global marketing leadership. An experienced marketing hand, Marc had a successful 14-year career with Unilever working in The Netherlands and New York offices and is now the Founder of the Institute for Real Growth (IRG) - a not-for-profit organization that helps CMOs and other growth leaders drive humanized growth.

Earlier Marc co-founded EffectiveBrands (2001), a global marketing leadership consultancy which later became a part of the the WPP group.Marc has learned from and collaborated with many of the world’s most prominent Chief Marketing Officers, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at business schools, companies, and industry conferences.

In this inaugural episode of The Super CMO Show, Swami and Marc discuss:


How Marc found his true calling in Marketing
How marketing influences the strategic direction of companies
The Da Vinci CMO model
Being an effective CMO
Tips for future marketers
Brand insights with Dove, Nike, Patagonia, Tide & Colgate
How technology, creativity and emotion drive marketing

and much more.

Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

For show notes and earlier guest interviews, please visit www.contraminds.com

To sign up for our weekly newsletter, please visit https://contraminds.substack.com/

Connect with Marc: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcdeswaanarons/

Connect with Swami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivaraman-swaminathan-9856501/

Connect with us:

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contraminds/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/contraminds/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/contraminds

Website: www.contraminds.com