Leaders

Entrepreneurship is an innovative and dynamic process of creating and nurturing a new company while guiding a team. Entrepreneurs are the catalyst for change, providing an assortment of opportunities. The emergence of entrepreneurs in society is highly dependent on its existing economic, social, religious, cultural, and psychological factors. Entrepreneurship and management by women, a recent phenomenon, foster economic growth as well as employment opportunities. In the current scenario, women have touched every unit of the Indian market and upheld it with utmost responsibility.

Ashwini Nair has emerged as a successful entrepreneur in the Brand Strategy domain, creating milestones with focus on solving business challenges. With advanced knowledge and an indepth understanding of how to build authentic brands, Ashwini strives to help her clients through ThePeopleCo. Below is an excerpt of her interaction with Women Entrepreneur Magazine.

Can you elucidate the prominent feature of your professional journey?

My career trajectory began in advertising, and moved on to marketing communication on the ‘client side’. This helped me appreciate the complexities of running a business and the role brand communication plays in the larger scheme of things. The culmination of this experience is the foundational principle of client interaction at ThePeopleCo. Brand and business being deeply interconnected, we help bridge the gap between business goals and customer expectations. So, in every aspect, we are cognizant of the fact that our creative solutions need to address business problems.

How have your education and experience shaped you as a good leader?

My education happened between Bombay (now Mumbai) and Ahmedabad, cities starkly different from each other. This was a fascinating juncture, where I developed my curiosity about people, culture, and their behaviour. To this date, my favourite activity is to watch people in different settings and see a pattern emerge. For me, this is the purest form of consumer research. In fact, while developing a research design, I avoid the standard questions on customer preferences and prices and focus on exploring their lifestyles, and habits, for insights into what motivates them. Although what consumers buy or how they buy may keep evolving, what drives a particular behaviour at a fundamental level seldom changes.

The combination of psychology and advertising during my graduate degree helped me understand how to craft creative solutions as part of our offerings. Also, fate played a part when I was constrained to work directly with senior management at the client’s end, even as a novice. It was extremely daunting, but the learning ground it provided was incredible. This journey has been the foundation of my key principle, that every problem has a solution. That’s a universal truth in my book.

Because of this, I find the term ‘leader’ a misnomer where I am concerned. I believe my key role at ThePeopleCo is that of a ‘facilitator’. I facilitate the process for our clients to look beyond the day-to-day grind of running a business and focus on understanding customers better. I facilitate team members to understand the businesses we work on and use that lens to craft solutions. And I endeavour to facilitate an environment where everyone enjoys what they do and thrive in the process.

What motivated you to establish ThePeopleCo.? Throw some light on the unique factors of the company?

The primary motivating factor to start this venture is that I simply love the process of building a brand. Since people are dynamic, brands that cater to them have to constantly evolve. It’s never boring. That said, from my agency experience I felt there was a better way of doing things. That’s what led to establishing ThePeopleCo. We understand and appreciate our clients’ businesses, their journey, their goals, and we take on the role of

their Brand Custodians. Our discovery workshops implemented as part of client onboarding have been designed to extract what’s unique about the business we work on. This forms the foundation of crafting the story of the brand. In fact, a consistent feedback we receive from these sessions is that they bring forth aspects of our client's business they had not considered before.

“Striving to attain a place where passion & profession intersect”

What are the major challenges you have come across in your professional journey?

Customer behaviour and the media they consume are extremely fragmented today. It’s critical to ensure that the brand is as much a living entity as its consumer. But the truth is, we are trained to look at customer journey in a linear fashion because it’s convenient. The reality is that customers zigzag across touch points. By the time we as marketers catch up, it’s quite possible that customer behaviour would have evolved. That’s why it becomes imperative to understand and build connections with customers at a deeper and fundamental level. Hence we focus on establishing a clear value system for a brand and help clients integrate this internally in their organisation as well.

What is your advice to young women entrepreneurs?

In all honesty, everyone doesn’t need to become an entrepreneur or a leader. It’s more important for an individual to find their rhythm, devoid of external pressure. What has always helped me in my journey is a checklist of my priorities in life. This self-discovery can be daunting at first, but if you stick to it, the road ahead is very rewarding. Eventually, success and failure are just words in the dictionary. Your focus shifts to more important things like the experience, the learning, and the impact you leave behind. What happens as a result is, you are able to find gratification on a daily basis. That’s something worth aspiring to in my book.

Ashwini Nair, Founder, ThePeopleCo

In the realm of brand management, Ashwini Nair is an emerging leader with an abundance of market understanding, providing one-stop solutions for a wide variety of firms across the country. Having a comprehensive experience in the ambit of brand building such as advertising, designing, digital marketing, and social media marketing, Ashwini aims to help her clients build brands that customers can trust.