Vijay Mansukhani, co-founder of India’s most loved television brand, Onida gave the special address at the Pitch CMO Summit 2018 and described his journey of building the much-loved brand. Evolution is a key to success and that has been proved by Mansukhani who started his early days with the shipping corporation of India and ended up as one of the top successful entrepreneurs of India today. During his session, he focused on how marketers should keep finding future opportunities, and shared his experiences. ‘I met GL Mirchandani, my partner in the 1980s, he had a license for making television sets in India back then. We tied up- my money and his license and gave a new definition to the history of television. This was the time when India didn’t have colour TVs. And fortunately for us, that also happened to be the time when Indira Gandhi decided to announce the Asian Games, opening the floodgates for all kinds of imports of television sets. We then decided to import televisions from places like Hong Kong at a 40% margin’, said Mansukhani. Here are few key takeaways from his session:-

• The role of marketing is only going to grow in future and to succeed marketers will have to merge it with R&D.
• Apart from operational excellence marketers must also focus on strategy and look for opportunities like absolute fanatics.
• While your products sell, the market capitalization of the company must also go up.