MAL 73:26 ISSUE 73 | Page 101

metrics moved most among the exact cohort the old positioning had been losing. That ' s a positioning correction that only a marketer standing close enough to the ground could have written and it took a vantage point, aimed correctly; to know it was time to write it.

You see the same pattern outside FMCG. A telecom brand chasing younger, urban subscribers with premium positioning can look right from the boardroom, competitive pricing, sleek campaigns, digital-first media. But if the ground data shows most of that segment still buys airtime in small denominations from a kiosk because cash flow, not aspiration, drives the purchase, the positioning is aimed at a customer who doesn ' t exist at scale. The strategy wasn ' t wrong on paper. It was wrong on the ground, that nobody spoke.

Most organizations misdiagnose a common problem. When a rep can ' t close, when the call ends in a discount instead of a decision, it gets filed as a sales issue, a coaching gap, this quarter ' s PIP conversation. Nine times out of ten, its marketing wearing a sales uniform. A rep falling back on price hasn ' t had a bad week. They ' ve been sent into the trade without ammunition, no sharp positioning to open with, no objection handling built for what the customer actually pushes back on, no benefit story strong enough to outrun " just give me your best price." That ' s not a rep failure. That ' s a vantage point that never made it to the ground or worse, one that was never current enough to arm anyone with.

Marketing isn ' t just the custodian of the brand book. It ' s a commercial partner, whether the org chart says so or not. And both halves of that partnership matter equally, the ground gives you customer centricity, the height gives you commercial astuteness, and neither one is optional.

AI has a real role to play here, but not the one most marketing decks give it. Used well, it doesn ' t replace time in the field, it multiplies what a limited number of field hours can actually tell you. A handful of call reports or customer conversations only tell you so much on their own. Feed enough of that raw, unfiltered ground material into an AI tool, transcripts of real conversations, verbatim rep feedback, open-ended survey responses, and it can surface patterns no single field visit would ever reveal on its own: a recurring objection nobody had named, a segment behaving differently to the one described in last year ' s deck. That ' s the real amplification. Not AI replacing the climb down to the ground, but AI helping a marketer see further and faster once they ' ve actually gone and collected something real to feed it.

So ask it of your own brand: when did you last ask a customer, plainly, what your brand actually means to them, not what they think of the campaign, but what they feel? Sit with a handful of them, loyal and lapsed, and listen for whether their words sound anything like your tagline, or like a brand you haven ' t quite become yet.

Ries was right, positioning lives in the mind of the prospect, not in the deck. Gretzky was right too, you only know where to skate if you ' ve been close enough to the ice to feel the play turn. So carry both into your next planning cycle: is your vantage point built on ground you ' ve walked recently enough to see where it ' s heading or on ground you ' re remembering from higher up?

Naveen Sukumaran is the Chief Executive Officer, Cipla Sub Saharan Africa. You can commune with him on this or related matters via mail at: Naveensnambiar @ gmail. com.

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