In conversation with Issac John, Co-Founder, Ivory - a pioneering age tech startup

Above: Issac John

Susan Mathen, Partner & Strategy Director at Hue & Why, in conversation with Issac John, Co-Founder, Ivory – a pioneering age tech startup. Prior to his entrepreneurial journey, Issac has led marketing for Discovery APAC, HealthifyMe India, Puma India, and has also held marketing responsibilities at Sport18 and HT Media as well. In this interview, Issac talks about repositioning Puma from a lifestyle focused brand to a performance oriented brand in India, about how HealthifyMe moved from being a calorie counting app to a brand that changes one's life, about how Discovery+ straddles the thin line between being a Magician Archetype brand without losing the wisdom aspect of the Sage Archetype, about conceptualising Ivory - the age tech startup brand that he cofounded, and more. 

Susan: Welcome to our Eagle Eye Column where we have conversations with marketers and brand experts. To kick off this conversation, could you begin by giving us a brief introduction covering your various marketing stints and roles?

Issac: Thank you, Susan, for having me on this feature.

Well, I have been a consumer marketer for most of my working life. I have worked with brands across different sectors and a defining feature of my career has been that I have never worked in the same industry twice – it is something that I take an immense amount of pride in. I have worked in Health Tech, Consumer Retail, Ecommerce through Puma.com, Content / OTT Streaming and I have also been an author. I have done Radio in the early part of my career. In a nutshell I have always felt that what you learn in one sector can actually be cross pollinated very smartly to another sector and that compounds what you as a working professional become and that is the reason why I chose the path that I chose.

Susan: You had mentioned your experience at Puma, could you elaborate on how you changed the positioning of the brand from a lifestyle focused one to a performance oriented one - what all did this entail, how was this brought alive across touchpoints and choice of brand ambassadors?

Issac: When I joined Puma, this is 2011, Puma did not have a sporting ambassador. Back in the day the kind of things they would do was very much targeted at the lifestyle consumer, 18-24 year olds, initiatives like Puma Creative Factory, Puma Social, Puma Social Club, was really like the mainstay of the communication. However the product direction was changing towards a more sports oriented avatar and that was to be led by running and football. Football and cricket – are very similar moulds - you can adapt the same footwear to these respective sports. In india the first step we took is that we took on a few cricket related IPs, one of the smartest investments Puma made was to enter IPL really early at dirt cheap rates, you can't even think at what rate Puma got the visibility that it did when Deccan Chargers won the IPL and in a similar vein we got in Yuvraj Singh and some Olympians. The idea was to come across as a credible brand by associating with these sports stars. We did a bunch of running events. Mobium was back then our number one footwear. In running we also had something called Evospeed that we were evolving across football and cricket. We signed on BFC which is an association that continues to this day, and we sponsored ISL – it boils down to who is the right fit for the brand, but other than that there is no way you are getting away with calling yourself a sports brand and not being seen actively on field. And that journey continued and Puma eventually went on to sign on a bunch of amazing crickets like none other than Virat Kohli, in fact he sported Puma colours for the longest time. This was essentially Puma’s journey - keeping the brand credible within sport, more than the quantum of visibility, it was the credibility of the sportsperson that you are associating yourself with that really counts. That got transferred across different retail touchpoints. Please understand that this was really different for Puma because a typical Puma image back in the day in a retail store was a bunch of cool looking teenagers playing pool with a drink in hand, with neon signages and that went to sports people using Puma in some way in their daily lives and even on field, even within that there was a segmentation saying Puma will have a performance range and a lifestyle range. The lifestyle range will also feature the sportsperson but it would not be in an on field moment – those kinds of creative calls, those kinds of product related decisions were taken in consonance with what the overall marketing objective was.

Susan: You have also seen the brand repositioning happen at a startup - HealthifyMe - could you tell us a bit about this repositioning process? How did the focus shift in HealthifyMe's case, and how was this brought alive, what initiatives were rolled out as a result of this?

Issac: Well, HealthifyMe was a very interesting one. The first version of the app was a calorie counting app. By the time I joined they had already been around for a couple of years, they had just raised a series A, which meant they had the flexibility to reach out to consumers on a couple of more touchpoints than just performance media and small format/facebook/google ads. What we first needed HealthifyMe to do was to move it from being a calorie counting app to an app that has nutritionists, trainers, weight loss programmes that can impact lives. We could have spoken about HealthifyMe being this health coach but the positioning that we took back in the day, and I am happy to say that it is a stance that they continue to use to this day – is to say that HealthifyMe changes lives, it is a changemaker in your life. HealthifyMe helps that young sister who wants to lose weight for her elder sister's wedding, and come across as a very fit person for that particular occasion. If HealthifyMe needs to come across as somebody that can transform the life of a thyroid patient or a diabetic patient, or somebody who has gone through even extreme things like bariatric surgery. The main transition that happened with HealthifyMe’s voice in the time that I was there was that we went from ‘Hey use HealthifyMe app to know about the calories that you consume' to 'Hey, here is an app that has got the potential to change your life and here are a bunch of customers who vouch for it'. A lot of customer testimonials actually became the pillar of our communication during my time there. Interestingly what we also saw – and there was some resistance internally first as to whether long one minute testimonials would actually work for the brand – HealthifyMe was all about creating snappy 15-20 sec videos, but the founding team took a punt and said let's do a bunch of ten of these, 70-80 sec stories of transformations, it not just helped the brand - didn’t just place the brand in the changemaker/magician archetype we wanted to place the brand in, it worked very well for the performance marketing team as well. It was a very interesting experiment we did back then and it continues to bear fruit for the brand even now.

Susan: You touched upon the brand archetype for HealthifyMe... Are there any other examples from brands you have led, where there has been a clearly articulated Brand Archetype? How did the archetype define how the brand fashioned itself? Did this impact your decisions on what comes within this brand world and what does not?

Issac: Yes. This is definitely true for Discovery. When I say Discovery, I mean Discovery+. For the longest time Discovery was in the Explorer/Sage archetype. When we launched Discovery+ however, we realized that when people think about Discovery, they associate us with going into the wild. You know like, wild animals and stuff like that – jungle jungle mein jaate hain , discovery kya karta hain, discovery jungle mein jaata hain. But Discovery+ was a platform where there could be a mythology show, some series on the biggest white collar crimes, karan johar, archeological shows, we wanted Discovery+ to have real energy with regard to the non-fiction side of things. Non-fiction at that time had this fuddy duddy image – it has changed a bit with Netflix and Prime Video throwing their hat in the ring. If you think about non-fiction some years ago, it was all about serious documentary type of things like Surabhi type of programming was happening, or amazing stuff like Raja Rasoi Aur Kahaniyaan kind of things. In the end it was still serious stuff. We felt that non-fiction doesn’t need to be that serious, it needs to inform but also entertain. That was a slightly bold step by the kind of brand that Discovery was. Discovery+ - we said we would push it in a slightly different direction. The archetype that we went for was a Magician archetype. Even if we entertain, we would entertain in a meaningful manner so that it impacts your life in a positive manner. That is something we did consciously with the Discovery+ brand. It was a branding exercise we undertook with a branding partner. We looked at whether we really are a Sage or Explorer – and everyone agreed that if Discovery was transforming lives, we come across as smarter in a social conversation because of Discovery+, so we did not lose the wisdom or the sagacity of the brand, but we said let's see what we do for the end consumer. One of the things we did for Discovery+ – we showed how a person gets a job because he saw something on Discovery+. I know I am saying this for the third time, but I am really happy that we went with that particular bit of communication because we had to straddle the thin line of coming across as a Sage but still passing muster as a brand that genuinely transforms lives (Magician). Discovery was the one brand where I went through the full journey of archetypes.

Susan: There is, unfortunately, still a misconception that logo = brand. Could you highlight some key focus areas that a marketer dwells on when trying to pin down what a brand is all about (visually and verbally), logo being just one element among many others?

Issac: Yes, I think a brand is much much more than a logo. And I think the finest example that is popping into my head, is the fact that Zerodha the brand stands for something. But 99% of people in my circles would not know what the logo of Zerodha is. It is not an exception, they have chosen to build the brand in a certain way. It stands for trust. Nothing exemplifies the fact that a brand is much more than the logo than something like a Zerodha. The one and only thing that I think goes into the making of a brand is the distinct positioning that a brand should definitely stand for – Zerodha probably for trust, Coke for happiness, Red Bull for energy, Nike for victory. Nike has not changed one bit in terms of what they should stand for across the 50-60 years they have been around for. A marketer should only dwell on what this distinct positioning should be, and his role should be to transform the same distinctive positioning across every channel that the consumer sees.

Susan: How did you go about conceptualising and building brand Ivory? What made you decide to launch this brand?

Issac: Ivory is a brand that came about when I met my co-founder and we both felt that the market for goods and services that is catering to the 20-25 year olds is absolutely cluttered and it is very hard to imagine a need especially for the tier1 audience that is not being met. On the other hand, when we look at 50-70 year olds, as both of us being kids of parents, who spent majority of their lives away from their families, we felt they were underserved. We did not know where the brand would go, but we said let's build for the senior audience. Over a period of time, it took us about 12-14 months, we came to a very specific pain point that it is known for – we felt that health and wellness was top of the chart. And within this health and wellness, the lack of information and lack of solutioning in the brain health space was absolutely minimal, neither is there any specific information on what they should do for brain health or any solutioning that is available. That essentially is what led to the forming of brand Ivory. Today we are all about detection of accelerated neuro degeneration. Accelerated aging. Which is the precursor to conditons like alzheimers and dementia.

We chose Ivory (as the name) because of two reasons: We were able to infuse some meaning into the name and the logo. We wanted the brand to stand for something which was very relevant for our audience. We chose Ivory for two reasons: ivory is a very precious element of nature. We were saying that our TG is very precious. It conveys elegance, purity, resilience. Ivory is an incredibly resilient element – fire cant douse and water cant dissolve. And this is something maybe you will appreciate maybe 1% more than the rest of the world. Its actually a throwback to our home state – both Rahul and I hail from Kerala and there’s a little skin of us in the name Ivory.

We also wanted a very clean look for the digital world.

At this stage it is too early for me to say whether Ivory will be a Magician archetype or… an Explorer, a Hero or something else. In the logo – while I did mention that we probably will have Ivory initially in the Magician space, the circle of the logo has two strokes, they are representative of the Hero’s Journey, that Joseph Campbell popularized. So if you go through an Ivory experience, you change yourself for the better. That’s the thought.

Susan: Which brand/brands do you think has/have managed to build a distinct, credible brand world for itself/themselves across multiple touchpoints consistently? Your personal favourites in terms of strong brands…

Issac: Such a fan of Nike. I just think that from Day Zero when the logo was made it stands for the goddess of victory. Everything that they have done from then, they have let go of athletes because they were beyond their prime – Roger Federer and Tiger Woods – just shows that the brand should be known for victory, they want to back winners, not back those who are at the last leg of their career. In India, I think I admire Whole Truth, everything that they do comes across as so true. It is not just the brands and packaging and labelling, it is also the founder’s personality. In the case of Zerodha, even the way Kamath brothers have branded themselves is relevant. The way Nikhil Kamath is building his persona, it is so organic, so authentic, so trustworthy. So yes, Nike globally and in India right now I would say The Whole Truth and Zerodha.