‘Made in Future: A story of marketing, media, and content for our times,’ by Prashant Kumar, founder of Entropia, is a crash course for aspiring marketers and creative leaders of the future.
Prashant Kumar founded Entropia, a full-service firm based in Malaysia that was acquired by Accenture in June 2021. Kumar was previously the head of IPG Mediabrands’ Asia international markets. His debut book, ‘Made in Future: A Story of Marketing, Media, and Content for Our Times,’ was released by Penguin India. Kumar believes that the way a story is delivered, as well as content, channel choices, and consumer expectations, have all been disrupted during the previous 20 years, which is the objective of his book.
“While execution has progressed, today’s marketing strategies nevertheless rely on templates and frameworks from the past.” . There is still a significant gap between marketing strategy and the marketplace. And that is the single most significant untapped opportunity in the global marketing sector. Kumar continues, “This is the vision with which I began writing the book.”
Kumar has had a lot of positive feedback from young and ambitious executives who don’t want to wait years to become marketing directors or chief marketing officers.
“This book serves as a stepping stone for them.” Ambition is simple to come by. But the most difficult question is how to accelerate these learnings.
“This is where the book gets its purpose,” Kumar explains. Kumar sees a trend of consultants acquiring agencies. “When Entropia first began in 2016, our goal was to establish ourselves as a ‘consulgency.’
” Consultancies and agencies added value to the marketing services ecosystem, as we could see. However, the fact that they worked at opposite ends of the spectrum and in silos resulted in a schizophrenic marketing discipline, which we didn’t like.”
More and more agencies will be acquired by consultancies in order to expand their agency capabilities. Kumar also anticipates a reversal in the trend, with more data and technology capabilities being developed by agency organisations.
“If you look at the acquisition trends across media organisations, you’ll notice that they’ve been picking up assets in the tech and analytics domains to acquire greater depth.”
Both industries are collaborating. “There has never been a better time to be at the forefront of the ‘consulgency’ revolution,” Kumar adds. It goes without saying that brand building and marketing have changed dramatically over the last few decades.
“For thousands of years, brands were formed by anecdotes,” Kumar says in response to these shifts. The Hindu Gods, Rama, Krishna, and Shiva, were all once monarchs who were transformed into Gods over thousands of years.
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