How we built Su-Kam’s marketing team — before digital marketing was a department

Marketing at Su-Kam was never only advertising. It was evidence assembly — products, projects, awards, dealer wins — told in public.

Before the department existed

In the 2000s Indian hardware companies outsourced marketing to agencies that understood hoardings, not harmonics. I wanted people inside the company who understood both:

• What the R&D bench had actually built
• What the dealer in Surat needed to say to close Sunday’s sale
• What a Facebook comment from Nigeria implied about export service

We did not hire “digital marketers” first. We hired believers who could translate engineering into stories — then gave them channels.

Three layers that became a team

1. Proof compilers. By the time I gave the Marriott Chandigarh talk in 2011, our marketing team kept assembling decks — products, projects, awards — so every stage story rested on evidence, not adjectives. That discipline later became the Technovations 2012 SlideShare archive.

2. Video creators. In August 2009 I launched the YouTube channel when management still thought video was unnecessary. The team that followed learned to shoot installations, explain inverters in Hindi and English, and publish faster than competitors could book print slots.

3. Community operators. Three months later we opened the Facebook solar community that grew to 143,000 members — created not only by headquarters, but by every employee proud to share a site photo. That is marketing team work even when the title on the org chart said “service” or “exports.”

What we optimised for

We measured marketing by market outcomes, not vanity metrics alone:

• Dealer retention and family attendance at meets
• Export repatriation stories surfacing on Facebook without being scripted
• Enterprise wins like Walmart Easyday where proof of uptime became the pitch
• Press that followed product truth — India Today Top 10 for Chic did not happen because of a press release alone; it happened because the product was already a public story

By the time the industry copied our YouTube and Facebook play a decade later, the team habit was set: document everything in the field, publish fast, let the community correct you if you exaggerate.

— Kunwer Sachdev