Some Goliaths were hurt in the making of this maverick marketeer

It’s 9 pm India time on a Saturday night. Nearly 2,000 Freshworks employees from around the world are watching Refresh19, the company’s annual day celebration featuring much song and dance held at the Chennai Trade Center. A white guy over 6 ft tall, dressed in a glitzy costume, steps onto the stage with a dozen other dancers stepping to the beats of Verithanam, the latest hit song in Tamil. Considering the dancers have had only a few days of practice, it’s going pretty well.

Earlier in the week, at our office in Chennai, this same American guy was videoed trying to learn the lyrics of the song. Sure enough, the video found its way to fans of Tamil actor Vijay. The next thing you know, it’s gone viral with thousands of tweets and reactions. The next morning he was seen recording a pocket demo of one of our new products, on Workplace, the work collaboration tool we use.

The week before, he was on a whirlwind trip to Delhi and Bengaluru, talking to the press about how software products crafted in India are set to take over the world of cloud computing and software as a service.

‘It’s how these products are designed to be simple, scalable, and embody the principles of self-reliance, craftsmanship and are also affordable,’ he’d say to the people he met on the tour. He’s alluding to Indian Democratic Design, a uniquely Indian approach to designing products. The idea is to decode India’s emergence as a product nation.

Back home in California, he’s plotting a guerrilla marketing campaign against the largest cloud computing company in the world. “They’ve been selling clunky business software for years, and it’s about time that changed and we’re going to lead the way,” he says.

Meet David, the chief marketing officer at Freshworks. In his fifties, he’s an energetic figure ever so ready to take on the Goliaths.

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Back at David’s office in Chennai, I’m looking to understand what are some of David’s defining traits? How did he develop them? Is there a method to the madness? And what is marketing?

“Marketing is telling stories. It’s maximizing drama.”

David is a theater major from Yale, the third oldest higher education institution in the United States with an acceptance rate of only 7%.

Growing up, he wanted to be an actor, director and an opera singer. At Yale, where he studied and worked as a bartender, he was exposed to “big names, big stars and big stories,” David recalls. Meryl Streep, George Bush (senior) and Hillary Clinton are just some of the people who went to Yale at different times, of course.

But it wasn’t his bar tending skills or hobnobbing with the stars that came in handy when he wandered into marketing. It was his training as a director that helped.

David Thomson

“As a director, you’re collaborating with your team, with your actors and your producers to bring a story to life, to maximize the drama and engage with the audience. So, as far as I’m concerned, that’s what marketing is,” he says.

Twenty years ago when David was the vice president of marketing at WebEx, he orchestrated a super bowl ad featuring American drag queen RuPaul Andre Charles that took on “boring meetings,” the villain in a room full of suited executives.

“Girl, you could be at home, sipping a latte in lingerie and still make this meeting. Don’t you have better places to be?” says RuPaul as she chases away bored suits from a meeting room.

One of the themes that stands out in the campaigns that David has run, is that they are very bold. Where does that maverick streak come from? It was the 1984 Apple commercial that started it. “I was very young and very impressionable when that ad ran. And it’s like stuck with me ever since. Like, be bold, be maverick, be aggressive. Don’t be shy about who you are,” he says. To that end, many times David’s campaigns are usually taken to the board for approval.

“I know my advertising is headed in the right direction if the CEO feels like he has to go talk to the board about it,” he says. The RuPaul advertisement was no exception. Subrah, the co-founder of WebEx, took it to the board and the board chairman’s answer was: as long as it makes money, I don’t care.

That was the perfect business response. The ad worked and even caught a lot of press. You look back at the video now and go, “well, that has aged well!” Earlier this month, Aruna Ravichandran, the Chief Marketing Officer at WebEx, wrote on the Cisco blog: “As a marketer with a deep appreciation for the power of advertising, it’s fun to flashback and admire both the innovative and creative DNA that is Webex which is found in this decades-old commercial.”

WebEx was acquired by networking major Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007.

Taking Freshworks brand global

Cut to the present: At Freshworks, which began its journey in Chennai some 10 years ago, David’s biggest challenge is to position the company as an umbrella brand that owns multiple products. Because Freshworks has nearly a dozen products that are strong brands on their own, it won’t be an easy task. “That’s a complex journey because the house of brands is really built for our small and medium business, and the branded house is built more for our mid market. And so bringing those two together is the kind of the ultimate branding challenge,” he says. Freshworks began as a company that sold products to small and medium sized businesses but has now moved upmarket to sell to some of the largest businesses in the world.

Freshworks is closely watched as one of the first truly global enterprise product companies from India. “Our mission this year is to create a Freshworks experience at all the touch points that customers and users have with us,” says David, who was recruited to Freshworks through Accel Partners, one of the leading investors at the company.

Confessions of an Indophile

Part of building the Freshworks brand is to capture the Indian entrepreneurial culture that is infused in the whole company and its products in particular. David spent months interviewing Girish the founder, as well as the engineers and designers across the company to understand the unique Indian approach to software design that distinguishes the Freshworks experience as well as other new companies. The result was the company’s first book, ‘Indian Democratic Design’.

Indian Democratic Design captures the Simplicity, Self-reliance, Scale, Craftsmanship and Affordability that characterize Indian product design and development. Helping customers understand the unique power of India’s culture to innovate new and exciting technologies is at the heart of David’s branding strategy.

“I’ve always reverse engineered all of the marketing that I do from the sales conversation, like, for example, with Indian Democratic Design,” says David who has been to India about a dozen times in the last 24 months. It was one of the salespeople at Freshworks who inspired David to turn the criticism of Freshworks being an Indian company on its head. When the sales leader met with prospects who expressed skepticism about Freshworks being an Indian company, the sales leader would respond: “How would you like a thousand engineers working for you?” David felt that answer was just right and wanted to make a deeper case for Indian companies going global. Indian Democratic Design is an attempt to really showcase how Indian companies are building globally successful products by playing to their strengths and drawing from their democratic traditions.

David’s interest in India goes back further to when he was only eight years old when his grandmother taught him Yoga. “Yoga had become like this kind of, you know, hippie passion and my grandmother was very much into it. She said you have to understand that yoga comes from India,” says David. Later, he learned about Chennai from Subrah, the co-founder of WebEx.

So there you have it, the story of Freshworks vs. Goliath as told by David.