Why Every Indian Brand Suddenly Has A Podcast
At some point in the last two years it became normal for an Indian company with no obvious reason to talk to anyone to start a podcast.
The case made internally is usually about owned audience. The reason a brand actually has a podcast is more often about access, and that reason is better than the one in the deck.
What a brand gets when it has a podcast
A legitimate excuse to sit with people it could not otherwise get an hour from. Customers, category experts, potential hires, and in business to business categories the buyers themselves.
The recording is almost a by-product. The relationship is the asset, and it is one very few other marketing formats produce at all.
Why the audience numbers are beside the point
Because they will be small, and a brand podcast measured as media will fail. Two thousand listeners is a rounding error against a television buy and can be the entire decision-making population of a category.
The failure mode is treating it as content marketing and judging it on downloads, which leads to chasing a general audience the brand has no reason to want.
The format also produces material nothing else does. An hour of unhurried conversation yields positioning language, objections the sales team has never written down and a supply of clips, which is a reasonable return even if the episode itself is barely heard.
When it is a waste
When nobody senior appears on it, when the guests are internal, and when it exists because a competitor has one. Those three together describe most of them.
The test is simple. If the conversations would be worth having without a microphone, the podcast is doing something. If not, it is an expensive way to produce audio nobody asked for.