Brands
Trust to be integral part of CEO strategy in 2019: brand-comm summit
MUMBAI: Integrated brand-comm, a Madison Group company, recently hosted the brand-comm Summit 'The Journey from Attention to Trust' in Bengaluru where it was inferred that trust is the most relevant theme and objective of communications in 2019.
Accenture Solutions Pvt Ltd chairman and senior managing director Rekha Menon stated that there can be a significant impact on value to a company from any compromise of trust. This is proved by the impact of the loss of trust on the revenues of companies. “Of some 7,000 companies studied globally by Accenture, 54 per cent of these organisations experienced a drop in trust. This had led to a revenue loss of over USD 180 billion. Considering these, it is essential that trust be an integral part of the CEO strategy,” she said.
Speaking on the subject of need to build trust among consumers is integral to the success of any brand at the summit, Mindworks CEO R Gopalakrishnan said that when crisis hits, there is panic within the company and its board. Under such adverse circumstances, the role of the leader becomes integral in decision-making. However, such decisions need to be taken in sync with the DNA of the company.
But the idea of authenticity in communication did not hit mainstream till the end of the last millennium, said Madison World chairman and managing director Sam Balsara. He spoke on how his campaign to advocate the continuity of the Parsi community in India has actually led to an 18 per cent increase in the population of the community. While the role of advertising is to make the product look larger than what it is, it is essential that authenticity gain precedence in the messaging.
Integrated brand-comm CEO and founder Ramanujam Sridhar said that consumers have become discerning, which have led to polarisation of views. He added that consumers will become increasingly selective about what they want to see and hear in 2019.
Continuing with the theme of authenticity, AVTAR Group founder-president Soundarya Rajesh suggested that attention, consistency and authenticity are integral to each other. She added that inclusive communication is critical to the process of creating trust.
Community disseminated messaging on the social media has built a greater trust among the millennials and other target audiences, hence there is a need to influence this narrative that would be in line with the communication that a business wishes to convey. So, brands need to influence creating content that would influence user,” said Saundarya Rajesh.
Brands
Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
