Taapti Ladkani

A naive plan to “stand out”

Now, let me be honest, I didn’t grow up wanting to be a marketer. Hell, at the age when we often look for a career path, one thing I was sure about was that I would never get into marketing simply because everyone around me was getting into it. I wanted to, and I quote, “stand out”.

To be fair, though, what do you expect from a naive 13-year-old girl who used to score well in Science and the people around her never shied away from reinforcing said Science path?

Science of Life, as a syllabus

So at 13, two years before the inevitable doom of the 10th board exams, I chose to pursue Engineering in Biotechnology. And don’t get me wrong, I did love Biology. I did a lot of research before getting into the field: attended seminars, did college visits, spoke to professors, the works! But turns out you can either be curious about the Science of Life or learn about it as part of the syllabus. The latter almost always becomes the slayer of the former.

How hard can it be?

Something else had also happened at 13. I wrote my first poem. Unsurprisingly, for a 90-something percent scorer, it felt like an overachieving gig during a free period, as part of something that had to be published in the school magazine. I genuinely opened the back of my notebook and started writing, but not before uttering the words, “How hard can it be? Isn’t poetry just about rhyming words?” (Oh, what I would give to gain the overconfidence of my 13-year-old self back!)

All said and done, being an overconfident, overachieving (li’l shit) paid off. The poem turned out to be pretty decent for a noob. Then it snowballed into more poems, stories, and during one particularly unemployed month, into my first job as a content writer.

It all boiled down to storytelling

But it wasn’t until my stint at a marketing agency that I really learned, understood, and honestly started enjoying content, brand, strategy, and the general world of marketing. Turned out all of it boiled down to the thing that I once started at 13 and really had a knack for: storytelling.

Stories, but for brands

And that’s what I do now. I write stories, but for brands. In the form of positioning, vision, content, strategy, ads, scripts, and more.

Now, I agree I am not the expert out there. Some marketers have, you know, studied marketing. Have way more experience, both on paper and practically. But here’s the thing about theory: it only tells, never shows. And as has been established before, studying from a syllabus often kills curiosity. So, no, if you are someone with a prerequisite of “must have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Marketing”, I am not your woman.

But if you are looking for someone who learns on the go, will devour the internet in the interest of research, and help you build memorable brand(s), hit me up!