Mohit Ghate, Co-founder of Wit & Chai Group, is a self-taught marketer who turned a series of startup experiments into a full-fledged creative business. After dropping out of engineering and learning marketing hands-on, he has gone on to help over 250 businesses shape their brand strategies. In this interview, he talks about building Wit & Chai into an “attention shop” for top brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Amul, and Red Bull—while staying rooted in wit, curiosity, and results.
From engineering dropout to agency founder, your journey defies the conventional career script. What made you take the leap into advertising, and what kept you going through the early uncertainties?:
One word: “Naivete.” Not knowing gives you immense courage to challenge all knowledge. The key was to ensure I kept my eyes open to reality. Fortunately, advertising is one of those fields where formal education is only a small part of your ability to create effective communication. This made the narrative less about me switching from engineering and more about the results we brought for our clients. And once you start talking about results, nobody really cares whether you’re a degree holder or a cow munching on grass.
This resulted in us getting early success in business, which, contrary to popular opinion, is the biggest driver of business. My partners also significantly shaped my ability to deal with uncertainties. Nahush is a CA, so he has a deep understanding of how to handle pressure correctly. And Nihar is a gem of a human, so he, often at his expense, would help me out by taking some stress off my plate.
Your agency started with Instagram posts for a café and now partners with some of the biggest brands in the world. How do you preserve that original spirit of wit and curiosity even as you scale?
It’s very easy to fall intao the trap of “good enough.” We have worked hard to ensure that everyone in the company understands to their core that good enough is never good enough. The way we achieve that is by conducting activities with our team which, at first glance, may feel like a waste of time, but when zoomed out, really end up driving the core values of the business into the minds of the team.
Again, naivete helped here. We didn’t know how things were supposed to be done, so we created our own way of doing things that cared solely about achieving our goals, not about whether it fit with conventional knowledge.
With clients ranging from Netflix to Amul, how do you maintain originality when working with legacy brands and pop culture giants alike?
Our entire team is extremely well-trained to understand businesses in depth. Once that is done, morphing from marketing for Amul to Netflix is as easy as changing a T-shirt. The goal stops being “How do I showcase my understanding of advertising?” and starts being “How do I showcase my understanding of business?” Once that switch flips in someone’s brain, whether to use a meme, a celebrity, or a billboard becomes an easy decision.
As someone who values business outcomes, how do you define effective advertising in today’s attention-fragmented world?
Attention is fragmented—if you look at the entire market. But the good news is, nobody is actually serving the entire market. The key to effective advertising today is capturing the attention of a tribe of people who are already somewhat interested in what you offer. This narrows your audience just enough to understand them deeply, inch-wide, mile-deep and craft communication that truly resonates.
This creates a positive feedback loop, where the tribe keeps growing both in numbers and in attention awarded to the brand. However, it’s important for brands to understand that since no one is constantly buying your product, no one is constantly thinking about it. And that’s perfectly okay.
You often blur the line between advertising and entertainment. Do you believe all ads need to “sell,” or is there space for just making people feel something?
All ads need to sell—what they sell is the real question. Sometimes, a brand is selling a discount on a shirt; other times, it’s selling the same shirt as a way to impress your date. It could be a watch you wear to look like an influencer, or one you buy to one day, gift your grandchildren.
Content for the sake of content is useless for brands. It only serves platforms like Instagram, which thrive on keeping people scrolling. Assuming that branded content will naturally get more attention than unbranded content is a mistake. To the consumer, everything a brand puts out is ultimately trying to sell something. Marketing becomes simple once you understand its core purpose: selling more.
As someone who closely observes human behavior, what’s one insight about people that most marketers still get wrong?
People don’t care as much about brands as marketers like to pretend. Then again, it is very hard to get someone to accept something if their job depends on them not accepting it.
Brands are a way for products to distinguish themselves from other, similar products—and that’s about it. Everything we do is to achieve that goal. A consumer only cares about a brand as much as Mark Zuckerberg is shown to care about the lawyer of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network.
