When you can be Impatient, why be Patient?

When you can be Impatient, Why Be Patient?

By Harish Bijoor

Youth and trends? That’s really an oxymoron, dear moron!

And that starting sentence of mine, in-the-eye, in-the-face, and in the gut, is really the way they talk. “Hey Dog” is a loving appellation.  A side hug that follows, that could get your shoulder dislocated due to impact strength, is a way of bonding with you and telling you we are one. We come from the same generation, and we are headed to the same hell as well.

The young in this country are difficult to understand. Youth and trends are words that don’t necessarily go together. The youth as a category and genre defies trends. The moment something sets in and looks like a seeming trend, the category moves its cheese and chips and Coke. Trend is for the old. The young believe in change. Change that is forever, and discontinuous. And discontinuous trend is really not a trend. Difficult thing to track with method, science and meaning as well. Those who believe they are trend-spotters, who have arrived, live in a fool’s paradise. The trend you write about is as old as the day it was written. It is jaded now, and there is something new around today. Let’s wake up and smell the young sweat.

Since trends are difficult to track, and once having been tracked, have this yen to change, there is a great way of keeping in touch with the youth and what they do, what they wear, what they speak, what they eat and what they drink and how they party. Just watch them at it. Track them. Track them without them knowing you are tracking them. Catch them in their natural surroundings. By the way this is not their home, their school, their college or their spanking new entry-level offices. Instead, it is the third-place where they are letting their hair down. Catch them in their gyms, the beauty-parlors, the Cafes, the pubs, the discs and more. It is here that they are themselves. Catch them as well on twitter and Face Book. Catch them on Tagged. Catch them with their pants down with their second and third digital handles that run as “HotArun” and “HawtGAWD” and “CoolKHIMCHI” and “KoolKHICHDI” alike. Catch them on sites you never thought guys and girls like them would ever be. The foot-prints you track today must be both physical and digital. And just as there are “physical third-places”, there are “digital third-places” where they hang out as well.  And then when you have watched them 1:1 in myriad “third-place” locations, build that pen-picture of theirs. This will change in three months flat. Therefore, keep building those pen-pictures every month, month on month, and keep calibrating your mind, mood, language, tone and tenor of the youth at large. You just might be on the right track then.

This piece on youth trend is therefore not as much as telling you the trends as teaching you how to trend-track in today’s crazy youth world. Teach a man to fish, rather than give him a now-truly-dead Pomfret you caught this morning.

 I do a fair bit of it. I use a lot of it in my strategy consulting assignments as I do donning my “Keynote speaker “avatar as well. On the whole, watching people do what they do,  with science as your tool, analytics as your buddy, and consumer skills as your science, art and philosophy, one can go places.

If there is one seminal thought I want to give in this piece, it is the thought to say that this generation baffles us all marketers. I call this Gen.  “The I-Gen.”.   The Internet Generation? No! The Impatient Generation!

Impatience is the hallmark of the youth. Patience cycles have progressively become smaller and smaller. Today, patience is dead and is no longer a virtue. Impatience is the new virtue. The more impatient you are, the more of a ‘go-getter-youth’ you are. The idea is a simple one. When you can be Impatient, why be patient?

Impatience hits you in the face all around in the lives of the young. The youth is impatient with love. There are relationships on the front-burner, just as there is a parallel one on the back-burner. Multi-hob is the way to go. And in some cases there is love on the sleeve, there is love in the heart and there is love in the wallet as well.

Impatience looks large with its beady moist eyes in marriages that are on the rocks rather fast. There is impatience in sex and there is just no binding yourself tight within the confines of a marriage anymore. If sex is bad in the house, go to the Cafetaria and get it. And the Cafetaria is large and welcoming, with no strings attached. It is a veritable buffet on offer. Relationships start stretching at the seams a bit too fast.

Impatience is everywhere, and the salivating marketer is ready to cater to it. When you fracture your patella and rush to the hospital, there are two cures possible really. The patient one is to be in a cast for six weeks, and the impatient one is do what the doctor in the big hospital is recommending. Put in those nuts and bolts and be up and about in one week flat. The marketer here (in benign disguise) is the doctor recommending the high-priced quick-fix versus the low-priced plaster of Paris in blue. This is everywhere in every realm you tread in youth space. Pay the price and get the lost time back. Time is a big part of the currency game. We live with two currencies today: time and money. At times time is at a premium over money even.

There is impatience in the foods we eat, fast food versus regular food. Restaurants versus QSR’s. Quick-serve restaurants versus slow-serve restaurants, if you will. There is impatience in the yen to create wealth, just as there is impatience to spend it all. The bio-clock of the youth at large is ticking at a pace that seems much more frenetic than at any time in our marketing history to date. There seems to be very little time to live, might as well live it fast and furious. Fashion, lifestyle, entertainment and digital use is witnessing this impatience all around.

What then is the real problem at hand? It’s not what, it’s who? The marketers. Marketers In the country are an older lot. Marketers are much older than the people they market to. Marketers are good at the old marketing format: Patience Marketing. Marketers today are good at marketing to patient consumers. Impatience is a mindset they just do not understand well enough. Even if they do, there is lip-service done to it. There is also this dominant attitude and notion in the minds of older marketers (and by old I mean age 30 and above, ouch!), that this impatience is a fad, and it will pass as well.

Marketers need to learn and practice impatience then to market to the youth. Embrace impatience within your brand DNA. Pack impatience within your brand offering, and showcase it to the youth.  Resonate with this impatience and be a part of it rather than be a part that criticizes it and passes value-judgments on it, just as an older person is bound to.

Re-check your  ‘young quotient’ dear marketer, before you attempt to market to the youth effectively. When was the last time you hit a discotheque and grooved to the tune of  Timber and Dubstep?                    And do you even know what we are talking about? Ouch!

Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist  & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter @harishbijoor

Modern retail and Shopper Marketing

Modern retail Ver. 2.0: Shopper marketing!

By Harish BIjoor

Shopper marketing is possibly the most under-explored, and for sure the most under-exploited science of them all. Shopper Marketing is therefore the most efficient of them all tools that lie out there in the open market place for retailers to grab and run with.

The story of retail is an interesting one.  Since retail is the oldest professions of them all,  every retailer stepping into the terrain imagines it to be kid-play. Choose a location, set up a store, stock it well, brand the store, advertise, and wait for your customers to walk in and pluck inventory off the shelves. And you are running to the bank, laughing all the way!

Wish that were true. The cruel fact is that it is not. Modern retail of both the big and small kind is way different, and way more difficult than all that. Don’t we know by now?

In the old days, Shopper Marketing was not even a subject to bother about. The terminology was yet to be invented and made ubiquitous. And "old days" was just 5 years ago!

Those were the days modern retailers were excited about plucking the low-hanging fruit of opportunity in the sector. The subject of retail had a centricity of approach that was entirely different. The approach was clearly one where you focused on back-end efficiency. This was really Modern retail 1.0 where you worked out great deals with suppliers, you worked out pack-size options that you were going to stock, you worked out shelf-stocking norms, and you were ready.

Modern Retail 1.1 was all about location. You took the next logical step of scouting out a location that was killer in all respects.  You did a quick 'thingie' with the demographics of the locality, local competition that was vulnerable, and if you were a wee bit savvier, you did a quick one on the psychographics of the folks who lived in that location. And you were ready. More or less. And most of the time, the Mall developer did all this home-work for you. All you needed to do was walk in with your ‘set-it-up-in-twenty-days’ store.

Version 1.2 of Modern Retail started depending on unique products your Modern Retail store could offer. Literally every super-market in the hinterland was offering the very same brands. Every super-market literally started looking like one another, except for the brand-name at the entrance and the ownership certificate you proudly had to display within the outlet at a prominent place for the Municipal authorities and the Shops and Establishments inspectors, and twenty others of their ilk, to examine when they did their visits.

In came the dealers’ own brands (DOB’s) in this phase of the development of Modern Retail in India. Every retailer vied with one another to have different sets of exclusive designer labels within their store, just as the 'dal-cheeni-chawal-atta” retailer tried to set up his own low-end private label brand. This was the differentiation at play.

And then came version 1.3. This was the phase where advertising took charge. The 30-second commercial on television was the big one to go with.  The store had sorted out its back-end issues splendidly, the location had been laid out thoughtfully, the store had been designed to efficiency norms that were global, the private labels were all there, and business was still 'parri passu'. Time to re-invent then. Time to think of drawing in customers through mass media. Through discounts. Through deals. Through loyalty programs.

Version 1.3 became 'parri passu' a bit too soon. Every Tom, Dick and Harish retailer was doing the same thing all round. Everyone brought in advertising. Every piece of advertising started looking like the suitings’ ad of yore, where you could not distinguish one brand from another. Therefore, one chain helped another, and advertising of the 30-second type became a generic piece that worked for the category of Modern Retail, but did not quite do too much to the specific brand for sure.

Every retailer went a step further and offered the loyalty card. The loyalty card of one store became the disloyalty card of another. Loyalty degenerated to location loyalty rather than brand-loyalty, and stores bled on this count. Version 1.3 of Modern retail in many ways was totally experimentative, 'parri passu' and bled moneys that a retail outlet of any size and ownership pattern could ill-afford.

I do believe we are still going through this Version 1.3 of bleed-value. Modern retailers are all of a sudden realizing the true-blue merit of Shopper Marketing at last!  As the high-hanging fruit of opportunity is all getting plucked by the host of 214-plus modern format retailers in the country, it is time for the real action to start. This action is in the realm of Shopper Marketing.

Version 2.0 of Modern Retail in India is about to kick-off then. This time round it is all about the most important link in them all: the shopper. It is time for insight building exercises that take you into shopper homes as you do wardrobe studies that tell you the exact number of ‘undies’ with holes in them. The exact number of lucky garments in the wardrobe and equally unlucky ones. The ones that make you fail in exams and the one that makes it rain heavily when you wear them even!

The world of insight into the shopper is getting more and more defined. Out of the window goes the 30-second spot, and in comes a focus on understanding the shopper holistically. And having done just that, time to put together Shopper-insight-geared offerings. Offerings that make your Modern Format retail chain that much more edgy and that much more buzzy than the shop next door.

Over to Modern Retail Ver 2.0 then: Shopper marketing.

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Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.,  a strategy-consulting practice with a presence in the markets of India, Hong-king, Dubai, UK and Turkey.

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Marketing the Niche to the Mass

Marketing the Niche



By Harish Bijoor





The niche. By definition, a small wedge. A small corner even.



Marketing as a process is the ability of a marketer to take a product, a service or a concept and make it as mass as possible. Marketing to that extent of definition is a process that fulfills a latent human need, want, desire and aspiration. Marketing is therefore a process that takes what is not known at all, and gets it known by as big a mass of people as possible.

You can therefore take a carbolic soap such as Lifebuoy and make it as mass as it is today. You can really build a hierarchy of brands that reach out to consumers, from the mass to the niche. Take soap and the Indian market for instance. Right at the bottom of the pyramid is the mass segment. Put a red Lifebuoy in it. Just above it is the mid-premium segment. Put a Lux in it. Just above it, is the premium segment. Put a Dove into it. And right above that would be a niche offering. An offering for Pimples? Clearasil soap! A soap for men alone? Aramusk! And tomorrow a soap for folk who are lesbian and gay in their preferences?

This is the niche. The niche is always small. The niche is different. The niche is unique. The niche is boutique. The niche is all about that one salmon that swims against the tide. It is about that one offering in the market that is so unique that people will pay a good price for the offering, but there won’t be too many people partaking of the offer.

The niche is therefore that narrow wedge of marketing space that brands aspire to occupy not for the sake of volume, but for the sake of image and continued brand sustenance basis just that.




How does one market the niche then? What are the primary challenges? And what’s so different in approach from marketing a mass soap, a mass focused travel agency and a mass focused consulting practice for that matter like what the Big Four(or is the Big Two and a half now?) do.


Marketing the niche brand is firstly a labor of love. Niche brands emanate from small little gaps in the market. At times they are non-gaps even. These are small little gaps and non-gaps seen by evangelists. Evangelists who are reasonably tired of mass market offerings. Evangelists, who at times have themselves experienced lack of service, frustration and a complete lack of fulfillment. The consultancy practice that looks at a zero-solicit model of business, where there is no advertising, no touting of business formats, no participation in market pitches for accounts and no brochure and no detailed website is one such example.

The challenges then are three mainly.


1. There is no money to advertise. Might as well make a virtue of that. A non-advertised brand must be good, na?

2. Niche brands slip between the slats of public recognition. At times too much recognition can be the bane of a brand in public space. Niche is boutique.

3. Niche brands forever look maverick and small. And that’s an advantage in today’s world where everything big is considered that much less optimal in its service and delight delivery standards.

Two do’s and two don’ts:

Do’s:
1. Spruce up your brand image and be totally cutting-edge in what you offer. You need to be one step ahead of big competition. Remember, bigger organisaitons take much longer to change with their clients. Clients change faster than those who service them do!
2. Don’t open up those offices all over. Follow a policy of the small office home office in every location till you have a minimum 5 clients in the kitty. It is better not to open a new office at all than close all of them one by one!


Don’t:
1. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver. Clients and consumers are tired of this.
2. Don’t be glib and slick at all. Don’t follow the big guys in this game. Be real. Be genuine. Be sincere. You will stand out like a loved sore thumb!

Wait! Even as I tap this onto my laptop, it strikes me that I operate in a niche myself.

Here is some niche-'gyaan' then from what I painted for my business practice eight years ago as a private label consulting firm with no MNC-consulting tag to it. Best way to talk the language of the niche. Best way to explore the challenge of the niche. My personal one.








Consulting! Possibly the world’s oldest profession. Rivals the other one for sure! A name that used to bring a smile on my face before I actually jumped into it. I had dealt with the big names in the Consulting business for a while now during my previous stints with Levers, Tata Coffee and finally Zip Telecom. I knew many an Anderson, a McKinsey and an E&Y! I knew many of the smaller names as well. Many a salivating consultant who would network at the parties I attended wearing the corporate hat.

The term Consulting has both a positive and a negative feel about it. The positive is that which talks of stellar strategy that creates many an alliance, many a turnaround and a domain that has been responsible for creating a wealth of wealth!

The negative connotation is best typified in the joke doing the cocktail rounds of a consultant being an entity that gets into your organization, wants to meet the folks who work there, asks for your watch, looks at it keenly and tells you the time!

I have never wanted to be one of that kind. And blissfully I am not! The first thing I did as the bug to get into bed with consultancy got to me was that I did a thorough analysis of the turf at hand. Being a Market Research enthusiast all my life, I could do nothing better. I looked keenly at the inadequacies in the profession, and said I would never trample on the terrain in the same manner as many others have.

I defined for myself a USP. Two actually.

One: My consultancy will never solicit business. No presentations to clients, no networking at parties, no presentations, no pitches and no brochures and direct mailers at all! I have had enough of that staring back at me from the other side of the fence when I was a Corporate for 18 long years!

Two: My practice would focus on walking the talk. Talking the talk is just not enough. The consultant must tread the path of his strategy and see it to fruition. I therefore adopted the Build-Operate-Transfer basis of business many a super-highway contractor adopts in his trade. I will build strategy; I will operate it for the client as if I am his own resource for a year. At point of satisfaction, I will transfer the business to the client CEO! Gives the profession a great deal of credibility!

This seems to work. It has kept me busy. My four offices are busy as well.


As big consultancies break up with corporates suspecting value-propositions, niche boutique consultancies that focus on individual specialty domains will become the order of the day! Private-label consultancy is here! The terrain is ripe for many a new entrant. More the merrier.

Being a niche player is really an advantage today. If this is a David versus Goliath play, the consumer of the future is poised to look keenly at David. David is small. David is nifty. David is value-for money (most of the time). David is like me. Small, real and vulnerable. The consumer emotes with small. B2B, B2C or to B2M (Business to machine) marketing, small is still beautiful. Schumacher was right!


The author is a brand and business-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private label-consulting practice with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, UK, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent. Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

Brand Trends 2011 and a Prognosis for 2012

BRAND TRENDS 2011
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Slow Down India


By Harish Bijoor



The year 2011 is wrapped up. All wrapped up on a cold January morning. Ready to be buried. It’s time to take stock of what went into it in marketing terms. What then were the trends that defined the calendar year 2011 in marketing and brand terms?

Here goes.
1. WATCH OUT! Activism is up:

This is a trend that is going to define marketing and branding in the years to come. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement in India, and indeed across the Indian diaspora, has set a trend all in itself for the marketer to watch, and watch out for. Activism is in. At this point of time this activism is all about an anti-corruption movement aimed at the politician and bureaucrat class at large.


Watch it spread to every terrain there is. Activism and consumer watch movements will now spread to corporate governance and surveillance in terms of corporate corruption, and corporate greed.


Watch it spread even wider in coming years then. Activism is a bug. A positive bug for sure. Watch it spread to activism in the terrain of wealth. Watch it become a movement that questions big wealth in the hands of a few versus no wealth in other hands at all. Activism in this space will question the possession of big cars versus small. Activism in this space will question every bit of flaunt. Activism in this space will indulge in audits of rich personas and what they wear, what they eat, what they use as accessories and what they spend on a single meal even.





In the immediate year ahead, expect consumer activism movements to gain traction. The marketer better prepare for this with transparent mechanisms. You might as well expect an RTI kind of legislation in the space of the brands and businesses you run and manage. Ouch!







2. E-commerce is the silent market-maker:

If in the year 2010, Multi-level marketing firms such as Amway were the silent market makers who gained big volumes and big acceptance in Indian homes, in the year 2011, it was the e-commerce outfit on the prowl.


VC moneys flowed into the terrain like vodka and whisky on New Year’s Eve we have just been through. Ideators and promoters of the e-commerce venture therefore went berserk burning money on the track to consumer stardom. Big successes were noted in the terrain with outfits in B2C commerce such as Flipkart, Home Shop 18, Yebhi, and their cousins in the C2C commerce such as eBay try every trick in the marketing book to reach out to distant markets urban, rurban and rural alike.


Cash-on-delivery (COD) worked miracles for the category. The Indian who largely distrusts credit card payments found comfort-space in paying at the doorstep for orders placed on the Internet. It’s a different matter that as much as 16% of all such orders are rejected at the door-step and the only guy who makes money on this entire transaction is the courier-agency which makes money twice over.


At the end of all this e-commerce evangelism at play, one big trend has emerged. India is today a level-playing field for all marketers. If you tie up with the right kind of e-commerce outfit, you will be able to reach distant markets, which you have ignored thus far. Distribution to rural markets is not such a big issue today for relatively higher value products such as microwave ovens, mobile phones and even cosmetics. Just tie up with an e-commerce portal, and sit back and enjoy.


This space saw the proliferation of group-buying sites as well. Localized and globalised outfits even. Snapdeal, Taggle, SoSasta and 94 others to be precise. Many folded up as well. Quick exits, as the category has inherent inconsistencies, which are yet to be attended to.




3. Telecom confused: 2G to Where Ji?:

If there is one consumer category that looked totally confused this year, it was telecom. Most of the biggies were still battling boardroom, parliamentary-committee room and courtroom woes in the wake of the 2G spectrum allocation issues.


3G came in, but everything seemed tepid. Telecom-service-provider marketers continued their advertising binges and splurged on creatives that kept the interest alive. Handset makers found themselves in a tizzy with market-shares getting re-defined drastically this year. The biggies were no longer the biggies. The smaller ones were struggling to make their bottom-lines look good, even as their top-lines boomed. The big issue at hand: sustainability. Telecom Darwinism is round the corner guys. The big ones will win and the small ones will struggle to survive.


Mobile number portability came in, the DND register got activated, smart-phones were a rage, VAS gained traction, green-tech saw investments and rural mobility was looked at with little more keenness. And despite it all, the category remained tepid and trends in the category are a bit amorphous for the moment.


4. Brands nudge health:

Brands continued to nudge the health bandwagon this year as well. Green tea became the biggest hit in political circles all over the country. Even government offices started offering green tea to visitors. And if it was a special visitor, the 'babu' offered honey with it as well, drawn out from the upper drawer of his desk. Wow!


Big opportunities spotted by the product category of tea, the category of honey, the category of Oats and the Services category of Yoga (of every avatar), meditation, gymnasiums and more. Wait for lots more of this in the years to come.


5. A De-branded India:

India got de-branded badly this year. Despite robust numbers on the GDP growth rates side of dynamics (which itself got scaled down dramatically) and despite the large consumer market we remain, issues such as corruption catapulted the nation into the active mind-set of a world audience. Corporate gurgles and noises of shifting investments to other parts of the world did its bit as well. Add to it a one-step-forward and one-step-backward attitude of the government at large, as witnessed on the FDI in retail issue, has India a bit on its back-foot.


But, as I keep saying, India is an idea whose time has come. Nothing can stop it. So watch out as every sector booms despite all this de-branding.


6. In the face:

Even as India as a country was a bit on the back-foot, Indians went places in the world scenario. 19 newly anointed CEO’s of large-format global companies were Indians. Shahrukh Khan roped in Akon for 'Chamak Challo', Lady Gaga was in India for the F1 show, Paris Hilton launched her bags in India, Tom Cruise came cruising by for the Mission Impossible launch, Snoop Dog was spotted with Akshay Kumar and Sunny Leone was a porn-star Indians loved to watch on Bigg Boss. Bollywood went went places.
India went viral as well as ‘Kolaveri Di’ hit 19 Million plus Youtube downloads and 'Jalebi Bai' replaced Shiela and Munni of 2010 with a raunchier visual than even Vidya Balan of The Dirty Picture fame.


THE ONE BIG TREND FOR 2012 AHEAD:

And what do I see to be the one big trend for 2012?


I would wager a bet on the “Slow-down India” movement. At this point of time, working Indian is a bit too keyed up. There is just too much pressure in our living and working environment. Schools kids are pressurized to perform, college students are on a suicide spree, working adults are working both ends of their butts off.


The one big trend I would push for would be a campaign to slow-down India. This trend will then have ‘slow-food’ outlets emerge in our metros where you eat slowly, and enjoy the value of every morsel. The ‘slow-down’ Indian movement could be one adopted by companies to incorporate in their brand themes as well. If Tata Tea’s campaign of yore was all about “Jaago India Jaago”, with a more awake India today, Vodafone’s 2012 campaign could be a “Slow down India” campaign.


The slow-down movement is essential for India as we emerge the capital of diabetes in the world, the capital of hypertension and a strong contender for the cholesterol capital of the world. As life-style diseases of every kind hit us and as Corporate India experiences it all first hand amidst its own employees, this is an idea whose time has come!
Royalties welcome for this idea.
A Happy New Marketing year 2012 then! Slow down guys!
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Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Twitter.com @harishbijoor
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2010: The Marketing Year it was........

The Year Munni Got ‘Badnaam’ and Shiela Got ‘Jawaan’



By Harish Bijoor


A Marketing wrap-up of year 2010 then. This has indeed been the year of Twitter. A year in which large hordes of young people believed in brevity. Brevity as defined by a 140-character Tweet. In keeping, let me get to the point right away.

What was this Marketing year 2010 all about? My take…..

The 5-Screens in our lives: The Indian remained a screen-potato. Five of them dominated our lives this year.
Television remained the big one for all of us, rural or urban. 148 million television sets decorated our homes with an average viewing time of 4.5 hours per day in rural and 23 minutes a day in Urban.
The second screen in urban lives was the desktop at office and in some cases in homes as well. The third screen was the laptop computer, fast losing its appeal among the wannabes who want a tablet in their hands.
The fourth screen that edged its way into Indian hands this year was the tablet. In came Samsung Galaxy, the I-Pad (brought in from the markets where it has been launched) and more.
The Fifth screen, though small in size, remained the biggest and most ubiquitous of them all: the Mobile phone. More and more applications went mobile and the death of the laptop became a hot topic to discuss.
When I look at branded players in the space across all 5-screens, I see just one. Samsung. Good thinking and good planning guys!

Brand-lines trusted less and less: The year saw stories of tumult rolling in from the US and UK and Europe alike. Stories of recession-hit markets. Stories of bank re-possessions of credit cards. Stories of re-possession of homes and more. The very same banks that had touted all those friendly lines that took the “us” line in their advertising of yore were now talking tough “you” lines 1:1. Credibility of advertising sunk in Western markets. As this did happen, the rub-off is seen here as well. Advertising lines are being trusted less and less. Marketers seem to have taken note. In come the more real lines now in our advertising as well. Vox-pop lines that bring more reality than fantasy to the process at large.


The I-Gen. is here: The Impatient-Gen. As attrition levels rise once again in industry, and as India emerges a most-ruthlessly young market ahead, loyalty lines are receding into the memory of past advertising. The new story in town is the range story. The story of variety on hand. I offer you the most number of options. You might as well stay with me. Flit like a butterfly from this variant to the other. But stay with me. Companies are vying with one another to build promiscuity-palate offers within their own mother brand to keep custom back. The automotive category is the best example here. Remember, we now have 621 variants of cars in the Indian market.
I-Gen products include On-the-go products in beverages and food, quick take-away meals from even traditional outlets which believed in sit-down dinners, and Gymnasiums that offer quick-work-outs that last a slim 20-minutes a day.

The Social Networking Funnel is here: Social networking grew leaps and bounds. The internet got accessed by 62 million people in India this year. 70per cent of them got on with devices that were not broadband led. Nevertheless, the killer application in use was the social networking site. Face book, Twitter and Orkut and thirty-one more.

A very important marketing funnel got created. Most top-end consumers of products and services alike got talking to one another socially first. This virtual interaction is creating a marketing funnel of significance. Ignore it only at your peril. Remember, a very important thing is happening here. Consumers are chatting with one another not only about their dating needs, but they are exchanging valuable information about products and services and brands. Consumers are chatting with one another about brands before getting to the market, particularly for more expensive and more long-lasting products.

The shift is clear: from Brand-networking to User-networking.

The world already has 1.3 Billion users of the Worldwide Web. 200 million websites cater to their needs. And the new trend is really the micro-site. Add a multiple on the 200 million and that is the brand opportunity here. Brands will go the micro-site way in the future. And the future is really already here.


The Reality show buzz is here: The consumer is a voyeur. And brands love that. If not for this one facet of the consumer, brands would never get the inquisitiveness they get. Marketers took this a step further. Marketing money fed the reality show this year. More and more brand moneys flowed in. Makers of Television reality shows plagued marketing companies with ideas. Many found takers.

In came Rakhi Sawant with her “Rakhi Ka Insaaf”. Men cried. One committed suicide as well, as alleged. Rakhi stripped them all. Of deeds of omission and commission. ”Kangaroo justice” was delivered. The nation enjoyed it. A voyeuristic nation that loved peeking into others bedrooms.

Talk of bedrooms, in came “Big Boss” that got you to peek into every room there was to peek into, in a home. Save the actual toilet and bathroom. Names such as Seema Parihar, Ashmit Patel and Veena Mallick got to be household names. If you put up a tantrum at home, you were told not to behave like a Dolly. If you ate too much, you were reminded of the Great Khali. Rural India lapped up the antics of Urban India, believing everything that happened in a Big Boss home to be exactly what happened in our booming urban homes.
Brands used the eye-balls opportunity well. Vodafone and Spice and more.
I am told more are coming. While “Sach Ka Saamna” got a lot of flak, bolder ones are planning a Husband-swap program on national television as well, I am told. Ouch!

A concern for the future: Small but seminal trends were spotted this year. The marketer woke up to global concerns. Green became big. As did Inclusive. Saving the future became a theme. Marketers plonked their moneys, as Aircel did on "Save the Tiger”. It made the number1411 memorable. PepsiCo spoke the conservation story, as did ITC. PepsiCo went one step further as well, declaring its work and intent on its packaging. The theme was clearly being tested. The theme ahead for the savvy marketer then: Conservation. Re-use. Replenishment. Conservation of all the re-sources you as brand-marketer strip the earth of.

The “Save” campaigns will cover the tiger, paper, water, energy and more.


“Munni getting Badnaam and Shiela getting Jawaan”: Block-buster movies. The biggest ones happened this year. While Sholay did it in the yester-years of Rs.3 and Rs. 5 ticket prices, ‘3 Idiots’ did it at multi-plex rates of today to become a big grosser. One outdid the other. In came ‘Dabangg’ and did it all over again. Out-did it as well and one kept wondering what was so great with it.

Movies marketed themselves with savvy. Movie marketers taught the traditional FMCG guy many a valuable marketing lesson. Emami first hit out at Dabangg and then got its Zandu Balm to piggyback the trend. If James Bond had an Aston Martin, Dabangg had a Zandu Balm.

The item number remained as the biggest hit of them all. The ‘Paisa vasool’ numbers made two big generic Quasi brands happen, much to the chagrin of women with these names: Munni was one and Shiela the other. Small-town India is abuzz I am told, with women of every age with these names being targeted with songs to boot!
Question asked at a pub in Delhi recently of the DJ who was refusing to get these numbers going: “DJ-ji, when is Munni getting Badnaam and Shiela getting Jawaan?”

Incredible India lived up to its name: In many ways it did. The India Tourism campaign has a brilliant line. Incredible India hit the news time and again this year with scams of every kind. The CWG corruption fiasco. Corruption fiascos everywhere, from Maharashtra to Karnataka to every nook and cranny of Indian politics. Corporate lobbying controversies to boot. Party lines and corporate lines were not important. Corruption remained the lowest common denominator soft-under-belly of Indian politics.

India remained incredible to an exocentric audience outside, waiting with a whipping stick in any case, to whip the poster-boy country of the world today.

Three Dark Horses:

Three dark horses took gallant little strides this year in Indian marketing. These three are really the big opportunities out there in the great Indian market as it is due to emerge in the future. As India boomed to become a Rs.1300 Billion Market in 2010 , the under-leveraged parts of the distribution economy is being tapped into by these three dark horses. The story is under-played as of now, but wait for the big strides these will take in the decade ahead.

Ok, let’s cut the chase:
1. Cash&Carry Wholesale retail: Bharti Wal-mart has made rapid strides in Punjab this year. Expect this to cascade into a ramp-up. I do believe this is the best solution to open up the largely under-served markets of Tier 3 and rural India at large. There is a big untapped demand from the hospitality sector, intermediary traders, villagers and farmers alike. The next new success is from there. Metro waits as well. As will more. In the queue.
2. Tele-shopping and Home-Shopping: This again is the next big opportunity ahead as more than 148 million household’s wait in anticipation. Direct selling offers the ability of under-served markets being able to tap into products and services that more-served markets in metros take for granted. The intermediary is cut out as well. Prices are competitive as well. Wait and watch as Guthy Renker, and literally every media house spots this opportunity and goes behind it.
3. Private labels: As organized retail booms, every super-market chain will want its piece of the action. More and more private label opportunities will emerge across the low-end, mid-market and premium tags. The apparel players are doing well on this count already. Expect more categories to open up. The private label will be private no more.
That’s it for 2010 then. A Tweet-year gone by.
Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.harishbijoorconsults.com
http://www.harishbijoorspeaks.weebly.com

What's Wrong With Marketing Today?

What’s wrong with marketing today?


By Harish Bijoor

Ouch! A lot of marketing folk will not even want to hear this question around. A lot of the oldies in the game tend to believe everything is hunky dory and right, as well.
This question is going to be junked the moment it is seen. Junked as a piece of rhetoric used just to get the attention it got.
What could be wrong with marketing after all? Are we not witnessing double-digit growth in many categories? Is there not plenty of excitement around with our mega-buck campaigns making it onto the Power jackets of newspapers? Are we not innovative as well? Are we not bending-backwards to get marketing noticed at large? And are we not winning all those awards at Cannes and everywhere else?

What then could be wrong with marketing?

If marketing people just got off the roller coaster, and if only we got off the 9 to 9 regimen of being a marketing man, woman or child, we would notice. The problem is one of people. The biggest P of them all!
The big is issue is out there and the worried lot are really the younger ones in marketing. In many ways the older ones have made their cocoons, padded them well and are quite happy with what they have. The fire though is burning elsewhere on this question. In the bellies of the young who have opted for marketing as a profession, and most certainly in the bellies of those who are just on the verge of choosing a career-track to follow.

The issues are out there staring at many. Let’s list some.

1. Young talent that is entering marketing is really not as committed to marketing as it should be. There are too many people who are here who just should not be here.
2. Marketing is not the best paymaster anymore. Finance is where the action is. Even HR is an exciting place to be in terms of money. There are just too many average marketing people around.
3. Where are the mentors? There just are not enough people around with time to coach the young entrant into Marketing. Youngsters are forever on a delivery-oriented mode. And on a limb. The accent for the young is execution and implementation. The planning role in Marketing is somehow appropriated by the ones at the top.

4. Marketing means just about everything today. 99% everything else and 1% branding is just not the right combination for the youngster seeking to make a mark in marketing. The youngster is getting painted into the corner of being “all legs and all hand” and no mind. Ouch!
The list can go on, depending which youngster in marketing you speak to, but let me stop.


When I look back at the issues that abound, I know what went wrong. It happened all but subliminally. Slowly but surely, one step at a time with actions that decimated what marketing meant to India and the Indian marketing professional in the days of yore. And 'days of yore' is just about 20 years ago.

It began in many ways with the bifurcation of sales and marketing as two separate streams altogether. Let me be politically in-correct. Sales for the less-conceptually oriented, and marketing for the more. Sales in many ways for the non-MBA entrant into corporate organization and marketing for the guy with the MBA-tag.

The moment this happened, the silo approach to marketing began. Sales became an acute specialization, which no marketing man wanted to touch, and marketing became an acute specialization that every sales person wanted to get into, but seldom could.
Proverbial nail number two hit into the proverbial cold coffin , when every sales organization that did its own direct selling into the market decided to out-source it all. Outsource it to distributors. The biggest companies in the tumult of marketing bid good bye to their own salespersons and offered distributorships that had the emergence of whole big tribes of distributors who are today a critical link between the company and its B2B consumers, the retailers.
As this happened, in the beginning the good practice of market working by sales, and in some measure by the marketing executives continued. What used to be considered standard good practice that meant visiting the distributor, working markets with the distributors’ salesperson, and visting retail outlets was slowly given up. Not altogether, but largely.
From a coverage span of 25 outlets per day of market visit; today the average executive in sales and marketing is doing all of 6. If not less. And the number of days in the market is quite another issue. From a healthy practice number of 10 days a month in market to the current possible 2 days in market.
Marketing people are therefore working markets less, and are in contact with their retailers that much less. Marketing people are visiting lesser number of consumer homes, and are therefore that much more divorced from their consumers. Marketers do not travel in the buses that their consumers travel in. Marketers do not watch “ Kunku” or “Bhagyalakshmi” which their consumers are umblically linked to. The sweat of the consumer is an alien sweat.

Marketers have over the last decade distanced themselves from their consumers. There is a certain overt reliance on aggregated approaches to a consumer who in reality is not aggregated at all. Reliance on consumer insight is totally basis dipstick studies that touch nano-segments of the consumer profile at large. Studying the consumer as a constituency of one is not done anymore. Everything is an aggregate. Everything is a cluster. And marketing is today itself a cluster-approach that does not seem to work as well as it should.
A pain-point with a lot of young marketing people I meet is the angst around the thought that marketing people do not grow into top management positions as fast as they used to in the past. It sure is true.




Marketing people will need to re-invent hard work as part of the regimen of being a marketing person. Hard work that is about spending a lot more time in the market, and with the consumer at large, rather than in Corporate Board-rooms with intermediaries who are into research, advertising or distribution alike. Intermediaries who bring a lot to the table, but just not enough. And not in the way it must.

Re-inventing marketing into a 1:1 process from the 1: All process it has become, will gain back lost respect, lost competencies, lost edges, and everything else that got lost in the process. Including lost promotions. Touche!


The author is a Brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor

Website:
1. http://www.harishbijoorspeaks.weebly.com
2. http://www.harishbijoorconsults.com