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

Indian Retail and The Grouse Economy

The Grouse Retail Economy

By Harish Bijoor

We live in a world full of complaints. The retail world is no different.

In the beginning, the micro Mom-and-pop retailer complained about the neighborhood large store. The Micro retailer had his own grouse. He ran his outfit with the help of wife and son and daughter. His was really a ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ enterprise. In came the corner grocer of relatively larger format. While the Micro-retailer managed with a 60-sq feet enterprise, the corner grocer was all of 600 sft. He stocked variety. He stocked both grains and packaged items. He offered better lighting and a better display. He had a refrigerator to stock butter and bottled drinks as well.  Consumers of the hinterland flocked to him, and the micro-retailer remained micro in terms of size and dream alike. The corner grocer became the big bad boy of retail. Mom, pop & Child cried hoarse.

And then came the super-market.  This happened all of 35 years ago. Into the hinterland of the corner-grocer, who had grown leaps and bounds, came the local Super-market. This guy was bigger than them all. He had occupied all of 3000 sft. He offered a seamless shopping experience that brought in self-service. A customer could not only see the item he was buying, but could touch and smell as well. He could compare one with the other. He could peer keenly into the produce and package. He could be that much more informed a shopper.  He ate into the hinterland of consumers hitherto dominated by the corner grocer and his smaller cousins in the realm of the ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ format as well. The large-format super-market became the bad boy of Indian retail now. The corner-grocer cried foul. The ‘Mom, Pop & Child’ enterprise believed this was karma playing out. The smirk was now on his face.

And then came real organized retail. Organized retail spearheaded by organizations that were never imagined to be in this space. These were Indian enterprises of every kind. In came the Future Group. We had a Reliance Retail happen. In came the Aditya Birla effort. In came every other effort from every other group, (the Tatas included), that was hitherto considered an entity that had bigger axes to grind than to look into the realm of retail as a business proposition at all.

This was big fish entering the space of relatively moderately sized fish.  This fish wanted to eat it all up in a way. It protested and said that nothing would happen to the micro-format, the corner-grocer and the medium-sized super-market at all. In many ways it was right. The market opportunity was so large, and the efforts so small by these biggies as they tested the waters, that nothing really happened to eh volumes enjoyed by the rest of the retail chain. Big fish did not really eat small fish. And Darwin was right. The fittest in every category survived and thrived. Every category had a space all its own to occupy and hope to thrive in. The operative word here is ‘hope’!

But then everyone cried hoarse. Everyone complained. The bigger you were, the ‘badder’ you were! Forgive me for coining that word and giving good grammar a beating. It deserves it here.

And then we have just about emerged from the cries and the tumult on FDI in retail. Even the biggest Indian names in retail are said to be in sync with this, only to attract FDI that goes to mitigate its losses in this space. It is said that the biggest Indian names would not like to compete with a 100% Wal-Mart or a 100% Carrefour effort. The wails are still around. The complaints are still floating in a space very near to all of us.

The latest cry is from the space of the physical brick and mortar retailer. Brick and mortar retailers are now crying about the current small fact that the e-retailer is making a dent into his business. Bookshop owners are crying hoarse that consumers are browsing physical books at their stores and buying them online at a discount. Quite the reverse of what was being done a couple of years ago. As of today, I buy my vegetables at home from an e-retailer.  E-retail is not ubiquitous as of now though, and I hold that e-retail is still anecdotal in its presence, reach, acceptability and habit. Even then, the cries are all around. The complaints are all around in our psyche.

The retail world has been a complaint economy thus far then. It started thirty-five years ago, and the complaints are still around. Newer ones replace older ones.

As all of this abounds, my one suggestion to the latest complainant in the space of brick and mortar retail is a simple one. All of us need to accept the fact that Darwin has always been right for all of these 175 years. The fittest will survive. Retail that caters to the needs, wants, desires and indeed growing and forever changing aspirations of the consumer, will always survive and will always thrive. There is space for everyone.

The fact remains that India is large. The fact remains that the Indian is on the morph. The fact also remains that for every one of our 1.2 Billion people, there is a solution that needs to be different in its appeal. Each of our retail formats, from the micro-retail format of 60-sft to the e-retail format of just no square feet at all, has an appeal to a distinct set of customers. Everyone will survive and thrive.  The fittest in every space will thrive.

Just no point complaining and wailing about it at all.  Let’s laugh together. Hopefully all the way to the bank. The e-bank.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting practice that operates in the realm of brand and business strategy. The company has a presence in the markets of India, Hong Kong, London, Dubai and Istanbul.

Harish is a public speaker who speaks to Corporate audiences across the globe in the realm of motivation, people-management issues, brands, marketing and business at large.

He is active on twitter @harishbijoor

Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paid Media Versus unpaid: A Debate

-->

Paid Media versus Upaid!

By Harish Bijoor 

The brand manager is in a dilemma today. In the old days, all media was paid for. Today, you have yet another avatar on the rampage, “earned media”. While paid media is what you buy as advertising in every form, earned media is what you earn as coverage in media that is viral, editorial in guise, and C2C (consumer to consumer) in reach, credibility and consumer buy-in terms.

The dilemma is simple and complex at the same time. The simple dilemma point is which one to back? Which one gives your brand the bang for the buck? Which one is trusted more? Which one delivers sales? Which one delivers image? And which one damages the brand more, when push comes to shove?

The complex part of the dilemma is measurement of efficacy. How do you know which avatar of media did what for your brand? How do you know what paid media did for you as opposed to earned media? And how do you plant your marketing bucks on each? In what proportion? And how deep must you be in earned media?

The dilemma of the brand manager will continue. I will however put my weight behind paid media for now. I do believe paid media works better for brands in today’s context. Paid media is specific, controlled by the brand to the point of a science, is dished out with consistency which a consumer is used to, and by and large, credibility of paid mediums remain reasonably intact to date.

Yes, advertising is being trusted less and less by consumers. Yes, advertising is seen to be something that promises the stratosphere and offers the sky. However, advertising is yet to reach the bathos point in India in terms of credibility and credulity norms. To that extent, all paid mediums are still trusted, except paid PR. Paid PR sadly has hit the bathos point in India with consumers switching off any communication that looks overtly paid for in PR terms.

Advertising on the other hand does not suffer that status and stigma as yet. Consumers are aware that all advertising is paid for by the brand, and this paid-for status is overt and in the eye. There is no subterfuge. The consumer does believe today that it is the right and privilege of the brand to advertise itself overtly. In many segments, advertising is seen to be a form of public service as well, as it is informative and disseminates what is wanted to be learnt by the consumer.

Earned media is however a tough cookie to understand today. It is totally amoebic and totally un-solicited. While in the early days, what you earned through such media exposure is considered “editorial” in nature and “use-centric” in output, a little while down the road, there is consumer distrust here as well. As tales of brand interventions in “earned media” space gain grounds, and as consumers understand that many a tweet and many a Facebook mention and   LinkedIn message could be “bought” as well, the USP of earned media dies.

My point is a simple one. The consumer loves brands as of now. He/she understands and appreciates the role, power and utility of paid-for advertising that is overt. He/she distrusts paid PR fundamentally because it is not overt, and hides behind editorial material that looks part editorial and part paid-for. The consumer hates being cheated. The consumer is fine being told clearly that this is a paid medium and this is not.  On the other hand, when it comes to earned mediums, the consumer is today not very convinced that what is “earned” is really earned, and what seems earned is really not paid for as well! Touche!

At the end of it all, lets remember, the consumer is not a moron. She is your mistress, if not your wife!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Twitter @harishbijoor