There is a little bit of CSR……..in my hair!
By Harish Bijoor
If I am to simplify all of life with a perspective that is distinctly marketing oriented, there are just two types of people in the world. A small set of marketing people on one side, and a whole large set of people being marketed-to at the other end!
Peek keenly at any person you know. Either she is a marketing person marketing a product, a service, a dream or even a desire to someone else, or is a person who is being marketed to all the time by the marketer at large!
Marketing is therefore a people-centric process. And just as long as it remains that, and just as long as man loves living in a society of his making, CSR is going to remain a big buzz-word for the future ahead! CSR remains a very relevant strategic marketing tool for the amorphous future ahead of us!
In these long years of being around in the great Indian marketplace, I have seen marketing morph in its ideals. In the beginning, there was the product and the service. Both had to be reached out to the customer in the marketplace. This was also a day and age when everything was in short supply. The demand was big. The marketer performed his role as a mere transporter of the goods to the arms length convenience of the hungry consumer. These were the days when you had to wait 6 years on a waiting list to buy a 'Vespa' scooter and in a longer still queue to possess that sturdy black telephone instrument in your drawing room!
Marketers in this day and age had a simple goal. Distribute. Distribute with equity where possible. Be fair. Appear to be fair as well!
Life changed dramatically. In enters the era of plenty. Plenty of products and services! Enough to come out of your ears and everywhere else! Competition is sharp! The marketer morphs from his old attitude in such an environment. He becomes consumer savvy. He offers not only the product, but a superior degree of service to go with it. He offers customer experience and delight that becomes the brand in itself!
We live in such a competitive marketing era. There are just too many marketing people around. Just too many with all the boring ideas around. Everyone has been to the same marketing school (if not the same type) and comes out with the same set of ideas to go to market! And everyone fails! Parri passu marketing does not work!
In such an environment of parri passu marketing, time to think different. Time to think of a new tool to use! CSR is a great one! If used sensibly and with the sensitivity it deserves!
Three Marketing Formats:
Let me offer a theory I propound extensively.
There are simply three marketing formats to follow in a society as it morphs. In the early stage, society is all about “I, me, myself”! At this stage in consumer societal evolution, the marketer gets away using the language of hedonism and pleasure. The “I, me, myself” kind of product and service works well. The ‘Axe’ effect works here!
And then there is the stage when the consumer has gone beyond that basic stage. He is now concerned about the people around him. His loved ones. His family of four. His extended family of four more, mother, father, father-in-law and mother-in-law, last to be included!
This kind of man likes brands to be inclusive in their language, tone and tenor. This kind of man wants products that are good for the entire family! Never mind the rest of society, just as long his close-knitted family is taken care of, he is fine! The 'Annapurna' atta story works here!
And then there is man who is more conscious of more people around him. This is the kind of guy who is bothered about the good of his immediate neighborhood and society! He wants his entire neighborhood to be happy! The ‘Lifebuoy’ “clean the neighborhood” story works here!
There is macro-man then. This is the kind of person who wants the good of his immediate society and his entire planet. This is the kind of guy who wants to use bio-based detergents that don’t hurt the eco-system! The ‘Surf Excel’ “Do bucket paani bachana hai” theme works here!
And finally there is Cosmos man! Concerned about the cosmos, much of which he does not know even! We are yet to get there!
CSR works at every level. CSR is an inclusive process! A process that embraces the good of society in a very inclusive manner. This inclusiveness could start at the level of the immediate family and morph on to embrace the entire Cosmos.
CSR plays a vital role in taking commercial brands out into the commercial marketplace with a theme that is appealing to the sense and sensibility of the modern consumer. CSR is therefore a valuable tool that marketers can use to market their brand of soap, detergent, sugar and tea with equal panache and commercial effectiveness.
CSR is not at all about running public hospitals and schools alone. CSR is not about sending Tsunami relief material to the trouble spots of the world. That is old hat! It is much more! The modern consumer understands CSR that much more intimately when you touch his life, with a wee bit of CSR in your soap. A wee bit in your shampoo! In your kids diapers and feminine hygiene products as well!
The future of marketing is full of CSR! Of a different kind!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting firm with a presence in the markets of India, the UK and SE Asia.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Twitter.com/harishbijoor
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Integrity Branding and Integrity Everything......
Three Chickens and an Egg!
By Harish Bijoor
In the several marketing summers I have lived, fought, sweated and thrived, there is one insight that has held me in good stead. This is the insight of Integrity branding.
Integrity branding is all about saying the simple truths in your brand communication process. Stick to the tone and tenor of integrity and you can’t do no wrong!
Let me look at it in a manner of detailing the concept at hand. The point is simple. All consumers are essentially truth seeking animals. Yes, all of us lie in some small manner or the other. These are really the small lies that make the fabric of our modern day lives. Small lies that ward off the inconvenience of a lie-less society.
Despite all these small lies, we are essentially truth seeking as consumers. When you buy a toothpaste, you expect honesty out of the entire exercise. The consumer-brand interaction process is a relationship. A relationship quite like the many relationships we go through in our social lives.
When you get into a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, or let me be politically correct and say member of the same sex even, you expect just one primary thing out of the relationship. The truth. There is no relationship you get into expecting dishonesty and the lack of integrity.
Very simply put, consumers get into brand relationships based on the expectation of the truth. But does she get it? And how much of it? And how frequently so?
My belief is that the brand that offers the most of the truth most of the time in this continuous relationship is the one that succeeds. The brand that fails on this count is an utter failure right away, or on the path of a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom round the corner.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Let me choose my favorite gourmet table bird for this example, the chicken! Let me take three of them.
There are really three chickens in our marketing lives. And remember, all of us are marketing people, since there are only two kinds of people in the world. The “marketing person”, who markets to others. And the “marketed-to person” at the other end!
Imagine three chickens out there. Each of the chickens is a manufacturer and a marketer. Each of the chickens has done something they are very good at. Each has laid an egg. And each of the eggs looks alike.
Each of the marketer chickens takes a different path to market their respective eggs.
There is the first chicken, which I call the “Shy chicken”. This chicken looks at the egg it has laid and finds the product quality to be all of 100. It then stands up, looks at the target audience of potential consumers and whispers with a decibel of shout that is at best 2 on a scale of 100.
This chicken’s whisper is heard by very few of those in the target audience. Even those who hear of it, hear it as a faint whisper. The promise offered by the whisper is just 2 on a scale of 100. Those few who hear the whisper actually come to see the egg, lured often by the under-shout that creates quite a bit of mystery in the consumer at hand.
When the few consumers actually arrive to see the product, there is great joy. The consumer expectation of 2 is rewarded with a delivery of 100. The positive strokes offered in this purchase is +98. The negative of this approach of course is the fact that it scores very low on consumer awareness scores.
Look at the second chicken then. This is what I call the “honest chicken”. This chicken looks at the target audience and shouts out the product offer with a shout level of decibel 100. The shout quality is equal to that of product quality.
The pros of this approach is apparent. Awareness scores are good. Everyone has heard that the chicken has an egg to offer. But there is a problem here. Consumers do not necessarily respect honest chickens. When the consumer has heard the full story, he does not want to see the egg at all. There is just no mystery. Only a few arrive to see the egg, and these are the only ones who actually need an egg. And when they arrive, they expect 100 and get 100. No positive strokes and no negative. The potential of a buy is low as well.
The third chicken is waiting. This chicken finds the competition hot. This chicken gets onto the rooftop and shouts with a decibel value 400. The darned chicken has laid an egg but shouts as if it has laid an asteroid! The awareness scores are terrific. The entire town lands up to look at the phenomena. The expectation is 400. The delivery is 100. There is a negative stroke quotient of -300. And nobody buys!
All these three chickens and their respective approaches are out there for the marketer to choose from. Each of us makes this choice every living day.There are variations available in the gamut of 0-400 in terms of shout levels. Different marketers choose differently.
But guess what, the chicken that shouts with a decibel of 80 is the one that succeeds the most. Also, after 400 what? Back to a decibel of 2. In a market where everyone is shouting at 400, the one chicken which whispers the least is the one that is heard and trusted the most.
Think about it. Which chicken are you as a marketer? And which chicken are you as a working person? And which chicken are you as a person living in a family of your own?
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a consulting practice with presence in the markets of Hong Kong, Dubai, UK and India.
Email:harishbijoor@hotmail.com
By Harish Bijoor
In the several marketing summers I have lived, fought, sweated and thrived, there is one insight that has held me in good stead. This is the insight of Integrity branding.
Integrity branding is all about saying the simple truths in your brand communication process. Stick to the tone and tenor of integrity and you can’t do no wrong!
Let me look at it in a manner of detailing the concept at hand. The point is simple. All consumers are essentially truth seeking animals. Yes, all of us lie in some small manner or the other. These are really the small lies that make the fabric of our modern day lives. Small lies that ward off the inconvenience of a lie-less society.
Despite all these small lies, we are essentially truth seeking as consumers. When you buy a toothpaste, you expect honesty out of the entire exercise. The consumer-brand interaction process is a relationship. A relationship quite like the many relationships we go through in our social lives.
When you get into a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, or let me be politically correct and say member of the same sex even, you expect just one primary thing out of the relationship. The truth. There is no relationship you get into expecting dishonesty and the lack of integrity.
Very simply put, consumers get into brand relationships based on the expectation of the truth. But does she get it? And how much of it? And how frequently so?
My belief is that the brand that offers the most of the truth most of the time in this continuous relationship is the one that succeeds. The brand that fails on this count is an utter failure right away, or on the path of a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom round the corner.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Let me choose my favorite gourmet table bird for this example, the chicken! Let me take three of them.
There are really three chickens in our marketing lives. And remember, all of us are marketing people, since there are only two kinds of people in the world. The “marketing person”, who markets to others. And the “marketed-to person” at the other end!
Imagine three chickens out there. Each of the chickens is a manufacturer and a marketer. Each of the chickens has done something they are very good at. Each has laid an egg. And each of the eggs looks alike.
Each of the marketer chickens takes a different path to market their respective eggs.
There is the first chicken, which I call the “Shy chicken”. This chicken looks at the egg it has laid and finds the product quality to be all of 100. It then stands up, looks at the target audience of potential consumers and whispers with a decibel of shout that is at best 2 on a scale of 100.
This chicken’s whisper is heard by very few of those in the target audience. Even those who hear of it, hear it as a faint whisper. The promise offered by the whisper is just 2 on a scale of 100. Those few who hear the whisper actually come to see the egg, lured often by the under-shout that creates quite a bit of mystery in the consumer at hand.
When the few consumers actually arrive to see the product, there is great joy. The consumer expectation of 2 is rewarded with a delivery of 100. The positive strokes offered in this purchase is +98. The negative of this approach of course is the fact that it scores very low on consumer awareness scores.
Look at the second chicken then. This is what I call the “honest chicken”. This chicken looks at the target audience and shouts out the product offer with a shout level of decibel 100. The shout quality is equal to that of product quality.
The pros of this approach is apparent. Awareness scores are good. Everyone has heard that the chicken has an egg to offer. But there is a problem here. Consumers do not necessarily respect honest chickens. When the consumer has heard the full story, he does not want to see the egg at all. There is just no mystery. Only a few arrive to see the egg, and these are the only ones who actually need an egg. And when they arrive, they expect 100 and get 100. No positive strokes and no negative. The potential of a buy is low as well.
The third chicken is waiting. This chicken finds the competition hot. This chicken gets onto the rooftop and shouts with a decibel value 400. The darned chicken has laid an egg but shouts as if it has laid an asteroid! The awareness scores are terrific. The entire town lands up to look at the phenomena. The expectation is 400. The delivery is 100. There is a negative stroke quotient of -300. And nobody buys!
All these three chickens and their respective approaches are out there for the marketer to choose from. Each of us makes this choice every living day.There are variations available in the gamut of 0-400 in terms of shout levels. Different marketers choose differently.
But guess what, the chicken that shouts with a decibel of 80 is the one that succeeds the most. Also, after 400 what? Back to a decibel of 2. In a market where everyone is shouting at 400, the one chicken which whispers the least is the one that is heard and trusted the most.
Think about it. Which chicken are you as a marketer? And which chicken are you as a working person? And which chicken are you as a person living in a family of your own?
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a consulting practice with presence in the markets of Hong Kong, Dubai, UK and India.
Email:harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Marketing the Small Business......
Marketing the Entrepreneurship
By Harish Bijoor
Most entrepreneurships that aim to be big, aim to be different. Entrepreneurships start small. Think big but start small. And that is the fact of an entrepreneurship at large.
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
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor
By Harish Bijoor
Most entrepreneurships that aim to be big, aim to be different. Entrepreneurships start small. Think big but start small. And that is the fact of an entrepreneurship at large.
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
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor
Marketing to the Bottom-of-the Pyramid: 3 key issues
INDIA INCLUSIVE
The Art, Science and Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP
By Harish Bijoor
The late Dr. C K Prahalad, in more ways than one, gave us the Pyramid once again. A Pyramid that is India. A pyramid that has small self-actualizing niches of the population at the top of the pyramid, large masses at the middle of the Pyramid and even larger impoverished, under-nourished and totally ignored populations at the Bottom of the pyramid in discussion.
The other thinker who gave us a pyramid all his own, Abraham Maslow was totally right in hindsight. Those at the top of the pyramid are really self-actualizing folk. Folk who think a lot more about the others than about themselves. In many ways this thinking class right atop the pyramid is the class that represents the thought leader paving the way for the India that is to be in 2020. This niche is however is not to be confused to the real India.
I read Dr. Prahalad’s picture of the pyramid that is India in tandem with the very notion of the “Next 2 Billion”(IFC). While the top 4 Billion population of the world are really the haves, the next 2 billion are the ones that don’t really have. The have-nots. The market is therefore right here with the have-nots. With the ones who sit at the bottom of the pyramid of every country there is. In the parts of the world still being defined as the “developing world”, the size of these have-nots at the bottom is really, really big, and in the case of the developed nations, the real worry is that the size of the niche at the bottom is really growing. Growing thanks due to the recession that hit the developed economies of the world not so long ago.
Sitting under my own Peepul tree, I come up with not one but two pyramids for India. When asked to describe India, I do not use Dr. Prahalad’s One Pyramid. I draw out two on my I-Pad. As an aside, India sure has moved in its symbolism of technology for the people: from the sanitary pad of the 1950’s to the I-Pad of 2010!
I draw two pyramids. One is a small. Another big. The bigger pyramid is three times the size of the smaller one. The big is RURAL and the small is URBAN. On each of these I draw three wedges as segments. The top of the pyramid, the middle and bottom. At the end of the exercise, when I put numbers in the tiers of people, the shocker really is that the size of the Top of the Pyramid in Rural is really 2.6 times the size of the Urban. And the size of the middle of the pyramid is just some 6 times that of the urban, just as the Bottom of the pyramid is just about 2.3 times that of urban.
The point then: BOP is a reality of both urban and rural markets. It really is a myth to look only at rural for the BOP manna that most marketers have rushed to address. There’s more to the concept of BOP than rural alone.
Having said and established that for a start, I do believe that the story of India Inclusive is really all about knitting the BOP into the mainstream that is India and Indian. Marketing to the BOP is both an art and a science. Along with that, and most importantly, its a philosophy. A philosophy that corporate organizations need to ingrain into their DNA.
The most important fact that needs to be bought into is the fact that marketing in the future is all about inclusive approaches and not the old exclusive approaches. In many ways, the concept of the brand and the very definition of brands swim against this new need. The brand in many ways is a premium. A premium that is extracted from the exclusive masses of its consumers. This notion needs to be re-jiggged now. The brand cannot be exclusive to its exclusive masses or niches. The brand needs to belong to all. And belong in an inclusive and all-encompassing manner for sure.
The key question then is whether marketing can change the world. And can marketing change India for a start?
I do believe it can. It can, provided we re-jig the way we look at markets and consumers at large. From the 47 and odd theories I have built in this realm over the last two decades, let me pick three key thoughts then, one each from the realm of the Art, the Science and the Philosophy that is marketing. Key thoughts that will help re-jig marketing at large, and help re-orient the way we want to open the can that is BOP and the can that is India Inclusive in its orientation.
1. The Art of Marketing to the BOP: Gandhian Marketing versus marketing the “Honest Shirt” and the “Toothpaste with Oxygen” in it!
Brand India has seen two kinds of brands emerge over the decades that marketing has touched the nation and its produce. At one end is the brand that is today that of the Mahatma. The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi is the biggest and most recognized brand that represents India internally and overseas. Mahatma Gandhi has emerged to be the most durable brand of them all.
Gandhi-ji never needed to take a full-page ad in the papers saying “Gandhi Shining”. Brand Gandhi happened as a function of the hard and dedicated work he did at the grass-root that is really India. Every action of his that focused on upliftment of the under-privileged, and every icon he gave to India became a durable representation of this ethos. Whether it was Khadi, the Dandi Salt Yatra or non-violence as a means of protest, Gandhi-ji reigns as a thought, even today. Across the world. This was true-blue bottom-up branding. Branding basis hard work at the BOP.
The second and more common marketing format in India today is the format of Top-down marketing. This format is all about taking a shirt and making it honest and taking a television and making it healthy and of course taking the humble tooth-paste and adding Oxygen to it. And around all these offerings, advertising has added further allure. Top-down branding is a format that has touched every segment of the pyramid and still attempts to touch the BOP. Sadly, it does not work here. The BOP is the most intelligent and most untouched-by-hyperbole segment of the Indian economy. This cannot be taken for granted and played with.
If you need to succeed here, simply adopt the Bottom-up-branding ethos. Do a Gandhi on the market, and stop putting Oxygen in the toothpaste instead. The BOP disbelieves advertising fluff and fare more than the de-sensitized marketing-anaesthesiatiszed top of the pyramid market.
When brands finally get to think of the BOP markets in both urban and rural, it is time to put together programs of what I call and practice as “Conscious De-branding”. A process where you sit and peel off the slick and the glib from your brand and advertising offering. Making the brand offering real. As real as the consumer.
2. The Science of Marketing to the BOP: Democratic Distribution systems versus the autocratic Top-down ones at play!
Distribution is a demon in India. Reaching masses of people who live across different terrain and at distances that are difficult to reach with consistency seems a big challenge even today.
The three tenets of a good distribution system are indeed the width of reach, the depth of reach in terms of product and service offerings and the consistency of reach, week after week, if not more frequently.
I do believe there are three types of consumers emerging in India today. The first is a consumer who buys products and services for self-use. For use by the self and family of 4.
The second type of consumer is the one who buys partly for self and partly to distribute. This consumer is 70 per cent consumer and 30 per-cent re-distributor. You find these mostly in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns of India, even today. They make a margin on what they sell and partly defray the costs of what they buy for themselves. These are savvy consumers and savvy business people as well in their own right.
The marketer needs to recognize this consumer and make offerings that are relevant, original and innovative.
The third type of consumer is the one that buys possibly 5% for himself and 95% acting as a re-distributor. I find these in the smallest of villages in India. The most efficient system of reaching out to the land that is India is really this. Millions of entrepreneur-distributors who make a living doing just this. This is a win-win for the marketer and consumer alike. A win-win combination that is totally under-leveraged as of today.
The future of cracking in to the pie that is BOP in both urban and rural is this. This is it!
3. The Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP: Creeping Urbanization versus Creeping Ruralization!
Ever since independence, India has witnessed a creeping and crawling phase where masses of people have morphed from mindsets and consumption sets that were rural to mindsets, which are more aggressively urban. The marketer at large has been responsible for this. The movement that was a crawl became a literal gallop in the early and mid-eighties when Television knitted the nation as one, pumping urban imageries of the modern marketing man in India to rural audiences. Television and all the advertising it carried threw up and pushed down rural throats and stomachs and bladders the urban way of life. In more ways than one, India became an Instant urban society.
This I do believe is an un-doing. An un-doing that needs to be corrected. In many ways marketing is a hegemony in India. The urban-educated and privileged marketer markets to the rural person. Never mind that rural is three times bigger than urban. The imagery that consumers emote with in India today is the urban imagery.
Turn turtle this and emote with real India. Emote with the imagery that is rural. Put a program that is rural in your marketing mix. Go one step further and show your archetypical brand hero in your TV commercials to be the rural person. See what it does. I do believe India is ready to turn-turtle its marketing imagery. The BOP market will admire this. And will certainly reward this effort. With market share. And money. And more than that, consumer affection.
The road ahead for the Inclusive India agenda is an exciting one. Tread it with strategy.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a strategy consulting firm with a presence in the markets of India, SE Asia, UK and Dubai.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Twitter.com/harishbijoor
The Art, Science and Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP
By Harish Bijoor
The late Dr. C K Prahalad, in more ways than one, gave us the Pyramid once again. A Pyramid that is India. A pyramid that has small self-actualizing niches of the population at the top of the pyramid, large masses at the middle of the Pyramid and even larger impoverished, under-nourished and totally ignored populations at the Bottom of the pyramid in discussion.
The other thinker who gave us a pyramid all his own, Abraham Maslow was totally right in hindsight. Those at the top of the pyramid are really self-actualizing folk. Folk who think a lot more about the others than about themselves. In many ways this thinking class right atop the pyramid is the class that represents the thought leader paving the way for the India that is to be in 2020. This niche is however is not to be confused to the real India.
I read Dr. Prahalad’s picture of the pyramid that is India in tandem with the very notion of the “Next 2 Billion”(IFC). While the top 4 Billion population of the world are really the haves, the next 2 billion are the ones that don’t really have. The have-nots. The market is therefore right here with the have-nots. With the ones who sit at the bottom of the pyramid of every country there is. In the parts of the world still being defined as the “developing world”, the size of these have-nots at the bottom is really, really big, and in the case of the developed nations, the real worry is that the size of the niche at the bottom is really growing. Growing thanks due to the recession that hit the developed economies of the world not so long ago.
Sitting under my own Peepul tree, I come up with not one but two pyramids for India. When asked to describe India, I do not use Dr. Prahalad’s One Pyramid. I draw out two on my I-Pad. As an aside, India sure has moved in its symbolism of technology for the people: from the sanitary pad of the 1950’s to the I-Pad of 2010!
I draw two pyramids. One is a small. Another big. The bigger pyramid is three times the size of the smaller one. The big is RURAL and the small is URBAN. On each of these I draw three wedges as segments. The top of the pyramid, the middle and bottom. At the end of the exercise, when I put numbers in the tiers of people, the shocker really is that the size of the Top of the Pyramid in Rural is really 2.6 times the size of the Urban. And the size of the middle of the pyramid is just some 6 times that of the urban, just as the Bottom of the pyramid is just about 2.3 times that of urban.
The point then: BOP is a reality of both urban and rural markets. It really is a myth to look only at rural for the BOP manna that most marketers have rushed to address. There’s more to the concept of BOP than rural alone.
Having said and established that for a start, I do believe that the story of India Inclusive is really all about knitting the BOP into the mainstream that is India and Indian. Marketing to the BOP is both an art and a science. Along with that, and most importantly, its a philosophy. A philosophy that corporate organizations need to ingrain into their DNA.
The most important fact that needs to be bought into is the fact that marketing in the future is all about inclusive approaches and not the old exclusive approaches. In many ways, the concept of the brand and the very definition of brands swim against this new need. The brand in many ways is a premium. A premium that is extracted from the exclusive masses of its consumers. This notion needs to be re-jiggged now. The brand cannot be exclusive to its exclusive masses or niches. The brand needs to belong to all. And belong in an inclusive and all-encompassing manner for sure.
The key question then is whether marketing can change the world. And can marketing change India for a start?
I do believe it can. It can, provided we re-jig the way we look at markets and consumers at large. From the 47 and odd theories I have built in this realm over the last two decades, let me pick three key thoughts then, one each from the realm of the Art, the Science and the Philosophy that is marketing. Key thoughts that will help re-jig marketing at large, and help re-orient the way we want to open the can that is BOP and the can that is India Inclusive in its orientation.
1. The Art of Marketing to the BOP: Gandhian Marketing versus marketing the “Honest Shirt” and the “Toothpaste with Oxygen” in it!
Brand India has seen two kinds of brands emerge over the decades that marketing has touched the nation and its produce. At one end is the brand that is today that of the Mahatma. The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi is the biggest and most recognized brand that represents India internally and overseas. Mahatma Gandhi has emerged to be the most durable brand of them all.
Gandhi-ji never needed to take a full-page ad in the papers saying “Gandhi Shining”. Brand Gandhi happened as a function of the hard and dedicated work he did at the grass-root that is really India. Every action of his that focused on upliftment of the under-privileged, and every icon he gave to India became a durable representation of this ethos. Whether it was Khadi, the Dandi Salt Yatra or non-violence as a means of protest, Gandhi-ji reigns as a thought, even today. Across the world. This was true-blue bottom-up branding. Branding basis hard work at the BOP.
The second and more common marketing format in India today is the format of Top-down marketing. This format is all about taking a shirt and making it honest and taking a television and making it healthy and of course taking the humble tooth-paste and adding Oxygen to it. And around all these offerings, advertising has added further allure. Top-down branding is a format that has touched every segment of the pyramid and still attempts to touch the BOP. Sadly, it does not work here. The BOP is the most intelligent and most untouched-by-hyperbole segment of the Indian economy. This cannot be taken for granted and played with.
If you need to succeed here, simply adopt the Bottom-up-branding ethos. Do a Gandhi on the market, and stop putting Oxygen in the toothpaste instead. The BOP disbelieves advertising fluff and fare more than the de-sensitized marketing-anaesthesiatiszed top of the pyramid market.
When brands finally get to think of the BOP markets in both urban and rural, it is time to put together programs of what I call and practice as “Conscious De-branding”. A process where you sit and peel off the slick and the glib from your brand and advertising offering. Making the brand offering real. As real as the consumer.
2. The Science of Marketing to the BOP: Democratic Distribution systems versus the autocratic Top-down ones at play!
Distribution is a demon in India. Reaching masses of people who live across different terrain and at distances that are difficult to reach with consistency seems a big challenge even today.
The three tenets of a good distribution system are indeed the width of reach, the depth of reach in terms of product and service offerings and the consistency of reach, week after week, if not more frequently.
I do believe there are three types of consumers emerging in India today. The first is a consumer who buys products and services for self-use. For use by the self and family of 4.
The second type of consumer is the one who buys partly for self and partly to distribute. This consumer is 70 per cent consumer and 30 per-cent re-distributor. You find these mostly in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns of India, even today. They make a margin on what they sell and partly defray the costs of what they buy for themselves. These are savvy consumers and savvy business people as well in their own right.
The marketer needs to recognize this consumer and make offerings that are relevant, original and innovative.
The third type of consumer is the one that buys possibly 5% for himself and 95% acting as a re-distributor. I find these in the smallest of villages in India. The most efficient system of reaching out to the land that is India is really this. Millions of entrepreneur-distributors who make a living doing just this. This is a win-win for the marketer and consumer alike. A win-win combination that is totally under-leveraged as of today.
The future of cracking in to the pie that is BOP in both urban and rural is this. This is it!
3. The Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP: Creeping Urbanization versus Creeping Ruralization!
Ever since independence, India has witnessed a creeping and crawling phase where masses of people have morphed from mindsets and consumption sets that were rural to mindsets, which are more aggressively urban. The marketer at large has been responsible for this. The movement that was a crawl became a literal gallop in the early and mid-eighties when Television knitted the nation as one, pumping urban imageries of the modern marketing man in India to rural audiences. Television and all the advertising it carried threw up and pushed down rural throats and stomachs and bladders the urban way of life. In more ways than one, India became an Instant urban society.
This I do believe is an un-doing. An un-doing that needs to be corrected. In many ways marketing is a hegemony in India. The urban-educated and privileged marketer markets to the rural person. Never mind that rural is three times bigger than urban. The imagery that consumers emote with in India today is the urban imagery.
Turn turtle this and emote with real India. Emote with the imagery that is rural. Put a program that is rural in your marketing mix. Go one step further and show your archetypical brand hero in your TV commercials to be the rural person. See what it does. I do believe India is ready to turn-turtle its marketing imagery. The BOP market will admire this. And will certainly reward this effort. With market share. And money. And more than that, consumer affection.
The road ahead for the Inclusive India agenda is an exciting one. Tread it with strategy.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a strategy consulting firm with a presence in the markets of India, SE Asia, UK and Dubai.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Twitter.com/harishbijoor
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Rin Versus Tide
Rin in-the-face
By Harish Bijoor
Is all of Indian advertising getting progressively more and more simple? Are brands getting back to the good old basics?
Colgate is talking the language of white teeth once again. Discarding everything else and very directly, re-discovering the tabletop model of the teeth as well and talking endlessly on the subject of germs hidden in-between teeth, which only Colgate reaches out to.
Nirma is talking dirt-busting capability with its eminently well-created Nirma jingle TV commercial that has dirt freezing in its tracks, quite afraid of the stentorian jingle of Nirma done with pizzazz and pomp. Nirma reinvents for itself its USP and the jingle. Both together.
And now Rin has gone back to a creative piece that re-discovers the joy, the pain and the trauma of comparative advertising.
Good formats and the good old ways seem to never tire in their efficiency scores.
The competitor’s brand to many is a four-letter word. In the case of Rin, it really is a four letter word as well: Tide. The current piece of Rin advertising, which has the brand name Tide repeated many times over, is certainly new, refreshing, in-the-eye and very-very straight.
There are many ways of looking at this creative. Here are just two quick Jekyll and Hyde set of thoughts of mine.
1. This is a very confident piece of advertising. It takes the time-tested route of direct product delivery and capability comparisons. Just as long as your data is independent and reliable, go ahead and do this sort of thing. If Rin had pixilated the brand name and done this, it would seem a trifle under-confident. What works with the consumer is confidence. Go out there and say it confidently if you have your facts right. Regain confidence for your brand and shake the competitors brand confidence index. Make people sit up and question with their eyes. Name the brand outright! Be bold! Take the battle out into the bastion of the competitor’s brand.
2. Hey! This is old hat. This kind of comparative advertising used to work in the good old days when consumers sat up and made purchase decisions basis product attributes and product delivery norms in terms of solutions. Good scent and whiteness are rather both generic to the category. How much ever anyone shouts in messaging such as this, consumers are going to be yawning and saying what next. Consumers hate this kind of relapse into age-old advertising formats that have the same old message of the sixties with the creative ability and excellence of production standards of the 2000’s staring back at them. Wake up and smell the change.
What do I believe in?
I do believe this is a confident piece of advertising. It’s a good one that will have consumers sitting up and take note of a very boring category that has been around since the days of Sunlight and Det. Consumers are voyeuristic in their habits. They will sit up and will want to enjoy the fight. In the boring detergents category, they will surely expect a Tide re-buff ad hitting the airwaves. Later than sooner.
In this summer of detergent-discontent, consumers will watch the fun as it unfolds and will do just what they want. They will take their favorite brand back home for more reasons than product attribute and product delivery reasons alone. They will pick the brand basis the scent of the brand. Basis the language of the brand. Tide Naturals has much to sell in its brand name itself on this count. And the bulk of consumers will buy basis the price of the brand as well. Price, sadly to the chagrin of the marketer and advertiser alike, remains the biggest lowest common denominator nudge point for brand purchase in 'parri passu' categories such as detergents today in India.
The Rin ad is good for the category at large as consumers sit up and watch the fight unfold on their television sets, in the courts, and indeed in the marketplace and homes of the millions of consumers who use these brands.
The current piece of Rin advertising is very clear in its visual language of comparison. There are shots of the competitive brands in the shopping baskets of both the women waiting for their kids. There is the all give-away shot of the boys emerging from the bus, one with the whitest of whites and the other with the creamiest of the creams. And finally there is the comparative half screen of both the brands with Rin winning over Tide. Rin understands the importance of price in this category and brings that in as well, as the round-figure of Rs.25 shouts vocally and visually.
What’s ahead then?
The Rin ad will be pulled off the screens. The fight will move off-screen. Rin would have got its bang for the buck already in terms of brand awareness scores in the initial burst of advertising before pullout. Many will criticize the genre of advertising as being nasty and a bit too nifty. Rebuff ads will follow. And much else will happen. The fun has just begun.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Feedback: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
By Harish Bijoor
Is all of Indian advertising getting progressively more and more simple? Are brands getting back to the good old basics?
Colgate is talking the language of white teeth once again. Discarding everything else and very directly, re-discovering the tabletop model of the teeth as well and talking endlessly on the subject of germs hidden in-between teeth, which only Colgate reaches out to.
Nirma is talking dirt-busting capability with its eminently well-created Nirma jingle TV commercial that has dirt freezing in its tracks, quite afraid of the stentorian jingle of Nirma done with pizzazz and pomp. Nirma reinvents for itself its USP and the jingle. Both together.
And now Rin has gone back to a creative piece that re-discovers the joy, the pain and the trauma of comparative advertising.
Good formats and the good old ways seem to never tire in their efficiency scores.
The competitor’s brand to many is a four-letter word. In the case of Rin, it really is a four letter word as well: Tide. The current piece of Rin advertising, which has the brand name Tide repeated many times over, is certainly new, refreshing, in-the-eye and very-very straight.
There are many ways of looking at this creative. Here are just two quick Jekyll and Hyde set of thoughts of mine.
1. This is a very confident piece of advertising. It takes the time-tested route of direct product delivery and capability comparisons. Just as long as your data is independent and reliable, go ahead and do this sort of thing. If Rin had pixilated the brand name and done this, it would seem a trifle under-confident. What works with the consumer is confidence. Go out there and say it confidently if you have your facts right. Regain confidence for your brand and shake the competitors brand confidence index. Make people sit up and question with their eyes. Name the brand outright! Be bold! Take the battle out into the bastion of the competitor’s brand.
2. Hey! This is old hat. This kind of comparative advertising used to work in the good old days when consumers sat up and made purchase decisions basis product attributes and product delivery norms in terms of solutions. Good scent and whiteness are rather both generic to the category. How much ever anyone shouts in messaging such as this, consumers are going to be yawning and saying what next. Consumers hate this kind of relapse into age-old advertising formats that have the same old message of the sixties with the creative ability and excellence of production standards of the 2000’s staring back at them. Wake up and smell the change.
What do I believe in?
I do believe this is a confident piece of advertising. It’s a good one that will have consumers sitting up and take note of a very boring category that has been around since the days of Sunlight and Det. Consumers are voyeuristic in their habits. They will sit up and will want to enjoy the fight. In the boring detergents category, they will surely expect a Tide re-buff ad hitting the airwaves. Later than sooner.
In this summer of detergent-discontent, consumers will watch the fun as it unfolds and will do just what they want. They will take their favorite brand back home for more reasons than product attribute and product delivery reasons alone. They will pick the brand basis the scent of the brand. Basis the language of the brand. Tide Naturals has much to sell in its brand name itself on this count. And the bulk of consumers will buy basis the price of the brand as well. Price, sadly to the chagrin of the marketer and advertiser alike, remains the biggest lowest common denominator nudge point for brand purchase in 'parri passu' categories such as detergents today in India.
The Rin ad is good for the category at large as consumers sit up and watch the fight unfold on their television sets, in the courts, and indeed in the marketplace and homes of the millions of consumers who use these brands.
The current piece of Rin advertising is very clear in its visual language of comparison. There are shots of the competitive brands in the shopping baskets of both the women waiting for their kids. There is the all give-away shot of the boys emerging from the bus, one with the whitest of whites and the other with the creamiest of the creams. And finally there is the comparative half screen of both the brands with Rin winning over Tide. Rin understands the importance of price in this category and brings that in as well, as the round-figure of Rs.25 shouts vocally and visually.
What’s ahead then?
The Rin ad will be pulled off the screens. The fight will move off-screen. Rin would have got its bang for the buck already in terms of brand awareness scores in the initial burst of advertising before pullout. Many will criticize the genre of advertising as being nasty and a bit too nifty. Rebuff ads will follow. And much else will happen. The fun has just begun.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Feedback: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
Friday, January 02, 2009
Silent selling
Prepare for Silent Selling!
By Harish Bijoor
The on-the-move culture is here. Almost here, if we are to believe the numbers doing the rounds in the more developed parts of the world.
Selling is on the move, it seems. Everybody is on the move. More so now than in the past. There is very little time during the working weekday for anybody to think of a really sedentary life. The day starts in a rush. Breakfast is to be grabbed on the way. There is a Café down the corner that has ready-made-sandwiches for you to grab at as you take your car out of the garage. There is coffee to go as well. You can pick it up at your corner petrol bunk. It’s hot, comes in a neat take-away tumbler and has a thoughtful lip-tip that will not let you scald your tongue!
You carry a mobile on the go. All your transactions happen on it. The U.S. prediction is that by the year 2006, seventy four per cent of mobile users will be mobile Internet users as well. And with the Internet comes every conceivable opportunity of working, entertaining and educating you. Again on the go! Everything you do, every breath you take, and every step you take, will be on the go.
The on-the-go culture is here! Almost! In India as well! Particularly so in the large metropolises that clutter our landscape.
Products, services and their peddlers will therefore have to morph their offerings to cater to the mobile needs of the mobile consumer. Take-away cans of 20 liter petrol sold out of petrol bunks to avoid the long waiting time at these retail points, take-away things to eat, to drink, even take-away things to defecate in (as Japan has actually offered in its super-markets; mobile toilets to bide your time through all those traffic jams)! The take-away culture is here!
Manufacturers and entrepreneurs behind products and services in India, particularly in Urban India, need to focus keenly on the new need of a whole lot of people who will demand for products and services that offer velocity and speed. A burger that will be hot and ready to take-away in a minute, piping hot 'biryani' available as a take-away from a drive-in point, packaged fruits, drinks and ready-snacks that can be grabbed into cars and scooters at street-corners, are going to be offerings that will hold relevance to a whole bunch of people. They will be small in number in the beginning. Their numbers will however grow.
The impatient consumer on the go will have a short span of attention on things that he grabs at junction-points of his busy life. His demand is for high quality at a geographical point of convenience. The 'sandwich-wallah', the Café, the bookstore and retailing enterprises of the kind, need to be at arms length of his desire. If the quality on offer for his brief stint at your retail-point is upto expectation, his franchise will return. Just as long as you keep offering a range of offerings that do not cause for that flavour-fatigue knocking off his custom, you have a life-time value of sandwich buys in your pocket! Don’t forget, this could run into thousands of rupees of business in the long-term!
Plan then for this customer on the go. The guys out there in the Indian marketplace are looking for that quick-grab on-the-go product to accompany them in their busy lives. The clever marketer will address this need and brand it as well. The clever salesman will sell it in his own style.
The salesman of today in the “On-the-go” market will need to be a salesman who is out there at the right place at the right time. A salesman who is going to distinguish his offering more in terms of visual merchandising ability rather than on the merit of the sales spiel he will let loose on the customer. Remember, the customer has no time to listen. He will just look, assess in those nano-seconds it takes for the mind to process visual information vis-à-vis need, want and desire, and pick the product or service he wants to franchise.
This is a quick-generation which has no time to stand and stare. No time for the sales banter. The new era salesman in these markets in a hurry need to customize their sales offerings completely basing the selling strategy on the two counts of location and visual appeal through merchandising and Point of Purchase material. Silent selling then!
If you ask me, this trend is already alive in the large metropolises of India. Particularly in Mumbai, where grabbing a sandwich, a ‘vadaa-pau’ and possibly a sachet of ‘Neera’, is a culture all of its own. Only this time round, the market is skewed towards the yuppie of Corporate India. This guy will not be seen dead grabbing a ‘vadaa-pau’ from an unbranded joint round the corner.
Silent selling with its appeal tags of visual merchandising appeal, hygiene, convenience and Point of Purchase glare, is here to stay. The salesman needs to re-define his abilities, and get silent for a change in these kinds of markets.
And that’s a difficult one!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting firm.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
By Harish Bijoor
The on-the-move culture is here. Almost here, if we are to believe the numbers doing the rounds in the more developed parts of the world.
Selling is on the move, it seems. Everybody is on the move. More so now than in the past. There is very little time during the working weekday for anybody to think of a really sedentary life. The day starts in a rush. Breakfast is to be grabbed on the way. There is a Café down the corner that has ready-made-sandwiches for you to grab at as you take your car out of the garage. There is coffee to go as well. You can pick it up at your corner petrol bunk. It’s hot, comes in a neat take-away tumbler and has a thoughtful lip-tip that will not let you scald your tongue!
You carry a mobile on the go. All your transactions happen on it. The U.S. prediction is that by the year 2006, seventy four per cent of mobile users will be mobile Internet users as well. And with the Internet comes every conceivable opportunity of working, entertaining and educating you. Again on the go! Everything you do, every breath you take, and every step you take, will be on the go.
The on-the-go culture is here! Almost! In India as well! Particularly so in the large metropolises that clutter our landscape.
Products, services and their peddlers will therefore have to morph their offerings to cater to the mobile needs of the mobile consumer. Take-away cans of 20 liter petrol sold out of petrol bunks to avoid the long waiting time at these retail points, take-away things to eat, to drink, even take-away things to defecate in (as Japan has actually offered in its super-markets; mobile toilets to bide your time through all those traffic jams)! The take-away culture is here!
Manufacturers and entrepreneurs behind products and services in India, particularly in Urban India, need to focus keenly on the new need of a whole lot of people who will demand for products and services that offer velocity and speed. A burger that will be hot and ready to take-away in a minute, piping hot 'biryani' available as a take-away from a drive-in point, packaged fruits, drinks and ready-snacks that can be grabbed into cars and scooters at street-corners, are going to be offerings that will hold relevance to a whole bunch of people. They will be small in number in the beginning. Their numbers will however grow.
The impatient consumer on the go will have a short span of attention on things that he grabs at junction-points of his busy life. His demand is for high quality at a geographical point of convenience. The 'sandwich-wallah', the Café, the bookstore and retailing enterprises of the kind, need to be at arms length of his desire. If the quality on offer for his brief stint at your retail-point is upto expectation, his franchise will return. Just as long as you keep offering a range of offerings that do not cause for that flavour-fatigue knocking off his custom, you have a life-time value of sandwich buys in your pocket! Don’t forget, this could run into thousands of rupees of business in the long-term!
Plan then for this customer on the go. The guys out there in the Indian marketplace are looking for that quick-grab on-the-go product to accompany them in their busy lives. The clever marketer will address this need and brand it as well. The clever salesman will sell it in his own style.
The salesman of today in the “On-the-go” market will need to be a salesman who is out there at the right place at the right time. A salesman who is going to distinguish his offering more in terms of visual merchandising ability rather than on the merit of the sales spiel he will let loose on the customer. Remember, the customer has no time to listen. He will just look, assess in those nano-seconds it takes for the mind to process visual information vis-à-vis need, want and desire, and pick the product or service he wants to franchise.
This is a quick-generation which has no time to stand and stare. No time for the sales banter. The new era salesman in these markets in a hurry need to customize their sales offerings completely basing the selling strategy on the two counts of location and visual appeal through merchandising and Point of Purchase material. Silent selling then!
If you ask me, this trend is already alive in the large metropolises of India. Particularly in Mumbai, where grabbing a sandwich, a ‘vadaa-pau’ and possibly a sachet of ‘Neera’, is a culture all of its own. Only this time round, the market is skewed towards the yuppie of Corporate India. This guy will not be seen dead grabbing a ‘vadaa-pau’ from an unbranded joint round the corner.
Silent selling with its appeal tags of visual merchandising appeal, hygiene, convenience and Point of Purchase glare, is here to stay. The salesman needs to re-define his abilities, and get silent for a change in these kinds of markets.
And that’s a difficult one!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting firm.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Indian Brand Trends 2008-2009
Brand 26Eleven and the trends that shaped 2008
By Harish Bijoor
The 26 November, 2008 terror attack and incursions into Indian sovereign civil space by a bunch of Pakistani youngsters with AK 47’s in their hands and terror-indoctrination in their hearts is going to make your Cappuccino more expensive. 26Eleven is going to give a big boost to the security product and security service industry at large. That’s obvious. The advertising you are approached by will change. The theme, tone, tenor and decibel of Indian marketing will change as well. That’s not obvious. Just wait. Just watch.
Everything impacts everything. Every event of our every day life impacts every marketing action there is going to be. I will flag 26Eleven as the one date that is the defining moment that epitomizes the loss of innocence of the Indian marketing man at large. This loss of innocence means a lot. It means that the hospitality sector in India will view everyone who enters its portals as a potential terror threat. If you live in a hotel, you will feel very secure inside from now on. So secure that you will love being viewed as a potential terror threat even. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. The security hackle and mantle, once up, is a forever mantle of cover. The Indian hospitality industry in 5-star space has lost its innocence. Watch this cascade. Watch the dominos push every sector there is. Close or distant, does not matter.
In a sense, you do not have to dig too deep into the gut of the Chaos theory, or even go up the path of the Domino effect and the several theories that abound in this terrain to understand that. Just peek into the trends that shaped our Marketing lives in 2008, and peek further into the crystal ball for 2009, and you have it all. Life changed in 2008. The Marketing man morphed his every appeal to the needs, wants, desires, aspirations and fantasies of Consumer 2008.
Let me then wear my annual trend-spotters hat and paint the picture of the year just gone by. Let me dig and go a little deeper than skin-depth marketing to draw the blood and gore of marketing the way it was in 2008. The trends that shaped Indian marketing.
Public Utility spaces got branded::
Public spaces in India have been typically under-utilized in an organized manner for branding. Gone are the days when companies could actually go berserk painting rocks and walls with their brand messages, at times covering entire mountains with advertising message for a Cola or Condom alike. 2008 saw the emergence of systematic play in the utilization of public utility space. Road stretches got branded inputs. Roads such as the ones that ply between a Chennai-Pondicherry, Mumbai-Pune, Delhi-UP, and more.
Branding opportunities arise in every nook of this space. Glow-signs, translates of every kind, branded restaurants, branded mile-stones (would the cigarette brand want to take that 555 Km milestone just outside of Bangalore that has Hyderabad and its distance listed out there?) Add to it the potential of building brand and brand romance in the roads of yore, such as the Grand trunk Road? Or the great Silk route?
Expect more of this in the years to come. Will a Hazrat Gunj station hold the potential of becoming a “Levi’s Ganj”? And Egmore station, a “Station More”?
Low cost bows out:
Strange but true. The highly visible aviation industry in India led the way. My friend Capt. Gopinath and his friend RK Laxman’s Common Man had to give way to the swish, short and very, very tight red skirts of a Kingfisher and the dreams of the King of Good times. Low-cost in many ways went out with the merger of Air Deccan with Kingfisher and the launch of the Kingfisher Red Service. 2008 saw the death of low-cost and the emergence of the high-value airline instead.
The space Air Deccan vacated is being filled in by a Go-Air and a Spice-Jet. One doesn’t know for how long though. The trend is clear. Low-cost models in aviation space just don’t seem to work. If one looks into the bottom-lines of the airline experiments in this space, one nearly baulks at what might have been termed predatory-pricing tactics in another country altogether.
Singh is King:
Though Mr .Manmohan Singh may not really be the king behind the kingdom that is India, Singh surely was king in many, many ways in 2008. The branding of movies took a new turn. Hindi cinema adopted the tone, tenor, mood, lingo, food, dress and everything else from Punjab. Punjabi cinema and Punjabi lingo went mainstream. The two big hits of the year were certainly “Singh is King” and “Rab De Banaa di Jodi”. While box office collections of the first grossed INR 48 Crores in the first ten days, the ‘Rab de’ option actually notched up INR 60 Crore in the same period. Punjabi lingo became the lingo to use in a Chennai and Kovilpatti alike. Many a discotheque floor across the country used music from every one of these movies to get their floors scorching. In many ways, Hindi cinema did yeoman service to the task of knitting this country together. Race no bar, language no bar, culture no bar, food no bar. At least for now.
IPL did it:
The year saw Lalit Modi’s dream-scape of IPL take off. Skeptics were left behind stunned. So was the rival ICL. Every trick was pulled out of the Pandora’s Box of marketing magic.
5-day cricket played in whites is boring today. For the oldies. One-day cricket played in colors is better, but still not the best. As the attention span of the new generation of Indians shortens, IPL is the best there is to savor in cricket. A short game of 20- overs each.
IPL did one more thing. It removed national jingoism and replaced it with city-jingoism. A Kolkata Knight Riders now vies for attention that is local in a unique manner. Never mind where you live, just as long as you are a Kolkata-fan, you will root for the KKRs.
IPL did one more thing. The multi-country composition of teams has erased International boundaries in one quick stroke of a set of matches of one IPL season. Today, an Australian will root for the Chennai Super Kings just as a person of British origin will root for the Rajasthan Royals. Their players play in it.
The nation kept breathing cricket. The game remained the lowest common denominator that unites the rich, the poor, the partisan and the political. If there is one thing that can pan out as a conversation point across income groups, religious divides, political divides, social divides and divides of every kind, it sure is cricket. And IPL is king!
Security-services see a boom:
The events of 26Eleven got every Tom, Dick and Harish very, very awake. Every hotel of every star category reviewed its security arrangements. Every apartment owner’s association woke up to the threat possibility that looms large on soft-targets as well. IT companies invested in sniffer dogs. The dogs are happy. The demand is big in this space, I hear.
High-end hotels went back to every vendor who had offered superior technology. Sniffer room cards that find and report electronically of traces of petroleum or RDX alike were explored. The demand for electronic surveillance systems is up. Scanners are in short supply, I hear.
Employment booms in this category. Many a BPO cab driver in a Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore is now getting trained to be a security guard. As BPOs lay off operators, they are forced to lay off out-sourced drivers as well. The driver now finds a new avenue.
Advertising morphed:
Advertising rose from an acute clutter of its own making in a remarkable manner. While most brands kept experimenting with theme, some brands went the way of the long-running story. The big idea that was campaignable with a story like format using the same set of anchor actors right through.
Advertising as we see it today can be divided into the tactical promotional pieces that talk of the latest price and the latest gifts that go with the brand. A superior form of this is the advertising that is theme centric. One product story brought to life with a 30 or 60-seconder that established the long term brand proposition. This year, advertisers went one step forward. Airtel experimented with the format of story-advertising. Madhavan and Vidya Balan did cameo roles of the couple on the move. This did Airtel a lot of good. Story replaced the boring single-theme led advertising of last year. Idea Cellular did similar good stuff with its “What an idea, sir-ji’ series. There is a new version every other month. Way to go.
Blank noise. Blank hoardings:
The year saw a lot of these all around. The Outdoor industry is a bell-weather industry. The first signs of recession typically translate themselves onto the visual displays on the hoardings of our cities and towns. The moment you see blank hoardings with messages that advertise numbers and names of the hoarding owners, be sure recession is here. The depth of such recession can be gauged by the width of such blank hoardings.
It works this way. The marketer who is on a cost-cutting spree as he watches his sales volumes and values touching lows such as never before, he chops the advertising budget. And the first one to face the axe is Outdoor. Next comes Point-of-purchase. Simultaneously with that is the cut on TV expenditure. Print falls next.
November saw loads of hoarding spaces looking blank. December has seen a deepening on that. Wonder how January will pan out.
With that point of wonder, let me close this piece. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in the world. The Marketing person, and the other is the Marketed-to person. Whichever you are, wish each one of you a Happy Marketing New year!
Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
By Harish Bijoor
The 26 November, 2008 terror attack and incursions into Indian sovereign civil space by a bunch of Pakistani youngsters with AK 47’s in their hands and terror-indoctrination in their hearts is going to make your Cappuccino more expensive. 26Eleven is going to give a big boost to the security product and security service industry at large. That’s obvious. The advertising you are approached by will change. The theme, tone, tenor and decibel of Indian marketing will change as well. That’s not obvious. Just wait. Just watch.
Everything impacts everything. Every event of our every day life impacts every marketing action there is going to be. I will flag 26Eleven as the one date that is the defining moment that epitomizes the loss of innocence of the Indian marketing man at large. This loss of innocence means a lot. It means that the hospitality sector in India will view everyone who enters its portals as a potential terror threat. If you live in a hotel, you will feel very secure inside from now on. So secure that you will love being viewed as a potential terror threat even. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. The security hackle and mantle, once up, is a forever mantle of cover. The Indian hospitality industry in 5-star space has lost its innocence. Watch this cascade. Watch the dominos push every sector there is. Close or distant, does not matter.
In a sense, you do not have to dig too deep into the gut of the Chaos theory, or even go up the path of the Domino effect and the several theories that abound in this terrain to understand that. Just peek into the trends that shaped our Marketing lives in 2008, and peek further into the crystal ball for 2009, and you have it all. Life changed in 2008. The Marketing man morphed his every appeal to the needs, wants, desires, aspirations and fantasies of Consumer 2008.
Let me then wear my annual trend-spotters hat and paint the picture of the year just gone by. Let me dig and go a little deeper than skin-depth marketing to draw the blood and gore of marketing the way it was in 2008. The trends that shaped Indian marketing.
Public Utility spaces got branded::
Public spaces in India have been typically under-utilized in an organized manner for branding. Gone are the days when companies could actually go berserk painting rocks and walls with their brand messages, at times covering entire mountains with advertising message for a Cola or Condom alike. 2008 saw the emergence of systematic play in the utilization of public utility space. Road stretches got branded inputs. Roads such as the ones that ply between a Chennai-Pondicherry, Mumbai-Pune, Delhi-UP, and more.
Branding opportunities arise in every nook of this space. Glow-signs, translates of every kind, branded restaurants, branded mile-stones (would the cigarette brand want to take that 555 Km milestone just outside of Bangalore that has Hyderabad and its distance listed out there?) Add to it the potential of building brand and brand romance in the roads of yore, such as the Grand trunk Road? Or the great Silk route?
Expect more of this in the years to come. Will a Hazrat Gunj station hold the potential of becoming a “Levi’s Ganj”? And Egmore station, a “Station More”?
Low cost bows out:
Strange but true. The highly visible aviation industry in India led the way. My friend Capt. Gopinath and his friend RK Laxman’s Common Man had to give way to the swish, short and very, very tight red skirts of a Kingfisher and the dreams of the King of Good times. Low-cost in many ways went out with the merger of Air Deccan with Kingfisher and the launch of the Kingfisher Red Service. 2008 saw the death of low-cost and the emergence of the high-value airline instead.
The space Air Deccan vacated is being filled in by a Go-Air and a Spice-Jet. One doesn’t know for how long though. The trend is clear. Low-cost models in aviation space just don’t seem to work. If one looks into the bottom-lines of the airline experiments in this space, one nearly baulks at what might have been termed predatory-pricing tactics in another country altogether.
Singh is King:
Though Mr .Manmohan Singh may not really be the king behind the kingdom that is India, Singh surely was king in many, many ways in 2008. The branding of movies took a new turn. Hindi cinema adopted the tone, tenor, mood, lingo, food, dress and everything else from Punjab. Punjabi cinema and Punjabi lingo went mainstream. The two big hits of the year were certainly “Singh is King” and “Rab De Banaa di Jodi”. While box office collections of the first grossed INR 48 Crores in the first ten days, the ‘Rab de’ option actually notched up INR 60 Crore in the same period. Punjabi lingo became the lingo to use in a Chennai and Kovilpatti alike. Many a discotheque floor across the country used music from every one of these movies to get their floors scorching. In many ways, Hindi cinema did yeoman service to the task of knitting this country together. Race no bar, language no bar, culture no bar, food no bar. At least for now.
IPL did it:
The year saw Lalit Modi’s dream-scape of IPL take off. Skeptics were left behind stunned. So was the rival ICL. Every trick was pulled out of the Pandora’s Box of marketing magic.
5-day cricket played in whites is boring today. For the oldies. One-day cricket played in colors is better, but still not the best. As the attention span of the new generation of Indians shortens, IPL is the best there is to savor in cricket. A short game of 20- overs each.
IPL did one more thing. It removed national jingoism and replaced it with city-jingoism. A Kolkata Knight Riders now vies for attention that is local in a unique manner. Never mind where you live, just as long as you are a Kolkata-fan, you will root for the KKRs.
IPL did one more thing. The multi-country composition of teams has erased International boundaries in one quick stroke of a set of matches of one IPL season. Today, an Australian will root for the Chennai Super Kings just as a person of British origin will root for the Rajasthan Royals. Their players play in it.
The nation kept breathing cricket. The game remained the lowest common denominator that unites the rich, the poor, the partisan and the political. If there is one thing that can pan out as a conversation point across income groups, religious divides, political divides, social divides and divides of every kind, it sure is cricket. And IPL is king!
Security-services see a boom:
The events of 26Eleven got every Tom, Dick and Harish very, very awake. Every hotel of every star category reviewed its security arrangements. Every apartment owner’s association woke up to the threat possibility that looms large on soft-targets as well. IT companies invested in sniffer dogs. The dogs are happy. The demand is big in this space, I hear.
High-end hotels went back to every vendor who had offered superior technology. Sniffer room cards that find and report electronically of traces of petroleum or RDX alike were explored. The demand for electronic surveillance systems is up. Scanners are in short supply, I hear.
Employment booms in this category. Many a BPO cab driver in a Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore is now getting trained to be a security guard. As BPOs lay off operators, they are forced to lay off out-sourced drivers as well. The driver now finds a new avenue.
Advertising morphed:
Advertising rose from an acute clutter of its own making in a remarkable manner. While most brands kept experimenting with theme, some brands went the way of the long-running story. The big idea that was campaignable with a story like format using the same set of anchor actors right through.
Advertising as we see it today can be divided into the tactical promotional pieces that talk of the latest price and the latest gifts that go with the brand. A superior form of this is the advertising that is theme centric. One product story brought to life with a 30 or 60-seconder that established the long term brand proposition. This year, advertisers went one step forward. Airtel experimented with the format of story-advertising. Madhavan and Vidya Balan did cameo roles of the couple on the move. This did Airtel a lot of good. Story replaced the boring single-theme led advertising of last year. Idea Cellular did similar good stuff with its “What an idea, sir-ji’ series. There is a new version every other month. Way to go.
Blank noise. Blank hoardings:
The year saw a lot of these all around. The Outdoor industry is a bell-weather industry. The first signs of recession typically translate themselves onto the visual displays on the hoardings of our cities and towns. The moment you see blank hoardings with messages that advertise numbers and names of the hoarding owners, be sure recession is here. The depth of such recession can be gauged by the width of such blank hoardings.
It works this way. The marketer who is on a cost-cutting spree as he watches his sales volumes and values touching lows such as never before, he chops the advertising budget. And the first one to face the axe is Outdoor. Next comes Point-of-purchase. Simultaneously with that is the cut on TV expenditure. Print falls next.
November saw loads of hoarding spaces looking blank. December has seen a deepening on that. Wonder how January will pan out.
With that point of wonder, let me close this piece. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in the world. The Marketing person, and the other is the Marketed-to person. Whichever you are, wish each one of you a Happy Marketing New year!
Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
Sunday, December 28, 2008
CSR and marketing in India
There is a little bit of CSR……..in my hair!
By Harish Bijoor
If I am to simplify all of life with a perspective that is distinctly marketing oriented, there are just two types of people in the world. A small set of marketing people on one side, and a whole large set of people being marketed-to at the other end!
Peek keenly at any person you know. Either she is a marketing person marketing a product, a service, a dream or even a desire to someone else, or is a person who is being marketed to all the time by the marketer at large!
Marketing is therefore a people-centric process. And just as long as it remains that, and just as long as man loves living in a society of his making, CSR is going to remain a big buzz-word for the future ahead! CSR remains a very relevant strategic marketing tool for the amorphous future ahead of us!
In these long years of being around in the great Indian marketplace, I have seen marketing morph in its ideals. In the beginning, there was the product and the service. Both had to be reached out to the customer in the marketplace. This was also a day and age when everything was in short supply. The demand was big. The marketer performed his role as a mere transporter of the goods to the arms length convenience of the hungry consumer. These were the days when you had to wait 6 years on a waiting list to buy a 'Vespa' scooter and in a longer still queue to possess that sturdy black telephone instrument in your drawing room!
Marketers in this day and age had a simple goal. Distribute. Distribute with equity where possible. Be fair. Appear to be fair as well!
Life changed dramatically. In enters the era of plenty. Plenty of products and services! Enough to come out of your ears and everywhere else! Competition is sharp! The marketer morphs from his old attitude in such an environment. He becomes consumer savvy. He offers not only the product, but a superior degree of service to go with it. He offers customer experience and delight that becomes the brand in itself!
We live in such a competitive marketing era. There are just too many marketing people around. Just too many with all the boring ideas around. Everyone has been to the same marketing school (if not the same type) and comes out with the same set of ideas to go to market! And everyone fails! Parri passu marketing does not work!
In such an environment of parri passu marketing, time to think different. Time to think of a new tool to use! CSR is a great one! If used sensibly and with the sensitivity it deserves!
Three Marketing Formats:
Let me offer a theory I propound extensively.
There are simply three marketing formats to follow in a society as it morphs. In the early stage, society is all about “I, me, myself”! At this stage in consumer societal evolution, the marketer gets away using the language of hedonism and pleasure. The “I, me, myself” kind of product and service works well. The ‘Axe’ effect works here!
And then there is the stage when the consumer has gone beyond that basic stage. He is now concerned about the people around him. His loved ones. His family of four. His extended family of four more, mother, father, father-in-law and mother-in-law, last to be included!
This kind of man likes brands to be inclusive in their language, tone and tenor. This kind of man wants products that are good for the entire family! Never mind the rest of society, just as long his close-knitted family is taken care of, he is fine! The 'Annapurna' atta story works here!
And then there is man who is more conscious of more people around him. This is the kind of guy who is bothered about the good of his immediate neighborhood and society! He wants his entire neighborhood to be happy! The ‘Lifebuoy’ “clean the neighborhood” story works here!
There is macro-man then. This is the kind of person who wants the good of his immediate society and his entire planet. This is the kind of guy who wants to use bio-based detergents that don’t hurt the eco-system! The ‘Surf Excel’ “Do bucket paani bachana hai” theme works here!
And finally there is Cosmos man! Concerned about the cosmos, much of which he does not know even! We are yet to get there!
CSR works at every level. CSR is an inclusive process! A process that embraces the good of society in a very inclusive manner. This inclusiveness could start at the level of the immediate family and morph on to embrace the entire Cosmos.
CSR plays a vital role in taking commercial brands out into the commercial marketplace with a theme that is appealing to the sense and sensibility of the modern consumer. CSR is therefore a valuable tool that marketers can use to market their brand of soap, detergent, sugar and tea with equal panache and commercial effectiveness.
CSR is not at all about running public hospitals and schools alone. CSR is not about sending Tsunami relief material to the trouble spots of the world. That is old hat! It is much more! The modern consumer understands CSR that much more intimately when you touch his life, with a wee bit of CSR in your soap. A wee bit in your shampoo! In your kids diapers and feminine hygiene products as well!
The future of marketing is full of CSR! Of a different kind!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
By Harish Bijoor
If I am to simplify all of life with a perspective that is distinctly marketing oriented, there are just two types of people in the world. A small set of marketing people on one side, and a whole large set of people being marketed-to at the other end!
Peek keenly at any person you know. Either she is a marketing person marketing a product, a service, a dream or even a desire to someone else, or is a person who is being marketed to all the time by the marketer at large!
Marketing is therefore a people-centric process. And just as long as it remains that, and just as long as man loves living in a society of his making, CSR is going to remain a big buzz-word for the future ahead! CSR remains a very relevant strategic marketing tool for the amorphous future ahead of us!
In these long years of being around in the great Indian marketplace, I have seen marketing morph in its ideals. In the beginning, there was the product and the service. Both had to be reached out to the customer in the marketplace. This was also a day and age when everything was in short supply. The demand was big. The marketer performed his role as a mere transporter of the goods to the arms length convenience of the hungry consumer. These were the days when you had to wait 6 years on a waiting list to buy a 'Vespa' scooter and in a longer still queue to possess that sturdy black telephone instrument in your drawing room!
Marketers in this day and age had a simple goal. Distribute. Distribute with equity where possible. Be fair. Appear to be fair as well!
Life changed dramatically. In enters the era of plenty. Plenty of products and services! Enough to come out of your ears and everywhere else! Competition is sharp! The marketer morphs from his old attitude in such an environment. He becomes consumer savvy. He offers not only the product, but a superior degree of service to go with it. He offers customer experience and delight that becomes the brand in itself!
We live in such a competitive marketing era. There are just too many marketing people around. Just too many with all the boring ideas around. Everyone has been to the same marketing school (if not the same type) and comes out with the same set of ideas to go to market! And everyone fails! Parri passu marketing does not work!
In such an environment of parri passu marketing, time to think different. Time to think of a new tool to use! CSR is a great one! If used sensibly and with the sensitivity it deserves!
Three Marketing Formats:
Let me offer a theory I propound extensively.
There are simply three marketing formats to follow in a society as it morphs. In the early stage, society is all about “I, me, myself”! At this stage in consumer societal evolution, the marketer gets away using the language of hedonism and pleasure. The “I, me, myself” kind of product and service works well. The ‘Axe’ effect works here!
And then there is the stage when the consumer has gone beyond that basic stage. He is now concerned about the people around him. His loved ones. His family of four. His extended family of four more, mother, father, father-in-law and mother-in-law, last to be included!
This kind of man likes brands to be inclusive in their language, tone and tenor. This kind of man wants products that are good for the entire family! Never mind the rest of society, just as long his close-knitted family is taken care of, he is fine! The 'Annapurna' atta story works here!
And then there is man who is more conscious of more people around him. This is the kind of guy who is bothered about the good of his immediate neighborhood and society! He wants his entire neighborhood to be happy! The ‘Lifebuoy’ “clean the neighborhood” story works here!
There is macro-man then. This is the kind of person who wants the good of his immediate society and his entire planet. This is the kind of guy who wants to use bio-based detergents that don’t hurt the eco-system! The ‘Surf Excel’ “Do bucket paani bachana hai” theme works here!
And finally there is Cosmos man! Concerned about the cosmos, much of which he does not know even! We are yet to get there!
CSR works at every level. CSR is an inclusive process! A process that embraces the good of society in a very inclusive manner. This inclusiveness could start at the level of the immediate family and morph on to embrace the entire Cosmos.
CSR plays a vital role in taking commercial brands out into the commercial marketplace with a theme that is appealing to the sense and sensibility of the modern consumer. CSR is therefore a valuable tool that marketers can use to market their brand of soap, detergent, sugar and tea with equal panache and commercial effectiveness.
CSR is not at all about running public hospitals and schools alone. CSR is not about sending Tsunami relief material to the trouble spots of the world. That is old hat! It is much more! The modern consumer understands CSR that much more intimately when you touch his life, with a wee bit of CSR in your soap. A wee bit in your shampoo! In your kids diapers and feminine hygiene products as well!
The future of marketing is full of CSR! Of a different kind!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
The Media Industry must not create Hara-kiri!
Media Must Not Commit Hara-kiri!
By Harish Bijoor
Media must not kill itself.
As I watch the evolution of media over the last several years, I worry for it. I worry hard as I watch the routes primary mediums seem to want to adopt in contemporary
Let me trace this story of a worry that haunts me through an examination of what I peek at when I look at the trends in the evolution of the mediums I have loved and used to commercial brand advantage so much all these years. Televsion, Press, Radio and the unconventional medium included!
The Evolution:
Communication and the want to communicate is possibly one of the oldest of the desires of man. Food, clothing, shelter, sex and the desire to communicate…..in that order for a start! At least I would like to believe that!
In the very beginning, the best form of communication is seen to be the 1:1 form! The earliest form of it all, where one individual meets another. Adam meets Eve. Communicates. Communication in the earliest forms we know of could be visual, verbal, aural or can be of any form that straddles sensory communicative ability! Seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, feeling, talking and hearing are indeed all forms.
The 1:1 form of communication is possibly the strongest form we have in terms of delivery efficacy! It is direct and personal. It has the ability to establish an instant rapport between the communicator and the one being communicated to. It is two-way as well! It provides for the ability of the communicator to cogently understand the needs, wants and desires of the person being communicated to.
But 1:1 communication is difficult at times. When communication of this form gets difficult to maintain, man evolves the next best form. 1:Many! In this form, the communicator is one and the communiqué is dished out to thousands of people. The local Press and the avatar of FM Radio as we know it today are possibly good examples of this form. There is still some semblance of localization maintained in the process. There is still some customization of appeal. This is mostly one-way. The communicator, at best, can use the process of extrapolatative market research to arrive at what the consumer wants and desires.
1: Many then morphs into the 1: Very-Many form. This is the form best represented by National Network television. One message dished out to the entire country with little or no customization at all! This form of communication is that much more divorced from local needs as any. Communication is dished out keeping the masses in mind, and there is indeed a lowest-common denominator being appealed to!
And then there is the 1:Too Many type! Fox News dishing out its American fare to the entire world is possibly a great example!
The final frontier will be breached when we are able to advertise on the moon. The vision of 2020! You take a moonlit walk with your beloved, look up to the moon, and there is an advertising message staring back at you: “The moon, brought to you by Coca Cola”! This indeed would be the final form. 1: All!
Many of us will go through all these forms of communication in our very lifetime! The point: media morphs! When one form gets inefficient and unable to deliver, a new form appears. The new form is not necessarily the best in terms of efficacy, but is certainly the best in terms of reach! Not the best in terms of impact, but certainly the best in terms of reach!
The evolution of media has largely been reach-centric. Everything else has been sacrificed on the way!
Things Gone Wrong:
As we have traversed the evolutionary process of mediums, from 1: 1 to the mythical 1: All media-fantasizers dream of, there are several things that have gone wrong on the way! There is one big worry I will focus on in this piece.
The one big thing mediums have for themselves is the fact that they are trusted mediums that disseminate content.
Right in the beginning, the medium emerges as a completely content-oriented form. Look at the first newspapers that hit the stands. The idea is content. The newspaper is the purveyor of content.
The first set of readers adopt the publication of their choice based on content. Content that is presented cogently and content that is presented with integrity. It is indeed content that shapes the medium and its readership. As readership builds up, the publication is successful in literally building a community of people who would swear by the publication for what it carries. The publication represents community interest and becomes a representative of the collective aspirations, needs and wants of its readers. Many a time, this very content is crafted with care taking into consideration its set of captive readers. This truly is the newspaper that understands its customers and delivers to them what they want.
As circulation numbers climb, there is a direct correlation between the increase in advertising among publications of all types. As more and more readers franchise a paper, the advertising side of the paper tends to deepen. And rightly so. No complaints here.
The evolutionary trend here is however worrisome. Publications at times tend to show a trend to keep increasing the advertising side of the paper at the detriment of content. What started as a 100 per cent content publication metamorphoses into an 80 per cent content and 20 per cent advertising 'avatar'. The end point in this game is however reached when advertising tends to weigh equally in page numbers as content does. No complaints thus far as well!
The complaints start coming when the publication in question starts leveraging its content to stay in tune with the needs, wants and desires of its advertisers rather than the needs, wants and desires of its readers! Many a publication traverses this terrain. And this is the big worry!
The reader of the publication is the guinea pig. How long will this pig remain a pig? Not very long really!
Every medium, whether in the terrain of the medium of television, press or radio is guilty of this trend. Time to correct the trajectory before it is too late!
The very credibility of mediums is in doubt. Let us remember that the very primary franchise of mediums is based on content. The franchisee of the medium adopts the channel, the newspaper brand or his FM channel of choice based on content and what it offers. As the years go by, if the user actually senses a lack of commitment on the part of the medium, the vehicle will be distrusted.
The very goose that lays the golden eggs for media houses is up on judgment. The more individual mediums leverage on advertising and bring every form of it in the guise of creative advertising executions amidst the form of content and at times well within it even, the more is the damage being done!
I want to trust my television channel. I watch it for content! I believe it offers me content that packs in integrity! I believe it will not do me wrong! I believe in what is offered on it! I swear by it! I will speak about it to others and increase its viewership! I am the simple consumer!
As advertising makes its way on the channel of my favour, I will trust the advertising equally. I will vest onto the advertising the positive cues I reserve for the channel. I will trust the advertising. I will even believe that the channel of my favour will not carry advertising that lacks integrity. I am the simple consumer!
As days go by and as I watch a lack of discretion in allowing in intrusive advertising on to the medium, I will start wondering whether my channel has it all right! As I keep to the franchise and as I see a lot of advertising finding its way into the content part of the channel, subliminal and overt, I worry more! I am still the simple consumer!
I keep watching my favorite channel. Till one day I discover that my favorite channel dishes out content that is not entirely above-board in terms of mixing advertising with content. I worry and distrust seeps in. I am still the simple consumer. I become cynical. I distrust the channel. I distrust all advertising on it as well!
The channel has taken it a bit too far. The channel has traversed from a 100 per cent content integrity channel to a cusp of the content and advertising. I am at times unable to discern what drives the channel more. The advertising or the content? The viewer of the advertiser?
As mediums get more and more driven by the advertiser, we need to worry. Time to re-jig our act. Remember, content drives it all! Also remember, the consumer drives this movement. Not the advertiser! Lets re-jig it all!
We owe it to our collective future!
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, a private-label consulting firm with a presence in the markets of
Email responses to: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The indian Economy and competitiveness
On Being Competitive
By Harish Bijoor
Marketing is too important to be left to marketing people!
Ouch! That hurts! But that is the reality of the future for sure.
Are you gearing up for change? Are you concerned about being competitive in the long term? Time to re-think the line. Marketing is too important to be left to marketing people.
Marketing is therefore the key concern of every Tom, Dick and Harish in your organization. It should be. From the CEO to the ‘chaprasi’ at the door, marketing is a ubiquitous fetish to adopt and cherish for the future ahead of us.
Firstly, marketing is all encompassing. It is about all of us in the business of life itself. Not a moment goes without the need of a marketing intervention. From the early morning cup of coffee to the late night tryst at the potty, marketing intervenes every moment of our lives. We can’t live without it. It is a part of our lives and indeed a part of our psyche at large.
Never mind then whether the man at hand is an entity urban or an entity rural, the needs are largely the same. The same set of bellies and bladders that crave for food and drink and the same set of teeth that crave that brush with hygiene early in the morning.
Marketing is therefore about every one of us. It is all encompassing. Marketing therefore needs to be inclusive. Inclusive about all our needs and inclusive about every one in the chain that contributes today and have the potential of contributing tomorrow.
Marketing is about competition then. The day of the early-mover-marketing is over. In comes the day and age of the mature market. The mature market where top-lines are under threat to the oldest marketed categories of them all. Consumers have live din these categories pretty loyally for long enough. There is a huge need and want to move to the better product and the better price. Marketers are hastening this process further.
As marketers cut prices, one in tandem with another, bottom-line profits become thinner and thinner. The vain quest for the top-line is hurting the bottom line no end. As all of this happens and the premium of the brand, built assiduously over all these years vanished, the concept of branding itself is in question.
The markets are therefore drying up. The early marketers of the day did his job pretty well. The marketer of the day is however finding it tough to go forward. The future is all about a competitive context that is different. A competitive context that needs to be understood carefully before planning a foray that is different.
As traditional markets dry up, time to look at the new. Look at the standard process the Indian marketer has adopted over the years. Step one was into the nascent urban market. Pluck the low hanging fruit of urban first. Pluck then the higher handing fruit of urban. Go then to the low hanging fruit of rural (43 million homes). And then into rural that is just about developing (90 million homes).
The only reality out there is competition. Marketers of the day face competition in one of the following four formats.
The competitive advantage of
If I am to look around the nations of the world and correlate models in current use, there are four distinct patterns that emerge. Four clusters that have whole sets of nations congregating in models those seem to work for each of them differently and with different levels of efficacy. Needless to say, the peculiarities of each nation in question dictate the distinct choice they have made for themselves. Let’s visit the clusters. And let’s call them all kinds of animal names.
1. The Earthworm Model:
The passive model of competitive reaction. The invitation theory that is best practiced by the earthworm. A rich worm really. It knows the basics best. It is in constant touch with the earth that it seeks nourishment from and nourishes back simultaneously. A fundamentally strong being.
Several problems in this model though. It is passive for one. Non-reactionary. A model in the self-fulfilling prophecy mode. The best example of the fatalistic theory in practice. When faced with danger, all it can do is continue its humble journey in the earth. Competition kills this model with ease. There is no reaction. The fatalistic model of competition at its best!
Is Indian marketing here?
2. The Snail model:
The common competitive model in practice by a whole host of nations. This model is reactively proactive. A clear cocoon orientation. When faced with competition and danger, there is a regression into the shell. The withdrawn marketer at play. The philosopher marketer even! The marketer who revels in the safety-static nexus. Waiting for the competition to just go away, so that normal life may resume again!
Is Indian marketing here?
3. The Porcupine Model:
This model tells the competitor clearly of the array of weapons that are available for retributive action. There is a clear emphasis on the display of the arsenal. It believes in the overt display. A clear détente model of competition. Avoids a lot of speculative action and is ready for the real battle
Is Indian marketing here?
4. The Everyone Else Model:
This is the model of the real-time player in competitive markets of the present and certainly the future. This is the real-time marketer. Reactive when necessary. Proactive when necessary. Guerilla in tactics when necessary as well!
This is a constant-change oriented model that believes in watching the scenario carefully and reacting accordingly. Making forays into proactive territory on a speculative basis. Never mind if even only one of those sixteen forays actually click! Life in the fast track of competitive marketing is pretty un-predictable and speculative. Change here is absolutely discontinuous. Making a decision on a point of competitive strategy based on happenings of the past and the present could be disastrous. The future never ever happens the way the past decided.
Change here is so discontinuous that it is aptly illustrated by the example of the baby-arrival process in the house. The first child in this baby-boomers house is born out of a Caesarian section, gone in for by an over-zealous gynecologist. The second baby of the house is therefore predictably to be one out of a similar process. Caesarian section! No! It isn’t. Change is discontinuous. The second baby is a natural birth! The third child is due to happen then. This time round, its Caesarian section as well! Oops!
The fourth child of this baby-happy home is due. Change is indeed discontinuous. There is no predictability here. Guess what! This time round, the baby is actually conceived, carried and delivered by the father of the baby! Oops! Again! Change is indeed that discontinuous!
Shouldn’t Indian marketing be here?
The British left
The one big strength that less than one other nation in the world can stake its claim to, is the size of the population that rests within the boundaries of our country. A huge weakness of gigantic proportions when viewed from the many development-oriented periscopes of the past. Not so when you view it with the future in mind. A future that is energized by these very large masses of people who have been the biggest liability for the nation of a billion plus!
The past viewed people as a liability. Not enough physical work to go round, not enough food to eat and of course not enough education to ventilate around. Every bit of progress that development achieved was sacrificed very, very quickly (possibly even before the economist was able to record and publish the feat), at the altar of population and its rather robust pace of growth.
While every sector of the economy did reasonably well in bits and patches over the last hundred years, so did the sector of population growth. Stretched food resources, stressed out finances, a pathetic situation on the physical infrastructure front and a complete lack of positive momentum represented the development of the last hundred years in
Not so anymore. Not in the hundred years ahead of us. One of the biggest assets of marketing-based
Think of a product. Think of a service. Think of a want. Think of a need. The biggest and the best of them will linger in the land that is
But then, people are not the only need of a consumer market. Consumption is certainly not the only key to unlock the riches of a marketing man’s Pandora’s box. Money somehow seems to be the real key. More money in these many hands, more the consumption. But then, is the money around?
While the pessimists answer to the question will say that men without money or men without the means to make the money, are of no use to marketing and its future, the fact remains that there is a value in the market that has a huge potential. A potential that can well nigh break open huge values in the times to come.
Let’s just remember one thing.
There is therefore a pyramid of consumption that lies all over the slopes of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. But then, everybody, rich or poor, has fallen within the confines of this pyramid. And just as long as they do, there is indeed potential for a robust market for commodities, quasi-brands, brands, super-brands and of course at the ultimate level of the self-actualizing folk, no brands at all!
Every one of these segments has a value though. And in value rests the potential for the marketer. The one big true-blue competitive advantage for
Time to change the paradigm of
The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label thought-leadership outfit with a presence in the markets of
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