Emergence of the New Cool

For some time now, we have been all taught that to be competitive is a real cool thing. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that. Our worship of competitive spirit keeps us charged, gets our adrenaline glands active, helps us test the boundary of human potential in sports, academics, business and makes authors of books on the topic really wealthy.

Trouble brews when we push that spirit too far and start playing zero sum games. That gets too much blood on the street, adrenaline pumps so hard that the heart gives in, and people do things in business that can now be called the Enron or the Worldcom effect, immortalizing relatively insignificant names such as Sarbanes and Oxley.

When I look back on 2006, I can see a year when getting too competitive started appearing uncool. Early in the year, a new book started appearing in the hand of every business executive trying to impress the boss. It is a simple and common sensical book with the title Blue Ocean Strategy. The mild but certain wave against over-competition manifested itself in what I believe is the new cool – collaboration. Collaboration is not on the surface of the stream yet; but if you look deep, you can see the strong undercurrent.

It’s not as if people and companies did not collaborate in the past; but somehow 2006 was different.

Client-Agency Collaboration

After years of clients trying to push down agency remuneration, I saw many clients in 2006 re-think. Result, the remuneration market has started to harden. Progressive clients have always believed that when you throw peanuts, you get monkeys. In 2006, I saw many clients starting to practice that belief. Now they believe in paying well and expect good counsel. Many have started treating the agency as equals and seating them at the marketing strategy table early on. Fewer clients are interacting with the media owners directly just for kicks. Net, the air of suspicion and distrust that has shrouded the client-agency relationship over last few years, has begun to clear. Fewer clients now take pleasure in calling a dozen agencies for a pitch, or getting the agencies to work on hypothetical, speculative assignments.

Agency-Media Owner Collaboration

Many people believe that there is no relationship more adversarial than the buyer-seller relationship. Both know they need each other; but quite often circumstances encourage them into thinking that they can perhaps do without each other. That’s why there is sometimes a sinister ring to the word ‘negotiation’. Having played the cat-and-mouse game for nearly a decade now, 2006 saw many examples of ‘let’s do something exciting together’ discussions rather than the ‘let me steal something from you’ type. This is one of the reasons why embedded marketing and advertiser funded programming gained currency during the year. And smart media owners started getting less irritated by the term ‘innovation’ when uttered by agency buyers. Smart agencies realize that media owners have more to give than just time or space and that has given a new dimension to collaboration.

Agency-Agency Collaboration

I forget whether technically 2006 was the year of the pitch fee debate or 2005, but it was certainly a hot topic for most part of the year. I am not discussing the relative merit of the concept here, but it did reflect a push back from agencies against pitch-happy clients. Privately and semi-privately, agencies have started collaborating on alerting each other on naughty clients, super-flirtatious employees, and game-playing media owners. There were some attempts to explore ways to resolve the talent crisis faced by the industry.

Media Owner-Media Owner Collaboration

Who would have thought the TOI and HT would ever join hands? But they did…first in Mumbai in shared printing services and then in Delhi to actually launch a joint title. There were many less visible examples of this newfound brotherhood in 2006- classical rivals finding strains of friendship in each other.

Marketer-Marketer Collaboration

Remember Coke and Pepsi joining hands to fight off the pesticide battle? They are not the only ones. More marketers are collaborating between themselves now than ever, redefining the meaning of competition. They are doing it in manufacturing, marketing, and even human resource management. Quite often, many of our clients ask us to introduce them to other clients, so that they can find mutual areas of collaboration.

Some cynics might say collaboration was always there. Others might claim not to see it even now. To me, never has the undercurrent been more prominent than in 2006. Does that mean, competition is dead? No way. But in a networked world, as social scientists say, there are no permanent friends nor any permanent foes. Whether you name this trend ‘coopetition’ or anything else, it is there for us to recognize and use. There will still be a few of us who will swear by competitive spirit alone. I can only wish them well in a brave new world.

[Published in IMPACT Jan 2007 issue]

The End of Pregnancy for Point of Interaction Communication.

Or why In-Store Media is the big undercurrent of 2006.

Over fours ago, I remember having included an interesting media option called Q-jam in a recommendation to a client targeting young people. Q-Jam is a networked jukebox that was then being installed in recreation outlets such as Café Coffee Day by a Chennai headquartered technology based marketing solutions company called Real Image. Users could play the song of their choice for a small charge and advertisers could insert their commercials and custom promotions between songs and on the menu. The recommendation did not go through because it was ‘ahead of its time’. Earlier this year, the folks from Real Image came and made a presentation to us at Starcom on Q-Jam and other services of theirs and I do not remember any of us talking about ‘ahead of time’.

As I reminisce on 2006, this is what appeals to me the highpoint of the year. It’s a bit like being in 1992 when the satellite television came or in 1996, when mobile telephony was launched. To me, when in 5-6 years, we all look back at how retailing and in-store communications has grown in India, we will realize that 2006 was the defining year.

It’s not as if retailing was new news to us by itself. We have all heard of Shopper’s Stop, Crosswords, Vijay Sales, Vivek’s, Subhiksha, Music World, Planet M, Agrani Switch, Crossroads, Barista, Heera Panna, Palika Bazaar, Apna Bazaar, Super Bazaar. And of course the mammoth and revolutionary Pantaloon Retail Group, now better known as the Future Group. But what makes 2006 very interesting is that big name gladiators are finally jumping into the game in full armour. Reliance, Bharti, Goenka, Birla, Munjal, Tata. Add to the list Godrej, Levers, ITC and that together between these, they will alter the way we buy is no longer in doubt. Finally, after nearly a half a decade of claiming that retail is the next sunrise sector, the sun is about to rise.

Modern retailing will have many influences on the way we make marketing and communications decisions. One of the more significant ones that will get all us excited and worried over the next few years will be in-store communication, or my colleague Kaushik Chakravorty calls ‘last 3-minute’ communication. Real Image now offers their digital point-of-sale advertising service Q-sign. Kolkata based Flash Media announced offering a memory-card based advertising option earlier this year across Shopper Stop outlets. Later in the year, a Bangalore based company called Tag Media Network started testing in-store advertising with original content and advertiser funded programming, across Spencers stores, mainly in South India. In October, the Future Group announced the obvious, starting of their own captive in-store media company – Future Media, headed by a Times Group stalwart – Partho Dasgupta. With dozens of own stores in all kinds of formats and growing rapidly, Future Media is expected to deliver a powerful retail level marketing solution to marketers. Another big news came towards the end of the year – Focus Media of China entering India under the guidance of the venerable Mr. Ishan Raina.

Some of us may choose to see this as another fad. I see a strong undercurrent. Will classical media such as television the way we know it die? Not really. But we need to re-assess our expectations from them and re-evaluate the way we use them and measure their efficacy. At Starcom, we are convinced that the single scarcest resource in marketing tomorrow will consumer attention and marketing practitioners will be evaluated on how well we attract and retain that precious resource. We will need to realize that attention will increasingly come in small measures. We will need to develop new knowledge on where our prospects are receptive and when they are attentive and engage with them in a manner that is relevant and contextually sensitive. The future will not be about draining our messages through a pipe that presumably goes directly to the consumer mind. That is too simplistic a view of the world. Tomorrow’s communication will increasingly need to be multi-dimensional, sensory and experiential.

This is where point-of-Interaction media such as in-store, malls, coffee bars, ATMs [RBI willing] fit the jigsaw. In my view this is the medium that will tip over the next few years.

[Published in the Hindustan Times dated Dec 30, 2006]