free2try

2011-01-01T15:02:00.001+05:30

Being inspired.

About a fortnight ago, I met Captain G R Gopinath, an ex Client of Starcom in Bangalore, in his office for 20 minutes. During that short meeting, he told me a little story about Christopher Columbus and the Ocean. Frankly, it was not even a story, it was more like the Captain’s perspective on what Columbus might be thinking before he gathered his fellow explorers and set sail on his fist voyage. Now, I have not studied Columbus and his life thoroughly enough, but there was something in the way the good Captain gave me his perspective.

Earlier this week, on the way from the Delhi airport to the hotel fairly late at night, my taxi driver Kamal told me his story of how he fled his home town Lalitpur in Nepal twelve years ago, to avoid being drafted by either the Maoists, or the Nepalese Army and to avoid being tortured by the Police on suspicion of being a Maoist rebel. He came to the unknown place called Delhi, when he could not speak Hindi, he didn’t have any relatives here, and started his career by washing cars by the day and sleeping in places vacated by them at night.

I find both the stories – of Columbus of Genoa, Italy and of Kamal of Lalitpur, Nepal – very inspiring.

In fact as I write the only farewell note of my 20 years of working career, I am thinking not of memories but of inspirations I am taking away with me.

I have always taken pride in the people who have chosen to work in our organisation and I have said many times that we have been so fortunate that people have chosen to work with us when they could have gone anywhere else. Today, I am reflecting on what an amazing and inspired 12 years, I have lived in this organisation. My inspirations have come from many people in our client companies and media owner partners, but they have mostly come from my co-workers – people like you.

From some, I have learnt how to treat the workplace as my second home, from others how to stand unperturbed on a bad hair day. Some have inspired me to be aggressive, some others to be patient. The analytical approach in some has got me excited, while I have learnt to be creative from some others. Some taught me how to deal with ambiguity, while some others encouraged me to provide clarity.

Many of you have inspired me without even knowing about it – through your thoughts, actions, and responses.

Today, I am not leaving SMG with a heavy heart and sadness. I am doing so with pride, relief, a sense of accomplishment. I have many good memories from SMG and I will always cherish them. But as I said before, it is the inspirations I am carrying, which I hope will hold me better stead.

Today, I am thinking of all the people I have interacted with – in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Chicago and many other beautiful cities where we have offices and where I have met some of the smartest people in my working life.

Today I am thinking of Cheryl, Niyati, Maria, Marilyn, Amith, Rafiah, Malli, Chetan, Pravin, Andrey, Sriram, Gan, Ranga, Dr Ravi Moorthy, Ravi Bhaya, Chee Weng, Bonita, Jeffrey, Melissa, Jean, Robin, Pushkar, Sanjay Barkataki, Santonu, Hemang, Dinkar, Angela, Preeyada, Atipol, Triluj, Madhavan, Shashi, Asokan, Praveen, Dupi, Madan, Nikhil, Sandeep, Sandip, KC, Tarun, Sanjay Shah, Raj Jha, Srikanth, Manish, Manjunath, Puneet, Gautam, Pranay, Mahesh Motwani, Mahesh Ranka, Anjana, Vikas, Ashish, Dinesh, Patrick, Anand, Sindhuja, Ashwini, Amrita, Priya, Naresh, Aruna, Avinash, Amitabh, Manik, Anish, LV, Atul, Natraj, Sejal, Mona, Verghese, Tejasvita, Shilpa, Manas, Kenny, Paul and many others, who have had a impact on me.

Each of these people have inspired me. I feel incredibly lucky for it and I feel humbled.

Amith [Prabhu] asked me to write something as my last piece of advice. But I have decided not to give any pearls of wisdom or helpful advice to you.

Today I just say my thanks, to each of you, for making my 12 years in SMG- each day of it- worth it.

Thank you.

[Published in SMG India house journal StarSync special edition, Dec 2010]

The World is less Black and White than we think

2009-12-20T21:06:00.001+05:30

The issue of whether to have one readership survey or more has its answer as much in practicality as in philosophy.

In seeking answer to this oft asked question, we must remember that the fundamental goal of a readership survey is to provide all stakeholders – marketers, agencies and media owners - a common reference in understanding consumer behaviour – both at a point in time as well as change over time. Sure, readership studies are used for buying selling discussions, but if we subjugate the knowledge enabling goal to the trading and transaction goal, we become vulnerable to our individual interests rather than serve the greater good of the industry.

The debate on one study versus two is for the reader to see in the two points of view above, and I feel in their own way, both the points of view are valid. However, when it comes to practice, often the market and cultural context decides what the stake holders and users accept. This is important because acceptability of any syndicated study is the most important contributor to it being the ‘currency’. If we have two studies available, but one is used disproportionately more than the other, we only have one currency. We can never lose of this.

So what makes a study gain high acceptance and usage? I think three things: SIMPLICITY, CREDIBILITY and CONSISTENCY. All these are important, since unlike basic researches such as those in Mathematics or Physics, all consumer research is finally an input to taking business decisions. If a research does not score well on each of these three dimensions, sooner or later it will fall to disuse, regardless of boardroom decisions taken for the industry to accept one versus the other.

So between one versus two studies, what does our cultural context make us lean towards? When I look objectively, I see that ours is a society that favours debate over consensus, balance between contrasting points of view rather than unified belief in one. Which is why we are a great example of a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-belief, oligopolistic society. Can a single currency system survive for long here? I don’t think so. In Singapore, yes. But in India? Not likely.

Look at what has happened to TV ratings. We moved from two parallel systems to one nearly a decade ago. While TAM has served the needs of the whole industry for all these years, we have been hearing the murmurs about a second system for a while now. The uneasiness is sometimes quite palpable. We know it costs a lot to support two parallel systems, but it often looks like some people wouldn’t mind risking it. Some of us may brand the cry for a second TV rating system a political manoeuvre by some interested stake holders, but perhaps what is at play here is our culture driven need for an opposing point of view. A consensus may be comforting and practical to some, but highly unnerving to others.

We are discussing merging the two readership studies now and the debate is alive. Leaving philosophy out for a moment, it appears to be the practical thing to do, given that one of the two – IRS – scores on all the three dimensions I mentioned above and already enjoys strong user acceptance and the other had gone through its challenges. Will our need for the Yang go away, even after we have merged the two? I don’t think so. But perhaps we can rely on the internal Yang, our balancing force, that which stops us from letting the one study go off track and our not having a reference point. The Technical Committee of IRS, with committed member constituents from all stake holder groups, and which has kept the IRS product credible for years, sometimes at great risk of being criticized by many, is that Yang.

Despite my natural tendency to recommend continuation of two studies, today I side with the one study camp. I simultaneously recommend a strong industry oversight of that one study, under users and not just financiers. I urge us all to rise above our legacy leanings and focus on strengthening IRS even further, under whatever name it may suit us.

I feel that as an industry, we have a responsibility to put knowledge creation ahead of transactional convenience, and encourage our young brand managers, planners, buyers and sellers to put their faith in data and insights, rather than allow them to get caught in transactional discussions [mainly around inclusion of a publication in a marketing plan and pricing] alone. It is my belief that not even 50% of the capability of data available today is leveraged to gain insights into consumer behaviour. This is the challenge we need to attack.

[written for the Brand Reporter, Nov 2009]

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Bring Love Back [originally called Bhala Meri Kameez...Kaise?]

2009-10-28T14:58:00.001+05:30

I returned to Mumbai in February this year, after a little over two years in Singapore. Taking advantage of the little distance that two years created, I met and spoke to many senior marketing practitioners purposefully in these nine months, to get their perspective on where marketing in India is headed. My learning has been interesting. A lot of what marketing people told me helps keep me excited about marketing as a discipline. Perhaps more importantly, many things I heard, about how companies practice marketing today and how their agencies guide them, makes me very anxious about marketing and communications. So when Brand Equity asked me to write a piece, I thought of sharing some of these anxieties. Disclaimer: I use the phrase marketing practitioner in the broad sense, it includes clients, ad agencies, media companies, research companies, direct marketing agencies, event companies and others.

VICTIMS OF FASHION?

Marketing seems to be suffering from a certain faddishness. Many things appear to be done out of a need to talk about them, rather than to achieve true marketing goals. Marketing people talk about accountability, engagement , digital media, social tools, innovation, ROI with a proficiency rarely seen before; yet brand managers seem not be aware of the difference between a product and a brand. I asked a client servicing manager to explain what she really meant by consumer engagement and I heard the longest pause I have ever heard. One time, I asked a marketing manager what was important to her company and I heard “efficiency, effectiveness and impact.” I am still wondering what she left out.

Another day, I heard a young brand manager talk a lot about her commitment to digital media and how excited she was about its possibilities, and then told me she is investing an amount on digital marketing that worked out to less than a per cent of her budget. Now, I am aware that a percentage allocation is not the only way to measure commitment to digital, but less than a per cent somehow does not fit.

MARKETING OR TACTICS?

In the recent past, many people appear very excited to discuss the ‘media roadblock’ as a marketing strategy. Now, as any smart marketing professional can tell you, a roadblock is as much strategy as giving a spoon free with a bucket is. What I find alarming is what kind of things get discussed as ‘strategy’ . Is ‘clutter breaking’ a strategy ? There is some merit in doing what has never been done before in a category or in the country. But should that be called strategy? What about ‘let’s do some innovation’ ? No wonder media owners are beginning to hate the word ‘innovation’ . One of them told me he has never faced a more abused term in English.

A MISDIRECTED OBSESSION

Don’t get me wrong, ROI is an excellent concept. It’s just that I get worried, when we use it loosely and conveniently. I ask marketing folks to define ‘returns’ and many give half a dozen definitions in the same sentence. So what do they do when it is difficult to define the goal or when there isn’t a dependable measurement system in place or where the relationship between input and outcome is a bit complex? They try to minimize the denominator — the so called investment. Many marketing professionals talk about marketing as an investment, then they try to squeeze the media owner dry when negotiating a deal.

INPUTS FASCINATION

In fact, rarely have I seen brand and marketing people get as excited about deal making, as now. It is indeed true that effective leveraging of media owner assets can help drive the brand’s business goals, so it is not that bad a thing if a brand manager takes an interest in engaging the media owner in a positive conversation . But deal making seems to go beyond that. It seems to be so enjoyable a process, that somehow the brand manager thinks is central to their job. So whose job is it to understand the customer and manage the brand?

BIGGER? SO WHAT?

Impact is a nice word for cocktail conversations. So whether it is relevant to customers or not, doing things bigger and louder seems to appeal to marketing and advertising folks a lot. It’s almost as if customers [in our company, we are reducing using the word ‘consumer’ ] are being presented with share of voice [SOV] reports every month and they decide to buy the highest SOV brands or services. Very few marketing people seem to be aware of the path to purchase their customers follow, real insights into what motivates or stymies customer behavior, the role of peer influence on brand choice or the relative role of a spike-n-stunt marketing plan versus a long tail plan, in influencing behavior. There seems to be a great deal of emphasis on dealing with fragmentation by creating noise, quite a wasteful approach really.

I am beginning to think that the biggest challenge to marketing is that too many people think they have learnt everything there is to learn about it. I feel we need to bring the humility back, follow the consumer calendar, focus on the customer rather than our rivals, and understand consumers as human beings and not as owners of wallets alone.

A client told me the other day how inspired he is by his eleven year old son’s enthusiasm about all things digital, and how that is prodding him to invest serious budgets in digital marketing . That’s good marketing to me, understanding simple human behavior and using that learning in marketing.

BRING BACK THE LOVE

Many of us took to marketing as a career for the romance of it. Today when I visit business schools, I don’t see that marketing has the romantic appeal for tomorrow’s managers.

I feel we need to bring the romance back. Marketing is more than just someone’s ego.

[Published in Brand Equity, The Economic Times on Oct 28/2009]

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2009-09-05T19:51:00.001+05:30

Why fight an outdated battle?

The debate between full service and specialist, when it comes to communication consulting and activation, is not as simple as some people make it out to be. Keeping the politics of ‘who is the bigger partner’ aside, we need to explore the practical relevance of the nature of client-agency engagement in today’s context.

By necessity, that exploration will take us back to the age when the whole disintegration’ or ‘specialisation’ process started.

There are two truths we have to keep in mind.

One, agency business models have changed only in response to client demand. Way back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as clients expanded their brand portfolio and appointed multiple agencies to handle different brands, they demanded consolidation of buying with one agency, so that they could enjoy the benefit of scale. That is how, most advertising agencies separated their buying departments, branded them and launched them as media buying companies. With the passing of time, clients saw the futility of separating media planning from buying and therefore integrated the two with the media agency.

Two, the separation of media from creative happened, when classical media such as TV and Print were the only media strategic to the client’s marketing efforts. The creative agency produced the message and the media agency found the most cost effective way of exposing it to the audience. Life was simple. It helped that classical media itself were neither as fractured nor cluttered as they are today.
Today we live in a world that can be called the Experience Economy. As consumers pay less and less attention to brand messages, Exposure based models, which old advertising agencies have followed forever, are failing to deliver. The 30 second TVC may never be dead, but it is getting consistently weaker in its effectiveness. For at least a small, but influential segment of customers, video means youtube and not television; that means the restriction on copy duration is over. At the same time, as the television is getting smarter as a box, ‘watching’ will soon be replaced by ‘using’, which again threatens the relevance of the 30 sec TVC, they way we know it.
Every brand worth its baseline is running to deliver a more powerful and enduring experience to its customers. Highly evolved brands going a step further: they are attempting to do what we at Starcom MediaVest Group call ‘branding the experience’.

Marketers today know that they have to truly respect the media neutrality of their customers and use a fine mix of mainstream media as well as direct marketing, experiential marketing, PR, word of mouth, digital marketing, point of sale, digital OOH, sports, cause enabled marketing, shopper marketing, trade marketing, relationship marketing, and many other disciplines to be able to build their customer assets. Which one agency has understanding of all these disciplines?
What then, is the relevance of the so called full service agency? What would you like as a marketer – a simplistic model of a full service agency, which constantly glorifies the 30 second TVC, and ‘also’ gives you suggestions of other contacts or would you integrate a powerful combination of specialists who understand your brand and its customer challenges?

Between simplicity and effectiveness, what will you choose?

The battle for supremacy between different types of agency models is over. Either we get it now, or we will write a book someday about the decline of our business.

[Published in IMPACT 5th Anniversary Issue, September 2009]

2009-09-05T19:48:00.000+05:30

Is there a loyalty 20 rupees off can’t buy?

Customer Loyalty is a complex subject in the best of times. Every marketer wants its own customers to stay loyal and buy repeatedly from it, while at the same time it wants to encourage experimentative behaviour in its rivals’ customers. This means a brand wants to stimulate fundamentally conflicting behaviour in people.

What is loyalty anyway?

The fact is, since brands live in a competitive world, loyalty is a relative and fluid term and its incidence can change from one category, customer segment and market to another. Except when people have little choice within a category [phone connections a few years ago or power supply at present, for example], some customers want to experiment with new brands and new variants, while others prefer to stay with a brand. Often, loyalty, which can be loosely defined as a customer’s willingness to choose a brand more often over a period than its rivals, is dependent on the price of the product, the level of involvement, the level of competitive marketing activity (including but not limited to advertising), and the number of brands available with similar perception of value delivery.

Often, as in the case of low choice categories, there may be natural barriers to brand switching, even where competition is stiff. In mobile telephony, for example, many post paid customers tolerate unsatisfactory service for fear of having to lose touch with people, if they were to switch their operator. This may give brands a false sense of loyalty, on classical metrics. Similarly, in packaged goods, given our retailing structure led by kirana stores and small, owner-operated super markets, customers are often loyal to the store, instead of to a brand. They move quite easily between brands within their basket, based on retailer push and often promotional offers. Modern format retailing encourages experimentative behaviour anyway and poses further threat to loyal behaviour.

What happens when times are tough?

As customers juggle to fulfil competing needs within limited resources during stressful times, their value consciousness scales new peaks. In fact, the definition of value shifts during challenging times. People prefer simple price offs over cross promotions, which they decode as attempts to get them to buy what they either don’t need or could easily buy at a later date. We found this and more fascinating behavioural changes when we conducted twin consumer researches earlier this year called SENTIMETER and SPENDRIFT, in partnership with specialist consumer diagnostic company - the key. Our ongoing research IntenTrack also gives us INTENT scores for brands within a category as a robust surrogate for loyalty.

It begins simply.

People talk more to each other and to ‘experts’ during stressful times. This means some people buy more of brands which they have got strong relationship with and actually recommend them to friends. Recommending a brand makes these customers appear to be ‘experts’. At the same time, deal seeking behaviour increases dramatically, and many actively look for promotional offers and ‘help friends’ by telling them about ‘the best deal in town’. ‘Deal seeker’ and ‘bargain hunter’ gain legitimacy as desirable labels and become badges to wear. Even well-to-do people compare prices vigorously. This results in faster movement within brand basket than usual and classical loyalty metrics suffer, as overall shopping activity drops. Result: brands which stand for value, both physical as well as emotional, enjoy strong loyalty and advocacy.

Strong company brands gain

In categories where the company is the brand [appliances, cars, services] or where the customer’s self perception of ‘native expertise’ is low, trust and therefore loyalty converges around the company. With a lower intensity, big and established packaged goods brand too hold their repeat purchase level. It may appear counter intuitive, but even small specialist brands see loyal behaviour, since their advocacy levels are usually high and a small group of people make an implicit decision ‘not to let my brand die’. In general, trust in the Government, PSUs, and big corporate groups rises and these see a loyalty shift towards them.

Net net, there is no one pattern loyalty flows during slowdown and resource crunch. It’s the same with brands as with human behaviour. Some think tough times are the best to cement relationships, while others think adversity is the license you need to flirt.

[Published in Financial Express BrandWagon Sep 1/2009]

Original article

2008-12-21T11:41:00.002+05:30

A Brand is not a Thing; it's a Being
Branding for a Young India

Author and lecturer Winston Fletcher once commented that ‘branding is probably the most important concept that marketing has given to the world’.

Intriguing and complex

Yet the brand and branding has remained one of the most inconsistently understood marketing concepts. I learnt marketing and communications in an era, when most brand managers equated branding with the size of their logo in a magazine ad or the length of logo exposure in a TV commercial and naturally fought with agency art directors to increase the size or prolong the exposure.

In an interesting way, to a lot of marketing practitioners, the youth appear intriguing, puzzling, a bag of contradictions. They are fluid and defy strict definitions. They question authority, yet respect authoritarian figures such as parents. They are experimentative. They are individualistic, yet want to belong. These qualities often make marketing people read the youth as fickle, undecided, disloyal, and unsure of their identity and so on. This is why almost every year seminars and conferences are held on ‘Marketing to the Youth’, people present case studies and successful examples, and yet, few answers are found and we all wait for a similar seminar the next year.

So I find it very interesting that I am writing a guest piece on Branding for the Youth, combining two very powerful topics.

You are what you deliver

So what does branding need to be for the young? To answer that, perhaps we should ask what branding and the brand need to deliver to the young? While brands deliver many things to their customers – from reassurance to trust to aspirational fulfillment to a sense of identity, I would like us to explore what makes youth a special segment.

Do I like you?

Young people are all that we said in the second para of this piece – fluid, experimentative, individualistic, tribal. Plus they are technology friendly, suspicious of politicians, fearless and yet apprehensive, risk friendly, yet not foolhardy. But more than anything else, when I look at youth as a phase, a mindset and young people as a segment, I feel this is the time the search for and exploration of relationships is at its peak. At home, in the neighbourhood, in the school and the college, in their tuition classes, at workplace, at friend’s homes, at weekend outings, in weddings, in the night club, young people are evaluating other people and deciding who is a potential friend and who is not. While the search for relationships will never really end, it is during youth that it really begins and accelerates fast and for the first time, unsupervised.
I believe this is the context in which branding and the brand can effectively engage the young. Sure, brands are about aspiration and identity. But perhaps even more, they are about relationships. Whether physical brands or human beings, we decide to from relationships based on a simple thing – belief. Belief gives us reassurance, makes us proud to associate with someone. Think of the friend in school with whom you hung out, the one with whom you discussed mathematics or the one who came over home when you needed company. Whether in public or in private, it is our belief in people that decides how far we will go with them. I read somewhere that a belief means that there is an internal and external faith in a particular set of values, a trust that the person will deliver that set of values. With trust comes a relationship, as people remain loyal to their friends.

Connecting as people do

It is no different between brands and people. We like people who are a bit like us, whose hobbies, interests, passions match ours. When brands behave like humans, rather than just a name on a pack, and tell us they have the same passions as ours, they begin to become our friends, someone we can hang out with, someone in whose company we can be proud of being seen. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the case of youth. Think of brands such as Nike, Coke, Apple and the relationships they have built with their predominantly young and young-at –heart customers. A resolve to build relationships makes you do a certain kind of things. Again, think of the college days or the first job. You develop a taste in music, movies, books, sports, chocolates, disco’s and all the other things similar to that of the person you are building a relationship with. Brands need to do the same. Seen in this context, why Nokia and Pepsi involve themselves with music, Red Bull goes after alternative sports, AXE does naughty things, become explainable and seem appropriate.

I keep looking for Indian examples and alas, none comes to my mind as well as these global brands. Are home grown brands such as Red Tape, Action shoes, or Killer jeans missing the point? I happen to see it as a great opportunity for them.

Brands and branding are more than the size of the logo. That’s too simplistic a view. A brand to me is no different from a human being, and need to connect with people as people do.

Thank you for your attention.

[Published in the USP Age December 08 Special Issue]

2008-08-15T20:54:00.002+05:30

The Obsessive Sacrifice of Innocence

Four things that the Indian media industry should watch out for

I have always believed that for an industry that claims that it’s about people, advertising and media industry is appallingly indifferent about people when it comes to putting its mouth where its money should be.

That’s why when IMPACT asked me to write a piece about the four things Indian media industry should watch out for, I thought of writing all four things in the context of people and what organizations should be doing about them.

It is my belief that while each person has her own talent, how people use their talent is guided by the context in which they operate and expectations set on them by their environment. This is why some people good at opening locks help us get into our house when we lose our key, while others try to break in when we are not around.

Over the last few years, I have seen organizations give up the common sensical focus on people and their nurturing, that I and several of my peers benefited from when we were at the early stages of our careers. As a result, four things that are so important in today’s exciting world are all but lost.

Curiosity

I remember that in the first few years of my career, all I had for people around me, my seniors, my clients and peers, was questions. Many things around me intrigued me. Much as the Economic Times on the surface felt like a boring paper, it was full of stuff I knew nothing about, things I had avoided in the macro economics class in my business school. Once I saw a book on direct marketing lying on someone’s table and I could not sleep properly, until I had read that book cover to cover. There was this print processing studio in Delhi called Ajanta, where I often hung around asking all sorts of questions to the technicians about their equipment, just for ‘time pass’. Going on market visits, observing housewives buy things at the kirana store and asking them a few impromptu questions, were things we ended up doing without thinking much about it.

Where did we drive curiosity away? I find youngsters today mouthing platitudes about marketing, making sales pitches, using PowerPoint and other tools effortlessly, but I don’t find them curious enough about business and marketing and communication. That worries me a lot.

Conviction

Conviction is different from loose opinion, which I find in abundance these days. Every time I read a book about an inspiring business leader or watch a movie I really like, I see conviction. I see people standing up for things they believe in. Early in my career, I met copywriters who would actually want to quit if you didn’t buy an idea they believed in. I had met film producers who would spend hours trying to persuade you about a frame in a commercial. Conviction comes from principle. I see too much of expedience in young people today. I have heard seniors teach things like ‘if the client wants to waste his money, I would rather he wasted it through me’. A lot of people today have an opinion; but who wants an opinion from you on a subject you don’t know? Conviction is not rigidity; it’s about true heartfelt belief. We need to encourage people to have conviction, rather than lose patience with them.

Conversation

This may actually seem to contradict with what I said before, but the truth is conversation is more important than ever in our life and in business. People are conversational on social networking sites, at hang outs, but why not in the work place? Conversation leads to participation, lack of it results in submission. At workplace, we need our people to question the way we have always done things, and take charge rather than passively accept board room dictates. When people become conversational at work place, they will respect conversations between brands and consumers, something that is crucial to building connections today.

Collaboration

A hyper competitive world has somehow misled us to believe that we can win the war on our own. No one wins the war on her own. We need to relearn and re-teach the value of collaboration. This is not just theory; it is an absolute necessity today. Collaboration works directly against ego clashes, land grabbing and turf battles, just the kind of things that come in the way of prosperity. It produces value for customers, companies and our own people.

We need to teach our people how to be innocent again and let common sense guide us as much as acquired knowledge. In my view, if we can create a culture of curiosity, conviction, conversation and collaboration, we would be channelling so much of young people’s energy for meaningful purpose.

[Published in IMPACT Annual Issue July 2008]

Getting Angry

2008-05-14T17:31:00.001+05:30

Embedded Video

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2008-04-06T00:46:00.002+05:30

Wishing Life were simpler? Don't.

Why structural integration of Creative and Media is so not today.

For a while now, I have heard arguments on whether the creative and media functions have gone too far from each other and have become too independent.

Sometimes the questions have come from clients, some other times from creative agency heads.

Every once in a while we hear of an ad agency folding a media unit back into itself.

While it is difficult to argue against integration per se, I now wonder how much of this argument for integration is meant to improve the communication development process and how much emanates from a personal need to exercise control and nurse the imaginary wounds inflicted by media’s independence.

Here are some raw truths and let’s look them in the eye.

First, media as a function became independent in the late Eighties and the nineties, as a direct consequence of the client demand that agencies develop skills and tools to understand and leverage an increasingly complex media world and consumer apathy to advertising messages. As independence allowed media folks to focus on the challenge, a lot of excellent conceptual frameworks, processes, approaches and tools have got developed over the last 15 years or so, to make the media investment rupee more productive, exactly what the clients wanted. To the best of my knowledge, the complexity of media hasn’t reduced recently.

Second, all sorts of disciplines have got specialized – direct marketing, PR, event marketing, outdoor, promotions, sports, and of late digital – mainly because specialists in general deliver a smarter product, even if it may appear that they work in silos. To force a structural integration of the kind that used to exist in the mighty Eighties is to attempt to turn back the clock. Not only is it cynical, it is actually as impractical as saying ‘let’s bring back the pager, because today’s kids are spending too much time on the mobile handset’.

Third, clients who moan about lack of integration should look within. I have a strong sense that their own internal departments – marketing, sales, promotions, new product development, research, consumer insights – work in big silos themselves. In fact, I have heard of clients who try to bring internal integration by firing from the shoulders of the agency to win an internal argument.

Fourth, the agencies that are trying to fold back media are mainly those who didn’t manage to develop a strong and sustainable media brand and deep media skills in the first place. So a purely defensive reaction aimed at survival is being touted as a new age philosophy of integration. Sounds logical to me, but not as a tomorrow-ready argument.

My view is simple and rather uncluttered. Integration is a god thing in general. What we need is integration of thought, not organizations. Anyone who is in any discipline related to marketing and communications, has a responsibility to put the consumer in the centre of our thinking. This involves investing time, energy, managerial bandwidth and financial resources to understand how today’s consumers make their purchase and recommendation decisions, where and how they get influenced, where they are receptive to our messages and where they reject them, how they get vocal about issues close to their hearts and where and to whom they voice their views. These are deep and substantive issues the resolution of which build or break clients’ businesses. To gloss over them and think that collapsing organizations built over time into singular units is the only answer to today’s challenges is too childish.

In my view, today’s world is about collaboration, not control. Look at the way young people all around us are collaborating to build a new future and we will understand the true meaning of this. Collaboration is about establishing effective processes, control is about drawing lines of reporting and creating elaborate militaristic structures. Collaboration is about building a stronger future, control is about land grabbing. Both are possible to implement, but collaboration works better.

There was a time only marketers with the biggest budgets separated media from creative and assigned the two accounts independently. I remember that when I was in Initiative Media in the late Nineties, we used to advise clients below Rs 20 Cr annual budget not to separate media and creative. Now, even a client with a 5 Cr budget wants to choose media and creative agencies separately and consultants line up half a dozen agencies happy to pitch. Why should the same clients then complain about lack of integration? Ever?

In closing, I have a straight forward recommendation. Look for synergy between organizations that already exist, train young managers to think holistic. If you are a creative agency, make your client servicing people spend time and energy in understanding media. Get them to attend media and research briefing and meetings. Do not ever allow them to deride numbers or tools. Crores of rupees get spent based on those. Tell them, client servicing is more than taking the client out to a drink.

If you are a media agency, get your planners to spend a day in a fortnight with real consumers, not the computer. Challenge them on conceptual thinking, not the mechanics. Tell them to dig deep and unearth true consumer-brand-media insights; it’s never easy. Don’t allow recycled media plans to go out the door.

It’s time for us to forget structural solutions to challenges; solutions lie in people and processes. Nostalgia has never solved anything, so let’s keep that in the photo album.

There really is no point in trying to oversimplify a world that has happily settled down to be complex.

2008-01-05T13:19:00.000+05:30

How do you wake up?

We all sleep differently. Some sleep tight, like a baby. Some sleep light, like the mother of a newborn. No matter how we sleep, most of us wake up with a start - some so mild in fact that we don’t recognize them, while some hard enough to bring our whole body and mind to sudden consciousness in a milli second.

Some times we are either too tired or too lazy to give up our sleep, and that’s when someone has to shake us up and give us a wake up call. It happened the night before the examination, during a rather chilly night, when the quilt seemed like a long lost friend, it happens many times now in hotel rooms in some distant city.

The wake up call is rarely likeable, but it’s meaningful and important nevertheless, because something really significant often waits for us on the other side.

As I look back at 2007, it appears to me to be a year of wake up calls. There were many major events than happened this year, that shook us out of our slumber, or they should have. There are other things that appeared to be minor sleep breakers, but meaningful nevertheless, perhaps because of their regularity of occurrence. Major or minor, these were not just events, for they will have an impact on our thought and action in 2008 and beyond.

I recount seven of my favorites here, in random order.

Wake Up Call 1: T20

T20 was not about India getting world cup glory back. It was not about defeating an arch rival. In a way, it wasn’t even about cricket. From a marketing viewpoint, it finally brought to life what we at Starcom have been forcefully claiming for a while – that today’s consumers are time starved, choice flattered and attention challenged. For the same reason the ODI cricket got popular decades ago, T20 became an overnight rage in 2007. The message is clear: in marketing anything, do not try the consumer’s patience, do not assume she is sitting there waiting for your message. Respect her time, respect the complexity of her life, and talk to her not just talk at her. The spirit of T20, applied to marketing is this: don’t just count your consumers, connect with them.

Wake Up Call 2: Input Cost Surcharge & the October stand off

The memory of the passionate October is too fresh for all of us, for me to revive it, but as with many things, there were two sides to the backdrop to the impasse. The October debate was not really about who is right and who is not. It was about perspectives and a willingness to achieve common goals. I believe that for a month we all forgot that the fundamental relationship between media owners and marketers has always been collaborative, even if at the negotiation table, it often looked to be adversarial. I have said this before and I will say this again. If we do not find ways to collaborate, today’s hypercompetitive world will find ways of decimating us.

Wake Up Call 3: Digital Signage

Place based media, point of purchase media, in-store media – whatever name you call it by, this is a medium whose birth 2007 will be remembered by. I was fortunate to attend a conference in November in Mumbai, where a lot of stake holders spoke very passionately about digital signage networks, why and how they work and about highly advanced technology driving it. Unfortunately, there were not many creative or media agency folks attending that conference, to receive the wake up call, although I remember meeting some people from ICICI, Levers and ITC. I understand that there are close to five thousand LCD screens that have been installed in stores, at workplaces and in lift lobbies across the country and hundreds more are going live every month. Mark my word, very few media will generate as much curiosity and excitement in the next two to three years as this one.

Wake Up Call 4: The Vanishing Line

As many of us started putting the tag Experience Society on ourselves, the already thin line between above-the-line and below-the-line became even thinner in 2007. Call it IMC, 360 degree marketing, through-the-line marketing or holistic marketing, no marketing practitioner worth her Kotler and Levitt can today ignore the necessity to connect with the consumers using all the cards in our box. This was particularly heart warming for us at Starcom MediaVest Group, as we have invested significant managerial energy and other resources building new competencies over the last four years and today quite proudly claims to be the media network with the biggest competency portfolio in India. Today, many of us are learning to activate one idea through multiple media and platforms, rather than plan one medium ate a time. It is my strong belief that anyone, marketer or communication practitioner, who does not upskill herself rapidly in how to think and activate holistic, runs the risk of being left behind.

Wake Up Call 5: Digitisation of Life

After years of wondering and imagining, more marketers than ever embraced the digital way in 2007, recognising that you cannot forever hide behind meek arguments of ‘too few internet connections’ and other such. Unfortunately, many are still stuck in the early 2000’s model of generating leads by burning a billion banners. This will change, with or without another wake up call. In 2008, I believe, we will see many genuine attempts by marketers to use digital as a platform, rather than a medium, to deliver an enriching experience to their consumers.

Wake Up Call 6: Using a New Body Part

To call the mobile phone a technological device would today be an error. It’s something we sleep with, take to the bathroom and cannot truly imagine our life without. The irony is the contrast between consumers’ alacrity to adopt everything mobile and the marketers’ hesitation in using the platform as a communication and enablement platform. Companies like Affle, One-to-One Technologies, and Sixty Nine mm are creating highly interesting mobile marketing platforms that can allow marketers connect well with consumers, particularly young consumers. Many of our clients are more curious than ever and we have to move to the next level of converting the excitement into application.

Wake Up Call 7: TV isn’t dying anytime soon

In the last few years, particularly with the growth of non-classical media and experiential marketing disciplines, it became fashionable to talk about the reducing effectiveness of TV and many of us were challenged to divert budgets to other media. At Starcom, we have a contrarian’s view. We believe that if anything, TV will become even more important in future. We call that future an era of visual engagement. The way consumers watch TV will change, and they way we will use TV both in its traditional box format as well as through other screens, will change.

The fight in the traditional TV front is getting interesting, with Zee TV slowly but certainly narrowing the gap with Star Plus, but the debate on TV is more than just a Star Plus versus Zee TV debate. It’s not even about dozens of new stations springing up. It’s about innovativeness of programming, about audience engagement and freshness of thought. The broadcast industry need to stop for a breather and take a long hard look at what it has been doing and how it wants to do that future. It won’t be easy. Waking up rarely is.

Have an exciting 2008. I will.

[Published on indiantelevision.com on Jan 2, 2008]

2007-07-14T08:20:00.000+05:30

Three things that will have an Impact on Marketing on the Road to 2010

Three years ago, our bai didn’t have a mobile phone. Nor did our driver. Today, our bai is thinking of getting a second phone, and the driver changes his caller tune, about seven times a month.

Three years ago, I might not have considered this a possibility. This is the trouble with forecasting. One half the things you forecast gets delayed; the other half happens sooner than you think.

This is why, as I look at the next three years and try to forecast what will impact marketing the most, I can see several hazy possibilities. One thing is clear to me though. Most of those ‘impactful’ incidents will be result of changes that are continuous, outcome of processes that have already started. But our realization will be a bit sudden. Like our bai’s decision to buy a second phone appeared to me a sudden change of our world.

Seen from the consumer’s viewpoint, three broad areas that will have serious effect on marketing as we know it and practice it are: Attention, Advocacy and Addressibility.

ATTENTION Everything around us is getting compressed in size, time and space. It’s a process we at Starcom call Digitisation of Life. Large parts of what we consume today- products, services, information – are being created, stored or delivered to us digitally, whether or not vast majority of us actually think we are using digital technology, most notably the Internet. This alone is putting enormous pressure on the attention consumers are willing to ‘lend’ to marketing and its messages. Result: marketers have to learn very soon how to attract and retain consumer attention, in a world that is getting more heterogeneous by the day.

My driver might actually sell his attention to a marketer for a few free ring tones every month. Our bai might order several items of provision for her own home by sending text messages to a server, while she is on the way to ours. As mobile phones start serving the role of a PC for most people, the endless debate of whether computers will really become affordable, will actually end.

The realization that the control over information has permanently shifted from the marketer to the consumer will not come to everyone at the same time. Some of us will continue to think we have a few more years, before we have to wake up. I reckon those will provide case study material to business schools a few years hence.

ADVOCACY In a choice starved world, marketers decided what they produced, and how they delivered it to us. The transaction ended with a sale and would not begin until the next time we had to buy the product again. In a world where every product is getting servicized, where consumers are increasingly being coxed with lower price, they are also willing to pay a premium for what they want.

Either way, they have learnt to speak up the way most of us did not know when we were growing up. Our parents at best wrote a letter to the editor when they were unhappy with a product or service, tomorrow consumers will not hesitate to sue a company or start a massive word of mouth campaign over relatively frivolous failures. Marketing has to recognize that consumer advocacy will be one of the biggest issues they have to deal with, no matter which category we operate in.

Naturally, advocacy will not restrict itself either to individual experiences, nor, when it comes to being sensitive to the world around us, will it restrict to a minority group we call activists. Every consumer will potentially be an activist and the only thing they might forget is the age old advice: forgive and forget. Consumer Advocacy will raise serious concerns about business in general and marketing in particular and ‘ethics in business’ will no longer be a seminar topic alone.

ADDRESSIBILITY As young and impatient consumers want to try out everything at half the age their parents did, marketing has to reckon with the near collapse of the practice of segmenting the market the old way – notably, on demographics and affordability. One of the consequences of this will be the addressable market growing rapidly to cover many more people that we previously thought possible. Marketing has to perhaps forget the old model of a carefully chosen segment buying products repeatedly, and embrace a world where a lot of consumers trying the products at least occasionally. Another outcome will be how marketers look at role of brands in their portfolio as mainstream and niche. In the past, niche brands got very little marketing support; they had to fend for themselves. As the definition of niche itself undergoes transformation, as the retailing structure allows small brands to be overnight successful and large brands, there will be a place for every kind of brand, regardless of size, as long as it is serving a market gap.

Managing the Paradox

Here are two paradoxes marketing will have to reconcile with on the way to 2010. One, even as contact options get more niche and targeted, the number of people marketers will need to address will dramatically shoot up. Two, while the cost of marketing to attention challenged and time starved consumers will rise sharply, almost at the same time, that cost will also crash. Look around yourself and you will see another Google or an i-Pod somewhere. Or perhaps the Nirma of twenty first century.

Published in IMPACT 2007 Annual Issue, July 2007

2007-01-14T13:31:00.000+05:30

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]

2007-01-06T07:11:00.000+05:30

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]

2006-09-01T18:39:00.000+05:30

How to be wrong while trying to be very right

There are two contrasting ways of looking at the TVS Apache spot.

One is the technical correctness. The spot is more about youth than about a bike. It tries to break bike advertising paradigm. It’s not about clichés and stereotypes of power, mileage, looks, maleness and individuality any longer. It’s about a gang of friends, hanging out, tribalism. It’s about scoffing at the mature and ‘settled’ [read old], which young people don’t like to be. Bang on. If you look at the commercial once and want to write a quick review about it, this is what you will write.

If you take the top layer off, however, the sheen is gone and the grime starts to show. The Apache is a powerful bike, not a moped. Bikes, particularly performance ones, are about boys. It’s about the individual who belongs to a tribe, because of the shared passion of the members. It’s not about a group of faceless individuals. Girls certainly don’t have place in it, let alone a prominent place. On the pillion, probably; but not in the foreground. Sounds chauvinistic? To the feminist in me, putting a girl in the foreground actually sounds patronizing and cheap. And certainly not effective.

Undifferentiated irreverence is about the entire youth, not only boys. That’s why it works for Pepsi, not for TVS. This spot has no strong audience connect, but misses out completely on category relevance.

There is a silver lining, probably an accident. The execution of the irreverence, to me looks like the innate scoff of the youth at the inevitability of ‘settling down’. It’s about enjoying life while it lasts, the true import of ‘now or never’. I recall the old Amit Kumar rendered Kasme Vaade song- ‘abhi zindagi ka le le mazaa, kal kya hoga kisko pata?’. Very youth, very today, very urgency evoking. If only the ‘me and my bike’ were to be integrated with that, it would have been a powerful combination of a life insight and category relevance. A ‘Dhoom’ style tribalism in execution would have been apt as a background; and would have actually added to the flavour.

The Strategy:** I wish I knew the actual strategy TVS was following, to be able to comment on it. Elsewhere in media, I have read the creative agency’s claim that it was ‘trying to appeal to collective consciousness of youngsters’. Replace ‘youngsters’ with ‘boys’ and you would have got a winner. I find trying to be ‘affiliative’ short on insights vis-a-vis boys and bikes.
The Idea:*** As explained earlier, scoff of the inevitability and tribalism of youth, are both strong ideas; but I think they have been integrated sub optimally.
The Execution:**** The execution is good and the spot is very watchable. I just wonder whether it has become too universally likeable, to have a strong audience specificity and affinity. But that is the responsibility of strategy, not execution.
Overall Impact:** Average, with a lot of lost opportunity, I would say.

In summary, I personally like the attempt by an underdog the take some risks and break the paradigm. I just wish the category context and relevance were respected by the account planner. That way the attempt to be right would not have ended up actually being wrong.

[Published in DNA on August 12th, 2006]

2006-07-21T15:23:00.000+05:30

Powerful or Grateful?

What kind of an employer are you?

For the last few weeks I have been reading and watching the new Microsoft advertising asking you whether yours is a people ready business. Very thought provoking, if you pause for a couple of minutes and reflect. While Microsoft finally wants us to buy its software, I would like to thank it for bringing a rather intriguing and burning issue to the fore.

The introduction to the campaign is really smart. I quote verbatim from the Microsoft website.

‘A people-ready business is a business that knows people are its most important asset. ‘

‘A people-ready business believes that people, more than processes, systems, machines, location, or outside consultants, are the ultimate drivers of business success.’

Almost everywhere I go these days, from almost everyone I meet, I hear sounds of optimism about business. Double digit growth, diversification, new launches, new markets, exports, outsourcing, insourcing, being recognized by overseas partners and parents, winning accolades by prestigious newspapers and magazines, parent company’s head honcho’s visiting our market, wining big deals. We are passing through exciting times indeed.

I also hear a litany of complaints and frustration. Mostly about people, human resource, talent. Mostly about youngsters. Lack of commitment, no sense of loyalty, flexible views on integrity, openly flirtatious behaviour, excessive ambition, money mindedness, undisciplined, scant respect for experience and seniority, gossipy, impatient, attitude problems. We are passing through exciting times indeed.

All of us know that talent is no longer an easy issue. The challenge is large enough everywhere, perhaps the most acute in service businesses, where talent is all that we have. In service businesses, talent is not just human resource. As we say at Starcom MediaVest Group; it’s our raw material.

Almost all businesses face difficulty these days of finding, attracting, and retaining top talent. It’s not as if people are in short supply. In fact, people with great academic degrees are not difficult to find either. Why do managers complain then?

As I reflect on the manager’s dilemma, it appears to me that a lot of us are trying to solve a 21^st century issue with tools that were useful a couple of decades ago. No wonder, we get frustrated so easily.

Should we redefine employment?

With the exception of dot coms, and other new age companies, most other firms are run by CEOs who started working a decade or two ago. In those days, there were more qualified people than good jobs. Result: many people applied to dozens of companies with the hope of getting a favorable response from at least one. Many of us were fortunate to get a decent job and unsurprisingly, stayed in that job for a long time. Problem of plenty was faced by some lucky ones who got into one of the few business schools or professional courses.

Those less fortunate were to wait longer to get a job. Some tried using recommendations. Some went to employment bureaus. Most were underemployed.

The equation was simple. Your parents managed to get you educated and you got a degree. You needed to find gainful employment. When you got employed, you felt loyal and paid back to the company over a period. The company, your employer, was the powerful benefactor and you were the grateful beneficiary.

My guess is, most of us who grew up in that old world forget that it’s a very different world today. The drives, aspirations, patience, risk appetite of today’s young people are fundamentally different from what we had.

As far as really qualified talent goes, we might be better off turning this whole employer-employee argument on its head. Perhaps we should think of the people as the benefactors and the firm as the beneficiary. Instead of expecting gratitude from our people for having given them a job, we should perhaps be grateful that they have decided to work with us. More than ever before, today’s young people are agents of their free choice. Perhaps we should explore ways of making ourselves attractive to them. It’s not that firms didn’t try to make themselves attractive to prospective employees in the past; they did. In my view, what we didn’t do was to keep ourselves attractive to the people who have already chosen to work with us. That’s something we need to do now.

Who should be loyal to whom?

Many people talk about employee loyalty and do all kinds of things, mostly little monetary incentives, to keep employees loyal. How many of us have given a serious thought to being loyal to our people? Beyond uttering platitudes, what do companies really do to communicate their loyalty? Do our militaristic, top-down structures allow two way loyalty to foster? How many of us hide behind policies to stifle the innate innovativeness of our people? How many of us truly empower our front line people? The old time lalaji employers are reputed to get personally involved in the lives of their people, they knew their employee’s family, and stood by during stormy weather. How many of us new age employers care enough to do that kind of stuff? Or is there so much of b-school in us, that we must make the work place and our relationship with our people, dehumanized, un-emotional and ‘professional’?

Why train someone who will leave soon in any case?

This is a popular grouse I hear. Training costs money and many managers don’t want to waste it behind people, who they know, will leave. I empathise with these managers. They are only trying to save their company precious financial resources. My question is: how do you know who will leave when? Are training and growth not a few of the things people leave to get elsewhere? By not investing enough behind training and skills development, do we not pretty much push our people away and make our own prophesies come true?

What do we look for when hiring?

Experience? Skills? Talent? I know the answer to such a leading question. But how many of us truly look for talent when hiring people? How many companies train their recruiters, often line managers, in spotting talent? Or do we take comfort in the safety of the prospect’s experience and skills? The truth is that the only thing we cannot teach within the organization is talent. Should we not invest a whole lot of managerial time and energy in looking for talent? We must. But we often don’t. Because it’s more difficult. And riskier. And most of us don’t want to go wrong. It’s so expensive. But can we ever avoid going wrong with people? I don’t think we can. That’s the beauty with people. We have to take chances with them. That’s what professional coaches are supposed to do with players. And their whole reputation depends on them. And even they know that unless they play enough prospects, they wont find a player.

Do we hire people around whom we feel comfortable?

Let’s admit it; that’s what we really do. Very few of us managers hire people who genuinely challenge our views. Whose work style might contrast with ours. Who make us uncomfortable, a little nervous perhaps. Exactly the kind of people we should be hiring to be effective in a world in which we did not build our early careers. People who can put some seeds of doubt into our heads. Who won’t hesitate looking us in the eye and disagree, when we are not right.

Do you hear that sound coming from the stomach? If you do, it’s a good sign.

[Published in the Financial Express on July 20, 2006]

2006-07-16T00:29:00.000+05:30

Shut down the War Room!

Why the time has come to de-militarise Marketing Thinking.

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The two big, really devastating wars of our times, are several decades behind us. One of the reasons the world has managed to avoid wars of that scale is the rise of diplomacy relative to military as a way of settling disagreements. In fact, today’s generation so prefers living to killing and dying that it would rather restrict world ravaging wars to movies and video and console games.

The Marketing discipline, however, seems to have got trapped somewhere in the thought and actions of the war. In our boardroom presentations as well as everyday choice of language, we so glamorize the metaphor of war that every other way of settling our ‘scores’ with consumers looks nearly naïve. We describe consumers as ‘targets’, segments of them worth ‘capturing’, we talk of marketing strategies in terms of ‘frontal’, ‘flanking’ etc, we expect our marketing communication to be ‘impactful’, and we use ‘intrusive’ tactics of ‘shock and awe’, ‘carpet bombing’, ‘air cover’. We talk of our budgets in terms of ‘firepower’. When translated into creative and media, we quite proudly use phrases such as ‘striking when the target is least suspecting’, we want to ‘outmaneuver’ our competitors, ‘defeat’ or ‘neutralize’ them, and we often try to do this by having a larger ‘share of voice’.

The truth is consumers have evolved from the post WW II days, the glory days of the military and marketing. For a few decades in the last century, they tolerated our armed invasion of their unsuspecting mind. Then they developed their own defence. As media and brand choices exploded, consumers started assuming control. Today, that control is nearly complete, often fueled by technology. The biggest ambassador of technology, the Internet, deeply touches even those people, who don’t think much of it. But while the Internet is the ultimate fuel for choice, choice itself is more than that. Choice is in our TV remote, in our mobile phones…more importantly, choice in our mind, in what can be called the hidden remote. As consumers exercise choice on media, media fragments. Those of us who feel helpless blame consumers, media owners and anyone else who will listen, about the media fragmentation and spiraling cost of reaching consumers.

Our world today is fundamentally different from the one where many of us got educated. Consumers are beginning to reject our ‘exploitative’ marketing techniques. They are punishing us by forcing us to redefine our old notions of brand loyalty. They are telling us to ‘stay out’. They have neither the time nor the patience to hear our long winded ‘me Vs ordinary’ stories. They know our TV commercials are trying to sell, not entertain. And they are skipping ads that we spend millions making. When they are not skipping, they are tuning off, using the mental remote. They are making us question the elaborate systems we have put in place to measure the ‘eyeballs’. As far as consumers are concerned, the eyeball and the brain [or the heart, if you please] are actually two different bodyparts.

The military led marketing is so weak now that Sergio Zyman became a bigger hero when he wrote ‘End of Marketing as we know it’ in 1999, than perhaps he was during the 30 odd years he spent practicing ‘marketing as we know it’. I might not agree with all that is inside Mr. Zyman’s famous book; but I believe that title is even more apt today than it was in 1999.

Our World is truly Connected and Communication is not a part of Marketing; it is Marketing.

Today’s young generation is often referred to as the download generation, unlike some previous generations. described as the ‘Pepsi Generation’ or the ‘MTV Generation’. Brands have less of a meaning to the new generation than they had to us. Forget pushing down the brand story through the consumer’s eyeballs, today marketers cannot even afford to upset the consumer. This is how ‘money back guarantee’, ‘click to unsubscribe’, and ‘opt-in’ have risen in their popularity. In a connected world, people are happy helping each other make choices, rather than wait for brands to come and fight it out inside their minds. The reason why word of mouth is more important than ever. Today, there is no bigger fear to a brand than not knowing when a consumer has rejected it. This is why companies and brands in the evolved markets are falling over themselves to set up official blogs. The begging is loud and clear – “If you have to say something nasty about us; please tell us first”.

Our society is looking down on uncalled for aggression

This is one of many contradictions of our times. Individually many of us are more aggressive in life. You see that at the airport, at the hospital, on telephone. But we want our parents, teachers, elected governments and brands – all those authority figures that dominated us in the past - to control their aggressiveness. We want our parents to be ‘friends’ to our children, we want teachers to stop flogging us in school, our governments to know that if they get too aggressive, we can go on the streets and on the Net and tell everyone to bring them down, and we certainly do not want our brands to intrude our minds and fight for supremacy. Actually, we are far less forgiving of brand aggressiveness, because unlike in the case of parents, teachers and governments, where we have little or limited choice, in case of brands we have nearly unlimited choice, and we are willing to exercise it just to prove a point.

Acceptance of aggression by the target is a precondition for the success of the military. Do we still believe militaristic marketing can work today?

The time has come to change the metaphor

I have often heard the line about ‘half of my advertising money getting wasted’. Is it possible that most of the marketing money gets wasted because of the militaristic blood-letting? Anyone who has tried to win a share of voice [SOV] game in marketing and media will empathise with me. SOV wars are mostly not won; they are lost. I wonder whether over emphasizing the role of competition in business and marketing is not an intrinsically wasteful strategy. Some people agree, I would say. Perhaps why ‘Blue Ocean’ is such a big deal, as is ‘Permission Marketing’.

The time has never been riper for marketing to learn from disciplines other than the military. Diplomacy perhaps? Or, Religion? Or should we learn from how people make friends and fall in love? Do I have an answer? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is clear as daylight to me is this: Marketing in the opt-in age is less about brands and their firepower than consumers and their power of choice and peer influence. The faster we learn and apply this, the more money we will save to invest in engaging with more people who will buy and recommend our brands to more of their friends. What more could we possibly want?

[Published in The Financial Express May 4, 2006]

2006-07-07T00:25:00.000+05:30

Whose agents are advertising agencies?
Look truth in the eye, you will know.

More than a decade ago, before I joined this industry, I read about a guy by the name of Volney Palmer. Palmer was one of the earliest known 'advertising agents' in our trade's Mecca, the US of A.

Whose agent was Palmer? Back in the second half of the 19th Century, Palmer figured a very smart way of getting rich quickly, legally. He negotiated bulk deals with magazine owners and got them to issue him letters of exclusive representation on the promise of steady flow of non-subscription revenue. Then he went to potential advertisers, first timers mainly, and told them that advertising in magazines is sure to increase their sales several fold, and the only way they could advertise in some of the best known magazines, was through him alone and he had letters to prove his claim. He also told them that if they bought advertising space for a long period, say a year, and paid him in advance, he would sell them the space at cost. What's more, he can also help the advertisers save a lot of money by getting the magazines typeset the adverts themselves, no artist fees.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

Lie # 1: The magazines Palmer represented were by no means the 'best known'; the ABC was still decades away from being formed.
Lie # 2: He never intended selling any space at cost, he bought space as low as he could and sold them as high as the advertisers would pay and just claimed that was in fact his cost (there was no printed tariff card to disprove him anyway).
Lie # 3: He did not have the foggiest idea whether the ads would really increase sales, so he got magazines change the manufacturer's claims at the typesetting stage, and insert claims that were never meant to be there. That is how took birth one of America's largest ever categories, patent medicines, which were neither medicinal, nor had any patent. Often claiming to prevent or cure dozens of common and private ailments, patent medicines created more illnesses than they cured. But then that's another story .

Palmer and few other gents of his stature created so much havoc those days that they effectively postponed the growth of a whole segment of media owners - the newspapers, who refused to carry 'those adverts' in the fear that their literate gentry would reject any overt attempts to peddle them manufactured goods.

Jai Thompson: It was to save the whole advertising industry from being maligned and suspected forever and to bring in some semblance of credibility in the agents that a fellow called J Walter Thompson championed the system of Open Contract, which later came to be known as the 15 per cent system. Thomson's idea was simple; the agency brought wholesale business to the Media, who saved on the cost of approaching many Clients, and in turn gave the agency a wholesale discount of 15 per cent - no less, no more. It was a clean and transparent system, which worked largely because all media owners and all Clients followed it. Fifteen per cent having been assured, the agencies then focused on doing what they were perhaps meant to do - try and make each ad work harder and smarter than the previous and then the competitor's. This was when interesting concepts like USP was born.

Every new concept has to degenerate over time, as did this one. Someone wrote that while the battle raged to grab consumer attention in the face of a really debilitating depression, under pressure to deliver continuous revenue growth (does that sound familiar?), and comfortable in a percentage remuneration system, agencies did what, in retrospect, sounds absolutely expected. Find ways of increasing the Client's spend (15 per cent of 2X is double of 15 per cent of X, if my Maths serves me right). Result: Bigger ads, more ads in every campaign, more campaigns every year and so on.

The Fallacy of Composition, which states that what is true for an individual, is not necessarily true for the group the individual belongs to, for once failed. Most advertisers believed, often on prodding by their agencies, than you got to shout louder than your competition to be able to ram home your message into your consumer's mind. So what happens when everyone tries to shout louder than the next guy? Overall noise is louder than ever, which means you have to shout even louder, which means….sshh…more 15 per cent money for everyone to share. (The eagerness to shout louder grew so fast that this guy called Ogilvy actually had to remind advertisers and agencies that the consumer was not a moron; she was their wife. Joke goes thus: When poor David was old and haggard, one of the fellas from his old agency asked him in a party what he meant by that statement - what was the difference anyway?)

What per cent is your soul? Having just crossed Thomson's century, as respectable-sounding newspapers create havoc in Client minds about whether they should pay their agency 15 per cent or 5 per cent, just by writing largely superficial stories and half truths, I am very tempted to go back to the fundamental truth of Thomson's Open Contract System.

So whose agent was the advertising agency? What do you think? Feel a little shifty? Slightly queasy? Face it pal, the 15 per cent did not come from the Client, it came from the media owner. And it kept coming for close to 8 decades. That's the truth of our life. While we kept claiming we were the Client's Agency, we kept working for the Media Owner on the sly, sometimes without realising it, mostly without admitting it. Insecure to the core, but pompous nevertheless, we refused to face the fact that the folks in the big boardrooms we make our presentations to, are actually paying our salaries.

Are agencies the only ones to be blamed for this? By no means. Advertisers accepted the commission system because it was simple, conventional and comfortable. It also made them more certain of their total payout, than other alternatives. It's a shame that even now, many advertisers are quite comfortable in the percentage system, all they are trying to do under pressure, is to cut it down so that they can save money. To me it shows a certain lack of willingness to think.

This is where it gets politically incorrect. So if you are the sensitive type, please click here to go home.

Prostitutes Vs Doctors: A professor in college told us that Advertising was the second oldest profession in the world. It took me several months in the business to understand why. Do you know why? Because the prostitutes needed someone to tell the world about their service. Is it any wonder that we in advertising sometimes behave very close to the practitioners of that oldest profession? (No offence, from now I will say sex worker)..

Have you ever wondered what most of our Clients really want us to be? Consultants, like Doctors, that's what. Funny thing is most of us know it, most of us claim to be consultants, but we still behave like the other type. Here are some of my favourite examples.

How many Doctors have you met who pitched for your 'business'?

I guess if they pitched by telling you how they have cured XYZ ailment of ABC guy, we would say okay. But how would you like it if your physician drew up two equally convincing sets of prescriptions and when you asked which one you should take said, "I like both. You can run with either!" Or "My recommendation is we should run an experiment and find out which one works. Then we will know the other one was not right"?

How many Doctors do you know who expect a percentage of your chemist's bill as their remuneration?

The reason we pay our Doctors is so that she can get us fixed at the lowest cost, not so that she can play golf with the chemist.

Imagine if the chemist suddenly decided to give a higher percentage on aspirin than on digestive? What will the Doc do?

Now think about this. How many times have we recommended to a Client to pull out money from Above the Line and put in Point of Sale or Public Relations or Direct Marketing? Rarely, where is the Open Contract on all these media?

How many Doctors do you know who have readymade prescriptions that are thrown at you the moment you walk in?

Yet, how many times have we heard of campaigns with the interchangeable logos, and scripts with interchangeable brand names? How many times have we allowed Clients to fast-track a campaign out of us in two days? How many times have we agreed to create media plans without even meeting one customer?

Try telling your physician 'C'mon Doc you can do it!' or 'I have deadline to catch, hurry up on that test, will you?' and you will see what I mean.

How many specialists do you know who will guarantee you exclusivity?

Imagine your cardiologist saying 'Sir, in the 10 days that I will take operating on you, I will not see another patient nor will I offer my counsel to any'. Will you let her even think of your heart? Hell no, I won't. I want her to be so busy looking after patients such as me, before, during and after she is on to me, that I would be reassured I am not her test case.

Ditto with lawyers and management consultants.

How come we are so eager to offer exclusivity to our Clients at the drop of a Stetson? Clients want zero-conflict. That has two aspects - confidentiality and exclusivity.

Confidentiality is a valid business expectation, which encourages Clients to share sensitive information with us.

Exclusivity is something we have created in the past as a way of holding on to something that perhaps is not rightfully ours ("Please stay with me because you are the only one I have in the category, never mind what product you are getting"). I am convinced that no Client's interest is served by withholding the agency's future source of revenue. Clients would rather have a great product than a poor but exclusive one.

How many Doctors do you know who will agree to be paid in return for advising how to raise our children, in addition to writing a prescription?

Why do some of us agree to write brand plans or develop market maps for Clients free? Or do research at our cost? Value additions, did you say? Say that again?

Time to Change the Mindset: That's what I believe. It's too dangerous to be politically correct with the guys who pay our salaries. Saying yes without meaning to may mean just postponing getting sacked. Getting under the skin of Client's Business is no longer just a fun thing to do, it's now or else. Trying to cook up 'some ideas that may work for the brand' the night before the presentation is death. What we need is solid freshness and ground breaking ideas in our thinking. The times are tough folks and our Clients are paranoid about their business, trials, volumes, shares. We cannot afford to be paranoid only about our percentage.

So what do we do? I have my counsel (free to try, a million dollars to buy).

If you are in an agency…

Refuse to treat advertising like a commodity. It's about understanding how fellow humans process information and make decisions. That's not a commodity; it's the closest you can go to Psychiatry, sitting on a chair.
Stand up and say that you work for the Client. Media Owners are partners in delivering a product to your Clients, not the other way around. De-link your remuneration from the Client's media spend, and link it to your intellectual capital invested.
Recommend what you believe is right, even if that may mean a lower remuneration.
Most Clients believe there is no such thing as a free lunch, tell them you believe in it too. Do not throw away intellect free of charge. It's your Client, not your child. Allow the Client to do his / her job.

What if you are an Advertiser? Am I going to deprive you of my counsel? Naah!!!

So here goes…

Don't throw peanuts, you know what you get when do that. Not tigers.
Don't give your agency the status of 'commission agents' of the media owners. That's sick.
Treat the agency and its executives like true physicians, not a chemist. If you need aspirin, you wouldn't go to a doctor, would you? Respect the agencies view, most of them know more about advertising, like you know more about your product. Your points of view may not match, but that's okay. Most of us differ with our doctor all the time, but pop in the pills anyway.
Do not ask for free lunches (I cannot stop thinking about the time a Client told an agency, "We don't know enough about our products and who uses it and so on. You have to came back and tell us. If you don't, we will find someone who will. What was that? A noble attempt to make a virtue out of laziness? Gimme a break!)
Never reward an agency for making you spend a lot of money. That's a commission agent masquerading as an agency. (The folks who say 'If my Client has to waste money, I'd rather he did that through me.')
Pay for an idea and intellectual investment, that's all your agency has got. Do not create pitches, just to get free ideas. Hate to sound moralistic, but stealing really is deceit.

There we go. I have contributed more to advertisers than to agencies. Now who is going to pay me for my time? Can I see some hands please?

On a serious note, it's time for each one of us to look Truth in the eye. If we don't, some day folks may say Advertising is the World's oldest profession. That would be a really sad day.

[Published in 2001 on agencyfaqs!]

2006-06-20T18:14:00.000+05:30

Aamir Vs Aamir

Is there a Lesson in Marketing from one of the most talked about celebrity outbursts?

Let me begin with a disclaimer. This is not a piece about how celebrities should conduct themselves in public or in media. It is not about whether or not they should get involved with or voice their opinions on politically or socially sensitive matters. It is not about whether they should do research on a controversial subject, acquaint themselves with ‘facts’ from both sides, and only then form an opinion instead of forming lazy opinions.

Enough and more has been written or spoken on these subjects. We have heard Aamir and his supporters from the ‘industry’ and elsewhere. We have seen other celebrities such as Arundhati Roy and Rahul Bose share their opinion with us on several news TV stations. In fact, only recently, I read a beautifully written piece by Rahul Bose on intentblog, one of the best open blogs I have seen.

My goal here is a little different. A little less selfless and more commercial, if you may. As a practitioner of marketing and communication, I am intrigued by the issue the Aamir-Narmada-Fanaa episode raises, even after the episode itself seems to have blown over.

If you try to simplify an otherwise multi textural issue, it’s Aamir the celebrity that endorses half a dozen high profile brands versus Aamir the concerned citizen who is compelled to raise his voice against seeming injustice. In fact, even more importantly, it’s Aamir the actor who acts for a living versus Aamir the brand whose equity must be protected, grown and leveraged.

Now look at what the brand did. It [doesn’t sound right to refer to Aamir, as ‘it’, does it?] jumped out of its popularly accepted, rather linear domain of acting-to-entertain, into an uncharted territory. Out of the larger -than-life fantasy world of the big screen, Dolby sound, and carefully directed retakes, into the grimy and sweaty world that millions live in every day. It could not have been easy choice. Particularly when a brand extension [Fanaa] was weeks away from its launch. I know there are people out there who believe Aamir’s Narmada outburst and rather ‘suddenly’ found social conscience were part of a carefully orchestrated bridge strategy between Rang De Basanti and Fanaa. If that is true, I wonder how many product or service marketing managers would take such a risk before a launch. In fact, whether Aamir’s Narmada voice was a marketing tactic is not the real issue here.

To me, the issue is whether brands need to learn a new lesson on how to communicate with their customers. Ever since brand management started as a discipline, most brands have tried to create and maintain a squeaky clean image, polished regularly by advertising. They have lived in a fantasy world where problems always disappear at the end of 30 seconds, ‘ordinary’ names always fail, rivals draw blood on an imaginary street. They have stood on pedestals and delivered sermons about the good and the evil, while obedient disciples listened with patience. Not unlike how Aamir and others in his profession talk to us in a theatre, if you think about it.

But the truth is, brands live in our minds and hearts and we live in a society. The society isn’t a fantasy world; it’s where we return when the three hours of fantasy are over. It’s where parents give interviews, so that kids can get admission into a school, where neighbors fight over relatively trivial issues, where corruption is something we practice in day time and watch on TV at night.

Do brands live in our society? With us? Should they?

If we want to move from an era where consumers move from just knowing our brand to liking it, a thought that is finding increasing acceptance amongst seasoned brand marketers, we should perhaps think of brands as social beings.

Not everyone in our society is our friend. Some people whose ideas and opinions are similar to ours, who have interests and hobbies common to ours, who help us face a challenge or leverage an opportunity, become our friends. Others become someone else’s friends. People fight normal fights, but we are most often loyal to our friends regardless of who is fighting against them. And while we might have many types of friends and some times we lose touch with some of them, we don’t change with friends very frequently.

Do we see our brand as a friend like this?

Here comes the provocation. In a world where people [consumers?] are getting increasingly cynical of marketing, advertising and brands, should we start breaking down some of the practices that built our powerful brands yesterday? Should we attempt to make the simple principles of friendship and social relationship work to create a relationship between our brand and attention challenged consumers?

Should our brands step down from the hallowed pedestal and mingle with the masses? Should they take stances on issues of social importance and urgency, even if some of them might be controversial and ‘politically’ sensitive?

Net, should brands take a social stance? Or should they avoid any kind of controversy and stay sanitized and clean?

How come Aamir thought of doing something that Shah Rukh, Amitabh, Aishwarya, Lataji and Hritik haven’t done? Is Aamir the only one? How about Shabana? How about Gere?

How come we regard Benetton, Bullet, MTV, Diesel, Harley, Zippo, Apple, Red Bull differently from countless others?

If we think of brands broadly as mainstream and leading-edge, how they have built, what chances they have taken, who owns them and how they behave, we might find some directions and explanations. But, then, that’s a broader subject, isn’t it?

[Published on indiantelevision.com on June 20, 2006]

2006-06-18T12:51:00.000+05:30

To play safe; start taking risks.

A friend of mine met a stranger on the net and they got married within three weeks. Several top executives – Sunil Alagh, Shripad Nadkarni, Nabankur Gupta – chucked very comfortable positions to strike out on their own. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3, which most people would have expected to be a parallel film, became a mainstream rage. Aparna Mafatlal became Ajay Mafatlal, teaching many of us a new phrase – gender dysphoria. More young people than ever before went into live-in relationships. The Metrosexual badge traveled beyond designers and fashion models, and started getting worn by people I know. Doctors nearly challenged the government to sack them on the reservation issue. Himesh Reshammiya made sufi hip and started overshadowing mainstream singers. Aamir slapped Gujarat politicians on the wrist on Narmada barely weeks before the release of high stakes Fanaa.

Isolated events? Parallel and un-connected trends? I see a strong common undercurrent.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. I am not sure he would have imagined his satire to take a new meaning in fewer than 100 years.

We are in a brave new world and the undercurrent of many things happening around us is a four letter word called risk.

Risk is all around and more and more people are embracing it; not avoiding it. That is something our uncles did. As people, we take personal risks, professional risks and social risks. It takes a bit of boldness; but more importantly, it takes a whole lot of pragmatism to embrace risk.

It’s not as if before last year people didn’t take risks. They did. But the risk embracing behavior of people is now getting more pronounced. And it is manifesting itself in the way they live their day, earn their living, raise their children, choose their friends, form their communities and support groups and perhaps decide on their brands.

Some of us hold brand clutter, media fragmentation and consumers’ flirtatious behaviour responsible for the severe strain brand loyalty as a concept is under. What we need to understand is that the real reason behind this symptom of disloyalty is the consumers’ boldness to experiment, to try new things, to take risks. We need to go beneath the apparent trend and read the undercurrent.

When is the last time we saw a brand taking a risk? Or a brand manager? Or an ad agency honcho? In fact, next to doctors, if there is one community I have noticed who, in general, have a mortal fear of risks, it is us - the marketing community. Most of us have been handed out a brand that we must ‘manage’, and the last thing we want to do is to leave a legacy of a setback to the brand. So we play safe, glamorize incrementalism and kill innovativeness in the name of ROI.

Do you call a new product launch, or a line extension, or brand extension, or a new communication as taking a risk? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Sure there is risk in each of these activities; but is that what you call taking a risk? Not really. Which is why most brand extensions fail and re-launch is such a nice phrase, because it allows us to blame the previous brand manager or the agency.

Benetton takes risks. Star Plus took a lot of risks in the days before KBC and for some time after. Zee TV is taking risks now. Apple took a risk when it got into the portable music player business. General Motors in the USA took a big risk earlier this year when it asked consumers to create commercials for Chevy Tahoe that’s available for everyone to see. This is not the place for me to pass judgments on which risks paid off and which didn’t. My argument is different here.

In my view, it’s time brands took well planned risks. Tested the boundaries of sensitivity. Communicated in ways and at places that made consumers sit up and think something, feel something, do something. Instead of producing the most boring pieces of communication and attempting to force them into the consumers’ unsuspecting minds.

It’s time we marketers allowed consumers to play with our brands, include them into their lives. The truth is consumers shape brands, brand managers don’t. Ask a Palm user or an i-Pod user. They get more information about the brand from a user group site than the corporate website of the brand. Who is giving the information? Another user, of course. Not all comments on user groups are favourable. Some of the biggest critics of a brand live there. Should brands be scared of user groups or encourage them? Think about it.

Like most people today, I am positive. I am confident that the ability to take risks is what will differentiate winning brands in the future. For the others, marketing has a nice phrase – also-ran.

Think.

[Published in IMPACT 2nd Anniversary Special Edition, June 2006]

2006-05-29T22:06:00.000+05:30

Above the Line or Below?

Watch out. The Line is getting blurred.

Two broad trends are blurring the line between Above-The-Line and Below-The-Line.

One, consumers are getting immune to classical ATL advertising. They have less time, attention and patience and are more advertising cynical than ever. They are multi tasking more than before. If they are not so in some geographies or categories, they soon will be. Two, marketers realize that their products are increasingly similar to their competitors’, and they do not have the luxury of years to build their brands. Their view of how brands are built is also changing. The traditional and linear cognition-emotion-action theory of brand choice is morphing into a more multidimensional experience-adoption-preference-repeat-recommendation model.

These two concurrent changes are accelerating the pace of adoption of integrated marketing and IMC [Integrated Marketing Communication] thinking. What was traditionally called BTL fits very comfortably today with ATL to form IMC. The important thing is, today it’s not a subservient discipline, it’s an equal.

In a 2004 Forrester Research survey amongst US marketers, 90% agreed that ‘media fragmentation and consumer ad blocking and skipping required big changes in marketing strategy’. 70% said ‘to be effective in today’s media environment, TV must be part of an integrated marketing campaign’. If we have to do a similar survey in India, the figures might not be that high; but something tells me, they won’t be insignificant either.

We are in an age where exposure based thinking is giving way to engagement and experience based models. Smart marketing practitioners know that delivering a positive brand experience to the consumer is the starting point of a lasting brand-consumer relationship.

Price promotions apart, many successful BTL activities of today can be best described as Experiential Marketing. It’s about creating brand encounters that change the way consumers evaluate competitive options and feel good about themselves. So whether it’s General Mills’ Betty Crocker baking experience, or AXE Deo’s longest party or Castle Lager’s Castle Loud events, or Western Union’s festival related consumer activation initiatives, the emphasis is on what we may call face-to-face marketing.

Not long ago, most new product launches saw a launch conference meant typically for the trade. Today, brands often prefer a consumer launch event, where at least key influencers and opinion leaders are invited. Brands are learning not to jump headlong into a launch without having seeded the product with real consumers and learning from their experiences over an extended period. Product sampling is no longer an afterthought; it’s a cornerstone of experiential marketing. Even classical BTL disciplines such as PR and direct marketing, are and can be much more proactive, and consumer directed. For many categories, sports can become a powerful way of creating and carrying the experience. Branded Entertainment can be used to communicate brand values in more engaging and more credible ways than classical advertising.

Increasingly mass media is being used to amplify activation and experiential initiatives, in a kind of follow-up role, rather than only as an initiator of the communication process.

Already tools such as Integration’s Market Contact Audit [MCA^SM] are helping marketers measure the effectiveness of the entire spectrum of marketing and communication activities. Adoption of such tools will help us avoid drawing an artificial dichotomy between ATL and BTL- strategic Vs tactical, measurable Vs whimsical.

Well orchestrated, integrated marketing is undoubtedly the future, where all marketing and communication efforts must help create a positive brand experience for the consumer.

Because experiences last; memory often doesn’t.

[Published in the Hindustan Times, June 3, 2006]

2006-03-24T04:17:00.000+05:30

A case for the ‘weaklings’

Or why Special Interest TV Channels can prove to be recession busters

Enough has been said and written in the recent past of the economic slowdown, the pressure on top line as well as bottom line. As marketers across product and service categories shape and reshape recessionary strategies, the same pressure is also being transferred to their media agencies.

Unfortunately, the approach most media planners take to build strategies does not seem to be adjusting to the new realities of our lives. Instead of looking for pockets of gold mines on the supply side, most of us continue to be driven by demand side frenzy and plan our brands’ activities the way we always have. Fact is, slowdowns and bad times are the best times to question the conventional way and to look for alternative solutions.

Here let’s argue how special interest TV channels such as news, sports, movies, music, and edutainment can provide those gold mines.

The popular thinking at present is skewed in favour of ‘the big and the beautiful’ channels. Most planners still create plans with a pyramid approach-put the biggest channels at the base to build reach, go on putting more and more money on them until reach stops building, or sometimes, until you have got enough money on each channel for you to be able to negotiate good prices, allocate something to the so-called ‘niche’ channels as an experimental investment, to top up the pyramid. Typically, this top-up money is not more than 8-10% of the total investment of the advertiser, if that much. Result: we are forever experimenting with ‘special interest channels’, often called ‘niche’ channels in a dismissive kind of way, without really attempting to realize their pull potential.

Stereotypical thinking helps mass channels

This is the reason why despite a very healthy 25% odd share of prime time viewing, all niche channels put together will probably close the year with 15% of the total TV advertising pie. On the other hand, with a comparable [35%] share of viewing, the top 3 Hindi channels [Star Plus, Sony and Zee] still get anything up to and perhaps more than half of all TV spend of about Rs 2600 Cr [expected 2001 year end figures]. There is nothing drastically wrong with the big, mass channels getting a bigger share of the ad pie, particularly since they provide the biggest block of audience for the biggest ad spenders, namely housewives to consumer goods advertisers. The key question is: how much.

Let’s look at a key recent trend: the share of viewing commanded by the general entertainment channels such as Star Plus and Sony is not increasing. For most audience segments, it has declined by a few percentage points in the last 3-4 months, a clear sign of stabilization. This means general entertainment viewing, from now on, will largely be a zero-sum game; one channel’s gain will necessarily be at the cost of another.

While housewives will continue to patronize the mass entertainment programmes such as soaps, the more evolved of them will move away every now and then to other channels. As many men already do. [That’s why entertainment channels together have a lower share of the total male viewing than that of female viewing]. And that’s our opportunity. The more we can exploit the specialist interest channels, the less we will be held to ransom by the demand side frenzy on mass channels. Here are a few reasons to start critically examining specialist channels.

Who is the audience? If the audience is anyone other than broad spectrum housewives [e.g. SEC ABC] , special interest channels have a case. In the car owning households in the top 6 cities for instance, mass channels have a 28% share of 25+ men audience, while special interest channels have 21%. The corresponding figures in the washing machine owning households are 25% and 18% [INTAM]. Other measures such as skew also prove that niche and upscale audiences lean toward special interest channels more than mass. What does this establish? While mainstream channels still have a higher share of audience, special interest channels do offer a healthy supplement. Fact is, when we buy mass channels for niche audiences [such as men in car owning households, or upscale youth], we pay for the core audience of the medium-women-whether we like it or not. That’s why the full potential of special interest channels must be exhausted before we have to use mass channels.

What is the reach target? High reach targets will necessitate mass channels. If your reach target is moderate [perhaps because your brand is not a number 1 or 2], you can do with very little of mass channels. In early 2000, when the Toyota Qualis was launched, this is the thinking that resulted in the launch plan which had only special interest channels. A healthy 40% reach was achieved at a cost that is often considered miniscule for TV.

How quickly do we want to build reach? The faster we want to build reach, the heavier will be our dependence on mass channels. That’s why specialist channels can play a strong role in continuous advertising requirements. Interestingly, used with smartness, specialist interest channels can also build reach fairly quickly; the secret is in understanding how a particular audience watches which channel and then exploiting that to the brand’s advantage. If the burst is anything over 4 weeks, special interest channels must be used to their fullest.

How clutter cutting is the creative? Very often, special interest channels are described as clutter busters. In a tough market driven by high demand for mass channels, special interest channels sell less commercial time than their bigger cousins. Some channels such as BBC have, in fact, an internal limit on commercial time; they can only sell up to 6 minutes of commercials in every hour, while the bigger channels are allowed up to 10 minutes. This has resulted in a dramatic difference in commercial clutter levels. For instance, the average prime time advertising sold per hour in the last 8 weeks is 3-4 minutes for English News and Sports channels, while it’s anything between 8 and 12 minutes for most general entertainment channels [In fact, ETC sells as much as 18 minutes an hour].

If we do not want to gamble on the clutter cutting ability of the creative, special interest channels score with a cleaner advertising environment. Of course, this is desirable only if low clutter is assumed to be good for message delivery [some opinions differ here, but then that’s another debate].

There are a few other arguments that favour special interest channels that must be mentioned here. Unfortunately, in the absence hard data, these arguments remain largely in the area of judgment and intuition. In that sense, they are still open to debate.

Special Interest Channels are viewed more actively: The active Vs passive viewing debate has not seen any conclusion. I am not even sure whether there is one universal answer to this question. Viewership measurement systems, such as TAM and INTAM, are expected to load in favour of mass channels, because that’s where most of the television viewing [and ad spend] is.

However, custom surveys conducted to measure the habits of upscale audiences, such as the Horizon Study jointly conducted by BBC and Starcom last year, do point to a greater inclination by this audience toward special interest channels.

Until more data is available, we have to take the active viewing argument for what it is: logical and intuitive. Fact is, if the audience is active and involved, up to a certain point, it will receive advertising more favourably.

Special Interest Channels help build a bond with the audience: This is another of those judgmental arguments that has not been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Although names of such channels come up in formal and informal discussions with members of niche audiences, whether recall means bonding is still open to discussion.

These last two debatable points apart, there is a strong and logical case for a thorough examination of the role of special interest channels in plans aimed at niche, particularly upscale audiences.

It requires a lot more work on the part of today’s planners, and an open mind on the part of the advertisers to get the best out of special interest channels.

But then, gold is not available as biscuits on pavements, is it?

[Published in 2002 on agencyfaqs.com]