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

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]

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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]

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.