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

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]

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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]

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

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]

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

Embedded Video

Blogged with the Flock Browser