Indian Marketing Trends

Marketing the Niche to the Mass

2012-02-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

Marketing the Niche

By Harish Bijoor

The niche. By definition, a small wedge. A small corner even.

Marketing as a process is the ability of a marketer to take a product, a service or a concept and make it as mass as possible. Marketing to that extent of definition is a process that fulfills a latent human need, want, desire and aspiration. Marketing is therefore a process that takes what is not known at all, and gets it known by as big a mass of people as possible.

You can therefore take a carbolic soap such as Lifebuoy and make it as mass as it is today. You can really build a hierarchy of brands that reach out to consumers, from the mass to the niche. Take soap and the Indian market for instance. Right at the bottom of the pyramid is the mass segment. Put a red Lifebuoy in it. Just above it is the mid-premium segment. Put a Lux in it. Just above it, is the premium segment. Put a Dove into it. And right above that would be a niche offering. An offering for Pimples? Clearasil soap! A soap for men alone? Aramusk! And tomorrow a soap for folk who are lesbian and gay in their preferences?

This is the niche. The niche is always small. The niche is different. The niche is unique. The niche is boutique. The niche is all about that one salmon that swims against the tide. It is about that one offering in the market that is so unique that people will pay a good price for the offering, but there won’t be too many people partaking of the offer.

The niche is therefore that narrow wedge of marketing space that brands aspire to occupy not for the sake of volume, but for the sake of image and continued brand sustenance basis just that.

How does one market the niche then? What are the primary challenges? And what’s so different in approach from marketing a mass soap, a mass focused travel agency and a mass focused consulting practice for that matter like what the Big Four(or is the Big Two and a half now?) do.

Marketing the niche brand is firstly a labor of love. Niche brands emanate from small little gaps in the market. At times they are non-gaps even. These are small little gaps and non-gaps seen by evangelists. Evangelists who are reasonably tired of mass market offerings. Evangelists, who at times have themselves experienced lack of service, frustration and a complete lack of fulfillment. The consultancy practice that looks at a zero-solicit model of business, where there is no advertising, no touting of business formats, no participation in market pitches for accounts and no brochure and no detailed website is one such example.

The challenges then are three mainly.

1. There is no money to advertise. Might as well make a virtue of that. A non-advertised brand must be good, na?

2. Niche brands slip between the slats of public recognition. At times too much recognition can be the bane of a brand in public space. Niche is boutique.

3. Niche brands forever look maverick and small. And that’s an advantage in today’s world where everything big is considered that much less optimal in its service and delight delivery standards.

Two do’s and two don’ts:

Do’s:
1. Spruce up your brand image and be totally cutting-edge in what you offer. You need to be one step ahead of big competition. Remember, bigger organisaitons take much longer to change with their clients. Clients change faster than those who service them do!
2. Don’t open up those offices all over. Follow a policy of the small office home office in every location till you have a minimum 5 clients in the kitty. It is better not to open a new office at all than close all of them one by one!

Don’t:
1. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver. Clients and consumers are tired of this.
2. Don’t be glib and slick at all. Don’t follow the big guys in this game. Be real. Be genuine. Be sincere. You will stand out like a loved sore thumb!

Wait! Even as I tap this onto my laptop, it strikes me that I operate in a niche myself.

Here is some niche-'gyaan' then from what I painted for my business practice eight years ago as a private label consulting firm with no MNC-consulting tag to it. Best way to talk the language of the niche. Best way to explore the challenge of the niche. My personal one.

Consulting! Possibly the world’s oldest profession. Rivals the other one for sure! A name that used to bring a smile on my face before I actually jumped into it. I had dealt with the big names in the Consulting business for a while now during my previous stints with Levers, Tata Coffee and finally Zip Telecom. I knew many an Anderson, a McKinsey and an E&Y! I knew many of the smaller names as well. Many a salivating consultant who would network at the parties I attended wearing the corporate hat.

The term Consulting has both a positive and a negative feel about it. The positive is that which talks of stellar strategy that creates many an alliance, many a turnaround and a domain that has been responsible for creating a wealth of wealth!

The negative connotation is best typified in the joke doing the cocktail rounds of a consultant being an entity that gets into your organization, wants to meet the folks who work there, asks for your watch, looks at it keenly and tells you the time!

I have never wanted to be one of that kind. And blissfully I am not! The first thing I did as the bug to get into bed with consultancy got to me was that I did a thorough analysis of the turf at hand. Being a Market Research enthusiast all my life, I could do nothing better. I looked keenly at the inadequacies in the profession, and said I would never trample on the terrain in the same manner as many others have.

I defined for myself a USP. Two actually.

One: My consultancy will never solicit business. No presentations to clients, no networking at parties, no presentations, no pitches and no brochures and direct mailers at all! I have had enough of that staring back at me from the other side of the fence when I was a Corporate for 18 long years!

Two: My practice would focus on walking the talk. Talking the talk is just not enough. The consultant must tread the path of his strategy and see it to fruition. I therefore adopted the Build-Operate-Transfer basis of business many a super-highway contractor adopts in his trade. I will build strategy; I will operate it for the client as if I am his own resource for a year. At point of satisfaction, I will transfer the business to the client CEO! Gives the profession a great deal of credibility!

This seems to work. It has kept me busy. My four offices are busy as well.

As big consultancies break up with corporates suspecting value-propositions, niche boutique consultancies that focus on individual specialty domains will become the order of the day! Private-label consultancy is here! The terrain is ripe for many a new entrant. More the merrier.

Being a niche player is really an advantage today. If this is a David versus Goliath play, the consumer of the future is poised to look keenly at David. David is small. David is nifty. David is value-for money (most of the time). David is like me. Small, real and vulnerable. The consumer emotes with small. B2B, B2C or to B2M (Business to machine) marketing, small is still beautiful. Schumacher was right!

The author is a brand and business-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private label-consulting practice with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, UK, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent. Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

2012-02-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

Modern retail Ver. 2.0: Shopper marketing!

By Harish BIjoor

Shopper marketing is possibly the most under-explored, and for sure the most under-exploited science of them all. Shopper Marketing is therefore the most efficient of them all tools that lie out there in the open market place for retailers to grab and run with.
The story of retail is an interesting one. Since retail is the oldest professions of them all, every retailer stepping into the terrain imagines it to be kid-play. Choose a location, set up a store, stock it well, brand the store, advertise, and wait for your customers to walk in and pluck inventory off the shelves. And you are running to the bank, laughing all the way!

Wish that were true. The cruel fact is that it is not. Modern retail of both the big and small kind is way different, and way more difficult than all that. Don’t we know by now?

In the old days, Shopper Marketing was not even a subject to bother about. The terminology was yet to be invented and made ubiquitous. And "old days" was just 5 years ago!
Those were the days modern retailers were excited about plucking the low-hanging fruit of opportunity in the sector. The subject of retail had a centricity of approach that was entirely different. The approach was clearly one where you focused on back-end efficiency. This was really Modern retail 1.0 where you worked out great deals with suppliers, you worked out pack-size options that you were going to stock, you worked out shelf-stocking norms, and you were ready.

Modern Retail 1.1 was all about location. You took the next logical step of scouting out a location that was killer in all respects. You did a quick 'thingie' with the demographics of the locality, local competition that was vulnerable, and if you were a wee bit savvier, you did a quick one on the psychographics of the folks who lived in that location. And you were ready. More or less. And most of the time, the Mall developer did all this home-work for you. All you needed to do was walk in with your ‘set-it-up-in-twenty-days’ store.

Version 1.2 of Modern Retail started depending on unique products your Modern Retail store could offer. Literally every super-market in the hinterland was offering the very same brands. Every super-market literally started looking like one another, except for the brand-name at the entrance and the ownership certificate you proudly had to display within the outlet at a prominent place for the Municipal authorities and the Shops and Establishments inspectors, and twenty others of their ilk, to examine when they did their visits.

In came the dealers’ own brands (DOB’s) in this phase of the development of Modern Retail in India. Every retailer vied with one another to have different sets of exclusive designer labels within their store, just as the 'dal-cheeni-chawal-atta” retailer tried to set up his own low-end private label brand. This was the differentiation at play.

And then came version 1.3. This was the phase where advertising took charge. The 30-second commercial on television was the big one to go with. The store had sorted out its back-end issues splendidly, the location had been laid out thoughtfully, the store had been designed to efficiency norms that were global, the private labels were all there, and business was still 'parri passu'. Time to re-invent then. Time to think of drawing in customers through mass media. Through discounts. Through deals. Through loyalty programs.

Version 1.3 became 'parri passu' a bit too soon. Every Tom, Dick and Harish retailer was doing the same thing all round. Everyone brought in advertising. Every piece of advertising started looking like the suitings’ ad of yore, where you could not distinguish one brand from another. Therefore, one chain helped another, and advertising of the 30-second type became a generic piece that worked for the category of Modern Retail, but did not quite do too much to the specific brand for sure.

Every retailer went a step further and offered the loyalty card. The loyalty card of one store became the disloyalty card of another. Loyalty degenerated to location loyalty rather than brand-loyalty, and stores bled on this count. Version 1.3 of Modern retail in many ways was totally experimentative, 'parri passu' and bled moneys that a retail outlet of any size and ownership pattern could ill-afford.

I do believe we are still going through this Version 1.3 of bleed-value. Modern retailers are all of a sudden realizing the true-blue merit of Shopper Marketing at last! As the high-hanging fruit of opportunity is all getting plucked by the host of 214-plus modern format retailers in the country, it is time for the real action to start. This action is in the realm of Shopper Marketing.

Version 2.0 of Modern Retail in India is about to kick-off then. This time round it is all about the most important link in them all: the shopper. It is time for insight building exercises that take you into shopper homes as you do wardrobe studies that tell you the exact number of ‘undies’ with holes in them. The exact number of lucky garments in the wardrobe and equally unlucky ones. The ones that make you fail in exams and the one that makes it rain heavily when you wear them even!

The world of insight into the shopper is getting more and more defined. Out of the window goes the 30-second spot, and in comes a focus on understanding the shopper holistically. And having done just that, time to put together Shopper-insight-geared offerings. Offerings that make your Modern Format retail chain that much more edgy and that much more buzzy than the shop next door.
Over to Modern Retail Ver 2.0 then: Shopper marketing.
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Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a strategy-consulting practice with a presence in the markets of India, Hong-king, Dubai, UK and Turkey.
Twitter.com @harishbijoor
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Brand Trends 2011 and a Prognosis for 2012

2011-12-29T20:12:00.000-08:00

BRAND TRENDS 2011
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Slow Down India

By Harish Bijoor

The year 2011 is wrapped up. All wrapped up on a cold January morning. Ready to be buried. It’s time to take stock of what went into it in marketing terms. What then were the trends that defined the calendar year 2011 in marketing and brand terms?

Here goes.
1. WATCH OUT! Activism is up:

This is a trend that is going to define marketing and branding in the years to come. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement in India, and indeed across the Indian diaspora, has set a trend all in itself for the marketer to watch, and watch out for. Activism is in. At this point of time this activism is all about an anti-corruption movement aimed at the politician and bureaucrat class at large.

Watch it spread to every terrain there is. Activism and consumer watch movements will now spread to corporate governance and surveillance in terms of corporate corruption, and corporate greed.

Watch it spread even wider in coming years then. Activism is a bug. A positive bug for sure. Watch it spread to activism in the terrain of wealth. Watch it become a movement that questions big wealth in the hands of a few versus no wealth in other hands at all. Activism in this space will question the possession of big cars versus small. Activism in this space will question every bit of flaunt. Activism in this space will indulge in audits of rich personas and what they wear, what they eat, what they use as accessories and what they spend on a single meal even.

In the immediate year ahead, expect consumer activism movements to gain traction. The marketer better prepare for this with transparent mechanisms. You might as well expect an RTI kind of legislation in the space of the brands and businesses you run and manage. Ouch!

2. E-commerce is the silent market-maker:

If in the year 2010, Multi-level marketing firms such as Amway were the silent market makers who gained big volumes and big acceptance in Indian homes, in the year 2011, it was the e-commerce outfit on the prowl.

VC moneys flowed into the terrain like vodka and whisky on New Year’s Eve we have just been through. Ideators and promoters of the e-commerce venture therefore went berserk burning money on the track to consumer stardom. Big successes were noted in the terrain with outfits in B2C commerce such as Flipkart, Home Shop 18, Yebhi, and their cousins in the C2C commerce such as eBay try every trick in the marketing book to reach out to distant markets urban, rurban and rural alike.

Cash-on-delivery (COD) worked miracles for the category. The Indian who largely distrusts credit card payments found comfort-space in paying at the doorstep for orders placed on the Internet. It’s a different matter that as much as 16% of all such orders are rejected at the door-step and the only guy who makes money on this entire transaction is the courier-agency which makes money twice over.

At the end of all this e-commerce evangelism at play, one big trend has emerged. India is today a level-playing field for all marketers. If you tie up with the right kind of e-commerce outfit, you will be able to reach distant markets, which you have ignored thus far. Distribution to rural markets is not such a big issue today for relatively higher value products such as microwave ovens, mobile phones and even cosmetics. Just tie up with an e-commerce portal, and sit back and enjoy.

This space saw the proliferation of group-buying sites as well. Localized and globalised outfits even. Snapdeal, Taggle, SoSasta and 94 others to be precise. Many folded up as well. Quick exits, as the category has inherent inconsistencies, which are yet to be attended to.

3. Telecom confused: 2G to Where Ji?:

If there is one consumer category that looked totally confused this year, it was telecom. Most of the biggies were still battling boardroom, parliamentary-committee room and courtroom woes in the wake of the 2G spectrum allocation issues.

3G came in, but everything seemed tepid. Telecom-service-provider marketers continued their advertising binges and splurged on creatives that kept the interest alive. Handset makers found themselves in a tizzy with market-shares getting re-defined drastically this year. The biggies were no longer the biggies. The smaller ones were struggling to make their bottom-lines look good, even as their top-lines boomed. The big issue at hand: sustainability. Telecom Darwinism is round the corner guys. The big ones will win and the small ones will struggle to survive.

Mobile number portability came in, the DND register got activated, smart-phones were a rage, VAS gained traction, green-tech saw investments and rural mobility was looked at with little more keenness. And despite it all, the category remained tepid and trends in the category are a bit amorphous for the moment.

4. Brands nudge health:

Brands continued to nudge the health bandwagon this year as well. Green tea became the biggest hit in political circles all over the country. Even government offices started offering green tea to visitors. And if it was a special visitor, the 'babu' offered honey with it as well, drawn out from the upper drawer of his desk. Wow!

Big opportunities spotted by the product category of tea, the category of honey, the category of Oats and the Services category of Yoga (of every avatar), meditation, gymnasiums and more. Wait for lots more of this in the years to come.

5. A De-branded India:

India got de-branded badly this year. Despite robust numbers on the GDP growth rates side of dynamics (which itself got scaled down dramatically) and despite the large consumer market we remain, issues such as corruption catapulted the nation into the active mind-set of a world audience. Corporate gurgles and noises of shifting investments to other parts of the world did its bit as well. Add to it a one-step-forward and one-step-backward attitude of the government at large, as witnessed on the FDI in retail issue, has India a bit on its back-foot.

But, as I keep saying, India is an idea whose time has come. Nothing can stop it. So watch out as every sector booms despite all this de-branding.

6. In the face:

Even as India as a country was a bit on the back-foot, Indians went places in the world scenario. 19 newly anointed CEO’s of large-format global companies were Indians. Shahrukh Khan roped in Akon for 'Chamak Challo', Lady Gaga was in India for the F1 show, Paris Hilton launched her bags in India, Tom Cruise came cruising by for the Mission Impossible launch, Snoop Dog was spotted with Akshay Kumar and Sunny Leone was a porn-star Indians loved to watch on Bigg Boss. Bollywood went went places.
India went viral as well as ‘Kolaveri Di’ hit 19 Million plus Youtube downloads and 'Jalebi Bai' replaced Shiela and Munni of 2010 with a raunchier visual than even Vidya Balan of The Dirty Picture fame.

THE ONE BIG TREND FOR 2012 AHEAD:

And what do I see to be the one big trend for 2012?

I would wager a bet on the “Slow-down India” movement. At this point of time, working Indian is a bit too keyed up. There is just too much pressure in our living and working environment. Schools kids are pressurized to perform, college students are on a suicide spree, working adults are working both ends of their butts off.

The one big trend I would push for would be a campaign to slow-down India. This trend will then have ‘slow-food’ outlets emerge in our metros where you eat slowly, and enjoy the value of every morsel. The ‘slow-down’ Indian movement could be one adopted by companies to incorporate in their brand themes as well. If Tata Tea’s campaign of yore was all about “Jaago India Jaago”, with a more awake India today, Vodafone’s 2012 campaign could be a “Slow down India” campaign.

The slow-down movement is essential for India as we emerge the capital of diabetes in the world, the capital of hypertension and a strong contender for the cholesterol capital of the world. As life-style diseases of every kind hit us and as Corporate India experiences it all first hand amidst its own employees, this is an idea whose time has come!
Royalties welcome for this idea.
A Happy New Marketing year 2012 then! Slow down guys!
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Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Twitter.com @harishbijoor
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2010: The Marketing Year it was........

2010-12-30T06:16:00.000-08:00

The Year Munni Got ‘Badnaam’ and Shiela Got ‘Jawaan’

By Harish Bijoor

A Marketing wrap-up of year 2010 then. This has indeed been the year of Twitter. A year in which large hordes of young people believed in brevity. Brevity as defined by a 140-character Tweet. In keeping, let me get to the point right away.

What was this Marketing year 2010 all about? My take…..

The 5-Screens in our lives: The Indian remained a screen-potato. Five of them dominated our lives this year.
Television remained the big one for all of us, rural or urban. 148 million television sets decorated our homes with an average viewing time of 4.5 hours per day in rural and 23 minutes a day in Urban.
The second screen in urban lives was the desktop at office and in some cases in homes as well. The third screen was the laptop computer, fast losing its appeal among the wannabes who want a tablet in their hands.
The fourth screen that edged its way into Indian hands this year was the tablet. In came Samsung Galaxy, the I-Pad (brought in from the markets where it has been launched) and more.
The Fifth screen, though small in size, remained the biggest and most ubiquitous of them all: the Mobile phone. More and more applications went mobile and the death of the laptop became a hot topic to discuss.
When I look at branded players in the space across all 5-screens, I see just one. Samsung. Good thinking and good planning guys!

Brand-lines trusted less and less: The year saw stories of tumult rolling in from the US and UK and Europe alike. Stories of recession-hit markets. Stories of bank re-possessions of credit cards. Stories of re-possession of homes and more. The very same banks that had touted all those friendly lines that took the “us” line in their advertising of yore were now talking tough “you” lines 1:1. Credibility of advertising sunk in Western markets. As this did happen, the rub-off is seen here as well. Advertising lines are being trusted less and less. Marketers seem to have taken note. In come the more real lines now in our advertising as well. Vox-pop lines that bring more reality than fantasy to the process at large.

The I-Gen. is here: The Impatient-Gen. As attrition levels rise once again in industry, and as India emerges a most-ruthlessly young market ahead, loyalty lines are receding into the memory of past advertising. The new story in town is the range story. The story of variety on hand. I offer you the most number of options. You might as well stay with me. Flit like a butterfly from this variant to the other. But stay with me. Companies are vying with one another to build promiscuity-palate offers within their own mother brand to keep custom back. The automotive category is the best example here. Remember, we now have 621 variants of cars in the Indian market.
I-Gen products include On-the-go products in beverages and food, quick take-away meals from even traditional outlets which believed in sit-down dinners, and Gymnasiums that offer quick-work-outs that last a slim 20-minutes a day.

The Social Networking Funnel is here: Social networking grew leaps and bounds. The internet got accessed by 62 million people in India this year. 70per cent of them got on with devices that were not broadband led. Nevertheless, the killer application in use was the social networking site. Face book, Twitter and Orkut and thirty-one more.

A very important marketing funnel got created. Most top-end consumers of products and services alike got talking to one another socially first. This virtual interaction is creating a marketing funnel of significance. Ignore it only at your peril. Remember, a very important thing is happening here. Consumers are chatting with one another not only about their dating needs, but they are exchanging valuable information about products and services and brands. Consumers are chatting with one another about brands before getting to the market, particularly for more expensive and more long-lasting products.

The shift is clear: from Brand-networking to User-networking.

The world already has 1.3 Billion users of the Worldwide Web. 200 million websites cater to their needs. And the new trend is really the micro-site. Add a multiple on the 200 million and that is the brand opportunity here. Brands will go the micro-site way in the future. And the future is really already here.

The Reality show buzz is here: The consumer is a voyeur. And brands love that. If not for this one facet of the consumer, brands would never get the inquisitiveness they get. Marketers took this a step further. Marketing money fed the reality show this year. More and more brand moneys flowed in. Makers of Television reality shows plagued marketing companies with ideas. Many found takers.

In came Rakhi Sawant with her “Rakhi Ka Insaaf”. Men cried. One committed suicide as well, as alleged. Rakhi stripped them all. Of deeds of omission and commission. ”Kangaroo justice” was delivered. The nation enjoyed it. A voyeuristic nation that loved peeking into others bedrooms.

Talk of bedrooms, in came “Big Boss” that got you to peek into every room there was to peek into, in a home. Save the actual toilet and bathroom. Names such as Seema Parihar, Ashmit Patel and Veena Mallick got to be household names. If you put up a tantrum at home, you were told not to behave like a Dolly. If you ate too much, you were reminded of the Great Khali. Rural India lapped up the antics of Urban India, believing everything that happened in a Big Boss home to be exactly what happened in our booming urban homes.
Brands used the eye-balls opportunity well. Vodafone and Spice and more.
I am told more are coming. While “Sach Ka Saamna” got a lot of flak, bolder ones are planning a Husband-swap program on national television as well, I am told. Ouch!

A concern for the future: Small but seminal trends were spotted this year. The marketer woke up to global concerns. Green became big. As did Inclusive. Saving the future became a theme. Marketers plonked their moneys, as Aircel did on "Save the Tiger”. It made the number1411 memorable. PepsiCo spoke the conservation story, as did ITC. PepsiCo went one step further as well, declaring its work and intent on its packaging. The theme was clearly being tested. The theme ahead for the savvy marketer then: Conservation. Re-use. Replenishment. Conservation of all the re-sources you as brand-marketer strip the earth of.

The “Save” campaigns will cover the tiger, paper, water, energy and more.

“Munni getting Badnaam and Shiela getting Jawaan”: Block-buster movies. The biggest ones happened this year. While Sholay did it in the yester-years of Rs.3 and Rs. 5 ticket prices, ‘3 Idiots’ did it at multi-plex rates of today to become a big grosser. One outdid the other. In came ‘Dabangg’ and did it all over again. Out-did it as well and one kept wondering what was so great with it.

Movies marketed themselves with savvy. Movie marketers taught the traditional FMCG guy many a valuable marketing lesson. Emami first hit out at Dabangg and then got its Zandu Balm to piggyback the trend. If James Bond had an Aston Martin, Dabangg had a Zandu Balm.

The item number remained as the biggest hit of them all. The ‘Paisa vasool’ numbers made two big generic Quasi brands happen, much to the chagrin of women with these names: Munni was one and Shiela the other. Small-town India is abuzz I am told, with women of every age with these names being targeted with songs to boot!
Question asked at a pub in Delhi recently of the DJ who was refusing to get these numbers going: “DJ-ji, when is Munni getting Badnaam and Shiela getting Jawaan?”

Incredible India lived up to its name: In many ways it did. The India Tourism campaign has a brilliant line. Incredible India hit the news time and again this year with scams of every kind. The CWG corruption fiasco. Corruption fiascos everywhere, from Maharashtra to Karnataka to every nook and cranny of Indian politics. Corporate lobbying controversies to boot. Party lines and corporate lines were not important. Corruption remained the lowest common denominator soft-under-belly of Indian politics.

India remained incredible to an exocentric audience outside, waiting with a whipping stick in any case, to whip the poster-boy country of the world today.

Three Dark Horses:

Three dark horses took gallant little strides this year in Indian marketing. These three are really the big opportunities out there in the great Indian market as it is due to emerge in the future. As India boomed to become a Rs.1300 Billion Market in 2010 , the under-leveraged parts of the distribution economy is being tapped into by these three dark horses. The story is under-played as of now, but wait for the big strides these will take in the decade ahead.

Ok, let’s cut the chase:
1. Cash&Carry Wholesale retail: Bharti Wal-mart has made rapid strides in Punjab this year. Expect this to cascade into a ramp-up. I do believe this is the best solution to open up the largely under-served markets of Tier 3 and rural India at large. There is a big untapped demand from the hospitality sector, intermediary traders, villagers and farmers alike. The next new success is from there. Metro waits as well. As will more. In the queue.
2. Tele-shopping and Home-Shopping: This again is the next big opportunity ahead as more than 148 million household’s wait in anticipation. Direct selling offers the ability of under-served markets being able to tap into products and services that more-served markets in metros take for granted. The intermediary is cut out as well. Prices are competitive as well. Wait and watch as Guthy Renker, and literally every media house spots this opportunity and goes behind it.
3. Private labels: As organized retail booms, every super-market chain will want its piece of the action. More and more private label opportunities will emerge across the low-end, mid-market and premium tags. The apparel players are doing well on this count already. Expect more categories to open up. The private label will be private no more.
That’s it for 2010 then. A Tweet-year gone by.
Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.harishbijoorconsults.com
http://www.harishbijoorspeaks.weebly.com

CSR and Brand-building

2010-12-14T01:14:00.000-08:00

There is a little bit of CSR……..in my hair!

By Harish Bijoor

If I am to simplify all of life with a perspective that is distinctly marketing oriented, there are just two types of people in the world. A small set of marketing people on one side, and a whole large set of people being marketed-to at the other end!

Peek keenly at any person you know. Either she is a marketing person marketing a product, a service, a dream or even a desire to someone else, or is a person who is being marketed to all the time by the marketer at large!

Marketing is therefore a people-centric process. And just as long as it remains that, and just as long as man loves living in a society of his making, CSR is going to remain a big buzz-word for the future ahead! CSR remains a very relevant strategic marketing tool for the amorphous future ahead of us!

In these long years of being around in the great Indian marketplace, I have seen marketing morph in its ideals. In the beginning, there was the product and the service. Both had to be reached out to the customer in the marketplace. This was also a day and age when everything was in short supply. The demand was big. The marketer performed his role as a mere transporter of the goods to the arms length convenience of the hungry consumer. These were the days when you had to wait 6 years on a waiting list to buy a 'Vespa' scooter and in a longer still queue to possess that sturdy black telephone instrument in your drawing room!

Marketers in this day and age had a simple goal. Distribute. Distribute with equity where possible. Be fair. Appear to be fair as well!

Life changed dramatically. In enters the era of plenty. Plenty of products and services! Enough to come out of your ears and everywhere else! Competition is sharp! The marketer morphs from his old attitude in such an environment. He becomes consumer savvy. He offers not only the product, but a superior degree of service to go with it. He offers customer experience and delight that becomes the brand in itself!

We live in such a competitive marketing era. There are just too many marketing people around. Just too many with all the boring ideas around. Everyone has been to the same marketing school (if not the same type) and comes out with the same set of ideas to go to market! And everyone fails! Parri passu marketing does not work!

In such an environment of parri passu marketing, time to think different. Time to think of a new tool to use! CSR is a great one! If used sensibly and with the sensitivity it deserves!

Three Marketing Formats:

Let me offer a theory I propound extensively.

There are simply three marketing formats to follow in a society as it morphs. In the early stage, society is all about “I, me, myself”! At this stage in consumer societal evolution, the marketer gets away using the language of hedonism and pleasure. The “I, me, myself” kind of product and service works well. The ‘Axe’ effect works here!

And then there is the stage when the consumer has gone beyond that basic stage. He is now concerned about the people around him. His loved ones. His family of four. His extended family of four more, mother, father, father-in-law and mother-in-law, last to be included!

This kind of man likes brands to be inclusive in their language, tone and tenor. This kind of man wants products that are good for the entire family! Never mind the rest of society, just as long his close-knitted family is taken care of, he is fine! The 'Annapurna' atta story works here!

And then there is man who is more conscious of more people around him. This is the kind of guy who is bothered about the good of his immediate neighborhood and society! He wants his entire neighborhood to be happy! The ‘Lifebuoy’ “clean the neighborhood” story works here!

There is macro-man then. This is the kind of person who wants the good of his immediate society and his entire planet. This is the kind of guy who wants to use bio-based detergents that don’t hurt the eco-system! The ‘Surf Excel’ “Do bucket paani bachana hai” theme works here!

And finally there is Cosmos man! Concerned about the cosmos, much of which he does not know even! We are yet to get there!

CSR works at every level. CSR is an inclusive process! A process that embraces the good of society in a very inclusive manner. This inclusiveness could start at the level of the immediate family and morph on to embrace the entire Cosmos.

CSR plays a vital role in taking commercial brands out into the commercial marketplace with a theme that is appealing to the sense and sensibility of the modern consumer. CSR is therefore a valuable tool that marketers can use to market their brand of soap, detergent, sugar and tea with equal panache and commercial effectiveness.

CSR is not at all about running public hospitals and schools alone. CSR is not about sending Tsunami relief material to the trouble spots of the world. That is old hat! It is much more! The modern consumer understands CSR that much more intimately when you touch his life, with a wee bit of CSR in your soap. A wee bit in your shampoo! In your kids diapers and feminine hygiene products as well!

The future of marketing is full of CSR! Of a different kind!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting firm with a presence in the markets of India, the UK and SE Asia.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Twitter.com/harishbijoor

Integrity Branding and Integrity Everything......

2010-12-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Three Chickens and an Egg!

By Harish Bijoor

In the several marketing summers I have lived, fought, sweated and thrived, there is one insight that has held me in good stead. This is the insight of Integrity branding.

Integrity branding is all about saying the simple truths in your brand communication process. Stick to the tone and tenor of integrity and you can’t do no wrong!

Let me look at it in a manner of detailing the concept at hand. The point is simple. All consumers are essentially truth seeking animals. Yes, all of us lie in some small manner or the other. These are really the small lies that make the fabric of our modern day lives. Small lies that ward off the inconvenience of a lie-less society.

Despite all these small lies, we are essentially truth seeking as consumers. When you buy a toothpaste, you expect honesty out of the entire exercise. The consumer-brand interaction process is a relationship. A relationship quite like the many relationships we go through in our social lives.

When you get into a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, or let me be politically correct and say member of the same sex even, you expect just one primary thing out of the relationship. The truth. There is no relationship you get into expecting dishonesty and the lack of integrity.

Very simply put, consumers get into brand relationships based on the expectation of the truth. But does she get it? And how much of it? And how frequently so?

My belief is that the brand that offers the most of the truth most of the time in this continuous relationship is the one that succeeds. The brand that fails on this count is an utter failure right away, or on the path of a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom round the corner.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let me choose my favorite gourmet table bird for this example, the chicken! Let me take three of them.

There are really three chickens in our marketing lives. And remember, all of us are marketing people, since there are only two kinds of people in the world. The “marketing person”, who markets to others. And the “marketed-to person” at the other end!

Imagine three chickens out there. Each of the chickens is a manufacturer and a marketer. Each of the chickens has done something they are very good at. Each has laid an egg. And each of the eggs looks alike.

Each of the marketer chickens takes a different path to market their respective eggs.

There is the first chicken, which I call the “Shy chicken”. This chicken looks at the egg it has laid and finds the product quality to be all of 100. It then stands up, looks at the target audience of potential consumers and whispers with a decibel of shout that is at best 2 on a scale of 100.

This chicken’s whisper is heard by very few of those in the target audience. Even those who hear of it, hear it as a faint whisper. The promise offered by the whisper is just 2 on a scale of 100. Those few who hear the whisper actually come to see the egg, lured often by the under-shout that creates quite a bit of mystery in the consumer at hand.

When the few consumers actually arrive to see the product, there is great joy. The consumer expectation of 2 is rewarded with a delivery of 100. The positive strokes offered in this purchase is +98. The negative of this approach of course is the fact that it scores very low on consumer awareness scores.

Look at the second chicken then. This is what I call the “honest chicken”. This chicken looks at the target audience and shouts out the product offer with a shout level of decibel 100. The shout quality is equal to that of product quality.

The pros of this approach is apparent. Awareness scores are good. Everyone has heard that the chicken has an egg to offer. But there is a problem here. Consumers do not necessarily respect honest chickens. When the consumer has heard the full story, he does not want to see the egg at all. There is just no mystery. Only a few arrive to see the egg, and these are the only ones who actually need an egg. And when they arrive, they expect 100 and get 100. No positive strokes and no negative. The potential of a buy is low as well.

The third chicken is waiting. This chicken finds the competition hot. This chicken gets onto the rooftop and shouts with a decibel value 400. The darned chicken has laid an egg but shouts as if it has laid an asteroid! The awareness scores are terrific. The entire town lands up to look at the phenomena. The expectation is 400. The delivery is 100. There is a negative stroke quotient of -300. And nobody buys!

All these three chickens and their respective approaches are out there for the marketer to choose from. Each of us makes this choice every living day.There are variations available in the gamut of 0-400 in terms of shout levels. Different marketers choose differently.

But guess what, the chicken that shouts with a decibel of 80 is the one that succeeds the most. Also, after 400 what? Back to a decibel of 2. In a market where everyone is shouting at 400, the one chicken which whispers the least is the one that is heard and trusted the most.

Think about it. Which chicken are you as a marketer? And which chicken are you as a working person? And which chicken are you as a person living in a family of your own?

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a consulting practice with presence in the markets of Hong Kong, Dubai, UK and India.
Email:harishbijoor@hotmail.com

Marketing the Small Business......

2010-12-14T00:56:00.000-08:00

Marketing the Entrepreneurship

By Harish Bijoor

Most entrepreneurships that aim to be big, aim to be different. Entrepreneurships start small. Think big but start small. And that is the fact of an entrepreneurship at large.

This is the niche. The niche is always small. The niche is different. The niche is unique. The niche is boutique. The niche is all about that one salmon that swims against the tide. It is about that one offering in the market that is so unique that people will pay a good price for the offering, but there won’t be too many people partaking of the offer.

The niche is therefore that narrow wedge of marketing space that brands aspire to occupy not for the sake of volume, but for the sake of image and continued brand sustenance basis just that.

How does one market the niche then? What are the primary challenges? And what’s so different in approach from marketing a mass soap, a mass focused travel agency and a mass focused consulting practice for that matter like what the Big Four(or is the Big Two and a half now?) do.

Marketing the niche brand is firstly a labor of love. Niche brands emanate from small little gaps in the market. At times they are non-gaps even. These are small little gaps and non-gaps seen by evangelists. Evangelists who are reasonably tired of mass market offerings. Evangelists, who at times have themselves experienced lack of service, frustration and a complete lack of fulfillment. The consultancy practice that looks at a zero-solicit model of business, where there is no advertising, no touting of business formats, no participation in market pitches for accounts and no brochure and no detailed website is one such example.

The challenges then are three mainly.

1. There is no money to advertise. Might as well make a virtue of that. A non-advertised brand must be good, na?

2. Niche brands slip between the slats of public recognition. At times too much recognition can be the bane of a brand in public space. Niche is boutique.

3. Niche brands forever look maverick and small. And that’s an advantage in today’s world where everything big is considered that much less optimal in its service and delight delivery standards.

Two do’s and two don’ts:

Do’s:
1. Spruce up your brand image and be totally cutting-edge in what you offer. You need to be one step ahead of big competition. Remember, bigger organisaitons take much longer to change with their clients. Clients change faster than those who service them do!
2. Don’t open up those offices all over. Follow a policy of the small office home office in every location till you have a minimum 5 clients in the kitty. It is better not to open a new office at all than close all of them one by one!

Don’t:
1. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver. Clients and consumers are tired of this.
2. Don’t be glib and slick at all. Don’t follow the big guys in this game. Be real. Be genuine. Be sincere. You will stand out like a loved sore thumb!

Wait! Even as I tap this onto my laptop, it strikes me that I operate in a niche myself.

Here is some niche-'gyaan' then from what I painted for my business practice eight years ago as a private label consulting firm with no MNC-consulting tag to it. Best way to talk the language of the niche. Best way to explore the challenge of the niche. My personal one.

Consulting! Possibly the world’s oldest profession. Rivals the other one for sure! A name that used to bring a smile on my face before I actually jumped into it. I had dealt with the big names in the Consulting business for a while now during my previous stints with Levers, Tata Coffee and finally Zip Telecom. I knew many an Anderson, a McKinsey and an E&Y! I knew many of the smaller names as well. Many a salivating consultant who would network at the parties I attended wearing the corporate hat.

The term Consulting has both a positive and a negative feel about it. The positive is that which talks of stellar strategy that creates many an alliance, many a turnaround and a domain that has been responsible for creating a wealth of wealth!

The negative connotation is best typified in the joke doing the cocktail rounds of a consultant being an entity that gets into your organization, wants to meet the folks who work there, asks for your watch, looks at it keenly and tells you the time!

I have never wanted to be one of that kind. And blissfully I am not! The first thing I did as the bug to get into bed with consultancy got to me was that I did a thorough analysis of the turf at hand. Being a Market Research enthusiast all my life, I could do nothing better. I looked keenly at the inadequacies in the profession, and said I would never trample on the terrain in the same manner as many others have.

I defined for myself a USP. Two actually.

One: My consultancy will never solicit business. No presentations to clients, no networking at parties, no presentations, no pitches and no brochures and direct mailers at all! I have had enough of that staring back at me from the other side of the fence when I was a Corporate for 18 long years!

Two: My practice would focus on walking the talk. Talking the talk is just not enough. The consultant must tread the path of his strategy and see it to fruition. I therefore adopted the Build-Operate-Transfer basis of business many a super-highway contractor adopts in his trade. I will build strategy; I will operate it for the client as if I am his own resource for a year. At point of satisfaction, I will transfer the business to the client CEO! Gives the profession a great deal of credibility!

This seems to work. It has kept me busy. My four offices are busy as well.

As big consultancies break up with corporates suspecting value-propositions, niche boutique consultancies that focus on individual specialty domains will become the order of the day! Private-label consultancy is here! The terrain is ripe for many a new entrant. More the merrier.

Being a niche player is really an advantage today. If this is a David versus Goliath play, the consumer of the future is poised to look keenly at David. David is small. David is nifty. David is value-for money (most of the time). David is like me. Small, real and vulnerable. The consumer emotes with small. B2B, B2C or to B2M (Business to machine) marketing, small is still beautiful. Schumacher was right!

The author is a brand and business-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private label-consulting practice with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, UK, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent. Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor

Marketing to the Bottom-of-the Pyramid: 3 key issues

2010-12-14T00:51:00.000-08:00

INDIA INCLUSIVE

The Art, Science and Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP

By Harish Bijoor

The late Dr. C K Prahalad, in more ways than one, gave us the Pyramid once again. A Pyramid that is India. A pyramid that has small self-actualizing niches of the population at the top of the pyramid, large masses at the middle of the Pyramid and even larger impoverished, under-nourished and totally ignored populations at the Bottom of the pyramid in discussion.
The other thinker who gave us a pyramid all his own, Abraham Maslow was totally right in hindsight. Those at the top of the pyramid are really self-actualizing folk. Folk who think a lot more about the others than about themselves. In many ways this thinking class right atop the pyramid is the class that represents the thought leader paving the way for the India that is to be in 2020. This niche is however is not to be confused to the real India.
I read Dr. Prahalad’s picture of the pyramid that is India in tandem with the very notion of the “Next 2 Billion”(IFC). While the top 4 Billion population of the world are really the haves, the next 2 billion are the ones that don’t really have. The have-nots. The market is therefore right here with the have-nots. With the ones who sit at the bottom of the pyramid of every country there is. In the parts of the world still being defined as the “developing world”, the size of these have-nots at the bottom is really, really big, and in the case of the developed nations, the real worry is that the size of the niche at the bottom is really growing. Growing thanks due to the recession that hit the developed economies of the world not so long ago.

Sitting under my own Peepul tree, I come up with not one but two pyramids for India. When asked to describe India, I do not use Dr. Prahalad’s One Pyramid. I draw out two on my I-Pad. As an aside, India sure has moved in its symbolism of technology for the people: from the sanitary pad of the 1950’s to the I-Pad of 2010!
I draw two pyramids. One is a small. Another big. The bigger pyramid is three times the size of the smaller one. The big is RURAL and the small is URBAN. On each of these I draw three wedges as segments. The top of the pyramid, the middle and bottom. At the end of the exercise, when I put numbers in the tiers of people, the shocker really is that the size of the Top of the Pyramid in Rural is really 2.6 times the size of the Urban. And the size of the middle of the pyramid is just some 6 times that of the urban, just as the Bottom of the pyramid is just about 2.3 times that of urban.

The point then: BOP is a reality of both urban and rural markets. It really is a myth to look only at rural for the BOP manna that most marketers have rushed to address. There’s more to the concept of BOP than rural alone.

Having said and established that for a start, I do believe that the story of India Inclusive is really all about knitting the BOP into the mainstream that is India and Indian. Marketing to the BOP is both an art and a science. Along with that, and most importantly, its a philosophy. A philosophy that corporate organizations need to ingrain into their DNA.
The most important fact that needs to be bought into is the fact that marketing in the future is all about inclusive approaches and not the old exclusive approaches. In many ways, the concept of the brand and the very definition of brands swim against this new need. The brand in many ways is a premium. A premium that is extracted from the exclusive masses of its consumers. This notion needs to be re-jiggged now. The brand cannot be exclusive to its exclusive masses or niches. The brand needs to belong to all. And belong in an inclusive and all-encompassing manner for sure.

The key question then is whether marketing can change the world. And can marketing change India for a start?

I do believe it can. It can, provided we re-jig the way we look at markets and consumers at large. From the 47 and odd theories I have built in this realm over the last two decades, let me pick three key thoughts then, one each from the realm of the Art, the Science and the Philosophy that is marketing. Key thoughts that will help re-jig marketing at large, and help re-orient the way we want to open the can that is BOP and the can that is India Inclusive in its orientation.

1. The Art of Marketing to the BOP: Gandhian Marketing versus marketing the “Honest Shirt” and the “Toothpaste with Oxygen” in it!
Brand India has seen two kinds of brands emerge over the decades that marketing has touched the nation and its produce. At one end is the brand that is today that of the Mahatma. The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi is the biggest and most recognized brand that represents India internally and overseas. Mahatma Gandhi has emerged to be the most durable brand of them all.

Gandhi-ji never needed to take a full-page ad in the papers saying “Gandhi Shining”. Brand Gandhi happened as a function of the hard and dedicated work he did at the grass-root that is really India. Every action of his that focused on upliftment of the under-privileged, and every icon he gave to India became a durable representation of this ethos. Whether it was Khadi, the Dandi Salt Yatra or non-violence as a means of protest, Gandhi-ji reigns as a thought, even today. Across the world. This was true-blue bottom-up branding. Branding basis hard work at the BOP.

The second and more common marketing format in India today is the format of Top-down marketing. This format is all about taking a shirt and making it honest and taking a television and making it healthy and of course taking the humble tooth-paste and adding Oxygen to it. And around all these offerings, advertising has added further allure. Top-down branding is a format that has touched every segment of the pyramid and still attempts to touch the BOP. Sadly, it does not work here. The BOP is the most intelligent and most untouched-by-hyperbole segment of the Indian economy. This cannot be taken for granted and played with.

If you need to succeed here, simply adopt the Bottom-up-branding ethos. Do a Gandhi on the market, and stop putting Oxygen in the toothpaste instead. The BOP disbelieves advertising fluff and fare more than the de-sensitized marketing-anaesthesiatiszed top of the pyramid market.

When brands finally get to think of the BOP markets in both urban and rural, it is time to put together programs of what I call and practice as “Conscious De-branding”. A process where you sit and peel off the slick and the glib from your brand and advertising offering. Making the brand offering real. As real as the consumer.

2. The Science of Marketing to the BOP: Democratic Distribution systems versus the autocratic Top-down ones at play!
Distribution is a demon in India. Reaching masses of people who live across different terrain and at distances that are difficult to reach with consistency seems a big challenge even today.

The three tenets of a good distribution system are indeed the width of reach, the depth of reach in terms of product and service offerings and the consistency of reach, week after week, if not more frequently.

I do believe there are three types of consumers emerging in India today. The first is a consumer who buys products and services for self-use. For use by the self and family of 4.

The second type of consumer is the one who buys partly for self and partly to distribute. This consumer is 70 per cent consumer and 30 per-cent re-distributor. You find these mostly in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns of India, even today. They make a margin on what they sell and partly defray the costs of what they buy for themselves. These are savvy consumers and savvy business people as well in their own right.

The marketer needs to recognize this consumer and make offerings that are relevant, original and innovative.

The third type of consumer is the one that buys possibly 5% for himself and 95% acting as a re-distributor. I find these in the smallest of villages in India. The most efficient system of reaching out to the land that is India is really this. Millions of entrepreneur-distributors who make a living doing just this. This is a win-win for the marketer and consumer alike. A win-win combination that is totally under-leveraged as of today.

The future of cracking in to the pie that is BOP in both urban and rural is this. This is it!

3. The Philosophy of Marketing to the BOP: Creeping Urbanization versus Creeping Ruralization!
Ever since independence, India has witnessed a creeping and crawling phase where masses of people have morphed from mindsets and consumption sets that were rural to mindsets, which are more aggressively urban. The marketer at large has been responsible for this. The movement that was a crawl became a literal gallop in the early and mid-eighties when Television knitted the nation as one, pumping urban imageries of the modern marketing man in India to rural audiences. Television and all the advertising it carried threw up and pushed down rural throats and stomachs and bladders the urban way of life. In more ways than one, India became an Instant urban society.

This I do believe is an un-doing. An un-doing that needs to be corrected. In many ways marketing is a hegemony in India. The urban-educated and privileged marketer markets to the rural person. Never mind that rural is three times bigger than urban. The imagery that consumers emote with in India today is the urban imagery.

Turn turtle this and emote with real India. Emote with the imagery that is rural. Put a program that is rural in your marketing mix. Go one step further and show your archetypical brand hero in your TV commercials to be the rural person. See what it does. I do believe India is ready to turn-turtle its marketing imagery. The BOP market will admire this. And will certainly reward this effort. With market share. And money. And more than that, consumer affection.

The road ahead for the Inclusive India agenda is an exciting one. Tread it with strategy.

The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a strategy consulting firm with a presence in the markets of India, SE Asia, UK and Dubai.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Twitter.com/harishbijoor

What's Wrong With Marketing Today?

2010-09-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

What’s wrong with marketing today?

By Harish Bijoor

Ouch! A lot of marketing folk will not even want to hear this question around. A lot of the oldies in the game tend to believe everything is hunky dory and right, as well.
This question is going to be junked the moment it is seen. Junked as a piece of rhetoric used just to get the attention it got.
What could be wrong with marketing after all? Are we not witnessing double-digit growth in many categories? Is there not plenty of excitement around with our mega-buck campaigns making it onto the Power jackets of newspapers? Are we not innovative as well? Are we not bending-backwards to get marketing noticed at large? And are we not winning all those awards at Cannes and everywhere else?

What then could be wrong with marketing?

If marketing people just got off the roller coaster, and if only we got off the 9 to 9 regimen of being a marketing man, woman or child, we would notice. The problem is one of people. The biggest P of them all!
The big is issue is out there and the worried lot are really the younger ones in marketing. In many ways the older ones have made their cocoons, padded them well and are quite happy with what they have. The fire though is burning elsewhere on this question. In the bellies of the young who have opted for marketing as a profession, and most certainly in the bellies of those who are just on the verge of choosing a career-track to follow.

The issues are out there staring at many. Let’s list some.

1. Young talent that is entering marketing is really not as committed to marketing as it should be. There are too many people who are here who just should not be here.
2. Marketing is not the best paymaster anymore. Finance is where the action is. Even HR is an exciting place to be in terms of money. There are just too many average marketing people around.
3. Where are the mentors? There just are not enough people around with time to coach the young entrant into Marketing. Youngsters are forever on a delivery-oriented mode. And on a limb. The accent for the young is execution and implementation. The planning role in Marketing is somehow appropriated by the ones at the top.

4. Marketing means just about everything today. 99% everything else and 1% branding is just not the right combination for the youngster seeking to make a mark in marketing. The youngster is getting painted into the corner of being “all legs and all hand” and no mind. Ouch!
The list can go on, depending which youngster in marketing you speak to, but let me stop.

When I look back at the issues that abound, I know what went wrong. It happened all but subliminally. Slowly but surely, one step at a time with actions that decimated what marketing meant to India and the Indian marketing professional in the days of yore. And 'days of yore' is just about 20 years ago.

It began in many ways with the bifurcation of sales and marketing as two separate streams altogether. Let me be politically in-correct. Sales for the less-conceptually oriented, and marketing for the more. Sales in many ways for the non-MBA entrant into corporate organization and marketing for the guy with the MBA-tag.

The moment this happened, the silo approach to marketing began. Sales became an acute specialization, which no marketing man wanted to touch, and marketing became an acute specialization that every sales person wanted to get into, but seldom could.
Proverbial nail number two hit into the proverbial cold coffin , when every sales organization that did its own direct selling into the market decided to out-source it all. Outsource it to distributors. The biggest companies in the tumult of marketing bid good bye to their own salespersons and offered distributorships that had the emergence of whole big tribes of distributors who are today a critical link between the company and its B2B consumers, the retailers.
As this happened, in the beginning the good practice of market working by sales, and in some measure by the marketing executives continued. What used to be considered standard good practice that meant visiting the distributor, working markets with the distributors’ salesperson, and visting retail outlets was slowly given up. Not altogether, but largely.
From a coverage span of 25 outlets per day of market visit; today the average executive in sales and marketing is doing all of 6. If not less. And the number of days in the market is quite another issue. From a healthy practice number of 10 days a month in market to the current possible 2 days in market.
Marketing people are therefore working markets less, and are in contact with their retailers that much less. Marketing people are visiting lesser number of consumer homes, and are therefore that much more divorced from their consumers. Marketers do not travel in the buses that their consumers travel in. Marketers do not watch “ Kunku” or “Bhagyalakshmi” which their consumers are umblically linked to. The sweat of the consumer is an alien sweat.

Marketers have over the last decade distanced themselves from their consumers. There is a certain overt reliance on aggregated approaches to a consumer who in reality is not aggregated at all. Reliance on consumer insight is totally basis dipstick studies that touch nano-segments of the consumer profile at large. Studying the consumer as a constituency of one is not done anymore. Everything is an aggregate. Everything is a cluster. And marketing is today itself a cluster-approach that does not seem to work as well as it should.
A pain-point with a lot of young marketing people I meet is the angst around the thought that marketing people do not grow into top management positions as fast as they used to in the past. It sure is true.

Marketing people will need to re-invent hard work as part of the regimen of being a marketing person. Hard work that is about spending a lot more time in the market, and with the consumer at large, rather than in Corporate Board-rooms with intermediaries who are into research, advertising or distribution alike. Intermediaries who bring a lot to the table, but just not enough. And not in the way it must.

Re-inventing marketing into a 1:1 process from the 1: All process it has become, will gain back lost respect, lost competencies, lost edges, and everything else that got lost in the process. Including lost promotions. Touche!

The author is a Brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor

Website:
1. http://www.harishbijoorspeaks.weebly.com
2. http://www.harishbijoorconsults.com

Rin Versus Tide

2010-03-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

Rin in-the-face

By Harish Bijoor

Is all of Indian advertising getting progressively more and more simple? Are brands getting back to the good old basics?

Colgate is talking the language of white teeth once again. Discarding everything else and very directly, re-discovering the tabletop model of the teeth as well and talking endlessly on the subject of germs hidden in-between teeth, which only Colgate reaches out to.

Nirma is talking dirt-busting capability with its eminently well-created Nirma jingle TV commercial that has dirt freezing in its tracks, quite afraid of the stentorian jingle of Nirma done with pizzazz and pomp. Nirma reinvents for itself its USP and the jingle. Both together.

And now Rin has gone back to a creative piece that re-discovers the joy, the pain and the trauma of comparative advertising.

Good formats and the good old ways seem to never tire in their efficiency scores.

The competitor’s brand to many is a four-letter word. In the case of Rin, it really is a four letter word as well: Tide. The current piece of Rin advertising, which has the brand name Tide repeated many times over, is certainly new, refreshing, in-the-eye and very-very straight.

There are many ways of looking at this creative. Here are just two quick Jekyll and Hyde set of thoughts of mine.

1. This is a very confident piece of advertising. It takes the time-tested route of direct product delivery and capability comparisons. Just as long as your data is independent and reliable, go ahead and do this sort of thing. If Rin had pixilated the brand name and done this, it would seem a trifle under-confident. What works with the consumer is confidence. Go out there and say it confidently if you have your facts right. Regain confidence for your brand and shake the competitors brand confidence index. Make people sit up and question with their eyes. Name the brand outright! Be bold! Take the battle out into the bastion of the competitor’s brand.

2. Hey! This is old hat. This kind of comparative advertising used to work in the good old days when consumers sat up and made purchase decisions basis product attributes and product delivery norms in terms of solutions. Good scent and whiteness are rather both generic to the category. How much ever anyone shouts in messaging such as this, consumers are going to be yawning and saying what next. Consumers hate this kind of relapse into age-old advertising formats that have the same old message of the sixties with the creative ability and excellence of production standards of the 2000’s staring back at them. Wake up and smell the change.

What do I believe in?

I do believe this is a confident piece of advertising. It’s a good one that will have consumers sitting up and take note of a very boring category that has been around since the days of Sunlight and Det. Consumers are voyeuristic in their habits. They will sit up and will want to enjoy the fight. In the boring detergents category, they will surely expect a Tide re-buff ad hitting the airwaves. Later than sooner.

In this summer of detergent-discontent, consumers will watch the fun as it unfolds and will do just what they want. They will take their favorite brand back home for more reasons than product attribute and product delivery reasons alone. They will pick the brand basis the scent of the brand. Basis the language of the brand. Tide Naturals has much to sell in its brand name itself on this count. And the bulk of consumers will buy basis the price of the brand as well. Price, sadly to the chagrin of the marketer and advertiser alike, remains the biggest lowest common denominator nudge point for brand purchase in 'parri passu' categories such as detergents today in India.
The Rin ad is good for the category at large as consumers sit up and watch the fight unfold on their television sets, in the courts, and indeed in the marketplace and homes of the millions of consumers who use these brands.

The current piece of Rin advertising is very clear in its visual language of comparison. There are shots of the competitive brands in the shopping baskets of both the women waiting for their kids. There is the all give-away shot of the boys emerging from the bus, one with the whitest of whites and the other with the creamiest of the creams. And finally there is the comparative half screen of both the brands with Rin winning over Tide. Rin understands the importance of price in this category and brings that in as well, as the round-figure of Rs.25 shouts vocally and visually.

What’s ahead then?

The Rin ad will be pulled off the screens. The fight will move off-screen. Rin would have got its bang for the buck already in terms of brand awareness scores in the initial burst of advertising before pullout. Many will criticize the genre of advertising as being nasty and a bit too nifty. Rebuff ads will follow. And much else will happen. The fun has just begun.
The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Feedback: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

Rin Versus Tide

2010-03-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

Silent selling

2009-01-02T22:29:00.001-08:00

Prepare for Silent Selling!

By Harish Bijoor

The on-the-move culture is here. Almost here, if we are to believe the numbers doing the rounds in the more developed parts of the world.

Selling is on the move, it seems. Everybody is on the move. More so now than in the past. There is very little time during the working weekday for anybody to think of a really sedentary life. The day starts in a rush. Breakfast is to be grabbed on the way. There is a Café down the corner that has ready-made-sandwiches for you to grab at as you take your car out of the garage. There is coffee to go as well. You can pick it up at your corner petrol bunk. It’s hot, comes in a neat take-away tumbler and has a thoughtful lip-tip that will not let you scald your tongue!

You carry a mobile on the go. All your transactions happen on it. The U.S. prediction is that by the year 2006, seventy four per cent of mobile users will be mobile Internet users as well. And with the Internet comes every conceivable opportunity of working, entertaining and educating you. Again on the go! Everything you do, every breath you take, and every step you take, will be on the go.

The on-the-go culture is here! Almost! In India as well! Particularly so in the large metropolises that clutter our landscape.

Products, services and their peddlers will therefore have to morph their offerings to cater to the mobile needs of the mobile consumer. Take-away cans of 20 liter petrol sold out of petrol bunks to avoid the long waiting time at these retail points, take-away things to eat, to drink, even take-away things to defecate in (as Japan has actually offered in its super-markets; mobile toilets to bide your time through all those traffic jams)! The take-away culture is here!

Manufacturers and entrepreneurs behind products and services in India, particularly in Urban India, need to focus keenly on the new need of a whole lot of people who will demand for products and services that offer velocity and speed. A burger that will be hot and ready to take-away in a minute, piping hot 'biryani' available as a take-away from a drive-in point, packaged fruits, drinks and ready-snacks that can be grabbed into cars and scooters at street-corners, are going to be offerings that will hold relevance to a whole bunch of people. They will be small in number in the beginning. Their numbers will however grow.

The impatient consumer on the go will have a short span of attention on things that he grabs at junction-points of his busy life. His demand is for high quality at a geographical point of convenience. The 'sandwich-wallah', the Café, the bookstore and retailing enterprises of the kind, need to be at arms length of his desire. If the quality on offer for his brief stint at your retail-point is upto expectation, his franchise will return. Just as long as you keep offering a range of offerings that do not cause for that flavour-fatigue knocking off his custom, you have a life-time value of sandwich buys in your pocket! Don’t forget, this could run into thousands of rupees of business in the long-term!

Plan then for this customer on the go. The guys out there in the Indian marketplace are looking for that quick-grab on-the-go product to accompany them in their busy lives. The clever marketer will address this need and brand it as well. The clever salesman will sell it in his own style.

The salesman of today in the “On-the-go” market will need to be a salesman who is out there at the right place at the right time. A salesman who is going to distinguish his offering more in terms of visual merchandising ability rather than on the merit of the sales spiel he will let loose on the customer. Remember, the customer has no time to listen. He will just look, assess in those nano-seconds it takes for the mind to process visual information vis-à-vis need, want and desire, and pick the product or service he wants to franchise.

This is a quick-generation which has no time to stand and stare. No time for the sales banter. The new era salesman in these markets in a hurry need to customize their sales offerings completely basing the selling strategy on the two counts of location and visual appeal through merchandising and Point of Purchase material. Silent selling then!

If you ask me, this trend is already alive in the large metropolises of India. Particularly in Mumbai, where grabbing a sandwich, a ‘vadaa-pau’ and possibly a sachet of ‘Neera’, is a culture all of its own. Only this time round, the market is skewed towards the yuppie of Corporate India. This guy will not be seen dead grabbing a ‘vadaa-pau’ from an unbranded joint round the corner.

Silent selling with its appeal tags of visual merchandising appeal, hygiene, convenience and Point of Purchase glare, is here to stay. The salesman needs to re-define his abilities, and get silent for a change in these kinds of markets.

And that’s a difficult one!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting firm.
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

Indian Brand Trends 2008-2009

2008-12-31T21:09:00.000-08:00

Brand 26Eleven and the trends that shaped 2008

By Harish Bijoor

The 26 November, 2008 terror attack and incursions into Indian sovereign civil space by a bunch of Pakistani youngsters with AK 47’s in their hands and terror-indoctrination in their hearts is going to make your Cappuccino more expensive. 26Eleven is going to give a big boost to the security product and security service industry at large. That’s obvious. The advertising you are approached by will change. The theme, tone, tenor and decibel of Indian marketing will change as well. That’s not obvious. Just wait. Just watch.

Everything impacts everything. Every event of our every day life impacts every marketing action there is going to be. I will flag 26Eleven as the one date that is the defining moment that epitomizes the loss of innocence of the Indian marketing man at large. This loss of innocence means a lot. It means that the hospitality sector in India will view everyone who enters its portals as a potential terror threat. If you live in a hotel, you will feel very secure inside from now on. So secure that you will love being viewed as a potential terror threat even. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. The security hackle and mantle, once up, is a forever mantle of cover. The Indian hospitality industry in 5-star space has lost its innocence. Watch this cascade. Watch the dominos push every sector there is. Close or distant, does not matter.

In a sense, you do not have to dig too deep into the gut of the Chaos theory, or even go up the path of the Domino effect and the several theories that abound in this terrain to understand that. Just peek into the trends that shaped our Marketing lives in 2008, and peek further into the crystal ball for 2009, and you have it all. Life changed in 2008. The Marketing man morphed his every appeal to the needs, wants, desires, aspirations and fantasies of Consumer 2008.

Let me then wear my annual trend-spotters hat and paint the picture of the year just gone by. Let me dig and go a little deeper than skin-depth marketing to draw the blood and gore of marketing the way it was in 2008. The trends that shaped Indian marketing.

Public Utility spaces got branded::

Public spaces in India have been typically under-utilized in an organized manner for branding. Gone are the days when companies could actually go berserk painting rocks and walls with their brand messages, at times covering entire mountains with advertising message for a Cola or Condom alike. 2008 saw the emergence of systematic play in the utilization of public utility space. Road stretches got branded inputs. Roads such as the ones that ply between a Chennai-Pondicherry, Mumbai-Pune, Delhi-UP, and more.

Branding opportunities arise in every nook of this space. Glow-signs, translates of every kind, branded restaurants, branded mile-stones (would the cigarette brand want to take that 555 Km milestone just outside of Bangalore that has Hyderabad and its distance listed out there?) Add to it the potential of building brand and brand romance in the roads of yore, such as the Grand trunk Road? Or the great Silk route?

Expect more of this in the years to come. Will a Hazrat Gunj station hold the potential of becoming a “Levi’s Ganj”? And Egmore station, a “Station More”?

Low cost bows out:

Strange but true. The highly visible aviation industry in India led the way. My friend Capt. Gopinath and his friend RK Laxman’s Common Man had to give way to the swish, short and very, very tight red skirts of a Kingfisher and the dreams of the King of Good times. Low-cost in many ways went out with the merger of Air Deccan with Kingfisher and the launch of the Kingfisher Red Service. 2008 saw the death of low-cost and the emergence of the high-value airline instead.

The space Air Deccan vacated is being filled in by a Go-Air and a Spice-Jet. One doesn’t know for how long though. The trend is clear. Low-cost models in aviation space just don’t seem to work. If one looks into the bottom-lines of the airline experiments in this space, one nearly baulks at what might have been termed predatory-pricing tactics in another country altogether.

Singh is King:

Though Mr .Manmohan Singh may not really be the king behind the kingdom that is India, Singh surely was king in many, many ways in 2008. The branding of movies took a new turn. Hindi cinema adopted the tone, tenor, mood, lingo, food, dress and everything else from Punjab. Punjabi cinema and Punjabi lingo went mainstream. The two big hits of the year were certainly “Singh is King” and “Rab De Banaa di Jodi”. While box office collections of the first grossed INR 48 Crores in the first ten days, the ‘Rab de’ option actually notched up INR 60 Crore in the same period. Punjabi lingo became the lingo to use in a Chennai and Kovilpatti alike. Many a discotheque floor across the country used music from every one of these movies to get their floors scorching. In many ways, Hindi cinema did yeoman service to the task of knitting this country together. Race no bar, language no bar, culture no bar, food no bar. At least for now.

IPL did it:

The year saw Lalit Modi’s dream-scape of IPL take off. Skeptics were left behind stunned. So was the rival ICL. Every trick was pulled out of the Pandora’s Box of marketing magic.

5-day cricket played in whites is boring today. For the oldies. One-day cricket played in colors is better, but still not the best. As the attention span of the new generation of Indians shortens, IPL is the best there is to savor in cricket. A short game of 20- overs each.

IPL did one more thing. It removed national jingoism and replaced it with city-jingoism. A Kolkata Knight Riders now vies for attention that is local in a unique manner. Never mind where you live, just as long as you are a Kolkata-fan, you will root for the KKRs.

IPL did one more thing. The multi-country composition of teams has erased International boundaries in one quick stroke of a set of matches of one IPL season. Today, an Australian will root for the Chennai Super Kings just as a person of British origin will root for the Rajasthan Royals. Their players play in it.

The nation kept breathing cricket. The game remained the lowest common denominator that unites the rich, the poor, the partisan and the political. If there is one thing that can pan out as a conversation point across income groups, religious divides, political divides, social divides and divides of every kind, it sure is cricket. And IPL is king!

Security-services see a boom:

The events of 26Eleven got every Tom, Dick and Harish very, very awake. Every hotel of every star category reviewed its security arrangements. Every apartment owner’s association woke up to the threat possibility that looms large on soft-targets as well. IT companies invested in sniffer dogs. The dogs are happy. The demand is big in this space, I hear.

High-end hotels went back to every vendor who had offered superior technology. Sniffer room cards that find and report electronically of traces of petroleum or RDX alike were explored. The demand for electronic surveillance systems is up. Scanners are in short supply, I hear.

Employment booms in this category. Many a BPO cab driver in a Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore is now getting trained to be a security guard. As BPOs lay off operators, they are forced to lay off out-sourced drivers as well. The driver now finds a new avenue.

Advertising morphed:

Advertising rose from an acute clutter of its own making in a remarkable manner. While most brands kept experimenting with theme, some brands went the way of the long-running story. The big idea that was campaignable with a story like format using the same set of anchor actors right through.

Advertising as we see it today can be divided into the tactical promotional pieces that talk of the latest price and the latest gifts that go with the brand. A superior form of this is the advertising that is theme centric. One product story brought to life with a 30 or 60-seconder that established the long term brand proposition. This year, advertisers went one step forward. Airtel experimented with the format of story-advertising. Madhavan and Vidya Balan did cameo roles of the couple on the move. This did Airtel a lot of good. Story replaced the boring single-theme led advertising of last year. Idea Cellular did similar good stuff with its “What an idea, sir-ji’ series. There is a new version every other month. Way to go.

Blank noise. Blank hoardings:

The year saw a lot of these all around. The Outdoor industry is a bell-weather industry. The first signs of recession typically translate themselves onto the visual displays on the hoardings of our cities and towns. The moment you see blank hoardings with messages that advertise numbers and names of the hoarding owners, be sure recession is here. The depth of such recession can be gauged by the width of such blank hoardings.

It works this way. The marketer who is on a cost-cutting spree as he watches his sales volumes and values touching lows such as never before, he chops the advertising budget. And the first one to face the axe is Outdoor. Next comes Point-of-purchase. Simultaneously with that is the cut on TV expenditure. Print falls next.

November saw loads of hoarding spaces looking blank. December has seen a deepening on that. Wonder how January will pan out.

With that point of wonder, let me close this piece. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in the world. The Marketing person, and the other is the Marketed-to person. Whichever you are, wish each one of you a Happy Marketing New year!

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

CSR and marketing in India

2008-12-28T20:22:00.000-08:00

The Media Industry must not create Hara-kiri!

2008-11-04T21:07:00.000-08:00

Media Must Not Commit Hara-kiri!

By Harish Bijoor

Media must not kill itself.

As I watch the evolution of media over the last several years, I worry for it. I worry hard as I watch the routes primary mediums seem to want to adopt in contemporary India today.

Let me trace this story of a worry that haunts me through an examination of what I peek at when I look at the trends in the evolution of the mediums I have loved and used to commercial brand advantage so much all these years. Televsion, Press, Radio and the unconventional medium included!

The Evolution:

Communication and the want to communicate is possibly one of the oldest of the desires of man. Food, clothing, shelter, sex and the desire to communicate…..in that order for a start! At least I would like to believe that!

In the very beginning, the best form of communication is seen to be the 1:1 form! The earliest form of it all, where one individual meets another. Adam meets Eve. Communicates. Communication in the earliest forms we know of could be visual, verbal, aural or can be of any form that straddles sensory communicative ability! Seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, feeling, talking and hearing are indeed all forms.

The 1:1 form of communication is possibly the strongest form we have in terms of delivery efficacy! It is direct and personal. It has the ability to establish an instant rapport between the communicator and the one being communicated to. It is two-way as well! It provides for the ability of the communicator to cogently understand the needs, wants and desires of the person being communicated to.

But 1:1 communication is difficult at times. When communication of this form gets difficult to maintain, man evolves the next best form. 1:Many! In this form, the communicator is one and the communiqué is dished out to thousands of people. The local Press and the avatar of FM Radio as we know it today are possibly good examples of this form. There is still some semblance of localization maintained in the process. There is still some customization of appeal. This is mostly one-way. The communicator, at best, can use the process of extrapolatative market research to arrive at what the consumer wants and desires.

1: Many then morphs into the 1: Very-Many form. This is the form best represented by National Network television. One message dished out to the entire country with little or no customization at all! This form of communication is that much more divorced from local needs as any. Communication is dished out keeping the masses in mind, and there is indeed a lowest-common denominator being appealed to!

And then there is the 1:Too Many type! Fox News dishing out its American fare to the entire world is possibly a great example!

The final frontier will be breached when we are able to advertise on the moon. The vision of 2020! You take a moonlit walk with your beloved, look up to the moon, and there is an advertising message staring back at you: “The moon, brought to you by Coca Cola”! This indeed would be the final form. 1: All!

Many of us will go through all these forms of communication in our very lifetime! The point: media morphs! When one form gets inefficient and unable to deliver, a new form appears. The new form is not necessarily the best in terms of efficacy, but is certainly the best in terms of reach! Not the best in terms of impact, but certainly the best in terms of reach!

The evolution of media has largely been reach-centric. Everything else has been sacrificed on the way!

Things Gone Wrong:

As we have traversed the evolutionary process of mediums, from 1: 1 to the mythical 1: All media-fantasizers dream of, there are several things that have gone wrong on the way! There is one big worry I will focus on in this piece.

The one big thing mediums have for themselves is the fact that they are trusted mediums that disseminate content.

Right in the beginning, the medium emerges as a completely content-oriented form. Look at the first newspapers that hit the stands. The idea is content. The newspaper is the purveyor of content.

The first set of readers adopt the publication of their choice based on content. Content that is presented cogently and content that is presented with integrity. It is indeed content that shapes the medium and its readership. As readership builds up, the publication is successful in literally building a community of people who would swear by the publication for what it carries. The publication represents community interest and becomes a representative of the collective aspirations, needs and wants of its readers. Many a time, this very content is crafted with care taking into consideration its set of captive readers. This truly is the newspaper that understands its customers and delivers to them what they want.

As circulation numbers climb, there is a direct correlation between the increase in advertising among publications of all types. As more and more readers franchise a paper, the advertising side of the paper tends to deepen. And rightly so. No complaints here.

The evolutionary trend here is however worrisome. Publications at times tend to show a trend to keep increasing the advertising side of the paper at the detriment of content. What started as a 100 per cent content publication metamorphoses into an 80 per cent content and 20 per cent advertising 'avatar'. The end point in this game is however reached when advertising tends to weigh equally in page numbers as content does. No complaints thus far as well!

The complaints start coming when the publication in question starts leveraging its content to stay in tune with the needs, wants and desires of its advertisers rather than the needs, wants and desires of its readers! Many a publication traverses this terrain. And this is the big worry!

The reader of the publication is the guinea pig. How long will this pig remain a pig? Not very long really!

Every medium, whether in the terrain of the medium of television, press or radio is guilty of this trend. Time to correct the trajectory before it is too late!

The very credibility of mediums is in doubt. Let us remember that the very primary franchise of mediums is based on content. The franchisee of the medium adopts the channel, the newspaper brand or his FM channel of choice based on content and what it offers. As the years go by, if the user actually senses a lack of commitment on the part of the medium, the vehicle will be distrusted.

The very goose that lays the golden eggs for media houses is up on judgment. The more individual mediums leverage on advertising and bring every form of it in the guise of creative advertising executions amidst the form of content and at times well within it even, the more is the damage being done!

I want to trust my television channel. I watch it for content! I believe it offers me content that packs in integrity! I believe it will not do me wrong! I believe in what is offered on it! I swear by it! I will speak about it to others and increase its viewership! I am the simple consumer!

As advertising makes its way on the channel of my favour, I will trust the advertising equally. I will vest onto the advertising the positive cues I reserve for the channel. I will trust the advertising. I will even believe that the channel of my favour will not carry advertising that lacks integrity. I am the simple consumer!

As days go by and as I watch a lack of discretion in allowing in intrusive advertising on to the medium, I will start wondering whether my channel has it all right! As I keep to the franchise and as I see a lot of advertising finding its way into the content part of the channel, subliminal and overt, I worry more! I am still the simple consumer!

I keep watching my favorite channel. Till one day I discover that my favorite channel dishes out content that is not entirely above-board in terms of mixing advertising with content. I worry and distrust seeps in. I am still the simple consumer. I become cynical. I distrust the channel. I distrust all advertising on it as well!

The channel has taken it a bit too far. The channel has traversed from a 100 per cent content integrity channel to a cusp of the content and advertising. I am at times unable to discern what drives the channel more. The advertising or the content? The viewer of the advertiser?

As mediums get more and more driven by the advertiser, we need to worry. Time to re-jig our act. Remember, content drives it all! Also remember, the consumer drives this movement. Not the advertiser! Lets re-jig it all!

We owe it to our collective future!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, a private-label consulting firm with a presence in the markets of UK, Hong Kong and the Indian sub-continent.

Email responses to: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

The indian Economy and competitiveness

2008-09-14T02:57:00.000-07:00

On Being Competitive

By Harish Bijoor

Marketing is too important to be left to marketing people!

Ouch! That hurts! But that is the reality of the future for sure.

Are you gearing up for change? Are you concerned about being competitive in the long term? Time to re-think the line. Marketing is too important to be left to marketing people.

Marketing is therefore the key concern of every Tom, Dick and Harish in your organization. It should be. From the CEO to the ‘chaprasi’ at the door, marketing is a ubiquitous fetish to adopt and cherish for the future ahead of us.

Firstly, marketing is all encompassing. It is about all of us in the business of life itself. Not a moment goes without the need of a marketing intervention. From the early morning cup of coffee to the late night tryst at the potty, marketing intervenes every moment of our lives. We can’t live without it. It is a part of our lives and indeed a part of our psyche at large.

Never mind then whether the man at hand is an entity urban or an entity rural, the needs are largely the same. The same set of bellies and bladders that crave for food and drink and the same set of teeth that crave that brush with hygiene early in the morning.

Marketing is therefore about every one of us. It is all encompassing. Marketing therefore needs to be inclusive. Inclusive about all our needs and inclusive about every one in the chain that contributes today and have the potential of contributing tomorrow.

Marketing is about competition then. The day of the early-mover-marketing is over. In comes the day and age of the mature market. The mature market where top-lines are under threat to the oldest marketed categories of them all. Consumers have live din these categories pretty loyally for long enough. There is a huge need and want to move to the better product and the better price. Marketers are hastening this process further.

As marketers cut prices, one in tandem with another, bottom-line profits become thinner and thinner. The vain quest for the top-line is hurting the bottom line no end. As all of this happens and the premium of the brand, built assiduously over all these years vanished, the concept of branding itself is in question.

The markets are therefore drying up. The early marketers of the day did his job pretty well. The marketer of the day is however finding it tough to go forward. The future is all about a competitive context that is different. A competitive context that needs to be understood carefully before planning a foray that is different.

As traditional markets dry up, time to look at the new. Look at the standard process the Indian marketer has adopted over the years. Step one was into the nascent urban market. Pluck the low hanging fruit of urban first. Pluck then the higher handing fruit of urban. Go then to the low hanging fruit of rural (43 million homes). And then into rural that is just about developing (90 million homes).

The only reality out there is competition. Marketers of the day face competition in one of the following four formats.

The competitive advantage of India in world markets is best assessed by taking a quick peek at the models of competition possible in markets of the present and the future.

If I am to look around the nations of the world and correlate models in current use, there are four distinct patterns that emerge. Four clusters that have whole sets of nations congregating in models those seem to work for each of them differently and with different levels of efficacy. Needless to say, the peculiarities of each nation in question dictate the distinct choice they have made for themselves. Let’s visit the clusters. And let’s call them all kinds of animal names.

1. The Earthworm Model:

The passive model of competitive reaction. The invitation theory that is best practiced by the earthworm. A rich worm really. It knows the basics best. It is in constant touch with the earth that it seeks nourishment from and nourishes back simultaneously. A fundamentally strong being.

Several problems in this model though. It is passive for one. Non-reactionary. A model in the self-fulfilling prophecy mode. The best example of the fatalistic theory in practice. When faced with danger, all it can do is continue its humble journey in the earth. Competition kills this model with ease. There is no reaction. The fatalistic model of competition at its best!

Is Indian marketing here?

2. The Snail model:

The common competitive model in practice by a whole host of nations. This model is reactively proactive. A clear cocoon orientation. When faced with competition and danger, there is a regression into the shell. The withdrawn marketer at play. The philosopher marketer even! The marketer who revels in the safety-static nexus. Waiting for the competition to just go away, so that normal life may resume again!

Is Indian marketing here?

3. The Porcupine Model:

This model tells the competitor clearly of the array of weapons that are available for retributive action. There is a clear emphasis on the display of the arsenal. It believes in the overt display. A clear détente model of competition. Avoids a lot of speculative action and is ready for the real battle

Is Indian marketing here?

4. The Everyone Else Model:

This is the model of the real-time player in competitive markets of the present and certainly the future. This is the real-time marketer. Reactive when necessary. Proactive when necessary. Guerilla in tactics when necessary as well!

This is a constant-change oriented model that believes in watching the scenario carefully and reacting accordingly. Making forays into proactive territory on a speculative basis. Never mind if even only one of those sixteen forays actually click! Life in the fast track of competitive marketing is pretty un-predictable and speculative. Change here is absolutely discontinuous. Making a decision on a point of competitive strategy based on happenings of the past and the present could be disastrous. The future never ever happens the way the past decided.

Change here is so discontinuous that it is aptly illustrated by the example of the baby-arrival process in the house. The first child in this baby-boomers house is born out of a Caesarian section, gone in for by an over-zealous gynecologist. The second baby of the house is therefore predictably to be one out of a similar process. Caesarian section! No! It isn’t. Change is discontinuous. The second baby is a natural birth! The third child is due to happen then. This time round, its Caesarian section as well! Oops!

The fourth child of this baby-happy home is due. Change is indeed discontinuous. There is no predictability here. Guess what! This time round, the baby is actually conceived, carried and delivered by the father of the baby! Oops! Again! Change is indeed that discontinuous!

Shouldn’t Indian marketing be here?

The British left India as a nation of shopkeepers. Our retail universe that covers a nano-fraction of super-markets, large numbers of small and medium sized shops and cubby holes of retail commerce in remote inaccessible corners of the country, is the biggest you can find in any of the 182 countries that comprise the world and its consuming markets. A population of 12 million retail outlets to service the needs and requirements of the world’s second biggest consuming mass of people!

The one big strength that less than one other nation in the world can stake its claim to, is the size of the population that rests within the boundaries of our country. A huge weakness of gigantic proportions when viewed from the many development-oriented periscopes of the past. Not so when you view it with the future in mind. A future that is energized by these very large masses of people who have been the biggest liability for the nation of a billion plus!

The past viewed people as a liability. Not enough physical work to go round, not enough food to eat and of course not enough education to ventilate around. Every bit of progress that development achieved was sacrificed very, very quickly (possibly even before the economist was able to record and publish the feat), at the altar of population and its rather robust pace of growth.

While every sector of the economy did reasonably well in bits and patches over the last hundred years, so did the sector of population growth. Stretched food resources, stressed out finances, a pathetic situation on the physical infrastructure front and a complete lack of positive momentum represented the development of the last hundred years in India. People were therefore the biggest liability.

Not so anymore. Not in the hundred years ahead of us. One of the biggest assets of marketing-based India is its numbers in the very many homes that dot the countryside of ‘sunny-side-up’ India! Lots of existing people and a robust yen to propagate more of the kind, only means a lot more stomachs to feed and a lot more bladders to fill. Lots more bodies to clothe and a lot more minds to educate.

Think of a product. Think of a service. Think of a want. Think of a need. The biggest and the best of them will linger in the land that is India! The marketing future of India is therefore made. Ready at the take-off stage which will have many a Schumpeter stumped!

But then, people are not the only need of a consumer market. Consumption is certainly not the only key to unlock the riches of a marketing man’s Pandora’s box. Money somehow seems to be the real key. More money in these many hands, more the consumption. But then, is the money around?

While the pessimists answer to the question will say that men without money or men without the means to make the money, are of no use to marketing and its future, the fact remains that there is a value in the market that has a huge potential. A potential that can well nigh break open huge values in the times to come.

Let’s just remember one thing. India has been a poor country for a long, long while now. People below the poverty line have numbered a strong platoon of people. And despite it all, the population has grown, survived and continues to thrive in its sheer numbers. People have found a way to survive. The fittest have survived on high value brands, the less fit than that have thrived on brands of a lesser caliber in the country. Those even lower in the hierarchy have survived on the fringe of the commodity in every category of want and need. Consumption needs have always found answers. Consumption solutions for all!

There is therefore a pyramid of consumption that lies all over the slopes of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. But then, everybody, rich or poor, has fallen within the confines of this pyramid. And just as long as they do, there is indeed potential for a robust market for commodities, quasi-brands, brands, super-brands and of course at the ultimate level of the self-actualizing folk, no brands at all!

Every one of these segments has a value though. And in value rests the potential for the marketer. The one big true-blue competitive advantage for India of the present and India of the future, is indeed its large population base articulating every basic need in consumption of products, services and utilities.

Time to change the paradigm of India’s population then! Every marketer of whatever origin, be it from within India or outside, will queue up in the consumer markets of the country, trying to woo the wallet of the willing. As traditional source markets reach a plateau in their consumption, nascent markets like the one in India will hold a great deal of allure to the marketing man in his Western strait-jacket.

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label thought-leadership outfit with a presence in the markets of UK, Hong-Kong and the Indian sub-continent. Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

The All-new Models of competition

2008-07-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Earthworm, Snail, Porcupine and Co.

By Harish Bijoor

Competition is a reality. None of us can ignore competition. There is competition in the home, in the school, in college, in office and most certainly in the great Indian market-place as a whole.

If there is life, there is competition. The baby in the house competes for your attention, just as that brand new hair gel on the shelf is seeking out your attention amidst a clutter of competition weighing down the super-market shelf.

How does one really compete? Let me paint four models.

If I am to look around the nations of the world and correlate competitive models in current use, there are four distinct patterns that emerge. Four clusters that have whole sets of nations congregating in models those seem to work for each of them differently and with different levels of efficacy. Needless to say, the peculiarities of each nation in question dictate the distinct choice they have made for themselves. Let’s visit the clusters. And let’s call them all kinds of animal names.

1. The Earthworm Model:

Several problems in this model though. It is passive for one. Non-reactionary. A model in the self-fulfilling prophecy mode. The best example of the fatalistic theory of the East in practice. When faced with danger, all it can do is continue its humble journey in the earth. Competition kills this model with ease. There is no reaction. The fatalistic model of competition at its best!

Is the Indian marketer here? I

2.The Snail model:

Is India here?

3. The Porcupine Model:

Many marketers seem here.

4. The Everyone Else Model:

Shouldn’t India be here?

The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

The Salesman is Dead!

2008-07-03T02:51:00.000-07:00

gog

Death of a Salesman

By Harish Bijoor

Who is a salesperson?

The typical definition points squarely at that one entity that runs out there in the field. That one entity that does the sales prospecting first. That very entity that makes the cold call. That entity that does the sales pitch. And most certainly that one entity that closes the sale and brings in the ‘moolah’ into the kitty of the company he represents or the individual purpose he touts.

The year is 2005. This rather antediluvian definition of a salesperson is changing at a rapid pace. The narrow spotlight that fell on the front-ended salesperson as the sales entity of the organization, focused in his revenue tapping activity, is gradually spreading wider and wider in organization.

The salesperson prospects. And so do a host of back-end operators today. Whole departments that sit behind computer data-bases and whole departments that still pore through directories of people who fit the profile of the company in question are becoming critical sales-lead points for the man in the field to follow. Is this a sales-person as well? But of course!

The salesperson tele-calls. And so do a host of call-center operatives set up to generate the hot leads from a whole fuzzy and amorphous list of prospects. Companies in the market for the aggressive sale boast of deep-seated call centers that work 24X7 to pass the lead on to the man or woman on the front. Is this a sales-person as well? Most certainly yes.

The sales-person plants the seed of an awareness in the minds of consumers. Your range of superior toilet-cleaner needs to be planted as a thought in the minds of prospective consumers. While the sales-person on the field does this physically one on one, advertising of both the mass media and specific kind does it all the while. Is the advertising creative person in his pony-tail, the media-person in his breeches and the peppy client servicing 'types' sales entities as well? Most vehemently yes.

The sales-person is therefore not one. The salesperson is many! Many entities that make for the end purpose of creating the awareness, stoking it on into an interest in the potty-cleaner, causing for a flaming desire for the same and of course clinching it into an action of a sale.

And is that the end of the road? Not at all. The post-sale process is equally important. Is the post sale service person an important entity in the chain of causing the sale and keeping it as such? Yes again. The service person is a sales person as well. Every service person is a salesperson at large, with the very big potential of making that sale happen for a second time and most certainly a very positive entity working to create a positive appeal for the company that has done the selling –in for a repeat purchase at some time in the near or distant future.

The focus of the narrow beam therefore widens. And there’s more.

I enter the realm of your sales office. There sits a guard at the door. Is he a salesperson? Yes, he is. Your office receptionist who is painting her nails as she responds to a call is a salesperson as well. Everyone is.

Why is it then that everyone in the enterprise of a sale does not really think he or she is a salesperson? And why is it that everyone listed out here does not really participate in the enterprise of selling with the vigor and zest that the front-ended salesperson of the organization displays?

These are indeed key issues that worry many a man, woman and child in the realm of selling. Trouble touch-points, if when corrected can actually result in cascaded quantum value for the selling organization.

Look keenly at the organization of sales in your company then. Peek keenly at the nomenclature in vogue. Call everyone in your organization a sales entity then. Bring in the S word with pride into the designation and job profiles of everyone in your organization. Call them all together and celebrate your sales successes. Remember, each of them, starting with the office peon to the guy who mans the kitchen has been equally responsible in creating the cascade of sale.

And don’t stop at that. Incentivise everyone in the organization based on the sale volume or value your organization commands every quarter. The sales-person in the front will of course garner the most of this incentive, but as the distance to the selling process increases, the incentive will decrease. Nevertheless, everyone earns a part of what the enterprise makes on its sale. Money talks and money helps weave purpose here.

The CEO sitting right atop the pyramid of organization needs to be a salesperson as well. She is indeed the ultimate salesperson of organization. Sales must be a part of the designation description of your CEO. It helps vest the S word with the dignity it demands and deserves.

At the end of it all, sales is the one activity that is the purpose of organization. Sales brings in the cash flow. Never mind whether you are a temple-trust, a modern multi-specialty hospital, a school at large or a company that sells dentures or dog biscuits. The purpose of the organization is the sale.

Get your corporate organization centric to the purpose of the sale. Get the S word going with gusto and reap the rewards that will follow.

The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

Marketing in the Days ahead..............

2008-06-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

The Future of the Future: Two Pointers….

By Harish Bijoor

The future is not for you to see.

Well almost. The future of marketing lies in the future of branding. Two pointers then to the future of the future……..

1. The Amoeba and I

Human beings are not static state entities. We change. Our minds change. The thoughts in our minds change. We are change animals. We actually morph all the while. Our bodies change. Our minds change as well. Our bodies change with time. Right upto the age of 18 we are on the growth path. From then on we are on the death path. Our cells grow all the while and then start dying all the while. The body is therefore all about change.

The mind similarly is all about change. Change that is even more dynamic. While the body and its changes are all about a relationship with time, the mind and its change is not about time at all. It is about the diverse sets of experiences we go through. It is all about experience and exposure.

When our minds (where thoughts live) are forever on a morph mode, how dare brands remain static and expect to thrive?

Brands need to reinvent themselves on the format of an amoeba that is forever changing. Amoebic Branding is it! Change with dominant sets of consumers. A brand can’t be static anymore. Brands need to have avatars that change all the while. And for this, for a start, brands need to know the minds of their consumers the way they are and the way they will be next month. Brands need to Scenario plan all the way ahead.

Brand appeal needs to be inconsistent. Consistency is old hat. Consistency is the old paradigm of the branding process. One needs to break through the walls of this very rigid edifice brand folks have built over the last several decades. A brand needs to be inconsistent. Inconsistent in sync with the consumer.

Consumers are changing faster than brands. And that possibly is one of the reasons brands are being left behind and consumers are sprinting ahead. Running away from brands! Amoebic branding is all about keeping pace with the mind and mood of the consumer and morphing brand offerings both in terms of imagery and more radically so, in terms of product as well! The product can’t be static anymore as well! Wake up to new branding! Wake up to the new DNA of a brand!

2. Watch out! Inclusive branding ahead!

The very base paradigm of branding is exclusivity. In the beginning, there was the commodity. The commodity was pretty much unrecognizable one from the other. Brand folk caused for distinction. The commodity morphed to a quasi-brand status of some recognition. Brand folk kept getting exclusive in their approach. The quasi-brand moved on to become a brand. The brand was exclusive space. And then came the super-brand! Very exclusive space!

If the brand is exclusive space, it excludes a whole lot of society from it.

As society evolves, the language of the day will move on to get more and more inclusive. Do brands today include the masses or do they exclude them? Do brands in India include the needs, wants, aspirations, desires and affordability parameters of the have-nots?

If they don’t, and if all they cause is a hunger for higher end products that just can’t be satisfied, time then to get going and get onto the bandwagon of what I call Inclusive Branding. Branding that involves every segment of the masses there is to please, feed, clothe and shelter!

Inclusive branding is therefore all about an offering that embraces all. In some way or the other. In an extreme manner of speaking, brands will aspire not to alienate but embrace. Brands will cause hunger amongst only the relevant groups of people they aspire to satisfy. Mass advertising will therefore need to get very sensitive. If you are a Skoda Auto, you will get very sensitive and stop using mass media altogether that reaches the recesses of the dispossessed in your country. You will remember that even people below the poverty line in your country watch television, and you will not want to create unnecessary hunger and saliva appeal amongst those who can’t afford what you peddle.

And this is not about being benign. It is all about avoiding social discontent. All about avoiding those negative cues and strokes your brand gives to a whole set of people who can’t afford to be within its consumption set.

One step further then. Brands just might have other offers for those who can’t afford what you advertise to the masses. A branded tea that retails at Rs.300 a Kilogram just might have a variant that retails at Rs.2 per 5 grams! The quality of the offering will of course be different, but the brand name might be the same!

Can a brand with the same name swim upstream and downstream in an economy at the same time? The paradigm might just have to be broken!

Inclusive branding will be about embracing all whom you advertise to. The strategies of Inclusive branding are many, but the goal is the same. Newer and newer routes will be discovered! Inclusive branding is the new DNA of a truly successful brand ahead!

The author is a Brand domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc, a private-label consulting outfit with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, London, Dubai and the Indian sub-continent

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

clustrmaps

2008-06-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

Marketing Models for India

2008-06-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

Earthworm, Snail, Porcupine and Co.

By Harish Bijoor

Competition is a reality. None of us can ignore competition. There is competition in the home, in the school, in college, in office and most certainly in the great Indian market-place as a whole.

How does one really compete? Let me paint four models.

1. The Earthworm Model:

Is the Indian marketer here? I

2.The Snail model:

Is India here?

3. The Porcupine Model:

Many marketers seem here.

4. The Everyone Else Model:

Shouldn’t India be here?

The author is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

The Indian Consumer of the Future

2008-06-12T02:06:00.000-07:00

Networking Working

By Harish Bijoor

The FMCG industry is back on the growth path in India. With a bang! After a big series of lulls seen in the industry with slackening rates of consumer interest, the FY 2008 promises a record growth rate of 17 % for the best FMCG brands in the country.

As one peels the Marketing Onion that is India, one finds successes that are bigger still in FMCG space. Bigger than the recorded growth rate of 17% even, as will be seen by majors in the space such as HUL, Marico and a P&G.

To get a hint of the real heroes of FMCG space in the last several years, peek keenly at the top-line numbers recorded by MLM (Multi-level marketing) companies. In the lead is just one company: Amway.

Top-line growth numbers of the company far out-strip the achievements of the oldest FMCG majors that have dominated the marketing environment that is India.

I theorize on this now. A theory I have built and evangelize across corporate organizations in the space of FMCG in India.

My theory then.

I do believe there are three dominant types of consumers in any marketing economy.

Indian Consumer Ver.1.1: The first is what I call a Pure consumer. This consumer buys for himself and his family. This consumer lives in the big cities of India. This consumer is a fourth or fifth generation branded FMCG buyer even. Marketers have traditionally focused on selling to such a consumer in India thus far.

Indian Consumer Ver.1.2: The second consumer is the one who is part consumer and part re-seller. He buys products and at times services not for himself alone. Whatever he buys, he will use a part for himself and his family, and the rest he will re-sell, often at a profit. Marketers in MLM companies typically sell to such folk. The success of the FY 2008 has been this Indian consumer Ver. 1.2. Amway reaped the wind here.

Indian Consumer Ver. 1.3: The third consumer is the one, who in the future, will actually buy only to re-sell. This consumer will emerge in the smaller towns of India. In the 6, 42,700 villages of India. This consumer will challenge the might of the distributor who was the re-seller in the old days. True blue democratization of the selling process, where the consumer is really not a consumer at all. He is only a Pure re-seller. There are marketers exploring this space. Taking baby steps here.

Harish Bijoor is a brand-specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

IPL Cricket and Indian Sports Marketing Dynamics

2008-06-10T03:59:00.000-07:00

Geography is History

By Harish Bijoor

Geography is history!

The IPL team brand is a reality today. Even as the bidding for the City Teams is done with and just as the top 80 cricketers are picked up in an open auction with open and overt commercial intent by a Preity Zinta or a Dr. Vijay Mallya, it is time to sit up and shake the paradigm of geography and its old value. At least in cricketing terms.

Cricket history is an old and valued one. If Hinduism has its Bhagvad Gita, Christianity its Bible and Islam its Koran, Cricket has its own as well with an ever-growing Wisden. But then, that’s old hat now!

A trace of the history of evolution of cricket then?

Kerry Packer saw it first. The audience for 5-day cricket with its men in whites was getting to be tiresome. Cricket refused to change its avatar. Packer came in with his revolutionary one-day format. In came cricket with colored uniforms and just 50-overs each. This was instant cricket. A game that wrapped up its results in just one day of each team playing fifty-overs.

The game prospered. The game grew. Sponsorship grew. Brands that sought quicker eye-ball impact picked the game with vigor. Now there was Cricket Classic (the five day version played by men in whites) and Instant Cricket (the 50-over variety with its adrenaline rush for the younger man). In many ways, if you were older and if you had a heart problem, you better watch 5-day cricket. If you were younger, there was One-day cricket around for you. And then of course there were cusp cricket fans who watched both the variants. There was just more cricket to eat than before, and no one complained. Except for parents of kids with exams to write, who just kept complaining that this was just not cricket.

In came the years of the 2000 series. Cricket administrators and those concerned with Cricket –commerce (many interested only in terms of audience reach and the ability to monetize this value in terms of advertising) were thinking fast and quick. The contemporary audience was tiring of one-day cricket as well. Lives were getting fast-paced. People just did not have enough time to sit and watch a One-day game that somehow seemed slower than the life-styles of most of the audience that was watching it.

The game changed. In came Twenty-20. A shorter game. A sexier version. A version that promised to compete with the 90-minute joy of the world’s biggest viewed game of them all, Soccer.

With history wrapped up, time to talk the paradigm of Geography.

In sheer brand terms, cricket is a game that has traditionally depended on the jingoism of nations at the International level. In some cases the jingoism of States and Regions even, just as the Ranjhi Trophy matches sought so desperately to build in the country. In vain of course!

The IPL is different. This nascent brand of wannabe cricket wants to develop a whole new paradigm of consumer acceptance altogether. The key proposition: build Team-brand loyalty rather than just plain old National-brand or State-brand loyalty.

How is this done? How long will it take? And what are the key hurdles to cross? And importantly, can it be done at all?

Last question first. Can it be done at all?

Most certainly yes. Peek keenly at soccer and the emergence of the mega-buck teams that represent a passion of their own. Are you an Arsenal fan? Or a Man-U maniac? And is the Manchester United much more of a movement than national football altogether? And what about the eye-balls that track the game? Do they follow Team-sport more than National Soccer? And which one is a weekly passion? And which one attracts the biggest bucks?

The answer is blowing in the winds my dear friends. Team soccer is bigger than it all. Team sport is more profitable than it all. More eye-balls, more frequent eye-balls, and indeed more eye-balls to monetize literally every week. More eye-balls and indeed every other body part of the fan to monetize, not only in playing season, but in slack time as well. Every ball, every T-shirt and every wrist band is an opportunity that packs money.

My definition of a brand: The brand is a thought. A thought that lives in people’s minds. The Team Bangalore of Vijay Mallya is a thought. A thought that will live in every mind. This thought is not only about soccer. It is about more. It is about a city. It is about the passion that Bangalore evokes in every heart, body and soul that lives in Bangalore. Add to it the heart, body, soul and every other sundry body part that thinks positively of Bangalore but does not live there. To that extent, this Team-branding of cricket provides the opportunity to harvest the passion of every cricket enthusiast who lives in Bangalore

The brand is today essentially consumed not by geographic clusters. Not even by consumers who live in common and identified Demographic clusters. The brand is today a Psychographic reality. Never mind where you live, you will consume Team Bengaluru. The moment you consume the brand and enjoy a passion-link into it, you are saying it out loud that you live out there with your mind rather than your body. Team cricket provides for this key insight to be harvested.

Building this new paradigm of Team Cricket will take time. It will not happen overnight. But then cricket and its administrators have all the time on their hands. It is the early entrants to the game who will singe their hands and minds and pockets. They will then wait and build. Build with every season. Build with every marketing tool of viral connect there is to use.

In sum, let’s lump it if not like it. Team Brand cricket is here to stay. The moneys in it are just too big to ignore. Marketers and owners of teams will harvest passion for the game, passion for the city and indeed passion for the individual cricket star over a period of time. Give it six years time, and you will watch nothing else but a Big Sunday game of Bengaluru versus Jaipuru! Maybe even a Jaipuru versus a Mysooru game in the future! What say?

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

India Everywhere

2008-03-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

We are like this only!

By Harish Bijoor

The last nail is just about being hammered onto the coffin of the year 2007, even as I furiously hammer this year-end piece onto my laptop. 2007 is a year done with. Wrapped up for posterity to savor. Wrapped up for the historian of the future to possibly pore through the pages of an exciting year that was.

How did this year go then? What were the seminal trend lines that defined 2007? Anything special? Anything new?

Lot’s really. Let me peek into the year just gone by and look at the big defining trends in the realm of everything that caught our collective imagination. There isn’t space for everything, but here are the some bigger ones. Ten of them!

India Everywhere: Intel was only inside, but India was everywhere. The year saw a renewed focus on India from every country there was. The biggest journals of the world carried big stories on the country that was touted to be a key player of the tri-polar world of the future. India had arrived. At least in terms of all the focus the business of this country evoked.

Corporate raiders from India continued a streak of acquisitions that looked at just about every industry vertical there was to tap. Tea, coffee, steel and the automotive sector saw big inroads. Ownership patterns of companies that were hitherto “developed world” oriented, shifted in many ways to incorporate a more inclusive “developing” world ownership.

India became a fashionable buzz-country to focus upon. MNC corporation’s world-wide encouraged their top managements to travel into the country and get a handle of what was happening. Authors such as Thomas L Friedman added grist to the flaming buzz that was India.

Incredible India:

With India being everywhere, the tourism industry went berserk. Travel was big. Tourist inflows into the country were big. Tourists of the business variety just kept coming. Tourists of the holiday variety were still not as big as must be, but the interest on India is bringing in the 'moolah'.

India at 60 was a fun place to be.

Services Boomed:

India has morphed from a pure products oriented economy to a services-skewed one. There is big demand for every kind of service there is to use. The realms of telecom in particular boomed. India boasts a total of 266 million mobile connections as the calendar year closes. The market remains on a fast growth path, clocking in 7.2 million new phone connections every month.

What a far cry then from the years of yore when one had to wait 12 years to get a landline at home!

Bollywood boomed on:

Bollywood remained the big harbinger of everything that was exciting in India. India continued producing the largest number of feature films in the world.

The big blockbusters had a nation craving for more. Controversial efforts such as “Kabhi Alvida Na kehna” were followed up by true blue interesting formats such as the Diwali release of “Om Shanti Om” and “Saawariya”. Smaller format films such as “Jab We Met” did a delightful amount of business as well. Small remained beautiful.

The universal favorite remained the love story format. Somehow this format seems to always be a big hit with man, woman and child.

The stock-market as category killer:

The market for money was never as good as this. The stock market defied every surge of a much-restrained bear. The bulls were all around. Some wore the colors of Japan, and many wore the colors of funds that were out here from every nation of funds there was. Source of funds was a matter of worry for a while, but a very responsible SEBI walked the tight-rope rather well.

The year end looks hot with the Sensex breaching well nigh the 20K mark time and again. The Sensex is a big brand in itself today.

Instant cricket:

Cricket is dead. Long live cricket.

The old format of 5-day cricket is today a fuddy-duddy format. The new generation of young, working and empowered Indians are looking for quick-fix sporting encounters. India is moving towards a 90-minute soccer game kind of fixation as well.

Cricket however remains the nation’s game. The 1-day format is getting tiresome even. Just as this happens, in came the T20 version. Cricket as instant and quick as it can get.

The 5-day game variant is now a family game that is watched by all those who have the time for it. The others watch the highlights.

A lot more have rushed in to partake of the 20-over variant. This T20 game is now the game of the young. Parents are however just about waking up in the country, asking their young ones to stay away from the snazzy new variant even, as T20 is seen as adult cricket, what with the skimpily clad cheer-leaders leading the way in every break there is.

Food and drinks morph:

The Cola controversy has been forgotten. More and more of the non-staple drinks are invading the market. Big forays are being made with water as well. Probiotic curd, live cultures, Probiotic Ice cream and healthy drinks of the natural variety are hitting our shelves in a big way.

Tele-marketing dies:

There is a small death that has occurred. Even thought there are only 6 million Indians who have registered for the Do not disturb register, marketers have re-oriented their early strategies of pestering the consumer with the Tele-marketing call.

Retail booms:

Big retail booms. Small retail is just about getting onto an aggressive stance of attack. The year witnessed the opening up of many a retail format that was organized retail that ate into the turf of hitherto small retail.

The fresh fruit and vegetable sector, grocery, apparel, footwear, electronics , auto, jewellery, and literally every other high-value category has seen inroads by organized retail.

The year end saw the biggest planned retailer of the country, Reliance Retail, redefining its approach to the Indian market, particularly in the sensitive terrain of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Simultaneously then, politically correct retail that focused on the rural sector of the country emerged. IOC’s ‘Kisan Seva kendras’, the DCM ‘Hariyali’ effort, ITC’s ‘Chaupal Sagar’ and efforts from the Murugappa group, Godrej and the Future group saw test markets.

10. And Narendra Modi won:

Even as the last few nails are being knocked into the year, the final political nail to be hammered onto the coffin of the year is the verdict of the Gujarat polls. Narendra Modi has won. Mind it!( As Quick Gun Murugan would say ), this is all about Narendra Modi and not the BJP. The man has won. Possibly the party has lost. Please read a lot of meaning in this sentence.

Politics remains a game of the impossible. Exit polls of every variety have gone awry once again. Never mind. The people’s verdict is clear in Gujarat. Modi will rule another five years!

The author is a business-strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

Marketing 2010

2008-03-06T22:30:00.000-08:00

The Marketing Year Ahead

By Harish Bijoor

Marketers do not normally remember the past. The past is history. Very simply because consumer’s do not remember the past as well. Consumers are essentially concerned about what’s now and what’s in the future. The consumer today is a “power of now” entity. So is the marketer.

The year 2007 is done with. Time to wrap it up in cellophane, put in the moth-balls and stack it in the attic of our imagination. Time to plan for the year ahead. The year 2008 and all the years that will follow it.

Trend-tracking the year that has gone by is an exercise on its own. Trend-spotting the marketing years ahead is a tougher exercise still. I am attempting it in this piece. Let me look at three big marketing trends that will define the years ahead of us and break every paradigm oriented behavior the marketer has painted himself into in the past..

Trend One: The Consumer as seller!

Let me explain this. Marketing as we know it is about to change in the future. The savvy marketer of the future (if you want to be one), needs to decimate the concept of the ‘consumer as consumer’ and ‘marketer as marketer’.

The consumer has for far too many decades been just a consumer. The consumer is changing. There is a big opportunity out here to harvest and capitalize upon, particularly so in India.

In the old days, the consumer was a pure consumer. Take urban India for instance. The user of a packet of tea is essentially a consumer, just as the buyer of a detergent is. The urban consumer of today is 100% consumer. She buys to use everything she buys completely on herself or her family.

Take a peek at a new trend. The urban consumer is of two types today. One buys to consume herself. The 100% consumer, and the other is quite like Bru coffee, 70% consumer and 30% re-seller! Take the examples we have in our modern urban life from an Amway, a Tupperware and a Herbalife.

Peek deeper still into the rural markets that are just about waking up to consumerism in a big way, prompted by the medium of television that does not distinguish urban from rural in its reach, messaging and advertising creatives alike. Television creates hunger for products and services in urban and rural markets alike.

In these rural markets, we will have a new profile of the emerging consumer. A consumer who is possibly 50% consumer (for self-use of product and service alike) and the balance 50% re-seller. This is the guy who is the Insurance agent, the intermediary for a financial product, and equally is the person who acts as an intermediary distributor of a detergent or a cake of soap alike. This channel, uniquely, is not restricted to the efforts of the multi-level channel marketer like an Amway, but is equally involved in selling products and services as a distributor on a direct mode of distribution.

Peek deeper still. You will see the emergence of the 10% consumer and 90% re-seller. This is the rural consumer who buys very little of the product for herself and the rest that she buys, she sells at a profit. She is part of an NGO at times, and at times part of a self-help group that is linked to the big marketers of the day. We see some signs of this emerging with the “Shakti-amma” of HUL and certainly in the case of a whole host of SHGs re-selling shampoo and Shikakai alike.

Watch out then for the consumer as seller. Part consumer and part seller. Capitalize on this and open up those dormant markets.

Trend Two: CSR is dead! ISR emerges!

Corporate Social Responsibility is unsustainable activity. CSR that harvests only the money of corporates and not necessarily the passion of the people who work in corporate organizations is a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom.

What will emerge in its place is ISR. Individual Social Responsibility commitments. Corporate organsiaitons will harvest the time and passion of its people and channelize it in as contributions to the social sector. When done in this manner, the passion of the people involved will emerge as movements on their own. Very long-term sustainable movements, unlike CSR, which at best is the fashion statement of Corporate Boards. Puffed up further by positive PR.

Trend Three: Harvesting consumer passion with a time-expiry date!

Consumer passion, something taken for granted in India, is vanishing fast.

Passion is essentially a lowest common denominator item. When a people are deprived of the basics, and when a people are hungry, they are the most passionate about the issues that plague society.

As India gets more and more prosperous, people climb the hierarchy of need higher and higher. As this happens, people become more and more besotted with the material things that make their lives good. This movement is contra to the movement that builds the passion of a people. Therefore, expect more and more consumers getting cynical about the issues that plague us day in and day out. Expect less of the economically empowered to vote. Expect less of them to contribute to the terrain of consumer passion.

Consumer passion today comes with a date-expiry tag to it. It will last another 15 years for sure. But lesser and lesser numbers with every passing year of consumer prosperity ahead of us.

Touché! And welcome 2008!

The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

Marketing Trends 2007

2008-01-01T07:17:00.000-08:00

Brand Trends 2007

By Harish Bijoor

Study the advertising and branding trends of a country, and you know what the country is all about. In a jiffy you know its peoples.

Branding and the core conception of the science of branding, the execution of the brand plan at the ground level through the tools of marketing and selling, and indeed the visual execution of the brand proposition through the means of advertising is a complete give-away of a culture. Brand culture.

Let me do just that for the year that has passed by. 2007 is just about buried as a year gone by. Let me peek into the gut and gore of the year, its many highs and a few lows from a complete brand perspective. A recap of the calendar year 2007.

Some slug-points then of the many trends that defined the year 2007.

What’s in a name?

Nothing at all.

UTI Bank decided to become an Axis by compulsion. Nothing changed at all. The visual depiction of twins, from cherubic babies to equally cherubic babes morphed on to show the fact that nothing had changed except the name. The colour coded execution worked very well. Consumers however kept wondering why change a name if nothing else had.

Hutch did the same due to change of ownership. The pug shifted kennels. Mega-spends ensured that the message was dinned into the heads of an audience that had come to love the three pink samosas of Hutch. The Vodafone red was everywhere in a campaign that was orchestrated well through every media there was to use. Ubiquity was the name of the game.

HLL became an HUL. The Hindustan story won here. Hindustan was bigger than Unilever in this case. Air Deccan morphed from being the common man’s carrier to a confused bird just about deciding what it wanted to be. At the moment it is a Simplifly Deccan.

Aviation space saw a lot of brand confusion. Air Sahara became a JetLite, just as Jet Airways itself underwent a change of colour and in-air identity. Indian of course was the most confused of them all. The airline which had gone on to change its name from an age-old Indian Airlines to Indian, changed its identity once again. The year saw the Public Sector aviation space with just one brand all across: Air India. Here again, nothing else has sadly changed. Except the name.

What’s in a name Shakespeare-ji?

There’s a little bit of Retail in my hair

Every Tom, Dick and Harish wanted a little bit of retail in their business plans this year. The year was the beacon year of organized retail. Kishore Biyani got crowned the ‘Corporate Dukaandar’ of the year and wrote his best-selling book as well!

The model of Indian retail is on the morph phase. The business model of yore fought battles that were completely “David versus David”. Small retail versus small. Today, the fight has just about begun. This is a “David versus Goliath” battle. The future will of course be all about a “Goliath versus Goliath” battle as Macro formats fight for survival.

Retail Darwinism will prevail in this market. Even as the “David versus Goliath” battle has begun, a whole army of small shop-keepers and of course a larger army of middle-men have gotten together to stall it in many a state. Reliance Fresh has taken the brunt of the attack this year. More will come.

Modern trade formats are re-defining their business plans and no plan can afford to be static in a market that is completely dynamic in its sweep. Time for modern retail to get inclusive in its sweep. Time to put together that format I touted four years ago.

A Reliance Retail must get into the market and get together the existing 3000 small retailers in Hyderabad. Sign an MOU with each one of them. Co-brand their outlet. Let there be a Reliance-Adarsh retail and a Reliance-Kavita Retail. Pool the back-end work and source jointly. Brand the front-end and professionalize levels of service. Let the small retailer have an option to survive. A co-opetition model?

The ‘Corporate Kaka’ is here? Not yet.

Madvertising was here

The creative pony-tailed guy with breeches holding up his pants in advertising agencies went berserk. Advertising morphed. Madvertising is here.

Cows chewed gum instead of cud and smiled happily ever-after. Vets touted brands and marriages for the cows they treated. Never mind that consumers felt quite like cows watching all of this. Creative license was a fun license to have and use.

Happy teeth lit up streets, tennis courts and of course the cars and dining tables of royalty. Bingo went on a spree making fun of accents and peoples and a new genre of madvertising was born. Excellent on the score of generating awareness and possibly interest in the brand, but I don’t really know how it fared in creating that one purpose of most businesses: the end sale and the repeat, sale after sale.

Bollywood defined marketing

Movies, music and ‘masti’ surrounding it all, made for a memorable marketing year. The two big touted blockbusters of the year used every marketing gimmick there was to push themselves down the throat and into the psyche of the movie-goer at large. Om Shanti Om and Saawariya. Marketing spend on both was big. One won. Another lost. Proving that content is king.

OSO has become a buzz-word of the last quarter of 2007. Everyone who was a teenager and more in the seventies has wanted to see this movie. Shahrukh Khan was the big draw, as was his six-pack.

The six-pack itself has become a brand in its own right. Every ageing Madonna who is a 40 plus, including the one tapping this onto the laptop for print, wants a six-pack now. The 40-plus man has a reason to live. And his wife has a reason to nag. “If Shahrukh can do it, why can’t you!”

OSO has led to two big music releases and a spate of OSO parties where everyone wants to wear an OSO shirt of the seventies. Retail outlets across the country have stocked up the big polka dot shirts and the short 'kurtis' with sequins and tight ‘churidaars’ well in time to meet the rush.

Watch out for the new look all around. The seventies look in your life. In everything. In cars, in advertising, in husbands and in wives as well.

Movies create a market. And how!

Vicarious Lives of Consumers and Marketers

Empowered consumers in the big cities of our country lived dual lives. Vicarious lives. One life was real in the midst of their families and in the midst of marketers who were all around them. Another was lived in the virtual world.

An on-line identity was rich in what it offered the vicarious-craving consumer. A whole host of websites such as a Facebook, Myspace, Vox, SecondLife, LinkedIn, Orkut, Minglebox, Yaari, Flickr and tens of others offered a dual life.

Your friendly dentist is possibly a Pole-dancer in SecondLife, just as your Barman at the neighboring watering hole might as well be a Temple Priest on the same site. People are living dual lives now.

Marketers have discovered this and a whole host of marketers such as Sun Microsystems, Reuters and Wells Fargo have set up shop on SecondLife to create a turnover for themselves in Linden Dollars, the currency of this vicarious space. What’s more, there is an Indian recruitment portal as well waiting to recruit the trespasser!

More and more marketers will jump in.

Internal branding grows

Corporates are progressively understanding the need to get an image for themselves that is benign, positive and internal-customer friendly.

Corporate organizations in the space of technology, end-to-end services, ITES, FMCG and Durables alike are understanding the need to adopt Internal branding as a practice.

People are seen to be the most difficult resources to gain and keep. India has morphed form being a market short of products and services to being a market that is short of people altogether. The talent crunch is hitting every sector, be it aviation with its shortage of pilots, manufacturing with its shortage of engineers and marketing with its shortage of sales and brand people of merit.

Internal branding gains, just as salivating consulting organizations that specialize in the practice flourish. Ouch! It hurts!

Womarketing is here

As society levels out its gender bias as issues of yore, the woman in India is getting pampered. This is the money-empowered woman.

With more and more women comprising the work-force, and with women spending more and more of an outdoor oriented life, the marketer is geared with his product and service appeal.

Every sun-screen and hair-colour is out with a range for women only. Every cosmetic has two avatars today. One for the man and another for the woman. Every Fair & Lovely has therefore a Fair & Handsome as well in reaction. The gender equation is getting evened out into being a non-equation even.

There are hotels that offer women’s only floors. Gyms that offer facilities only for women all day long. Malls that ostensibly promote themselves as Malls for women alone. Men are welcome to tag along though.

As a Volvo internationally develops a concept car for women, developed by women themselves, and just as women in Holland and Belgium have developed for themselves a Rose beer for women alone, India takes baby steps to woo the empowered woman at large.

As this movement gets more and more ridiculous, expect to walk into a specialty restaurant and find a “Male Biriyani” and a “Feminine Biriyani” on the menu even. Bah!

Social issues are in

As the year races to a close, and as product categories, jaded by use of the old USP of functional and emotional dimension alike tire out, newer and newer experiments are being made.

Tata Tea takes a different route. A route taken once by Surf a year ago with its “Do bucket paani bachana hai” campaign, and a route taken by Lifebuoy as well with its urban locality clean-up campaign with kids in its visuals.

Tata Tea now wants you not to “Utho” (get up) but to “Jaago” (wake up)! The politician who comes seeking a vote is being grilled. Even asked his qualification….thankfully along with a cup of tea at hand to hold brand relevance!

Idea Cellular is aiming at removing the caste tag and replacing it with a mobile number and Coke on its own is hoping to harvest the general consumer sentiment with its Little drops of joy campaign.

Many of these look premature for a market just about waking up. However, these are baby steps. Let them be.

And a mish-mash of things altogether

For a trend-spotter, which is a hat I wear once every quarter, the year gone by has been an exciting one. A mish-mash year with a whole chunk of mish-mash trends. Let me run through some as I close this piece and welcome Marketing Year 2008.

Packaging got interactive. Frito Lay’s Kurkure led the way by inviting consumer faces on its pack-front along with winning recipes. Everything offered itself to be branded. New media emerged. The full railway station, tunnels, an aerobridge at airports and much more.

The instant movement was appreciated widely. The 5-day game version of cricket found few takers. One-day cricket was quick and fun. In came T20 and the 20-over variant of instant cricket was a big hit. Watch out. In the future parents may stop their young ones from watching the T20 variant which has the skimpily clad cheer-leaders. 5-day cricket will be family cricket and T20 for the rest of them all. Ouch again!

Brand-endorsement trends morphed as well. Cricket remained the big sourcing ground, apart from Bollywood and Tollywood and Sandalwood and all our other woods. Foreign stars found relevance. What MRF pioneered with Lara and maybe what Cinthol pioneered even earlier with Imran Khan gained credence as a movement. In came a Ricky Ponting, a Bret lee and of course Shoaib Akthar. We looked across the border.

India remained restrictive in its marketing mood and mind. Particularly when it came to the issue of sex, conception and misconception. Sex education in schools remained a point of vehement debate. Cipla’s morning-after I-Pill took flak and more.

The Sensex got branded. A positive brand as of now. This is going to be a roller-coaster ride as usual. India arrived. Indian hotel chains changed from the dual tariff regime of Dollar and Rupee to a single tariff regime of the Rupee only. With the firm rupee, time for the IT industry in India to take a cue, I guess. Same goes for the export-oriented industry at large.

Tele-marketing lies on a stretcher with the Do not call register in place. And websites continue to rule with offers of every kind. While a FirstPhera promises to take care of all your wedding needs, the Madras Cemeteries Board website promises live online telecast of funerals for the benefit of friends and relatives all over the world who are unable to attend. Every niche is covered.

RIP.

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.
Emailceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

Branding in 2010

2007-07-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

"The Three Things that will Create an Impact in the Branding industry on the Road to 2010".

The Future of the Future Of Branding

By Harish Bijoor

The future is not for you to see.

Well almost. The future of marketing lies in the future of branding. Three things then that will impact on the future of the future……..as I see it.

1. Impact ONE: The Amoeba and I

When our minds (where thoughts live) are forever on a morph mode, how dare brands remain static and expect to thrive?

2. Impact TWO: Watch out! Inclusive branding ahead!

If the brand is exclusive space, it excludes a whole lot of society from it.

Can a brand with the same name swim upstream and downstream in an economy at the same time? The paradigm might just have to be broken!

Impact THREE: People!

Brand people are getting more and more difficult to get. Good branding people. There are a limited number of well-trained (red: pedigree trained) branding people in the country. You can count them on a 100 page book, one page representing one trained brand soul.

A sub-set of these well-trained people are people from this set who understand the realities of the day and are completely contemporary in their approach to branding. Branding is an art, a science and philosophy that is changing at a furious pace.

The killer combination is the true-blue trained branding person who is completely attuned to changing realities on the consumer front. A forty year old who reads the market like a 12-year old on the verge of his teenage years.

The search for these kinds of people is a tough one. This is going to impact branding and its practice tremendously. Companies will spend a lot of money down the chute, experimenting with people. This search is the one search to get right.

The search is certainly as elusive as the mostly futile search launched by many a woman in the past hundred years with the buzz-phrase: Wanted! A good husband!

Email: ceo@harishbijoorconsults.com

2006: More Marketing Trends.................

2007-01-07T05:47:00.000-08:00

Marketing Masti 2006

By Harish Bijoor

As we put the year 2006 to rest, time to peek at the defining trends that made marketing Year 2006 what it was.

Here is a trend-watch of what led to what.

Interactive Everything: Consumer boredom got handled reasonably well in 2006. The Interactive movement just about emerged.

It started with radio and television. The plethora of channels of both radio and television meant a more competitive programming structure for both mediums. In the beginning, all mediums just dish out fare that they devise by themselves. When things get competitive, channels then get interactive. 2006 saw a lot of this.

Every television channel got down to get the viewer involved. Programming that had viewers watching and then voting was big. The 'Nach Baliye' syndrome was here for good. And then comes news. Television channels actually got people to vote in rampantly for every issue there was to vote upon. The Jessica Lal trial, Prince and Budhia, the Nitish Katara murder trail, and tens of such causes were taken up. SMS revenue sharing deals were struck and television channels made money on a new revenue model at play.

Simultaneously with the revenue inflows due to participative viewership programmes, viewers felt happy. What a good combination this was! The viewer felt involved. Citizen journalists happened as well.

The interactive movement will not stop here in the years to come. It will move on. Interactive product development is a game to test and try. Make your consumers devise your product. Make your consumers make their own toothpaste the way they like it. At least make them feel they made it. Consumer product development! Consumer brand development! Interactive advertising! Interactive Branding! Interactive selling!

Modern Retail takes off but small is still beautiful: My friend Kishore Biyani calls himself a “Dukandar”. The 'Badshahs' of retail hogged the lime-light this year. “Dukandari” became an honorable profession to boot. The young Management Trainee who got selected by Reliance Retail went home excited this year. Even Grandma at home would not fret and say that her grandson who did this 2-year MBA program now works in a shop. Even Grandma looks at modern retail with a whole new perspective. Working in a shop is now a great thing to do.

Modern retail has arrived. The USD 280 Billion retail industry of India is all set to see aggregation of business. The medium sized retailer is set to perish by the road-side and the big retailer will gain. Your local ‘subzi-wallah’ now needs to compete with the corner Reliance Fresh outlet. Your 'subzi-wallah' will need to offer tomatoes at a standard price all through the year as a Reliance Retail will. Your 'subzi-wallah' will need to compete on hygiene, shopping experience, customer service and norms of glitz and glamour. Will he?

As all this happens, the micro retailer will continue to thrive. Your corner ‘kaka shop’ will thrive on the basis of location, low overheads and an overall yen to survive. The ’small is beautiful’ model will still be relevant to India. As modern retail arrives and thrives, we have a polarization of outlets then. At one end is the glitzy modern trade outlet. And at another, you have the small little micro-retailer. The 'pan-wallah' will continue to thrive in his business as well.

India is a nation of 12 million shops with a density of retail outlet population that stands at 12 outlets per 1000. This will largely thrive and survive.

Even the Promo-mindset changed: I have lived and thrived in a country where the consumer promotion is the ultimate salvation for sagging sales lines of the corporate organisation. Ever since the first promotion in the sixties of a stainless steel spoon on a Det detergent, the stainless steel spoon has remained the one-enduring item that every manufacturer of tea, coffee, soap, 'dal, cheeni, chawal and atta' doled out to the consumer.

We have offered spoons, combs, steel tumblers, mugs, and buckets as freebies for long enough. We are tired.

The year 2006 saw a definitive change in this trend. Marketers are experimenting with more. Traditionally, we have always offered a product with a product. A spoon with a packet of Tea. Now, we have a service being offered with a product. Pespsodent offered its buyers a coupon for a Café Coffee Day cup of coffee at any of its 370 and odd Cafes in the country. Shortly, expect to have a product offered with a service. Maybe a DVD player with a Television channel subscription? Or a free bottle of Oil to take home with every Body Massage at a spa? Travel First Class by Kingfisher Airlines and you will get a chauffeur driven car for a destination drop!

Colas join the Social Ostracism Categories: 2006 was a defining year for the Cola companies in India. India and the Indian at large appeared as connected to the world as any, when it came to issues of health and environment.

This had to happen. The James Bond movie today hits every Indian theatre whether it is in Hyderabad or Holenarsipura on the same day as it hits the multi-plexes in Houston and Halifax. The world is as seamless as it comes. Why then must not India awake and shout at everything the world is shouting about?

Pepsi and Coke faced their toughest year in India. The pesticide controversy rose to new heights. Kerala banned all of it and Karnataka banned it in its schools and hospitals. As the year ends, Karnataka has banned colas and is contemplating a full ban on junk food in schools and colleges and hospitals. Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss in Delhi is pleased as punch!

The food and drink category is progressively getting polarized into two segments. Junk food at one end and Real food at another. Junk food is getting the status of what I call a “social ostracism category”. Other social ostracism category products sitting higher on the sensitivity scale of the consumer at large are the Cigarettes, liquor, 'Gutkha' categories. Food now joins the lowest rungs of these. Junk food in particular and the Colas as a non-staple beverage. Junk food and junk drink, if you may call them that.

Cola companies have therefore looked outwardly brave and fought it all with marketing vigor and bravado. The year saw a Rajeev Bakshi starring in a commercial for Pepsi even. And Rajeev gave Aamir Khan a tough run for this money!

Simultaneously Cola companies have got inward looking at their base strategies. The companies are undoubtedly busy re-inventing their business models. Expect to see a lot of these embracing the “Real Food” and “Real Beverage” categories even. The Cola companies will have two verticals in their future businesses for sure. One will be on the side of the “Real” and the other on the side of “Junk”. Needless to say, both portions will thrive at different points of time. Time to hedge bets in the social ostracism categories at large.

Health and Wellness is sexy: Marketers of food and beverage have been plucking the low hanging fruit of consumer expectation, want, need, desire and aspiration for long. India is now entering into Phase 2 of its marketing era.

Phase 1 was really the early years from the Sixties on. The years when India showed a gradual craving for the product and service the whole wide world was consuming. This phase really reached its take-off stage in the early years of the 2000 series. Today, things are taking a wee bit of a turn.

Phase 2 of marketing era in India is just about beginning. 2006 showed the first signs of this trend. Consumers are waking up. Consumers connected to the developed world at large are waking up to concerns of health. Health as represented as offerings in the food and the beverage the consumer consumes. The Maggi ‘Atta’ noodles is here!

New categories are emerging. The sugar substitute has now matured. What used to be a sugar substitute in a small sachet for use in a cup of tea or coffee is now in a large jar for kitchen use. You might as well make even a 'Gajar Ka Halwa' with a branded sugar substitute in a bottle.

The movement is bound to cascade. Consumers are going to question the amount of sugar in a bottled drink, the amount of fat in a cup of cappuccino, and indeed the amount of fat in a portion of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The trans-fats debate in the US is having its own impact in India. Sugar is an issue at debate. Oils of every kind will face scrutiny. So will fats. Every food and beverage player, whether in the product space or service space, will need to re-invent themselves for the future. As margarine rises, butter will face flak! And there will be a margarine in every category of food and beverage, waiting to offer itself as a salvation product or service.

Indian Innovation continued: Innovation, thy name is the Indian.

All of us have heard of the ‘Jugaad’ in Uttar Pradesh. All of us have heard of the Washing machines that make 'Lassis' at prosperous 'dhabhas' in Hoshiarpur.

The quest for innovation continued. The latest in the line up is the saree shop in Chennai, the Sri Kumaran Store. The store has launched a traditional sequinned saree with an innovation that is truly South Indian. The saree has a mobile-phone pocket! The saree with a mobile phone pocket, if you will! Technology meets tradition!

The 20 year old is actually 40: At the consumer end, the one big thing that happened in their lives was the complete down-aging syndrome of the Indian masses in the prosperous urban centers.

The man in the city is younger than the man in the village. The 50 year old started thinking like the forty year old and the forty year old thought he was all of 20.

Consumers are thinking younger, and in turn want to look younger as well. A whole range of cosmetic products will have a major run sooner than later.

When you devise a product or service in the future, watch out. Make sure that you devise it for people who are 20 and most certainly for all those people who are much older than that, but think they are 20!

Tele-marketing scaled new peaks of irritation: January 1, 2006. I was woken up in Boston at 4 am by Shilpa from Citibank who wanted to sell me a credit card. She had this “once in a life-time offer” for me and I was one of 100 lucky winners who would get a free credit card posted to me. All I had to say was a yes.

I screamed. I raved. I ranted. Shilpa warned me the call was being recorded.

Tele-marketing done by marketers which comprised a whole bunch of folk who represented products as close-knit as personal loans, car loans, home loans, and loans to pay off all other loans, pestered a hapless mass of consumers to irritation. I hear even Finance Minister P Chidambaram was not spared on his overseas trips. This is true-blue democracy at play!

The TRAI largely attempted little and the DNC registry was at best spoken of and left at that. At the end of the year, right now in December, President APJ Abdul Kalam has put his weight as well behind the cause of banning tele-marketing calls.

Tough days ahead for the tele-marketer hopefully. There will be a DNC registry, and possibly a high tariff on tele-marketing calls (a suggested Rs.1000 per call) which just might dissuade the tele-marketing call altogether.

The telemarketer will miss a whole big market of 185 million connections in India, projected to grow at 6million connections per month in all of 2007! And that makes it an exit volume of 257 million connected telephones in the country by the year end 2007.

Dotcom 2.0 starts making those early noises: The first rush of the Internet and business on the net ended up in a bubble burst all of us remember all too well. While Dotcom 1.0 was all about eye-balls, page-views and the dominance of the advertising model on the net. Dotcom 2.0 will be more solid. Promises to be.

The right gurgles are being heard as of now. 2006 saw the emergence of potent business models that had the Internet in India marrying the current requirement of the day to a very robust application led model of E-biz.

E-buzz is just about to happen then. Every Naukri.com is on a flourish mode as the job market in India booms over with the BPO, Technology, Bio-tech, Retail, Banking, Insurance and Real-estate sectors at the take-off stage. The Pure Internet play portals are doing a roaring business for sure.

Want to get married? Try the net. Want to buy an airplane ticket? Try the net. Want to do anything at all that can give you a pure Internet play experience, do it on the net. Just as long as the fulfillment process can be completed online, just do it.

As on June 2006, a Comscore Networks survey reveals a net using population in India (above the age of 15) standing at 18.02 million. Expect a quantum growth on this month on month. As the global online audience will rise by 2.7-3.0% month on month, expect an 8.5-9.5% growth rate in India. Quite in sync and match with the GDP growth rates on hand. India’s excitingly low broadband connect rates will help spur this on.

Hunger among the not-hungry: One last trend then. A negative one. A trend every marketer must be wary about. Worried about.

Marketers everywhere are guilty of causing hunger for products and services that consumers don’t necessarily need and want. This movement surged in leaps and bounds in 2006. The images a whole nation of consumers watched on television are essentially urban led images in a nation that has three fourths of its population living in rural areas. The hegemony of the urban rich continued to dominate the marketing agenda.

Hunger for inane products and equally inane services continued to be made in the advertising hot shops of the country. The prime goal behind all development remained the creative tone and tenor. Everything else was secondary.

The party-sparkles(“chamki” to the ‘desi’ at heart), hard-set hair gel and the scented panty-liner used advertising executions that excited a nation of consumers on the wall.

Marketers must therefore get ready to pay a ‘Guilt tax’ soon for all their errors of commission and indeed omission. Watch out!

On that note, wish you a very happy New Year 2007!

The author is a Brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a private-label consulting outfit with a presence in the markets of Hong Kong, UK, the Middle East and India.

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com

Indian Marketing Trends 2006

2007-01-02T02:59:00.000-08:00

Marketing Watch 2006

By Harish Bijoor

Time to save Marketing Year 2006 onto an old CD. Time to put it away as well. Store it out there in the Marketing archives of our time.

Time to therefore peek at the trends that shaped the year just gone by. Here is my take on the defining trends that made the year what it was.

Let’s trend-spot then….