Kumar's Blog

Do you continue consuming the product hoping the product will eventually start delivering more? Or do you stop using it and look for alternatives where you might have to change your routine and incorporate consumption of the alternate in your routine? Or do you continue consuming and look for alternatives on the side, ready to jump the moment something that offers more comes along?

Marketers are at wit's end trying to get their customers to fall in the first category. They are doing this through loyalty programs, customised offers, discounts, advertisements, and every other avenue they can think of. But majority of the customers are in the third category.

So am I.

As adoption of a product increases, it gets harder and harder to keep people in the first category. Products need little to no diversity in their consumers in order to keep exceeding their expectations. More diverse the consumer, more varied are their expectations. Thus, harder to exceed them all.

Brands tell stories. Stories that generate trust. And trust is what keeps people in the first category. If your story is consistent, a diverse set of people will continue to trust you.

You can either do the easy and divide your user base into groups on a spreadsheet and tell a different story to each one. And have them all slip to the third category.

Or you can tell a consistent story.

There are always two sides to things. If you focus all your energy on one side, the other will slip out of your fingers and fall and crash.

You're balancing your time between playing and studying. Between watching TV and reading a book. Between spending time with your family and spending time with your friends. Between going back home to your loved one and putting in that extra hour at work. Between that extra dessert and your gym time.

Organizations spend a lot of time designing processes, hiring the right people, engaging consultants, all in the hope of ensuring profits are balanced with customer satisfaction. But this is at the highest level. Some organization succeed while others fail because not every organization understands how to keep the balancing act intact as the highest level goal is drilled down into smaller bits and pieces which have to come together.

This is why someone who does a great job as CEO of a small start-up will most likely fail to do a great job as the CEO of a big conglomerate. And why someone who does a great job of preventing a football club, favourites to finish bottom, from being relegated will most likely fail to win the league with the team that are favourites to finish first.

Marketers need to balance the expectations created by the hook (advertisement, title of a blog post, etc) with the user experience (the actual product, the content of the blog post, etc).

The first step is to understand what the two things that need to be balanced are. Then comes the actual act of balancing them.

When I write, I like to use examples, quotes and recount experiences I have had. But I very rarely have to think of an example or a quote or an experience that fits the context. It almost always springs up right on cue. Even when I'm talking to someone, references to things I have seen, read, experienced come quite naturally. But quite obviously, these recollections constitute only a minor subset of my past interactions.

I might have watched certain advertisements millions of times, watched several seasons of a TV series or listened to a song a thousand times, but that's not enough for them to make me recollect them in time for usage in the context I'm currently in.

Only those that have had an impact on me surface to the top of my head or the tip of my tongue in time.

Advertisers strive for recollection. This was a reasonable target to aim for when the media that people were exposed to were few. If there was a remarkable ad during the half time of a football game, there would definitely be conversation in the office cafeteria that goes like 'Did you watch that ad last night?'.

One remarkable ad was good enough in this scenario.

But today, every person is exposed to multiple media and with the advent of personalized advertising, there is a high probability that the ad watched by one was different from that watched by others. So there is no cafeteria conversation around it even if it was remarkable.

This takes out the second crucial step from the impact-generation process of an advertisement.

When one sees a remarkable ad, she has to either talk about it or be put in a scenario where she hears/sees something that validates the claim in the ad. If not, the ad is soon forgotten.

There is not enough room for validation in a highly personalized advertising strategy. There has to be a way to put the target audience through a validation process. Since it is easy to find out who a person most talks to, either on Facebook or Whatsapp or any other platform, it perhaps makes more sense to show the same ad to these people who talk to each other often even if they all do not fit into the description of the target audience.

I'm quick to admit that I have an algorithmic lifestyle. A lot of things I do follow a certain routine. This makes me quite an easy target to marketers because if they can't tell as to what I'm likely to be doing and where I'm likely to be at any given time, they are highly likely to lose their jobs.

Most advertising decisions and product decisions today are based on the understanding of customer behaviour patterns and routines. But how effective is this really?

I have come to realise that if I'm settled into a routine, it is for a reason. The reason is that I'm comfortable and happy with that routine. If I go to Costa Coffee every Sunday to read a book, showing me an ad or sending me an offer about Cafe Coffee Day won't make me go there. The time to show me an ad or send me an offer would be on a Sunday when I either don't go to Costa Coffee or leave earlier than usual (unusual behaviour). Because it is likely that there was a break in my routine because I had a bad experience there (either it was crowded, or the coffee was not good).

Understanding customer behaviour patterns is really helpful if the gathered data is made use of the right way. If the customer is following a certain routine, she is happy with it and unlikely to break it after viewing an ad for a competing product. She is far more likely to be persuaded by an ad when she breaks her routine. So identify breaks in routine rather than trying to induce breaks in routine. It is likely to fetch better returns.

And if your product is already part of customer routine, ensure you please the customer in every way possible, continue to exceed expectations. Do not give her a reason to break the routine.

While designing products, a lot of thought goes into the situations in which the end user will actually use the product. Everyone from smartphone app-developers to dish-washing soap manufacturers consider the context in which the product will be used in order to provide a better user experience. You don't have to look beyond Steve Jobs or Marissa Mayer if you want to get an idea of how obsessed product developers can be about providing a good user experience.

This is a delightful way of doing things if you're a product developer, and I have thoroughly enjoyed taking this approach with the products I'm currently working on. It is imperative to understand the context of usage to introduce the right set of features in the product.

This is something a lot of marketers need to learn from their product developers.

Advertisements are products as well. Although all marketers worth their salt take into account the context in which their communication will be received by the target audience, they only look at it from the perspective of 'Is this the right context to reach a good portion of my target audience?', and almost never give a thought to user experience.

I have been thinking about this for a while now as the number of times I skip ads on Youtube has constantly reduced my frequency of visits to the site. But it was exacerbated when I watched Gravity last night. Wonderful movie that it is, the number of ads I was made to sit through in the interval completely ruined the experience.

The advertisers got everything right. They had a good portion of their target audience partially focused on their communication. That is a huge success in the advertising world. But the user experience was beyond awful.

Advertisers need to care more about the holistic experience rather than just look at their communication in isolation. But I doubt it will ever happen.

Is the same as building a brand.

When you go (un)prepared to a class, you are setting the expectation that even the basics ought to be covered and that there will be little conversation (as opposed to a monologue) in the class. Eventually, the teacher comes to class with this expectation.

When you turn up to and leave office at pre-defined hours, you are setting the expectation that you have more important things to do outside of work and that you have a clear demarcation of work-life and outside-of-work-life whose intersection is actively prevented by you. Eventually, your boss and colleagues will learn to expect this behaviour from you and it will reflect in your promotions and appraisals.

It is the same with how often you visit your parents, how often you go out with your significant other, how much time you spend with your kids, how dedicated you are to your hobbies, and everything else. Your behaviour sets expectations. This expectation defines how those around you will treat you and engage with you. No matter what you say or claim, eventually, it is your actions and behaviour that define what is to be expected from you.

You can charm people with your words and get projects, get assignments, get a job or get a date. But pretty soon, those engaging with you will be able to see through the words.

It is the same when it comes to brands. It is easy to gather users through tall claims and over-the-top sales and marketing efforts. But after the first sale, it is the product behaviour that will set expectations and not the claims made by the brand.

It is essential to be charming to entice customers into initiating that first sale. But it is even more essential to have the character to live up to the expectations set. For this to happen, the product must be remarkable.

This is the feeling every marketer wants to evoke in her target audience. Every brand wants to be the reason, the cause for the feeling of contagious excitement. But only a handful succeed.

The ones that do succeed almost never achieve this as a result of their marketing efforts. They achieve it by making remarkable products. When Apple is about to release a new product, there is contagious excitement. Before the start of the Barclays Premier League season, there is contagious excitement. Before a new Christopher Nolan movie is released, there is contagious excitement. Because the products coming out are expected to be remarkable.

It is the dream of every brand to get their audience feeling this way. It is the dream of every organization to get their employees feeling this way.

Steve Jobs made a name for himself by obsessing about focusing on making remarkable products. Focusing on the product first and the customers next.

Many brands, in the garb of engaging their audiences, are trying a host of things but are continuing to dole out products that are just about good enough. No wonder people are growing more averse to advertisements by the day.

You can find about 322,000,000 results when you search for 'how to make a video viral'. All nonsense. There is only one way to make a video viral, to make an idea viral, to make a product viral. That is to make it bloody darn good.

Obsess about making the product remarkable. All else follows.

Marketing plans are often approached with a specific budget in mind or some specific communication channels in mind. How do I make the best marketing plan with $50,000? I've been told that we should be on Facebook. What is the best plan to get the most out of it?

With Marketing departments being divided into teams based on the channel of communication, and with each of those teams being evaluated on the basis of the performance of the marketing efforts on that channel, it is only natural that the silo approach is taking centre stage.

Brand building must be a singular effort. Marketing plans must only focus on one thing. Identifying the needs of the target audience and communicating to them the ways in which the product helps fulfill those needs. There is no need to have complicated marketing plans. There is no need for each team to show a positive RoI. Marketing plans make little sense when developed in silos. It has to be a singular effort.

When I was following fewer people on Twitter, when I had fewer Facebook friends, when I had fewer RSS feeds in my subscription list, when I had fewer people to call and catch up with, keeping up engagement levels was fairly easy. It was a pleasure. It was genuine. But, soon I began to realize that engagement doesn't scale.

Today, it is simply impossible for me to read every tweet published by the ones I follow, read every post that populates my reader application, or reply to every e-mail that I receive. If this is the case for me, I can only imagine the problem a popular brand will face. Be it a business blogger, a fiction writer, a consumer product or anyone/anything else that has a following and has initiated engagement at one point or another. It is impossible to scale the engagement that was seen at the beginning.

So how does a popular brand scale its engagement?

Hiring people to do it is, although a very popular practice, simply inauthentic. It is good enough for many brands, but not something that I would advocate. Engagement through blogs, through social media accounts are different from traditional advertising and will only show different results when treated that way.

Seth Godin is one of the most popular business bloggers, and an advocate of engagement. So it will come as a surprise when you notice that he doesn't have a comments section on his blog. Surprising as it may seem, it makes perfect sense. He simply cannot engage with everyone that comes in with a comment. Instead, he recently started accepting questions through e-mail, which he answers through blog posts now and then.

Of course, this is not a model of engagement that every brand can follow effectively. But, that's the point. Each brand has to identify how its followers would like to engage with it. And then identify a way to make that happen.

Engagement is the hardest to scale. But getting hard things done is the only sure way to success. 

Because most purchase decisions made by people are irrational.

Most organizations crave for diversity in their employee profiles because people with different backgrounds bring in different perspectives. When a team with a diverse set of people are presented with an open-ended problem (nearly all vital problems that an organization has to address to stay afloat and trudge forward are open-ended), it is highly likely that each one will bring her own perspective in addressing the problem.

Yet, while deciding on how to present advertisements, how to design product features, we still try to think in a rational way by understanding what need the product is solving or the advertisement is claiming that the product will solve and use that understanding to design the features that define the product or the advertisement.

Over the last one month, I have been involved in designing the User Experience (UX) for our product and that has been a very revealing experience. The traditional way to go about it is to put ourselves in the skin of the customer and decipher what she would like to see in the product. The actual design will reflect that understanding. But when putting ourselves in the customer's skin, the time has come to ask 'which' customer's skin?

While organizations understand and appreciate diversity in their own employees, they actively disregard diversity in the customer base for their products. Until recently, this was acceptable because it was not practical to understand the background and the expectations of the customer base. It was good enough to think rationally by entering an 'average' customer's skin and deciding product features. But no longer.

It is now possible to understand all the quirks and the seemingly irrational behaviour of our customer base. It is only rational that we go ahead and obtain this knowledge. And then make use of it to customize our offerings to exceed the expectations of every customer. Not just the average customer. 

They come to see themselves.

When designing a product, a marketing strategy, a brand communication, an advertisement, we often spend a lot of time trying to get the colours right, the words right, the lighting and the alignment right. We consider whether the product will solve the perceived customer problem. We consider whether the advertisement will induce the target audience to act in a desirable (for the brand) way.

We do not always consider what the target audience wants to see.

This means that there is no one strategy for digital or social. It all depends on understanding what the audience wants to see. Which is themselves. So unless we understand the audience thoroughly, we cannot deliver a remarkable product.

Understanding the audience is becoming easier by the day with every device being connected allowing every user action to be logged. We can no longer get away with casting a wide net and waiting for the fish to come. We can no longer be gatherers (of customers). We need to become hunters.  

We ran a proof of concept for one of our products over the last one month. The aim was to better understand our target audience and their reaction to our product. The whole process highlighted the problem that every marketer faces. The problem is one of attribution.

The target audience for any product are exposed to many types of touch points through which they receive communication about the product. It is every marketer's nightmare to attribute how much each of those communications contributes to the final decision that the customer makes about making the purchase.

I like to see the potential customer as a bucket and the marketing efforts as water. The purchase action happens only when the bucket is full of water and is about to overflow. Every marketer has jugs of varying shapes and capacities at her disposal. This could be social media marketing, TV advertising, referral marketing, direct sales efforts, etc.

Every time a marketer gets her communication across to a potential customer, she has used one of the jugs to fill some water in the bucket. Now, each jug takes its own time for re-filling. For example, if a potential customer sees two advertisements for the same product one after another, the incremental effect of the second one is very little. Whereas, if some time elapses between the two, the incremental effect is higher.

At the same time, two plus two isn't always four. In fact, it is never four. During the time that elapses while the marketer is re-filling her jug, there are competitors that make their own efforts at targeting the customer. This is akin to making holes in the bucket that the marketer is trying to fill. The customer herself tends to forget about the communication as time elapses. This is akin to the bucket being out in the sun where the water being filled constantly evaporates.

The task of the marketer lies in identifying how quickly the target audience forgets about the communication, the effect that the competitor's communication has on the target audience, the weight associated with each type of communication that a marketer can use and the ideal frequency at which they should be used for the best incremental effect. All this is clubbed as the problem of attribution.

In order to know how to be less wrong with your attribution (you can never be right!), I highly recommend this wonderful article by Avinash Kaushik.

Earlier this week, Facebook put an end to its EdgeRank algorithm that was used to determine what posts users would see on their newsfeeds. The posts that used to be shown were selected based on affinity, currency and engagement. This was using Big Data in the most primitive way. Identifying past behaviour and trends to determine future behaviour. Even the primitive use was pretty good is testimony to the potential of Big Data.

Now, Facebook has taken a step further in how it uses Big Data. The new algorithm has one simple addition to the way it worked previously. If Facebook knows that you haven't seen a post that you are statistically inclined to interact with, that post will be shown in your newsfeed even though it is not necessarily a 'current' update.

This is a very good feature that benefits not just users, but brands that advertise on Facebook as well. Facebook's mobile revenues have seen a big boost due to native advertising (advertisements showing up as one of the news items in the newsfeed) this year. With Facebook understanding the user's behaviour in different contexts, and then using it to determine what goes into the newsfeed, brands have an easier job of targeting their audience. They no longer have to post the same thing multiple times, once every few hours to reach more people. They just have to generate content that users are likely to engage with.

But there is one aspect of user experience that will be affected. I'm used to viewing newsfeed items in chronological order. If this algorithm alters that too much, it might take me some time to get adjusted to the new view. And whenever there is user adaptation needed, there is always the risk of making the user unhappy. But in order to innovate, you have to take these risks in your stride and that is exactly what Facebook is doing.

All marketing efforts fall into on of these two categories.

Permission marketing is gaining more and more semblance with people consuming from an increasing set of media sources. Meanwhile, interruption marketing is holding its own irrespective of the advances in the technology.

When both strategies work, it becomes extremely important to understand which strategy works in what context. If one is used in place of the other, you might not just fail to convert that user, but you might end up annoying her and making her wary of any future efforts you throw at her.

If your efforts involve e-mail marketing, or telemarketing, you would be better off using permission marketing. You will only end up annoying the user if you send her a barrage of promotional e-mails or calls when she has no interest in engaging with them. If your efforts focus on advertising on TV and other entertainment media, interruption marketing has proved to be the most successful.

With people spending an increasing amount of time on smart devices like their laptops, phones and PCs, either playing, reading, watching, listening or consuming content in any other manner, it becomes extremely important to understand how they interact with each application they use. If a person is engrossed in an article, she would hate to see an ad pop up mid way through the article. If she's playing a game like Temple Run, it can be frustrating to see an ad after every time she's caught by the monkey. At the same time, if she's browsing through her Facebook feed, ads that blend into the timeline (and interrupt her experience) can be quite successful. In fact, Facebook stock has come back to its IPO levels after reporting a big rise in mobile revenues thanks to this kind of advertising.

You are heading for trouble if you decide on device-specific strategies. That used to work when the functionality of different devices were clearly demarcated. Now, the demarcation is not at all clear. So it is foolish to go ahead with device-specific strategies. Whether you go for Permission or Interruption should only be decided by the engagement level of the user.

Stop holding back.

This article makes the case for how your willpower and cognitive resources are drawn from the same pool of resources. Whether you're trying to prevent yourself from doing something, or holding back from saying something, or whether you're fully engaged in your work making good progress, you're using up resources from the same limited pool. So, if you want to be productive at what you're doing, you ought to spend lesser time holding yourself back from doing or saying certain things. This might explain why most accomplished people are known for certain quirky behaviours.

When I looked at my routine with this lens, it made a lot of sense. The article talks about how we're being expected to make more and more choices and how this is taking a toll on our resources, the very same resources that contribute to willpower and cognitive abilities. I no longer make choices about what TV shows I watch when, or what I cook, or what clothes I wear, and so on. Most of these decisions are derived from an algorithm that I just had to decide once. I felt that the article made sense as this allows me to burn these resources on other things.

This kind of a research opens up marketing opportunities that lie in ethical grey areas. For example, showing a billboard inviting a person driving by for a dinner at your restaurant is a lot more likely to persuade her if she is on her way back after a long day at work, as compared to her driving back after watching her kids perform in a play at school. Or, you are more likely to have a user click on your ad if you show it to her after she has just completed a challenging game rather than after making the first move in a game like chess.

But the flipside is that when you pursue such techniques, you still ought to deliver on exceeding the expectations of the customer you have just acquired. If you don't, they end up regretting their moment of weakness in falling prey to the advertisement and you will have lost your credibility.

Advertising has always been about creativity. Advertising agencies have been flourishing because creativity is not in abundance. Nearly all brands end up going to an advertising agency to make their advertisements. Before an advertisement is made though, a key action lies in identifying who the target audience is, what their behaviour is, and where they are most likely to view an advertisement and act on it.

In the last few years, advertising agencies are growing increasingly dependent on the likes of Google and Facebook for answering those questions about the target audience. This growing dependency seems to have scared the likes of Omicon and Publicis.

What is their answer to it? Merge into one entity and combine their data expertise to take on the likes of Google and Facebook. At first look, this looks incredibly stupid. After a little reflection and thought, it still seems quite stupid. What does this advertising giant hope to achieve? Can it know the Facebook users better than Facebook does? Can it know the online behaviour of people better than the makers of the home page of hundreds of millions of people?

Their fear is understandable. Their evaluation of the role digital and Big Data will play in advertising is understandable. But their solution is not something I understand.

This is a situation that will leave anyone in a dilemma. Whether to compete with the ones having rising influence on the industry? Or to embrace the emerging powers and focus on improving the value we offer?
As often is the case, there isn't a right answer. We will just have to see how Publicis Omnicon will fare in the coming years.

I make the case for Big Data and the opportunities it offers quite often on this blog. It will make it possible for you to identify and map the usage and behaviour patterns of a lot of people with respect to the products, software services and several other things that they use. Many marketers and business developers have their own plans for using Big Data.

Marketing strategies are being formulated, SEO optimization techniques are being planned, new product ideas are being thought of, advertisements are being scripted, movies are being made, even as I write this. All looking to capitalize on the learnings from Big Data.

The opportunities on offer can be capitalized on only when there is an understanding of what all the data means. It is not at all enough to just know historic patterns and extrapolate them to predict future behaviour. It is unfortunate that many marketers tend to forget the first lesson in Statistics in the excitement of all the opportunities. They tend to forget that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Technologies are being disrupted in ever quicker cycles. If Apple had mined Big Data about phone usage patterns, they would never have disrupted and made the iPhone.

Big Data is not a replacement for disruptive innovation. You just have to make use of it to aid innovation. Not incremental innovation like adding a small extra feature. That is no good in the long term. But disruptive innovation. You need to understand usage and behaviour patterns not to make more products that will allow the users to continue using these products and services in the same way. All small companies that have become big, overshadowing the existing giants, have done it by disrupting user behaviour and hooking them on to a newer and better way of doing things.

How will you use Big Data?

"We see people and things not as they are, but as we are."
                                                                                         - Anthony De Mello

Every Marketing textbook, and every business book, must have a few pages dedicated to laying emphasis on this statement. Understanding this is a must to making a successful mass product. You can make successful products without understanding this. But that will only cater to an audience who are fairly similar to you, the creator. If you want a wider audience to accept and remark about your product, you have to understand that they see your product as they are, and not as you intend it to be.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago about the importance of choosing the right context to communicate with your audience. While the context is an important aspect to consider, the frame of mind, the behavioural traits and the personality of your target audience matters a lot as well. Understanding this is extremely hard. That is what makes Marketing hard. And that is what makes building successful global products hard.

Geographic traits, local cultural traits, demographic traits all aid in the process of understanding behavioural traits of your target audience. But this is only helpful as long as you cast a wide net (target thousands of people with the same advertisement). This will give you a reasonable success rate as a good number of the target audience will receive your communication the way you want them to.

But as precision targeting of advertisements increase (especially online), this strategy is no longer good enough. You need to understand your target audience a lot better than you do right now. And this is the challenge for digital marketing at the moment. Big Data is showing some promise in meeting this challenge, but there are still a lot of hurdles to cross.

It is true that digital marketing is not showing success rates as promised. It is true that very few brands have been built through digital marketing efforts alone while thousands have been built through traditional marketing efforts alone. But that is no reason to give up on the hope of realizing the promise. We just have to find ways to make it work. The first step is to gain credibility when making claims about overcoming privacy concerns of people.

FOMO, short for Fear Of Missing Out, has been prevalent ever since people started living in societies. FOMO is the primary reason why people are affected by peer pressure. If you do not fear missing out on what your peer circle is doing and what they might get out of it, the question of peer pressure doesn't arise at all.

A lot of people pick courses or streams while going to University that the majority picks because they do not want to miss out on opportunities by picking something else. It is common to think that if the majority is picking something, then it ought to be the best choice available.

With social media allowing every single person with an account to broadcast her daily activities to the rest of the world (or to the rest of her peer circle), the fear of missing out on things only amplifies.

If you look at the total number of status updates, tweets, photo uploads or blog posts every minute, it is easy to conclude that people like sharing most of their activities with their peer circle. When you look at everything that is shared knowing about FOMO and the effect it can have on a person's behaviour, you will undoubtedly want your brand to be talked about in these media. You will want your brand to be a part of these daily broadcasts.

When there are enough people talking about your brand, FOMO will ensure that most of those who are not active users of your brand will at least give it a try.

Your social media strategy must be to engage people and get them to talk about your brand. The only way you can get people to remark about your brand is by being remarkable. Stop wasting your time flooding your followers with pretty pictures of your brand. You have plenty of other channels to do that. Do something different on social media. Utilize fully what is on offer.

It is common knowledge that you need to exercise your body regularly to keep it in shape. It is impossible to wake up one day and run a marathon. You need to train for it. The training is not just in terms of running a mile every morning, or hitting the gym for an hour every day. It involves everything from following a healthy diet, working out, running regularly, staying in the right frame of mind, and many many more things.

Keeping your body fit is not a deliberate act. In fact, it is a lifestyle choice. You make the right choices for your daily routines and you'll keep your body fit.

It is no different when it comes to keeping your mind fit and creative. It is impossible to just turn up one day with the next big marketing idea unless you do creative things on a regular basis. Creativity is not something you're born with. It is a lifestyle choice. Just like you keep your body in shape by working out regularly, following a healthy diet and so on, you do the same for your mind. If you aspire to be a writer, you ought to be a voracious reader, you ought to write stuff everyday. You have to pick a right mix of things to read just like you would pick a healthy diet. You ought to write stuff every single day just like you would go for a run or hit the gym every day. If you want to be a marketer, you need to make it your business to understand customers of whatever products you come across. If you aspire to be an entrepreneur, you need to look to create value in whatever you do.

If you want to be in the creative business, you need to exercise your Idea Muscle on a regular basis. Otherwise, you will be trying to run a marathon after a month of sitting at home and watching TV, ordering Domino's every night.