Kumar's Blog

When somebody in a prominent position at a Fortune 500 company, a government, a cricket team, indulges in unethical and immoral behaviour in his personal life, which is then unearthed, it matters. It is turned into big news by the media. The person in question may be sacked from his position, may be suspended from his responsibilities, may lose endorsement deals from big brands like in the case of Tiger Woods.

This highlights the tendency of the majority of us to follow people and brands rather than follow ideas. We discredit the ideas of those whose occasional actions are questionable, even though the ideas themselves are credit-worthy.

Commissioner Gordon (in The Dark Knight):

The Joker won. All of Harvey's prosecutions, everything he fought for...undone. Whatever chance you gave us of fixing our city dies with Harvey's reputation. We bet it all on him. The Joker took the best of us and tore him down. People will lose hope.

This must act as a guiding principle for all brands. We do not differentiate the brand and the idea it represents. It is one and the same to us. Barcelona will not have the same set of fans if it suddenly changes to a defensive style of play.

That doesn't mean that brands cannot change what they stand for. The change needs to be natural and accepted by their followers.

Recently, Vikdevil made a point that this is the reason why Arvind Kejriwal had to quit being the CM of Delhi the way he did. He had to come back with a new manifesto that he could actually deliver on, and at the same time not lose too many of his followers.

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.  

"My major allegiance has been to story-telling, not to history."
                                                                                               - Russell Banks

We often pledge our allegiance to a religion, a country, a lifestyle, a person, a political party, a scientific principle, an author, a company, an idea. Then we rely on this allegiance for guidance. Most of our actions are shaped by the allegiances we forge. After a while, we stop reasoning whether we ought to go ahead with a certain action. Instead, we start reasoning as to whether that action falls within the ambit of what is allowed by our allegiances. We often tend to focus on the history than on the story-telling.

Since we act this way, we expect everyone around us to act the same way. We do not take change very kindly. This is why brands are ever so cautious about changing their stance about certain topics. Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to hear one of the biggest and oldest brands in the world, the Pope, come out and say "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" This, after a million moms raised their voices against JC Penney for roping in Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson.

Far too often, we get lost in the ambit of our allegiances and fail to act, fail to create and fail to be remarkable. Brands most often reflect the popular opinion, which means this prevents brands from being remarkable as well.

If we let the history go and focus on the story-telling alone, we will witness brands, governments and everyone else doing the same. When we look at the way a brand communicates, or the way a government is run, or the way our organizations are run, we are looking at mirrors.

What do you want to see in them?

It is common for marketers to be working with different product teams at the same time, especially if they're part of a company with a big product portfolio. It makes business sense to have a common Marketing department overlooking all products, rather than having individual marketing teams for each product. It is a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient in terms of resource usage.

But it comes with its own problems.

When the same set of people are working on several products simultaneously, it is easy to get lost in the thick of things and start neglecting the differences between the products. This can be very dangerous and can lead to incurring the wrath of the product teams.

It is essential to understand the working and the aims of each product and to keep them in mind while doing any work related to that product. But, too often, I see marketing teams trying to follow the same procedures and the same communication strategies for different products. This will make the work of the marketing teams very easy, but it will add little value to the product.

Each product is different and must be treated that way. Not just by Marketing teams, but by every team whose resources are dedicated to multiple products simultaneously.

When this is not done, and it is often not done, big companies end up churning out mediocre products that is accepted by a mass who are ready to jump onto the next company that can offer similar products at a cheaper price. The new models and new products that come out are only incrementally different from their predecessors and innovation slowly grinds to a halt.

It is essential that big companies manage all their resources effectively to continue to innovate.

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.

"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.

New businesses and new products come up to fill some void on the supply side. There could be a need on the demand side that is not yet satisfied by the existing supply of products and services, and the one who identifies this has the opportunity to fill that void by creating his own solution for the problem. 

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.

I'm an advocate of pricing products based on the value they offer. It makes rational sense to ask the customer to pay an amount that he is likely to rather than a little above what it costs to make the product available for that customer. Usually, the best way to identify what a customer is likely to pay is by understanding what value the product offers her.

But there are certain kinds of products that make people take seemingly irrational decisions about the price they are willing to pay that have little relation to the value they get out of it. Whether it be the decision to buy jewelry, or buy a house, or work for Goldman Sachs, people don't seem to decide on the price they are willing to pay based on the value they derive. They just have a threshold limit up to which they are willing to spend.

When I see people buying houses for prices that they can never hope to recover in thirty years through monthly rental income, I feel that the decision to pay the over-valued amount is not based on value derived. This doesn't mean that people who do this are foolish, though. Quite the contrary. They define the threshold because they know that anything acquired at a price up to that threshold will give them a certain standing in their social circle that they aspire to have.

It should be the target of every brand to achieve such a place in the consumer's mind that they are willing to define a fairly high threshold price at which they are willing to buy the product. This gives the brand immense power when it comes to pricing. 

This was the headline of an article today in, you guessed it right, Times of India. The Wednesday in question is the tenth day of July. Agreed, the rains in Mumbai have been unrelenting this past month. But a headline like this just takes all the credibility out of the story. This phenomenon is quite common in the world of advertising. In fact, it is common in every aspect of life that involves grabbing attention of others. As a matter of fact, the first thing that came to my mind after looking at this headline was the way in which resumes are written back in B-school.

This is classic example of trying too hard to conform to a pre-approved format. You can see this very regularly in deo ads where a good majority of the brands all have ads showing girls attracted to the guy who applies the deo. The latest to conform to this is Cobra Deo.

Advertisers are becoming so afraid to try new themes that we keep seeing very similar ads for similar products. This is perhaps why the advertisements that won awards at the Cannes Lions 2013 were ones that stepped out of the norm for the category and did something different, even though these didn't necessarily increase short term sales.

Everyone wants to fit in first before they stand out. Even when they do stand out, it is still only within the confines of what is acceptable. In a creative industry like advertising, you will go nowhere by conforming. You need to be bold and be creative.

This is the approach many marketers are taking with the advent of Big Data. With so much data available, the emphasis in marketing activities is shifting to number crunching. The brilliant new marketer who can transform the image of a product is now the one who can make sense of the data available to her about customer behaviour.

While mining of Big Data can provide wonderful insights, they provide just that, insights. The mined data will only enhance available information. The hard work of incorporating this information into product feature decisions, pricing decisions, distribution channel decisions, etc still remains to be done. No amount of number crunching will throw up these answers. If you make the mistake of thinking they will, you're ruling out the possibility of any innovation.

With numbers come metrics. With metrics come hard targets (hard targets are different from hard-to-achieve targets). And when the focus is on meeting these hard targets (like gather 2000 new customers from Mumbai area who have previously disliked a competitor's service in a month), there is little room for innovation.

Marketing efforts are not just responsible for boosting sales and brand image, they are equally responsible for boosting innovation. It is easy to be engulfed by the promise Big Data beholds. But it is essential to not get sucked into a world of metrics and hard targets. Innovation is paramount.

I recently bought a washing machine from LG. The retailer was Reliance Digital. I went and sought out this very model because my parents have been using the same model for the last three months with excellent results. But the person who was tasked with selling me this obviously didn't have this background information.

Ideally, a brand like LG will want the retailers to do justice to their products by highlighting the features of the product that make it stand out when compared to others in the category. I would have liked the sales rep to talk about the features as well (this was just one product where I happened to have prior knowledge). But he  seemed to have no inclination to do so. He let me wander around the store reading the descriptions and the product specifications, and to make my decision about the product. While I don't like sales reps pushing certain products down my throat, I don't like them not making an effort either. After all, there's a reason why I chose to go the store instead of ordering on Flipkart.

Once I had decided on the model, though, the sales rep swooped in like a hawk to sell me extended warranty and insurance and what not. When I refused to entertain him, he did the opposite of what a sales rep ought to do and started listing out how previous purchasers of the model have needed insurance due to malfunctioning of the product under consideration. I just couldn't help thinking how LG must feel if they were to see how their product was being sold.

Once the product was delivered, the person who came for installation (again from the retail chain), had no technical knowledge about the product's working. He tried and failed miserably to get the product up and running. At this point, he tried talking me into buying warranty extensions for other LG products that he could see in the house. I politely showed him the door and lodged a complaint with his manager. The next day, an LG representative turned up and got the machine installed in all of 5 minutes, of which he cursed the representative from the retail chain at least 5 times claiming LG was getting a bad name due to lack of technical knowledge of the retail representatives.

The lesson for every brand here is to ensure the face that represents their brand in front of the customer has some alignment with the brand.

One of the things that is harped into us at B-school is that a brand should manage the risks that arise out of depending on external agents for existence and growth wisely. This means diversifying the dependencies instead of relying on just one supplier or one marketing platform for the concerned activity. The moment you rely on just one supplier, you're crippled and can't ship your product if that supplier refuses to co-operate.

If you rely on just one platform for your marketing efforts, you will fail to get your message across if that platform changes policy. For example, if you're relying heavily on TV advertising and the rule allowing channels to show only 12 minutes of advertising per hour every hour kicks in, your costs are bound to go up and you'll have little leeway in avoiding those costs.

In fact, I personally faced a similar issue a week ago. For two years, a good chunk of the audience for this blog came from the student board of my B-school. Having graduated, I lost access to that board last Sunday. Had I been over-reliant on that platform to get my opinions across, I would have had to start from square one. But, I have been making use of several platforms, so I'm not as badly hit.

This has two lessons.

One, when it comes to the dependencies that are key to your existence and growth, you need to make sure that you aren't over-reliant on any one supplier or platform.

Two, when it comes to your value proposition, you need to strive to be the only one that your customer is reliant on.

Achieve both and you'll be one of the most successful brands ever. 

As Big Data continues to get traction, a lot of possibilities are cropping up for companies to target customers and potential customers. Better targeting of advertisements is being adopted quite aggressively. But this only marks the beginning of the possibilities.

Big Data can be used for a host of other things, including differential pricing, product bundling, product/service enhancements and so on. Amazing things can be done with the data that is so easy to collect and is only getting even easier to do so. But for every amazing thing that can be done, there is a bit more of that privacy that you so covet that you will have to give up.

Brands have already experimented with differential pricing based on health records, criminal records, job profile, sexual orientation, salary-day spending pattern and so on. Targeting advertisements and pricing based on salary-day spending pattern seemed really sinister to me. Imagine having to pay a little bit extra for a movie ticket or a dinner booking because it happens to be your pay-day, or even your birthday or anniversary.

Amazing things can be done with Big Data. You just have to decide whether you want to do amazing things for your consumers and enhance your brand equity for the long term, or do amazing things for yourself (as a company/brand), and enhance shorter term profits. More often than not, these two do not overlap.

Be it at work, or at home, you always have some responsibilities on you. It is only natural to do just about enough to either meet or slightly exceed the expectations of someone who is also concerned about these responsibilities. This someone could be your boss, your spouse, your parents, or even yourself. The effort you put into fulfilling the responsibilities will, for most part of the time, be determined by the expectations of this person (or people).

If this person is pushing you to your limits, not by force or intimidation, but by raising the right questions that make you feel you can probably do better to answer them, and is motivating you to do better, your work and your actions will only improve with time.

If this person fails to constantly keep you on your toes and maintain your drive, by setting the bar of expectations too low, you will fall into a pit of lethargy and will have to find another person to bring out the best in you.

This is true of brands as well. If a successful brand is not kept on its toes, by constantly changing and constantly improving, a competing brand is bound to overshadow it in time.

It is important to choose that person who can bring out the best in you (doesn't matter if you're a person or a product). It can be someone in the morning and someone else at night. It can be you all day everyday. And it is just as important to switch from one person to another when things aren't going as good. The hardest part is to tell when things aren't going as good.