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?