Kumar's Blog

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.

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.

"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?

"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.

When a product is first established (or in any subsequent point of significant change to it), Marketing 101 tells you to first identify the target audience before plunging into designing and implementing a marketing strategy for the product. It is simply pointless to talk about what the product has to offer if it is not clear who the offering is for.

Once the target audience is identified and the marketing strategy (right from pricing to communication) has been decided, it strictly applies to all. If the target audience has been split into a few segments with a slightly different strategy for each of those, then what has been decided will apply the same way to all in a particular segment. Those falling outside the umbrella of the target audience will seldom affect any major decision related to any aspect of the product.

Simply said, the job of the marketer is to focus her efforts on pleasing the target audience. At the same time, she is expected to understand that she will reach nowhere by trying to please everyone (whether target audience or not).

This is something we need to learn from the way successful brands are built. To design brand behaviour with only the target audience in mind and nobody else.

Just like a brand, a person will go nowhere if she tries to please everyone in every situation. Her actions ought to be determined only by what her target audience is (either in terms of goals, or morals, or the people she cares about). 

Nilofer Merchant recently wrote a wonderful article for the Harvard Business Review. The article revolved around the personal brand being like the exhaust fume of a car.

While she was talking about the personal brand of working professionals, I think this is true of any product or service as well. When we talk about brand image, it is nothing but the remnants of the regular operations of the concerned product or service.

Car manufacturers put in a lot of effort into making the exhaust fumes less polluting and less harmful. They might have the best of features, but if they fail to keep exhaust levels below stipulated norms, the car won't even hit the market. At the same time, no customer actually enquires about exhaust levels when she goes to buy a car. She will take it for granted that it is under acceptable levels and focus on the other features.

This is pretty much the case when it comes to Marketing as well. The marketers put in a lot of effort in getting the product noticed by potential customers and communicating to them about the features. If they do not do this, the market will never take off. At the same time, no customer thinks about the marketing efforts of the product when she is making the purchase. She will only talk about the features of the product.

While marketing efforts are essential for the success of any product, they almost never feature in the parameters under consideration at the time of purchase.

A lot of advertisements featured in the Cannes Lions 2013 a couple of weeks ago. A few of them won awards for creativity, concept, etc. If a movie wins awards, at least that goes into promotional material for persuading people to watch the movie. But with advertisements, awards mean nothing. What matters is communicating the value proposition of the product to consumers. 

'When you read good content, think of us.'

Tata Docomo might as well go ahead and use this in their next ad of the current campaign, claiming that most content publishers use their network, and add logos of Blogger and Wordpress below the message.

The latest campaign has featured many ads in this format. The campaign has been about telling the viewers that the major brands in any sector prefer to use the Tata Docomo network.

Up till this point, Tata Docomo had focused on communicating the advantages and the positives that the network had to offer, like faster browsing speeds, more value for talktime and so on. This is a step in a new direction.

When it comes to choosing a mobile network, the main criteria of selection are the value provided by the network as compared to its competition, and perhaps the preferred choice of network among the majority in one's peer circle. I have never heard anyone saying that she wanted to switch to a particular network provider because her bank or her newspaper publishers used that network.

The communication will probably ensure good recall of the brand. But with the creativity of Vodafone and Airtel to compete with, achieving a good recall is hardly any good. There is little in this campaign that will make a subscriber to a competing network want to switch.

Although the campaign gets a plus for its creative, I am thoroughly skeptical about it making even the slightest impact on sales. Perhaps, the objective of the campaign is to prevent the existing customers from switching to competing networks. The campaign holds little promise on that front as well, as loyalty to network providers is a rare commodity today.

So, while the customers might think of Tata Docomo, that is all they might be doing. If buying is what Tata Docomo wants its users to do, it should do more.

I have been a strong advocate of digital marketing. Even after reading this piece by Bob Hoffman, I still am a digital marketing evangelist. Bob makes a strong claim that if you walk down the aisles of a supermarket, there is not a single brand among the hundreds on offer that was built up solely through digital marketing efforts.

Bob's right when he says that it is nearly impossible to build a brand online unless the brand's product is inherently online, like Flipkart or Youtube. Before dismissing online marketing efforts as unnecessary distractions, we must understand why TV has been so successful in building brands, and why digital marketing efforts can never hope to replicate that, except for video ads on Youtube and (yet to commence) Facebook.

First, all brands have the same starting point when it comes to TVCs. I'm not talking about being able to afford the 30-second spot to air a commercial. But, among the brands that do buy those 30-second spots, there is a level playing field. They all have the same audience to target, who are all in the same frame of mind. Since a whopping majority of the people watch TV for entertainment, they are in a fairly relaxed mood while watching TVCs. So, if an advertisement is clutter-breaking in terms of its narrative or style of direction, it will catch attention of the audience irrespective of the brand's previous association with the audience. As the audience comes across these advertisements over and over, in a few months, a new brand can hold its own in the mind space of the target audience.

This is not the case online. 

Today, every brand wants to engage its customers through content and what-not. An average person interacts with (purchases/considers purchasing) about a hundred brands every month. Now, this person might have certain websites that she will frequent, certain kinds of content that she reads regularly, and there can never be more than a handful of brands whose content matches these interests.

Unlike TVCs, a brand cannot put out content that doesn't fall under the umbrella of interest of the target audience, and still hope that it makes the desired impact. If there aren't real-world brands like Tide, Lays and Coca Cola that have been built entirely through digital efforts, it is because digital is a different ball game. It needs to be approached in a way that can leverage its strengths.

What are its strengths?

If brands focus on the few people whose online activity involves engaging with content similar to what the brand has expertise in, and gains their trust and appreciation, they will spread the word to others whose online activity doesn't fall under this category.

It is unfair to compare the effects of a digital campaign and a TVC simply because they don't work the same way. 

Dove came out with their 'Real Beauty Sketches' campaign recently, where an FBI trained forensic artist draws two sketches of a woman. The first sketch is based on a description given by the woman herself. And the second description is given by a close acquaintance of hers. The artist never sees the woman. When the two sketches are compared, the sketch of the description given by the acquaintance is more beautiful. This prompts Dove to say 'You're more beautiful than you think you are'. You can watch the video here:


This is a really nice concept. It has been wonderfully executed, has great recall, and has received a lot of good press. The only criticism can be that this looks more like a social experiment sponsored by Dove than an advertisement for the soap. Even this is not really a criticism. There are thousands of advertisements where the brand urges the audience to go out and buy the product and claims to be this and that, while the Dove campaign is at a higher level of abstraction. The kind of audience that will resonate with this ad is perhaps mutually exclusive from the one that appreciates in-the-face-advertising.

Dove, of course, is a Unilever product. Now let us take a look at an ad for another Unilever product - Axe:


Both the products are targeted at entirely different audiences and have their own merits. But you cannot miss the contrast in the message of the two ads.

When I know that Unilever is running campaigns like this for Axe and a campaign of 'Real Beauty' for Dove, I just don't feel that Unilever cares in the least. It is just getting ads out that it thinks will resonate with the audience. Not that that's a bad thing. But the plaudits for the 'Real Beauty Sketches' campaign must only be for the creative and the execution, and not because Dove is taking a higher ground when compared to its competitors.

What do you think?

There are thousands of ways to explain how Coca Cola makes you feel, and one way to describe them: AHH!

Visit the umbrella website of this new campaign to see what it is all about. This website is on the domain 'Ahh'. And for each 'h' you add in the domain, you'll see a different creative waiting for you. There are 61 such pages, with everything from GIFs to games that all revolve around (you guessed it) Coca Cola. Apart from these, the site also asks users to submit their 'Ahhhh' idea so that it can be added to the campaign.

This campaign is being targeted at teenagers. All the pages are better viewed on a mobile device in my opinion. Credit to Coca Cola for making the user experience entertaining. When content marketing is turning cliche, here is Coca Cola bringing a whole new perspective to content, with this campaign.

While there has been a lot of talk about brands providing valuable content at regular intervals to its followers, Coca Cola has brought a new twist to it. With this campaign, Coca Cola is banking on its creative capabilities rather than context or any other attribute that lies outside the realm of the brand. Coca Cola is not looking to appear next to seemingly relevant posts, search results or tweets. It is looking to draw users to its site instead, voluntarily.

Just like the Oreo tweet during the Super Bowl, this is not at all easy to replicate. It is easy enough to replicate the campaign, but not the impact, as hordes of brands have realised after failing to replicate the Oreo tweet.

I think Coca Cola has done something really innovative here, and the campaign holds a lot of promise. I have not seen all the 'Ahhhh's yet, but I liked the ones that I've seen so far. Another thing I liked about the 'Ahhh' pages is the simple (but elegant) design. They know what they want the customers to see and they've ensured there's nothing other than that.

The campaign gets a big thumbs up from me. What do you think?

Just like everything else.

Recently, a senior marketing executive at Coca Cola made the news by commenting that social media doesn't work, and that Coca Cola's digital efforts had negligible effects on short term sales (I wrote about it earlier here). He's not alone. Several brand managers have come out and said the same thing. And Bob Hoffman likes to constantly remind us that there isn't a single brand that has marked its arrival by being on Facebook (and other social media) alone.

This is because they spend little time understanding how things work in the social realm. It is similar to a B-school student who doesn't come prepared to a class, doesn't constructively participate, and then complains about the ineffectiveness of either the pedagogic technique or the professor herself. Just like a student ought to know that it is what she brings to the class that gets amplified, marketing executives ought to know that social media is all about engagement.

If the expectation from a social campaign is to increase click throughs, it is akin to barking up the wrong tree. Here's a really good article by Mitch Joel about setting the expectations right, and then putting in requisite effort to make social media work.

Another emerging trend is to rely heavily on data and metrics. On the surface, social media looks like any other, but with the added advantage of easily collectible customer data and measurement metrics. This has lead many marketing executives to apply advertising techniques that work in traditional media, understandably with similar expectations. The metrics and the data are driving the marketing efforts in social media.

It seems to have been forgotten that the data collection and analysis follows the creative for the communication. It is the other way around with most campaigns today. As Mitch points out in his article, social media doesn't work, just like every other medium, if you fail to understand how to make it work and then act upon it.

Give them an unforgettable experience instead.

I've been listening to this song called 'Heroes' by David Bowie several times today. Normally, I don't think I'd have given it a second listen. But I've taken a liking to this song because of the context in which I first heard it. It is one of the soundtracks used in the movie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I enjoyed watching the movie and because of the context in which this soundtrack is used, it really resonated with me. In the last one year, I can list several songs that I've taken a liking to, solely because of the context in which I first heard it.

The context makes all the difference.

Of course, nobody understands this more than marketers. We realise that it is necessary for the advertisements, and all the other content about the brand that is communicated to customers, to be in a context that will resonate with them, and make them like the brand and push them to make the purchase. But the problem arises in achieving this. The first problem comes in identifying the right context for every customer. In the mass marketing age, the context always took a backseat because it was hard enough to find spots where a bulk of the target audience would be present. But, in the age of digital marketing, the proliferation of social media and smartphones is increasing at such a fast pace that it is no longer very difficult to identify the right context for each individual in the target audience.

Now that it is relatively easy to get the context right, every brand is making strides in getting their communication out in the right context. This is causing user fatigue. If a person sees ten different advertisements (all for similar products) in the time that she is receptive, hardly any of them will resonate with her and the entire point is lost. A fatigued user will not respond to even the most creative of advertisements.

This is one of the key reasons for the uptake of content marketing. If you get value-adding content across in the right context, and manage to make a lasting impression on the potential customer, you will have her coming back for more content at regular intervals.

If you identify that your advertising spot is crowded and is causing fatigue in the target audience, and is failing to provide you the results that you hoped for, increase your emphasis in providing value content and focus on inbound marketing instead.

"That's 5208 feet. Yes, I go the extra mile."
                                                                   - John Dorian, from Scrubs

I was watching an episode of Scrubs today, and it revolved around 'going the extra mile'. John Dorian, the protagonist, tries to make his colleagues realize the importance of doing that little bit extra, even though it is not part of your job description, even though it is not expected from you. Of course, you don't have to go to the extreme that John Dorian does in this episode (he shaves his head to keep his cancer patient company during her chemo-therapy). All you need to do is take the initiative to make the customer experience better, not because it will improve your sales (it might), not because it will provide a lift to your brand image (it might), but because every customer deserves to be treated that way.

I came across two brands that went the extra mile, in very different ways.

Fab, that spends a good deal of energy on e-mail marketing, did something unthinkable for an e-mail marketer. They identified people on their e-mail list who had never opened a mail from them and sent them one final mail stating that they would no longer continue with the e-mails and reduce the disruption in their inbox. Ebay, are you listening? I get several mails (not just from ebay) everyday that I never open. I now have years of unread promotional mails in my inbox. Yet, they keep coming. Fab could have continued mailing people like me. There is always the odd chance that someone might open a mail and take action (read purchase) accounting for an additional sale. But, Fab went the extra mile in foregoing that opportunity. People might say, good riddance, and not give Fab another thought. But, they did it anyway.

The other brand is Havertys. What Havertys has done is nothing along the lines of Fab. Many might say that what they have done is just very good advertising. You can watch the ads aired over a year, here.

This is going the extra mile in advertising because they focus on what the customer wants - a story! Everywhere, be it in a job interview, or in a graduation speech, we are told to communicate in the form of a story. Because everybody loves stories. Advertisers have always tried to make a story for the 30-second spots. In fact, I have even seen incomplete Pepsi TVCs that end in a '...to be continued'. But Havertys has approached this differently. They have a protagonist for their ads, and they have aired different ads over time that progresses with a story line. Right from the first date of the protagonist to her engagement. And the ads all have the same theme, so they resonate. They are elegant. And for the best part, being elegant and going the extra mile is the same thing.

Have you seen any brand go the extra mile?

You might have loyalty programs in place. You might educate your front-line staff to treat regular customers differently. You might offer your customers discounts on their birthdays and anniversaries. You might remember all your customers' preferences. Are these enough to delight your customers?

Maybe. But most probably not. Maybe these will delight the customer the first time, the second time. By the third time, she will get used to it, and start expecting it. When you're only meeting the expectations of the customer, you are no longer delighting her. You're treating her better than the first-time customers, yes, but she has now come to expect that.

The possibilities of big data are talked about in terms of the automation of advertising that it brings in. When your customer searches for some information about the product that you sell, an algorithm will decide what ad she sees alongside. Algorithms decide what promoted tweets are to be shown. Even the interactions of the front-line staff with customers is dictated by pre-set instructions (algorithms) and the tone of the interaction is very rarely genuine. Every time I'm on a flight, I can so easily tell that the smile of the air-hostess is plastic. I'm totally for using these algorithms. They bring in personalization, they bring in relevance and possibly induce engagement. These are all important things to have, and they are all easily replicable.

When the role of the brand is growing ever more important in aiding customers' purchase decisions, having these replicable features do not add any more value to your brand than they do to your competitor's. It brings no competitive advantage. It just brings your brand up to average.

While you continue focusing on these aspects in your marketing strategy, also keep in mind that you have to do other things to elevate the stature of your brand in the mind of the customer. And the only way to do that is by delighting her.

Add the element of surprise, add serendipity to your communication. Give the customer the unexpected. Exceed her expectations while continuing to raise her expectations. Your brand will achieve true customer engagement only through surprise and delight.