The Hindu Business Line : Influence sells!

If you had been like me, unfortunate enough to have been seeking a job in the Seventies in developing India, then you too might have realised the need for and the value of the power of ‘influence’. Something that one never had and always (wrongly perhaps) yearned for. There were too few jobs being chased by too many people with no real skills, like me. The employment exchange was an important destination for the urban unemployed. I too had been there done that. Not surprisingly quite a few of us were unable to get jobs. And it was not uncommon to hear the refrain, “You need influence!” Sounds familiar?

In the world of marketing, and that obviously includes consumers as well, the concept is equally relevant, albeit with a slight twist.

That, essentially, is the power of the influencer in a few product categories. Let me ask you a few simple questions. What is the brand of battery that your car is fitted with? I can hear a lot of you saying Exide and some of you may be right as well. But a few of you might be surprised when you actually open the bonnet of your car. Your car battery might well be Amco! Strange? Not really. Most consumers would not know the brand of battery in their car. Others might realise what the brand is only when the car refuses to start! But nearly all the consumers who own these vehicles are likely to rely on an influencer in their brand choice. That influencer in this case is the automobile mechanic. Consider another product. The motorcycle chain. Would a two-wheeler owner who rides his bike with such passion and speaks so fondly of it know the brand of chain that his bike is fitted with? Certainly not. Almost certainly the mechanic would know, recommend and very often fit it without even telling the owner of the bike what brand he is using (assuming that he does fit a brand). This is the challenge that a few product categories face.

Let’s move from cars to houses. Many of us build our houses with great love and care watching every brick and tile that goes into the house. But how many of us know the brand of cement that goes in despite the heavy advertising that the category has been doing? We might be reminded of that when we see the bags of cement lying around the construction site. Here again the mason is the influencer.

The maid too is assuming increasing importance and influence in the purchase of products for the kitchen such as cleaning powders, cakes and liquids. Rumour has it that as DINK (double income no kids) households proliferate the maid is growing in influence, purchasing power and authority as the hassled couple (probably software engineers) abdicates almost all the household purchase decisions to the lady in question, the maid. She draws up the shopping list. Brand managers, beware! It is the maid who is the belle of the ball as far as this piece is concerned.

Categories Vs Brands

Very often we need an important piece of information to take strategic marketing decisions. When the consumer makes a decision, is she making a category choice or a brand choice? It can be a little more complex than it seems at first blush. The choice between Pears and Liril is a straightforward brand choice.

While the formulation is important and different in the case of these brands, they are both from the same category. Sacrilegious though it sounds in an article on branding, a soap is a soap is a soap.

Now let’s move on to a different product category – cleaning liquid. Here there are choices in the form of powder and bar. This particular product form seems quite popular.

The liquid, while more efficient and more modern, also suffers from perceptual problems. Liquid is seen as more expensive, the maid will not use it properly, she will waste it … There were two principal characters in the kitchen, not the mother-in-law and the daughter- in-law as Ariel wanted us to believe but the housewife and the maid between whom an uneasy if not a love-hate relationship existed. The maid had her domain of influence in cleaning products definitely. She was more comfortable with the bar and could easily reject the cleaning liquid and that could pass off as a logical decision as the perception was that cleaning liquid was more expensive.

So what did Pril do? Henkel India, the company behind the brand, decided that it needed to address gaps in perception and talk to the maid of the house. Yet there was a slight difference. The company realised the need to talk to both the influencer and the decision maker as it did not wish to alienate either.

Maid to order

Research suggested that the Indian household revolved around the maid. She and her opinion mattered. There were instances in households were the housewife used the cleaning liquid for the cutlery and more expensive dishes while the maid was given the bar which she was more comfortable with for the less glamorous and more greasy utensils. Pril felt there was a genuine need to educate the maid, correct perceptions, reassure the lady of the household and build its brand simultaneously.

Engage, entertain, educate

Pril as the leader in the liquid washing segment had to promote and develop the category and there was a clear need to make the maid the leading lady. The brand’s research quickly suggested that the maid had never been formally trained in her life. A trained, more skilled maid would be a welcome benefit to the lady of the house as well. The maid on her part is very often the breadwinner of her own household and her health and well-being are extremely crucial to her own family’s welfare. The maid too has never got the share of recognition, forget her place in the sun!

The company launched a home care academy and a training programme. It involved a lot of logistics and organisation in addition to promotion and publicity in the locality which included door-to-door invitations and where the opportunity presented itself, a product discussion about the usage of the product. There was also a major incentive for the maid. Given her value to her own family, she was given an insurance policy that people in her social class did not normally get to have.

The event

Maids, if they do get entertainment, get it from their black-&-white TV sets at home or in the households they work in when the master and mistress put up a performance for her benefit and trade insults! This event that Pril had organised had a famous TV personality that the maid could rub shoulders with, come on stage, get recognised and also get a product demonstration that would help her performance, and most significantly she would get a life insurance policy that was for Rs 25,000 that was delivered to her house.

The maids, wherever the centre, had the time of their lives even as the brand’s benefits were conveyed to them. This was a programme that worked with equal strength for both the decision-maker and influencer. In fact, the maid’s influence is being quickly recognised by competitor Hindustan Unilever whose commercials talk about New Vim and how the maid is using it with great effect. Sometimes a brand’s greatest strength is when your competitor imitates you.

What must we do?

It is important for us to watch and learn from around us. The starting point would be some honest soul-searching.

Does your brand have an influencer?

Do we know enough about her?

Are we alienating the user as we woo the influencer?

Can we engage her? This is necessary, particularly in a category like cleaning liquid.

Do we have a consumer insight?

Today marketing has become a lot more complex than it has ever been.

The solutions to the future need not necessarily lie in the past. Think differently. Think innovatively. Execute effectively and watch your competition imitate you. It can be fun.

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of One Land, One Billion Minds.)

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