The Hindu Business Line : The gut and gore of 2007

OSO has become the buzzword of the last quarter of 2007. The six-pack has become a brand in its own right. The 40-plus man has a reason to live. And his wife has a reason to nag. “If Shah Rukh can do it, why can’t you?”

Study the advertising and branding trends of a country, and you know what it’s all about. In a jiffy you know its people.

Branding and the core concept of the science, the execution of the brand plan through the tools of marketing and selling, and the visual execution of the brand proposition through the means of advertising is a complete giveaway of a culture. Brand culture. Let me do just that for the year 2007 that has passed by. Let me peek into the gut and gore of the year, its many highs and a few lows.

What’s in a name?

Nothing at all.

UTI Bank decided to become an Axis by compulsion. Nothing changed at all. Consumers, however, kept wondering why change a name if nothing else had.

Hutch’s pug shifted kennels with change in ownership. Mega-spends ensured that the message was dinned into the heads of an audience that had come to love the brand’s three pink samosas. The Vodafone red was everywhere, in a campaign orchestrated well through every media there was to use. Ubiquity was the name of the game.

HLL became HUL. The Hindustan story won here. Hindustan was bigger than Unilever in this case. Air Deccan morphed from being the common man’s carrier to a confused bird just about deciding what it wanted to be.

Aviation saw a lot of brand confusion. Air Sahara became a JetLite, as Jet Airways itself underwent a change of colour and in-air identity. Indian, of course, was the most confused of them all. The airline, which changed its name from Indian Airlines to Indian, changed its identity once again. The year saw the public sector aviation space with just one brand all across: Air India. Here again, nothing else has sadly changed. Except the name.

What’s in a name, Shakespeare-ji?

A little bit of retail in my hair

Every Tom, Dick and Harish wanted a little bit of retail in their business plans this year. The year was the beacon year of organised retail. Kishore Biyani got crowned the ‘Corporate Dukaandar’ of the year and wrote his best-selling book as well!

Indian retail is in the morph phase. The business model of yore fought battles that were completely ‘David vs David’. Small retail vs small retail. Today, it’s a David vs Goliath battle. The future, will, of course, be all about Goliath vs Goliath as macro formats fight for survival. Even as the David vs Goliath battle has begun, a whole army of small shopkeepers and, of course, a larger army of middlemen have gotten together to stall it in many a State. There’s more to come.

Modern trade formats are re-defining their business plans. Time for modern retail to get inclusive in its sweep. Time to put together that format I touted four years ago. A Reliance Retail must get together the existing 3,000 small retailers in Hyderabad. Sign an MoU with each one of them. Co-brand their outlet. Let the small retailer have an option to survive. A co-opetition model?

Madvertising was here

The creative pony-tailed guy with breeches holding up his pants went berserk. Madvertising is here.

Cows chewed gum instead of cud and smiled happily ever after. Vets touted brands and marriages for the cows they treated. Never mind that consumers felt quite like cows watching all of this. Creative licence was a fun licence to have and use. Bingo went on a spree making fun of accents and people and a new genre of madvertising was born. Excellent on the score of generating awareness and possibly interest in the brand, but I don’t really know how it fared in creating that one purpose of most businesses: the end sale and the repeat sale.

Bollywood defined marketing

Movies, music and masti surrounding it all made for a memorable marketing year. The two big touted-as-such blockbusters of the year used every gimmick there was to push themselves down the throat and into the psyche of the movie-goer. Spends on Om Shanti Om and Saawariya were big. One won. Another lost. Proving that content is king. OSO has led to two big music releases and a spate of OSO parties where everyone wants to wear an OSO shirt of the Seventies. Retail outlets across the country have stocked up the big polka dot shirts and the short kurtis with sequins and tight churidaars well in time to meet the rush. Movies create a market. And how!

Vicarious living

Empowered consumers in the big cities lived dual lives. A whole host of Web sites such as a Facebook, MySpace, Vox, SecondLife, Orkut and tens of others offered a second one. Your friendly dentist is possibly a pole-dancer on SecondLife, just as your barman might as well be a temple priest on the same site. Many marketers, such as Sun Microsystems, Reuters and Wells Fargo, have set up shop on SecondLife to create a turnover for themselves in Linden Dollars, its currency. What’s more, there is an Indian recruitment portal as well! More marketers will jump in.

Internal branding grows

Corporates across sectors are progressively understanding the need to get an image for themselves that is benign, positive and internal-customer friendly. People are seen to be the most difficult resources to gain and keep. India has morphed from being a market short of products and services to being a market that is short of people altogether. Internal branding gains, just as salivating consulting organisations that specialise in the practice flourish. Ouch! It hurts!

Womarketing is here

As society levels out its gender bias as issues of yore, the woman in India is getting pampered. With more women comprising the workforce, and spending more time outdoors, the marketer is geared with his product and service appeal.

Every product is out with a range for women only. Every cosmetic has two avatars today, one for each sex. Every Fair & Lovely has, therefore, a Fair & Handsome as well. The gender equation is evening out into being a non-equation, even!

Social issues are in

As product categories, jaded by use of the old USP of functional and emotional dimension alike tire out, newer and newer experiments are being made.

Tata Tea takes a different route. It now wants you not to ‘Utho!’ (get up) but to ‘Jaago!’ (wake up)! The politician who comes seeking a vote is being grilled, even asked his qualification … thankfully along with a cup of tea at hand to hold brand relevance! Idea Cellular is aiming at removing the caste tag from names and replacing it with a mobile number. Many of these look premature for a market just about waking up. However, these are baby steps. Let them be.

And a mishmash of things altogether

For a trend-spotter, which is a hat I wear once every quarter, the year gone by has been an exciting one. A mishmash of a year. Let me run through some as I close this piece and welcome Marketing Year 2008.

Packaging got interactive. Frito Lay’s Kurkure led the way by inviting consumer faces on its pack-front along with winning recipes. Everything – the entire railway station, tunnels, an aerobridge at airports – offered itself for branding.

The instant movement was appreciated widely. The 20-over variant of instant cricket was a big hit. Cricket remained the big sourcing ground, apart from films. Foreign stars found relevance. What MRF pioneered with Lara and maybe what Cinthol pioneered even earlier with Imran Khan gained credence as a movement. In came a Ricky Ponting, a Brett Lee and, of course, Shoaib Akthar.

Tele-marketing lies on a stretcher with the ‘Do not call’ registry in place. And Web sites continue to rule with offers of every kind. While a FirstPhera promises to take care of all your wedding needs, the Madras Cemeteries Board Web site promises live online telecast of funerals for the benefit of friends and relatives all over the world who are unable to attend. Every niche is covered.

RIP.

(Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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The gut and gore of 2007