The Hindu Business Line : Super-instant cricket

What will happen to cricket of the five-day variety with the emergence of T20? Is the marketing buck going to be channelised more towards this form of new cricket?

- Romesh Bhalla, New Delhi

Romesh, yes, I do believe this will happen. Slowly but surely.

Brands will gradually segment their marketing spends. These very many types of cricket will offer plenty of opportunities for the marketer to segment. The rate card for each of these types of cricket itself will provide for a multiplier use of the many avatars of the game for maximum marketing impact.

Younger brands will use T20. Older heritage brands will use a mix of both. Cricket will be divided into a game of cricket in whites vs cricket in colour! Cricket of the five-day classic variety and cricket of the T20 variety.

The classical game will be a family game as well. The T20 variant with the skimpily clad cheerleaders will appeal to the younger audiences. Watch out. Parents might stop their kids from going to T20 matches where there is a lot more flesh than kids can digest at the cheerleaders end!

Marketers will now seek out opportunities across the spectrum of the game to back the right teams, the right cities, the right individual cricketers and the right coaches even. It looks like money is to be made by everyone all around.

Do private labels have the ability to garner as much consumer loyalty as do the big brands from FMCG companies such as a Pepsi or a Surf? And how do FMCG companies compete with these new offerings of the retail trade?

- Jayavanth P. Shah, Ahmedabad

Jayavanth-bhai, I do believe they can, provided the retailer can actually build credence in the offering.

The exercise needs to be carefully implemented, avoiding the pitfalls of the private label business as it has emerged in countries such as the US, the UK and in many parts of Japan and Europe. India needs to devise a private label plan that is generic to the retail industry at large. The industry needs to be governed carefully by norms of self-governance that will not kill the goose of private label business which shall lay all the golden eggs of the future for the retailer at large.

Consumer loyalty is in any case fickle today for mass-promoted brands. It is time to harvest loyalty of the retailer-led brands. This is possible as there is bound be a shift of power from the mass marketed brand promoted by MNC companies to the hands of retailers who will have better and captive touch-points with consumers in India in the future. The point of purchase is today morphing in India. The point of purchase (the store) is more than a point of purchase. It is the point of marketing. The point of front-faced consumer touch. The point of front-faced consumer research. The point of advertising. The point of branding. In short, the point of purchase is going to emerge tomorrow as the point of everything!

Private labels that dominate this point of purchase hold the potential of swinging the loyalty indices of customers. The future is fluid in this space.

And how can manufacturers compete with private labels?

This will be a difficult exercise where manufacturers will be swimming against the tide of consumer acceptance. The large movement of consumer swell will want to franchise private label brands in many basic and rudimentary categories that are not fashion- and fad-linked.

The best solution for the manufacturer would be to put up his own clones of products that look quite like the private labels and cost just as much. He needs to desist from advertising these brands altogether. If you can’t beat them, join them! That’s the ethos at play!

When brands change identities, how do they maintain consistency?

- R.P. Shukla, Jaipur

Shukla-ji, simply by continuing the positive cues of the brand in question in terms of visuals and colours at times. Axis Bank has held on to its colours. Colours are powerful tools that continue the visual imagery in one line, tone and tenor. Sometimes it is a jingle format that remains the same, sometimes the voice of an anchor that remains the same. Consistency is maintained by one or a combination of these many elements of brand identity.

Consumers have a changeover window from old brand to new. This period could vary from 60-360 days depending upon the category of product or service, and also depending upon the frequency of interaction with the brand. One needs to manage this period very carefully in terms of the changeover communication. In the case of a telecom service provider such as Hutch-Vodafone, the interaction with the brand is 24X7. In this case, the transition time was faster than that of Axis Bank where interaction with the bank could be once a week.

Companies in the consumer durable space are bringing in product innovations that are niche and very, very expensive. What’s the point of such innovation where only a hundred people are real buyers?

- Jyoti Ranade, Mumbai

Jyoti, product innovations add value to a brand in one of two ways. One: Adds value in terms of image. Adds value to the brand in terms of communicating to all consumers alike that the company adopts cutting-edge technology and is on the forefront of R&D that is connected to consumer wants, needs, desires and aspirations. Two: Adds real value in terms of the innovation improving the quality of life of the consumer. Companies use product innovations for both the above purposes. The one that is true-blue long-standing is the one that adds value to products in terms of innovations that improve the consumers’ quality of life. There are few in this terrain.

Some brands in consumer durables space have innovations are largely at the end of image. However, this has been useful as well. The bells and whistles innovations. As signified by the fingerprint identification desk-top (someone else has done it in laptop space) and the Bluetooth-enabled car audio system, which add to the image of the brand LG, for instance. It offers the consumer a great deal of positivity when the consumer buys any LG product. There might be few takers for these two highest-common-denominator products, but the positive effect rubs off on a horde of consumers who will not necessarily buy these, but buy the lowest common denominator products like a television set and a microwave oven!

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

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