The Hindu Business Line : A pioneer of meta marketing

S. Ramachander, who many of you know through his insightful and stimulating columns in Business Line and his books, passed away last Saturday. He was a close friend for 25 years and someone I turned to when I needed to push my thi nking to the next level. This article is about how one of the ideas/concepts he evangelised – Meta Marketing – has been central to the design and marketing of my own consulting product and the course I teach at IIM Ahmedabad: Customer-Based Business Strategy.

Over the years, and culminating in his book Ascending the Value Spiral; From Insight to Innovation”, Ramachander has clearly described and delineated the two roles of marketing – one which is the operational “get the product off the shelf” marketing management function, and the other, which is the more strategic, business-connected meta marketing. He refers to the latter as the “thought process of marketing, an abstraction that [is] simply the competitive and mutual exchange of value [for the company with its customers]”. He felt that it was high time for marketing to be “given a thorough shake-up and a makeover”, and said the stuff that the rest of us hesitated to say – that it “is time the fraternity stood up and let itself be counted. We cannot be paralysed by the awkwardness of a fuller and more realistic definition of marketing, which might lay us open to the charge from our fellow managers that we are trying to arrogate to ourselves nearly all of management’s seriously long-term functions!"

I started my life in market research and over time felt increasingly uncomfortable about the way we would research a market “with a view to developing strategy” , as our proposal would state. Even though two companies addressing the same market segment could have totally different business goals and strategies, our research approach would be the same. So, for example, we could be retained by Toshiba or IBM or Apple or HP but we would do the same ‘usage and attitude’ study for everyone and provide the same map of market opportunity and the same customer segmentation scheme”.

In the late ’80s, I worked full-time for Hindustan Lever, doing competitive strategy analysis. It was obvious that Nirma’s success in the market was not so much about its functional marketing excellence but because of the totality of its business concept and design. Karsanbhai had, to use Ramachander’s later words, managed to “link [market] insights to business goals; and create innovative strategies along the value chain to achieve these goals”… He had a distinctive “mental model” of the market, which HLL then did not have, and he drove his businesses based on that.

Around then, a special issue of the Journal of Marketing unveiled for the first time the concept of what it called marketing strategy – a blueprint for a new kind of marketing discipline. It had a hallmark article by Yoram Wind called Marketing Strategy: New Directions for Theory and Research, which said that marketing management was about defining programmes and policies in the market and marketing strategy, “as such, it is a part and parcel of business strategy”, was about how a business should compete in the market in order to gain competitive advantage. It pointed out many deadly sins of marketing as people narrowly practised it, including the fact it was obsessed with the single brand as a unit of analysis and did not think about business portfolios, and that the marketing discipline was totally divorced from the strategic framework of the company. As with a lot of these ideas, they made total sense, but need to be worked on much further in order to be actionable.

Thus began my torturous journey up the “value spiral” (as Ramachander would describe it), from market research service provider for marketing management decisions to customer-centric business strategy consulting, a new space that business heads as well as marketing directors found engaging. In this journey I frequently sponged off Ramachander’s thinking in this area and used it to sharpen the positioning of my consulting and teaching offers.

The hardest part of establishing this new avatar of the business strategy aiding marketing discipline in India was communicating what this was. I tried many labels just to communicate it better – market strategy, not marketing strategy; strategic marketing; market-focused strategy, and so on – but with limited success. People would listen to me and ask, “Yes, but what do you actually do?”. Until one day on a sheet of paper Ramachander scrawled a diagram that suddenly made it clear and easy. I call it Ramachander’s ‘3-circles framework’ or ‘the three levels of marketing’ or ‘marketing’s third eye’. He later christened it ‘meta marketing’. Reproduced here is his final version of it, and next to it an earlier version that is an essential slide in many of my presentations. It is now easy to explain that my work relates to the top circle. With this framework, it is easy to see that my consulting and teaching space is about understanding markets in order to shape business direction, not just execute a chosen direction in the market.

(The writer is an acclaimed thought leader on market strategy and consumer behaviour. A visiting faculty at IIM-Ahmedabad, her alma mater, she is also on its Board of Governors. She serves as an independent director on the boards of Infosys Technologies, CRISIL, Axis Bank, Godrej Consumer Products, Subhiksha and Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Ltd.)

(Ramachander wrote about this in Business Line on July 24, 2006.)

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