The ABCs of marketing

How often have you set out resolving to buy a different brand of soap or shampoo and ended up buying the same one because you didn’t have the time to mull over the pros and cons of a new one?

You at least settled for a familiar one instead of a totally new one, probably. And it’s due to this familiarity that brands assume importance in people’s lives — as time-saving devices that make people take decisions faster, sifting the known from the unknown and tipping the decision in favour of the known, says D. Shivakumar, Chairman & CEO – India Region, PepsiCo India.

Speaking to students at a convention organised by the Madras Management Association, on ‘Winning Strategies of Strong Brands’, Shivakumar said citizens of the world are time-poor and that this is the big thing brands need to think about when they communicate with consumers. Today's is a mobile-first social world. Managers are balancing certainty with adaptability in an uncertain world. There are about 900 million mobile phone users and 150 million social media users in India.

Going on to talk about the ABC of what makes strongs brands today, Shivakumar said authentic, not aspirational, was important today. For the last 20 years, advertising was all about having consumers aspire to bigger and better brands, but no longer. B is for benefit, beyond the basics. He cited the example of Tata Tea, which is known not only for its tea but for its inspiring campaign Jaago Re , which exhorts citizens to stand up for their rights and do their duty — such as vote in an election.

C is for collaboration. Brands should collaborate with consumers as today, user-generated content is the way to go, whether in product development or communication. Equally, brands should collaborate with the government, business partners and stakeholders, Shivakumar said.

Design comes next. Watch out, it’s going to be the new focus for brands in the next 10 years. Simple and intuitive design will become an imperative for them.

Finally, how does a brand make you feel? Happy? Frustrated? Experience will top it all, said Shivakumar. He mentioned chocolate brand Milka, which for a recent campaign called ‘Dare to be Tender’, made 10 million bars of chocolate with one piece missing. The mystified buyers were asked to write back and tell them whether they wanted that piece, or whether they wanted it sent to someone they knew with a personalised message. Now how’s that for some customer delight?

Milka dared its customers to be tender. Start-up jobs portal Naukri.com dared. As a David that needed to establish itself in a market that featured Goliaths such as Monster.com, it launched a “risky” piece of advertising that took a cutting swipe at a holy cow of the job world – the boss. Speaking on breakthrough branding strategies for brand success, Ambi MG Parameswaran, Advisor, FCB Ulka Advertising, said the campaign was based on the insight that people leave jobs not because they hate their work but rather because they hate their bosses. It was able to create breakthrough branding for the company which, ten years on, is a force to contend with.

The concept of ‘paying per second pulse’ in mobile telephony had been adopted by many players but had failed. However, Tata DoCoMo made an ad that showed how life could change in an instant, and tell viewers that they need not, therefore, pay on per-minute basis for mobile phone calls. This, said Parameswaran, made the brand aspirational and it became the fastest growing one among telecom brands for a year.

How can a company that enters a new category establish its desirability? When Hero Honda (now HeroMotoCorp) launched Pleasure, its first scooter, it decided to market it to women because until then it had only made and marketed motorcycles, a very male domain. ‘Why should boys have all the fun?’ the agency had it saying, pitching Pleasure as a device that took women where they wanted to go, and gave the boys and the men a fair bit of envy too! It even set up showrooms staffed by women, and went on to launch more scooters after that.

What you see is what you get. Or is it? How many times have you seen seductive pictures of faraway destinations on travel websites, only to get a very different image in reality when you actually get there? In a rather naughty TVC that contains a scenario that might rile animal rights activists had it been real, the campaign for makemytrip.com told customers that what they saw on its site is what they got in real life.

Parameswaran also mentioned his campaign for Amul, where cutting-edge technology made milk the sole hero of the ad, animating it.

Intersections galore!

He pointed out that in today’s world, advertising is no longer about 30-second ads, but fell in grey zones between advertising, news and content. A case in point, he said, is the Oreo Daily Twist campaign, done by Draft FCB, New York. The cookie brand, for its 100th anniversary a few years ago, created a new piece of shareable content every day for 100 days, for its ‘Daily Twist’. They ranged from Gay Pride to Elvis to the Mars Rover landing to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video, and for the big finale — the 100th Daily Twist — the brand invited fans to submit and vote on their own story ideas with real-time polling.

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