A discovery of insights

Marketing is not about just making promises. Marketing is about ensuring that you deliver too. People often think that brands are about smart advertising. But brands are about living up to the promise that you made through your advertising. Many times marketers make tall claims that do not live up to the expectations of customers. Or there are no takers for the product. The product has to come from a solid customer insight. You find what customers want, build a product that satisfies them, then you make great advertising that highlights the benefit that this product is satisfying. If any of the three elements in the value chain is weak, the product is going to fail. The insight is the core.

The key part of mining for insights is not about what the customer is saying, but about understanding the core of the problem that customers may have, for which they are not specifically asking for a solution. No customer asked us for a recorder. But the insight they gave us was that housewives spend hours cooking for their family. But the family is too busy in front of the television rather than enjoying and appreciating the food. The housewife did not specifically ask for the recorder box.

Then we always thought that a product like Tata Sky’s Actve English – learning the English language using Hindi as a medium – will only appeal to a certain kind of mindset. I remember going to a home in a slum in Bhubaneswar which was less than 100 sq. ft. But when we took the Actve English application out there, the lady of that house was ready to touch everybody’s feet. In her life the very fact that she learnt five new English words gave her so much pride and confidence. We think that there is a particular kind of people’s life that we are changing.

What needs to change is the clichéd view of customers, especially the view that we have of rural customers in our country. Marketers think they can just tweak the urban product for the rural consumer and it will work. They do not realise that rural customers seek as much value as urban customers. But the definition of that value need not be low pricing. It is defined as ‘give me a product that is relevant to me’.

Second, the rate of innovation is very important. Companies getting out there and launching products faster than what is happening in the market is very important. Marketers feel that as long as we are first in India, it is good enough. But that’s a misconception. Today, the urban Indian customer is fully aware of what is happening globally. If you want to be the change agent, you better be competing on innovation that’s happening globally. When it’s an app, we are competing with anybody and everybody globally. That’s the world we live in.

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