Are you teasing your customer?

The moment brands irritate consumers, they will get into serious trouble. Brands such as Karbonn and MRF are riding on the IPL bandwagon. But there isn't any method in the madness, sadly.

One of the most entertaining commercials I have seen over the years is for Rolo, a brand of confectionery. The commercial opens in a zoo where a little boy is watching a baby elephant. He has a sweet in his hand and beckons the elephant, ostensibly with the intention of giving it the sweet. When it comes close to him, he pops it into his own mouth, mocking the poor elephant in the process. The film cuts to several years later where there is a young man wearing a sweater similar to that of the young boy's shown in the commercial and there is a procession of elephants which our young man is watching with interest. Suddenly one of the elephants in the procession turns around and thumps the young man on the head. Clearly the young elephant has not forgotten being tormented several years ago and the voiceover goes on to say “Think twice what you do with your last Rolo”.

Of course, the commercial demonstrates the ‘memory of an elephant' as a creative thought but more importantly it shows the need for marketers and brand managers to be careful with their consumers and not tease them or needle them unnecessarily. So what's the connection, must be the question uppermost in your mind. That's because as we get into the business end of the IPL (is there any other end?) cricket season, I feel that the organisers, the sponsors and the television channels should spare a thought for the poor customer sitting at the other end of the television screen who is being constantly harassed, bombarded and insulted. And who knows how long she is going to be patient? I say ‘she' deliberately as perhaps one of the real achievements of the IPL has been its ability to get women to come and watch not only in the stadia but also in living rooms. I think the point to be made is that while IPL has put India on the global sports marketing map and shown the world a thing or two it is certainly throwing up certain distressing signs and early warning signals that marketers must be alert to.

Properties and all that jazz

Marketers are constantly looking for properties that their brands can own and at times it is easier to buy some properties from media and try and make the most of them. The IPL has demonstrated a tremendous ability to make things sound larger than life, and “first ever' and “best ever” are terms that seem commonplace here. Let me explain. T20 cricket is all about fours and sixes and never mind about the poor bowlers who in any case are being paid to get slaughtered. The pitches are deader than mortuaries in government hospitals while the boundary ropes are being made shorter and shorter and at times rival the length of the cheerleader's skirts! So more sixes are scored in a T20 game than in a season of test cricket and not surprisingly sixes are a hot media property called the “DLF Maximum” And we have commentators who are better served being at the WWE so much do they rave and rant once the ball clears the short ropes!

And then there are the catches called the “Karbonn Kamaal Catch” which takes the cake. A fielder holds a catch which a schoolgirl would normally hold with her eyes closed before the commentator nearly has a heart attack waxing eloquent about the Karbon Kamaal Catch which could also be a Citi moment of success - another branded property from a bank that has redefined success in recent times. Nor is that all. There is another blot on the landscape in the form of an MRF blimp which is being heralded as the greatest technological innovation after the space shuttle and then there are strategic time-outs (all branded) and tons of commercials, creepy crawlers in the frames, a commercial being shown on the big screen in between balls, Akshay Kumar flying around the kitchen playing tennis and a completely bewildered and irritated consumer who doesn't know what on earth is hitting her.

Advertising makes the world go around

Mind you, I am a great fan of advertising (after all, the industry has fed and clothed me for three decades now) but surely there has to be a method in the madness. Isn't this a bit of overkill? Are these advertisers watching these commercials when they come on air or listening to what people have to say about them? I would urge them to come into my living room when a few of my friends are watching the match with me. They would cringe and immediately pull their commercials off air. Some of these brands are big – why are they trivialising themselves? Take MRF, one of the brands I truly admire. A brand which has consistently stayed with cricket, a brand with a heritage, a brand that has done so much for the game in the country, a brand that has legends endorsing it … It got the enthralling serial Bodyline into the country nearly two decades ago and persisted with cricket and has built its equity over the years. Yet, I feel sorry for the brand. If only the people in MRF would listen to the inane stuff that is being said while their blimp is being shown, they would quickly jump ship and start endorsing ice hockey. Television is not the “theatre of the mind” as radio is for the viewer to imagine what is being said. I am seeing the telecast, for God's sake! Why are you insulting my intelligence?

Why brands need to be careful

Today brands live and try to grow in a crowded marketplace. They are often trying to outshout each other and create awareness for themselves. While awareness is all fine, I think the ambience in which brands present themselves to their consumers is extremely important too. Brands have a personality and every appearance must reflect that personality. Are the brands as loud, grating and in-your-face as they are made out to be by their presence in IPL? And how can brands that are in different stages of their life adopt the same strategy? A new brand such as Karbonn that wishes to establish itself needs to perhaps shout to get attention, but should not the Citis of the world and the MRFs do something more subtle and sophisticated? In fact, it would be very interesting if the large spenders did an objective evaluation after this exposure as to what consumers think of their brands. Yes, a lot more people might be aware of the brand, but what would the values associated with the brand be?

Hype vs substance

The IPL is an entertainment extravaganza and there is a kaleidoscope of colour, sound, lights, celebrity and, on occasion, skin on display. Of course, in the middle of all this is cricket, in between strategic time-outs of course. So it is easy to get carried away. It is like watching a “first day first show” of a Rajnikant movie. There is constant excitement - rupee notes are being thrown on the screen, people are whistling, shouting and clapping. The atmosphere has to be seen to be believed. Yet, how do you evaluate the movie? Can you, at all? I think the IPL is in a similar situation. There is so much hype and hoopla around it that brands can lose their way or what is worse, lose their character. More importantly, every brand is trying to dumb itself down and talk the language of the lowest common denominator and that is bothering me as a consumer.

I think we need to remember one thing. The Indian consumer is not yet cynical. He believes the advertising that he sees and trusts in celebrities. He believes what he reads in the newspaper and what he sees on TV, He thinks the expert is objective, perhaps with a slight India bias. But what one is seeing in the IPL is the world of hyperbole. Everything is exaggerated, amplified and made larger than life. It is easy for brands to succumb to the heady potion that the IPL is dishing out. But concerns remain. If brands lose credibility then all that they have been doing for years might just become diluted.

Yes, these are challenging times, but also times of great opportunity. But as always one needs to be anchored in the basics. The basics are simple. Business is about brands and brands are about consumers. The moment brands irritate consumers, they are going to be in serious trouble. I am on the verge of getting irritated. Are you?

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly: Branding on Indian Turf.)

Who's the whitest of them all?

The marketing wars in consumer products are fought hard and bitter and the crown sits uneasy on the winner's head. Comparative advertising can be used to great effect

The detergents business is a dirty business, if you will forgive the pun. The contestants fight bitter and often unsavoury battles to garner a few percentage points of market share and once in a while, advertising is the means to secure the sordid end. Hindustan Unilever (HUL) has been the leader in the detergents market for as long as I can remember but its position has been challenged by a number of regional brands that have been eagerly snapping at its heels over the years, and recently big global players such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) too have joined the fray.

The last named, a global major that knows a thing or two about marketing warfare and strategy, is still a late entrant into the country. It would be reasonable to say that the company has come to terms with India and its consumers and has made slow but steady progress in recent times. P&G recently introduced a low-cost detergent, Tide Naturals, claiming in its ads that it provided “whiteness with special fragrance”. The product was clearly positioned against HUL's leading brands Rin and Wheel. This claim was challenged and the Madras High Court passed an order directing P&G to modify the ad as the company was not able to substantiate the claim. The court has granted an injunction and directed P&G to respond within three weeks.

But that was just the trailer with the main movie hitting the small screen over the weekend when the courts were closed, with a new Rin commercial (shown time after time in programme after programme) featuring two mothers with shopping baskets, waiting for their respective children to return from school. One of the ladies has Rin in her basket while the other has Tide Naturals. The Tide lady speaks smugly about the brand's fragrance combined with whiteness while the Rin lady, of the strong, silent type, waits for her son's shirt to do the walking and talking. The much-awaited bus eventually arrives (after all, it is only a 30-second commercial) and the Tide boy appears in a dull shirt (what else?) while the Rin boy breezes in, in a sparkling white shirt with a flabbergasted ‘Tide Auntie' staring in wonder. Of course, the well-behaved Rin boy cannot resist taking a potshot and innocently asks “ Aunty chaunk kyun gayi?”, a reference to Tide's advertising line thereby certainly providing enormous mirth to HUL's sales force at least, for it is still debatable whether this particular campaign will make them laugh all the way to the bank.

As commercials go it certainly didn't make me stand up and cheer, but to put it mildly, all hell broke loose as the media got into it. Dark threats were uttered secretly, if not publicly; legal action, complaints to ASCI were poured out … In fact “it was all happening” and people like me wondered what the lather was all about. While it seems obvious that the marketing bigwigs at P&G are getting hot under the collar, now that Holi has come and gone, let us objectively look at the situation and see what it means for advertising, the consumer and the companies in question.

The Leader Wears an Uneasy Crown

Hindustan Lever, as that's how people of my age would refer to the company, has ruled the roost in detergents, toilet soaps and shampoos for as long as I can remember. It also used to be the widow's stock, the safe option that you could bequeath to your family (people need to bathe and wash their clothes) and a ‘day-one' company on campus at IIMs. It continues to be one of the largest advertisers and one of the best marketing companies in the country. But things have changed and sadly, for the worse. I remember my boss in Mudra, A.G. Krishnamurthy, saying, “The moment you sign on a new business it is under threat.” If that is the case with advertising agencies, imagine the plight of market leaders! Not only national brands such as Nirma, but a host of other regional brands are snapping at HUL's heels, some with enormous success. The emergence of cable and satellite television has meant that a number of brands such as Power, Discount and Arasan from Tamil Nadu are giving the detergent major sleepless nights.

The fickle management graduates of today see dollar signs and their eyes seem to light up only when they see investment bankers and consulting firms (who are day-zero companies today) and are not enamoured of soaps and detergents as we were; of course, the less one speaks about HUL's performance at the stock market the better, as it brings up unpleasant memories, for me at least. Truth be told, companies such as Infosys have shown this company and the world a thing or two about stock appreciation and investor relations. To put it in a nutshell, we have a beleaguered giant being pushed to the brink, fighting for share and attention. I daresay the campaign has to be viewed in this overall context.

Comparison not new

Comparative advertising has been used to great effect by challengers such as Pepsi and mavericks such as Apple. In India Thums Up (earlier) with ‘Don't be a bandar' and more recently, Sprite, have cheekily continued to make youngsters smile and cheerfully sip the soft drinks, even as they took pot-shots at the competition. In recent times Horlicks and Complan have gone for each other's jugulars. As a general rule, comparative advertising works when the audience is more discerning and aware of the products in question. There is research to suggest that it works better in the case of high-involvement products. People buying cars and motorcycles might be interested in feature-for-feature comparisons, as to which has the greater bhp and fuel economy and so on. But will it work for detergents? In India, brands have desisted from naming their competition but the legal position is changing with the times and now brands can claim superiority as long as they do not disparage their competitors. Does the Rin commercial disparage Tide Naturals? Let's leave that to the courts and focus on the brand's choice of strategic direction.

Earlier advertising in the Indian context, in startling contrast to advertising from the West, fought shy of actually naming its competition. Pepsi would say ‘We replaced his Pepsi with a cola' in India, while they would say ‘We replaced his Pepsi with Coke' (in the MC Hammer commercial). Complan would say that they were better than brand “H” and even mentally-challenged consumers would recognise the blinding flash of the obvious and say, “Oh, are they talking about Horlicks?” Today it is okay to name the competition and often that can open up a can of worms. It is interesting to note that research suggests that when you claim that brand X is better than brand Y, consumers actually end up being confused as to which is actually better and end up buying brand Z. Often, we forget that consumers are not waiting with bated breath for our commercial and do not hang on to our every word the way we would like them to.

Questions remain

HUL might be patting itself on the back for hitting out at Tide which is a smaller player, but is the commercial really something to write home about? Is comparative advertising the way to go? How credible are these independent laboratory tests on which the commercial is based? How different is the theme of this commercial from detergent advertising of two decades ago? In the mid-Eighties Surf Excel ran a commercial with Lalithaji, where envious ladies tell the camera that she is showing off with new clothes on Sport's Day while the truth is that she has washed her clothes with Surf. (God, it must be tough to write detergent scripts!) Does the commercial disparage its competition?

While the timing of the release of the ad seems to have been planned to precision (over a weekend when the courts were closed), does the execution have the same meticulous attention to detail? Surely, surely, there has to be a better way of showing that your product is superior. I always believe that strategy sounds awesome on paper but customers don't get to see the strategy document, all they get to see is a 30-second commercial.

Having said all that, what is my personal view? Give me a “ Daag acche hain” any day!

Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly - Branding on Indian Turf.)

Sachin Brandman

An endorsement that is truly synergistic with the maestro's core is yet to be seen..

Who is greater - Sachin Tendulkar or Don Bradman? I have never watched the great Don Bradman bat, live, poor me, born as I was in 1952, four years after the great man walked away, bat under his arm at the Oval, after being bowled by Eric Hollies for a duck (his eyes misted over perhaps by the tremendous reception), so I am least qualified to comment on the relative merits of either or “compare and contrast” as we were taught to in school. There is, however, no doubt that Sachin Tendulkar's 200 ‘not out' in a one-day international (ODI) has given Indians something to cheer about even if opinion is divided on Pranab Mukherjee's Budget which followed immediately after.

Sunil Gavaskar has promptly thrown his hat into the ring by saying Sachin is the greatest the game has produced, Don or no Don. David Frith, a celebrated writer of the game, on the other hand, whilst lauding Sachin's phenomenal achievements, says “Sorry India, the Don is better”. Let me present my two bits on the subject. Sachin is easily the greatest player that we have had the good fortune to see, live, and am I glad that I have watched him not only take on Shane Warne, Shoaib Akhtar, Brett Lee, Dale Steyn and Glenn McGrath, but also take them all to the cleaners. Having said that, I believe comparisons are odious. Bradman never wore a helmet, played on uncovered pitches, faced bodyline, did not have the super-compressed powerhouses (read bats) that today's batsmen use or had the ropes pulled in to allow sixes to be hit at will. So let's not get into the futile controversy of who is the greatest but let us just celebrate our own maestro and remind ourselves that a couple of years ago some were baying for his blood.

So let me just stay with Sachin the brand and the endorser of a million (okay, hundred) products, the man who has shown the way to sponsorship to a host of less talented sportsmen for over twenty years, the man who has earned crores of rupees and will continue to earn crores more as long as he wishes to earn them. How can brands capitalise on the aura around the man, use it and yet not get sucked into it? What should the strategy for ‘brand Sachin' be now that its valuation is at an ‘all-time' high?

Surrounded by men with feet of clay

The sports world has its own share of celebrities from different sports and from different parts of the world, many of whom probably earn a lot more than Sachin Tendulkar, given the popularity of the respective sports in the countries that they live in. Whilst the sporting prowess and the consequent ability of these people to make news and make money were hardly in question, there was another side to these great sportsmen: They all had feet of clay, to put it mildly. They had roving eyes, their marriages were as fragile as the Indian batting line-up had been in the past, their fingers were ever ready to send raunchy text messages, they indulged in scraps at bars, had the ability to resist anything but temptation … what colourful lives some of these celebrities have led! But while that makes for titillating reading to all of us, it has certainly given the sponsors quite a few sleepless nights. With every Tiger Woods joke doing the round on the Internet, Accenture must have squirmed just a little more. And this is perhaps the greatest advantage with Sachin Tendulkar, who has a squeaky clean, almost boring reputation, for which I am sure sponsors are willing to pay a premium. If there has been the slightest discordant note it has been the tax imbroglio involving his Ferrari and my personal quibble is he switched camps from MRF which picked him up as a fresh-faced kid, to Adidas. But who am I to crib?

Tendulkar power: just go get it!

I have been watching the sojourn of Tendulkar as a model and as an endorser over the years. Of course, he has been a very saleable commodity and has been cheerfully and freely used by his admirers. Was a time when he was the only batsman doing well whilst all around him the Indian team was collapsing like nine pins and Amul cheekily wrote an ad that read “Tendu ten don't” with a picture of a defiant little champion along with images of ten other desolate Indians. But then Tendulkar has always been in the news and for the right reasons.
The earliest commercial of Sachin Tendulkar that I can remember is for Pepsi, where a baby-faced Sachin and his school batting partner Vinod Kambli indulge in acrobatics to get the only remaining bottle of Pepsi after a round of strenuous practice, only to have it taken by the captain Azhar who cheekily says “Relax boys, have a Pepsi” while both have flabbergasted looks on their faces. Sachin grew in stature, became more mature even if his voice was a bit squeaky. One of the best fits for Sachin that I could remember was for Visa the credit card. Visa was looking for a young, middle-class Indian who had nothing but the ability to make it to the top, as that was the message it wished to convey to young India.

And which better role model than the young cricketer who came from a lower middle-class family, set Shivaji Park alight, broke records and later bowlers' backs to become the finest player that India had ever produced? The commercial was a hit. I remember the commercial being played during the tournament at Sharjhah were Sachin set the stadium and the whole of India alight with his once-in-a-life time ‘desert storm' when he beat Australia single-handed. I remember the client getting hundreds of calls that night for Visa credit cards. With every four that was being hit and with every exposure of the commercial, the wires were getting burned at the Visa call centre as everyone wanted Visa Power.

A true victor

Another landmark commercial for brand Sachin has been for TVS Victor that was launched just before the cricket World Cup in 2003 in South Africa. Sachin dazzled as he took on team after team and attack after attack with breathtaking freshness. India fell at the final hurdle but Sachin was the true victor, and TVS went on record to say that the choice of Sachin as their brand ambassador was one of the prime reasons for the brand's successful launch.

Yes, Sachin has delivered and not only on the cricket field but at the cash register as well. Other brands such as Boost have used Sachin as the ‘secret of their energy'. There have been scores of others, the more recallable ones being MRF and Adidas. Yes, the Sachin juggernaut has rolled on, taking several brands with it and I have only talked about a few because of constraints of space. Sachin is at the very moment at the very pinnacle of his prowess, and has a record that no one can hope to achieve, not even Ricky Ponting (who is suddenly realising that he will have a lot more catching up to do). So that brings me to the million dollar question: Here is the most saleable commodity India has, a jewel in our crown and the envy of the world. But being the brand he has always been, he has, naturally, a price tag, so will you or won't you sign on the legend?

Make the most of the moment

It is quite likely that the marketing machinery will get into high speed as the maestro's prices skyrocket. While one cannot put a price on his phenomenal ability, using him has been and will always be a business decision. Ultimately every celebrity decision is one of cost versus benefit. Consider that. Emotional decisions rarely work. I think it is time for brands to realise that they have to go beyond Sachin's presence and aura which will definitely help awareness.

But what next? The future will belong to any brand that captures the essence of the great man. And what is that essence? It is the ability to constantly reinvent himself. It is the enthusiasm of a child for the game, which enables him to dive full length to stop the ball after playing for 20 years. Brands constantly struggle to remain young, attractive and relevant to newer audiences. They should take a lesson or two from the ageless master. Let's hope that some brand, any brand, will capture the true essence of Sachin and achieve a brand fit that has not happened so far, in his case, at least. Someone has to write a memorable script that embodies the true Sachin, for what brand Sachin has been missing over the years has been a breakthrough script. Now that he has scored 200 in an ODI, it is perhaps time that the script too makes a dramatic entry.
And despite all the debate about who is the best, something tells me Sir Don Bradman would have approved of the successor to the mantle of the greatest batsman of all time.

(The writer is the CEO of brand-comm and the author of ‘Googly - Branding on Indian Turf'.)Ramanujam Sridhar

Image Source : 3BP

The trouble with customer service

Aspiring to create a service differential is a noble thing but make sure your routine services are handled well. While it is all fine to strive to build a service differential it is certainly risky to embark on the pillow trail if the other routine service stuff is not handled adequately.

Customer service or should one say the lack of it, is a great conversation opener. I always wonder which opens up tongues more, the brew from Scotland or poor customer service. I am sure it is the latter and even the most stubborn of introverts have no difficulty opening up to total strangers as their tale of woe about one service provider or the other finds a more than sympathetic listener who is more than willing to share his own horror story. Sadly though, there is a lot of heat that the subject generates and even a few laughs, but not too much light is shed on the way forward. After all, as Indians we love to criticise when the shoe is on someone else's foot even if we do not have something constructive to offer. But there are exceptions to conversations about service and I experienced this when I had the opportunity to interview Dr A. Parasuraman, Vice-Dean of Faculty and Professor at the University of Miami, an acknowledged expert on service quality and a renowned and respected academician. He has one more admirable qualification that I must table – he was my senior at Don Bosco school in Chennai's Egmore, and what better qualifications can a person have to talk about service or for that matter any subject under the sun! Tempted as I am to wax eloquent about my alma mater, my escapades that were part of my life there and my penchant for churning out impositions (with amazing regularity), I shall desist and stay with the less glamorous topic of customer service.

Pillow talk

Parasu, as he is affectionately referred to, had come to India to be the keynote speaker at the Custommerce summit at Mumbai earlier this month. I used the opportunity to spend quality time with him and as always he came up with some interesting insights that have been a feature of his writing and teaching over the years. His ideas made me think about my own experiences as a customer which too are reflected in this piece. He shared an interesting experience of his where he had been to a star hotel which welcomed him with a glitzy ‘pillow menu' in addition to the usual stuff that people who inhabit five-star hotels are familiar with. Even to this social class that has been there and done that a ‘pillow menu' is certainly a rarity and worth talking about.
So what happens when you see a glossy pillow menu listing ten different types of pillows (from soft to medium to hard), one of which would be delivered to your room at the touch of a button? The first is that you are impressed enormously and can hardly wait to rest your head on one of those fluffy things. The second, which does not have to wait till you go to bed and which happens almost immediately, is that your expectations from the hotel skyrocket (how good will this hotel be that actually thinks up a ‘pillow menu') and quickly plummet when the hotel forgets to give you your wake up call in the morning which is something that most hotels normally do without too much trouble. There is an important learning for organisations from this incident. While it is all fine to strive to build a service differential it is certainly risky to embark on the pillow trail as you can so easily end with egg on your face if the other routine service stuff is not handled adequately. As an aside, the innovation too is pretty expensive as you have to create a glossy brochure, actually find different types of pillows and handle the inventory for hundreds of rooms, not to forget the additional personnel that such a service entails.

Routine or non-routine?

Parasu spoke at length about the routine aspects of service and the non-routine aspects of service that companies constantly have to deliver. Let's take the case of airlines - ticketing, checking in people, delivery of baggage are all routine stuff and companies usually have a process to handle this. Of course, let's not forget for a moment that while these are ‘hygiene' factors, the inability to deliver on this could cause disproportionate angst when the airlines slip up on any of these. Parasu argues that while organisations do have a process for the delivery of routine service, they come to grief often when they have to face non-routine service demands. They usually have metrics to measure their performance on routine stuff, like how long it takes or should take for a person to check in, how long before the luggage arrives to the room after check-in, and so on.
What happens in the case of non-routine stuff is quite another kettle of fish altogether. How often have we seen tired, weary travellers anxious to go home after a long and draining flight only to be told that their baggage is not on the same flight! This is clearly a non-routine event and the service provider that is prepared for this, the one that has metrics for measurement and has a back-up plan to tackle contingencies such as these will win the service stakes.

Of course, every industry has its own share of non-routine events. Take the hotel industry - how often have we seen irate hotel guests losing their cool in the lobby when they are told they do not have a reservation, though they very clearly believe they have one! They tell the whole world, even if they are not interested in the story, about how pathetic the hotel is and how it needs to overhaul its reservation systems! We have seen in our own experience in the consulting business too, when a client wants as scope of deliverables something that we are not readily used to, the entire process goes into a tizzy and needless delays occur in submitting a proposal, which in any case is the easiest of the various stages in the consulting process.

A non-routine dosa!

With my mind full of routine and non-routine service experiences I came back to Bangalore, the dosa capital of India (or so we would like to believe). The newest joint making waves in Bangalore is a restaurant called Maiyya in Jayanagar which has people waiting forever (or so it seems) to get into, three stories that are brimming with hungry residents of Bangalore, a stand-and-drink coffee centre and a bakery all rolled in one. We went there as a large group and complicated the normally efficient hotel as we asked for non-routine stuff! Bangalore has this habit of inserting chutney inside the dosa which is a specialty (or a pain) depending on which side of the Cauvery you belong to. I cannot handle it whilst some in my group wanted it that way, our instructions to have a few with and a few without created so much chaos and caused so much angst, with the wrong dosas being served and being returned, and everyone including the waiter was thoroughly aggrieved in the bargain. I am sure that he never wants to see my bald head again and I am sure I am never going back. If only, I thought to myself, if only I could have stayed with the simple, routine dosa the way it is served in Karnataka, I might have never realised the value of the point being made by Parasu, for after all, nothing has such a lasting impression as the lesson learnt on an empty stomach!

Service is in the details

So here are a few thoughts that you can mull over in the context of customer service:
Is more time being consumed in talking about service in your company than actually delivering it?
Is your senior management committed to customercentricity and service?
How well is your technology integrated with your entire service offering?
How closely do you monitor both your routine and non-routine service deliveries?
Do you have metrics to measure and monitor both?
How good are your retrieval mechanisms when something goes wrong, for a retrieval situation can actually provide a wonderful opportunity to cover lost ground.

The reality is that service is hardly as glamorous as it is made out to be. It is unremitting, constant attention to detail, boring, repetitive but with great scope for both irritating and turning away your customers. And yet, there is a pot of gold to be won at the end of the ordeal, as so few service providers make the cut with an increasingly demanding customer.
Are you the one?

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly - Branding on Indian Turf.)

Image Source: InsideSocal

Mani Ayer's two-word mantra

S. R. Mani Ayer,Former Managing Director, Ogilvy & Mather

Ayer was visiting Chennai. I presented with great enthusiasm a campaign we had developed for a client. Little did I know about the two-word weapon he would use to assess it.

Ayer put every advertisement to the ‘So what?' test. It was the quickest way to check for relevance. How does it matter to the audience? How does it matter to the client? Often, these two words removed the puff and helped us discover the essence of what we wanted to say. Much as we dreaded the sessions where we laid out advertising strategies and creative work to SRA, the discussions that ensued were enriching.

Ayer hired me at Ogilvy Benson & Mather in 1975. In my very first interview on December 2, 1974, he said, “I will hire you. I don't know when and where.”

I did not know how to react to this. I asked him if I could call up to find out. “Sure. Once a week.” Thereafter from December until March, I called him every Thursday at 9:15 a.m. sharp. The conversation was simple.
“Good Morning, Mr Ayer. Sridhar here. Any news for me, Mr Ayer?”
“Not yet. Keep in touch.”
Finally, he gave me my letter in March 1975. He sent me to Chennai soon thereafter.

October 11, 1976. Four of us from Chennai had come to Mumbai to attend an account management training programme. Three of my colleagues died in an air crash that morning. I had stayed back to visit my sister, but the Times of India had also carried my name in the list of passengers who were killed. On hearing the news, I rushed to Apeejay House.

Ayer was visibly relieved to see me. You could see he was disturbed but he had to take charge and move on. He asked me, “Is it OK for you to fly this evening?” I returned to Chennai and he arrived the next day.

I saw a great leader, a compassionate human in action in the days that followed. I accompanied him on his visits to the families. He quickly put together a team to run OBM, Chennai. Supriya Das from our Kolkata office moved in to run the office until we could hire a manager. Mohan Menon moved from Mumbai to look after the Creative Department.
Ayer would fly in every week to meet clients, spend time with us and keep us going.

There used to be a Southern Railway Canteen opposite Higginbotham's. We used to have curd rice for lunch there. Ayer would join us for these curd rice lunches.

He and I used to visit Bangalore to meet Vijaya Bank and Binny's. We used to take the Bangalore mail and stay at Barton Court. Travelling with Ayer was an extraordinary experience. He was a fund of knowledge and a great storyteller. I remember one particular trip when we spoke throughout the night until we arrived in Bangalore.

As he helped me grow in the organisation, I began to understand this extraordinary person. Plagued by self-doubt, I often went to him with my resignation. He would listen to me with infinite patience, give me tips on what to do, and I would go back confident and happy. It was like talking to a therapist. He made me feel valued, respected and important. Many of us proudly call ourselves graduates of the Ayer school. He helped us realise our potential — he nurtured us as he would plants in a garden.

When Suresh Mullick passed away, he was keen to bring out a book on him and entrusted me with the task. The project did not take off for quite some time. I was embarrassed about my inaction but Ayer was kind and patient. Finally, we managed to put together an e-book on Suresh. I feel blessed he gave me a task that was dear to him.

He was a boss, a mentor, a coach, guru — no single word can describe my relationship with him. He lit a flame in each of us who worked with him. It is a flame eternal, that will continue. Those of us who were lucky enough to receive must be gracious enough to give. That is what he taught us.

(The writer is a graduate of the Ayer school.)

In niches there are riches!

Leading from the front:Harsh Mariwala, CMD, Marico

Harsh Mariwala of Marico shows the importance of clear strategy and meticulous execution..

Creating a culture in an organisation is easier said than done. It calls for rigorous implementation and the use of training. It calls for constant communication and collaboration amongst the key people in the organisation.

January 31 is a special day for people in advertising and marketing in Bangalore as it is the day the Ayaz Peerbhoy memorial lecture has been delivered to an eager audience over the years. It has been a calendar event for the Advertising Club, Bangalore for years now. This time it was the 29 th such occasion that the lecture was being delivered and the speaker was in no way inferior in achievement to his illustrious predecessors who had delivered it earlier - a who's who of Indian industry, people such as R. Goplakrishnan, C.K.Ranganathan and Kishore Biyani, to name just a few. Harsh Mariwala, Chairman and Managing Director of Marico Ltd, spoke about the exciting corporate journey of innovation that his company had taken over the years with little nuggets of wisdom and experience that had the audience thinking and perhaps wondering why they were unable to do the same with their own companies. The man embodied what his company stood for - understated, yet with the ability to think differently and inspire a whole bunch of MBAs to leading the company from a modest turnover of Rs 5 crore not too long ago to Rs 2,800 crore today.

Strategy is key

One of the most abused words in management literature is that curious word ‘strategy'. I say curious because different people have different perceptions of the word strategy. In the case of my students in business school, they have heard the word repeated so often by so many different people, that they have it coming out of their ears and often are clueless as to what it actually is. But less of my students and more of Marico Industries. Strategy, as any expert will tell you, is basically sacrifice, as when you choose one particular segment you ignore others, and at times the grass can always seem to be greener on the other side. Marico has consistently stayed in areas that have seemed niches (mind you, some of them have become pretty large over the years), areas where it could dominate and where it did not have to contend with MNCs with deep pockets and staying power.

The company that was primarily in the low-value commodity business transformed itself consciously over the years into a high value FMCG company. Often, people in marketing, thanks to their preoccupation with the brand and sales promotions, do not acknowledge the importance of culture and people to the brand's success. Mariwala placed the transformation of the organisation's culture and the dissemination of values as the key factors behind the success of the company and the brands driving it. It is often the ‘blinding flash of the obvious', but simple things such as sharing of information, being on first-name basis with the senior management, higher responsibilities or cross-functional exposure, though often talked about, are not practised with the same zeal with which they are spoken by companies. Clearly, Marico has been doing it, with great success, so that it has become internalised now.

A lot of Marico's success has been due to Parachute, the leading coconut oil brand. Parachute is a brand that most Indians, particularly in the South have used and continue to use, those with hair at least. When Mr Mariwala spoke about some of the innovations that the brand had been doing over the years, my mind wandered (as it seems to do more often these days). Often enough, copywriters in agencies turn up their noses when asked to create advertising for certain products saying these are ‘dull', and my response usually has been, “There are no dull products, only dull writers!”

Similarly, it is easy to view coconut oil as just a commodity, but the company has not and the results are there to show for it. The company did a number of packaging innovations starting with HDPE and also through its specially designed pack prevented freezing, something that is very common in the North of India. The seal guarantee also made it difficult to duplicate, even for the experts that India seems to unearth so often in this wonderful world of fakes and imitations. Parachute entered the rural market through laminated pouches and its flip-top and mini-packs brought in a new category of users. Innovations continued with the promotion of the concept of ‘ champi' with Parachute before shampooing. Suddenly, the category had become visible and attractive to the Levers of this world. And as Hindustan Lever (as Hindustan Unilever was then known), acquired Tomco, it promoted Nihar aggressively and threw its weight of distribution and promotions behind it. Levers even tried to take over the brand and Marico's stock price fell dramatically.

But the company counter-attacked, held on to its market shares, eventually did a David and also did the unthinkable (at that time, at least) by acquiring Nihar in 2006. Strike one for an Indian company against a large multinational! Innovation can often be a treadmill and the companies that are on it refuse to get off and the attempts to morph Parachute from a coconut oil brand to a beauty brand continue with variants, new fragrances and new formulations.

From the head to the heart

Very few people of my age can get away without using Saffola, thanks to the benefits of relaxed lifestyle built around addiction to the couch and the picture tube and a tremendous ability to postpone anything that suggests even the mildest physical activity. We are the people that keep doctors and the makers of Saffola laughing all the way to the bank. Just to put things in proper perspective, Saffola, all said and done could have been just another cooking oil, but it strongly positioned itself on the heart platform, taking the stance of a leader on World Heart Day and propagated walking every day.

True to company culture, innovations continued, like the 15-litre tap to enable ease of usage. But Saffola realised it had the capability and the competence to build on the equity in the health segment as it introduced oil blends and brand extensions such as low sodium salt and products in the area of diabetes and cholesterol management. Over the years the brand has moved from being just another edible oil brand to a health brand.

Marico has moved on to skin care with a bevy of Kaya skin care centres that are making waves all over India as young Indians get more conscious of the way they look and are opening their wallets to the new concept all over the country.

Significantly, the company has been avoiding the franchise route as it wishes to control the quality of service and the output that customers receive.

Creating a culture of innovation

Creating a culture in an organisation is easier said than done. It calls for rigorous implementation and the use of training. It calls for constant communication and collaboration amongst the key people in the organisation. The company too has been empowering its people by committing resources and ensuring that new members are carefully integrated into the organisation. The key thing about innovation is not only about ideas but about their implementation.

So what are the learnings for people who are leading organisations or teams?

Do you believe in your people?

Are you open to ideas?

Can you build a team of ‘constructive yes men' and not ‘boring yes men'?

Can you create a culture where there is a willingness to experiment and learn from failures?

Can you keep being innovative over a period of time however difficult and however expensive?

Success stories are good to read about after they have happened and there are lots of things to be learnt from examples like these. I have probably made it out to be a lot simpler than it actually has been for the company and the people who made it happen. They had a leader who believed in the team and who led from the front without actually getting in the way of his charged troops. It is certainly not a rags-to-riches story but a story that demonstrates that if you have a clear strategy and meticulous execution then niches are certainly the way to riches.

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly - Branding On Indian Turf.)

Loyalty in a promiscuous world!

When I was young (how distant that seems) we had one scooter in India, the Bajaj Chetak. One waited seven years to get a scooter (and one was branded as fortunate by one’s envious neighbors if it was allotted) and sold it seven years later for the price at which one bought it for! You waited 4 years to get a white Premier Padmini and promptly booked ones next one so that one could get it 4 years later! Thankfully times have changed for the consumer and one has over 700 models of cars to choose from. If one wants to buy a pressure cooker today in India one can choose from 250 brands. Yes today as I have choice, I find that I am hardly loyal. Many of today’s consumers seem to exhibit the roving eye of a Shane Warne of yesteryear or Tiger Woods of today. Is there a truly loyal customer? One wonders. Instead of needless conjecture let us look at what brands and companies are doing and let’s figure out whether it is working.

The myth of the loyalty program

Airlines, retail chains, credit card companies, hotels…. all of these have loyalty programs that are run with varied degrees of success. They remember our birthdays, our anniversaries; remind us when we have not visited the store for some time… I was the first citizen of India’s first retail chain. I shall not name it as it is widely recognized as a leading light in marketing practices! So much for our judgment! But let me cut to the chase. My name is Sridhar Ramanujam which even I recognize is a mouthful. There is little that we can do about our names unfortunately, unless we are in politics and believe in numerology. But I am digressing. Perhaps as a consequence of the strangeness of my name I have received over 70 mailers addressed to Sridhar Raitanujam! Each one of these mailers would make me wince! As one of my less sympathetic friends said “they probably know you love curd (raita) that is why they are referring to you as Raitanujam”. Small comfort! Marketing is all about execution, not lofty statements and the least a consumer wants is for the company to spell his or her name right! Though in the same breath I must compliment Jet Airways (my former favorite) for sending me a mailer with an intriguing caption that read “Now we see you, Now we don’t” referring to the fact that I had not been using the airline for a few months. (Of course I say former favourite because Jet is systematically messing up its brand, with its Jet Konnect, but that is not the brief for this piece). The biggest problem with all these loyalty programs is that they have limited success and quickly disintegrate into distribution or expectation of freebies thereby diluting the brand’s equity. What is the difference between one brand’s loyalty program and another’s? With everyone bending over backwards to offer the same, loyalty programs have become a bare minimum, or a hygiene factor and hardly a differentiator.

It is all about the “Wow” factor

Sometimes it is not a bad idea to revisit the basics. One of the most abused words in marketing is ‘customer delight’ where the customer is floored by something that she does not expect from the service provider. In fact she is so thrilled by the experience that she tells the whole world about her experience. Let me share an anecdote that I heard somewhere. A customer was trading his car for another car. He drives out of the dealer outlet in his brand new car and switches on the radio. To his delight the radio in his new car is programmed exactly in the same way his old radio was – the first channel being the weather, the second the news, the third rock music… Can you imagine the happy surprise that the customer must have experienced? The key thing to be remembered is that it is not done by some major company executive with a strong sense of service but by a committed mechanic who wanted to excel at what he was doing. The challenge of course is that in most organizations service excellence is the outcome of a few outstanding individuals and has not been institutionalised.

So what does this mean for companies and brands?

The customer is changing dramatically and her expectations are being fuelled not only by the increasing affluence but by her own spiraling aspirations.

Companies are spending too much time on building expectations and too little in delivering them.

How much time and effort is being spent on training employees to deliver the “wow” experience?

How many companies spend time on understanding the ‘life time value’ of customers and what are they doing to hang on to their customers for dear life?

As always all these questions are probably easier to ask than to answer but companies must realize that customers are the very source of their business. Let me end with a quote by Mike Clasper who said “I would label the consumer of 2025 in three ways: more demanding, wiser and more worried."

Are you ready to serve tomorrow’s demanding customer today?

Ramanujam Sridhar is the CEO of brand-comm and the author of ‘Googly. Branding on Indian turf.’

Image Source: Shaira Vincie

Beware the aura of IPL

Some of the glitz and glamour is bound to pall, given that there's much cricket from around the world being beamed into living rooms in India..

Stars all:The owners of the teams, Ness Wadia and Preity Zinta (Kings XI Punjab - left, extreme right), Shilpa Shetty (Rajasthan Royals – second from left) and IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi (second from right).

Australian cricket dominated pretty much all opposition it came up against from the mid-'90s till the end of 2006 at least, thanks to two outstanding champions, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar individuals in one team, but they had one thing in common — both were champions. Batsmen came to grief against these two, who often bowled their team to victory in tandem, more often than not because opposing teams ended up playing more than mere bowlers but battled the strength of their collective auras which combined to make the Australian team almost impossible to beat. Batsmen, thanks to the benefit of TV technology, had nightmares of the Gatting ball (or the ball of the century as it was branded) whenever the blond leg spinner came to bowl. They unearthed demons that were non-existent and played for drift that seemed larger than life and lost their wickets with surprising ease. As for McGrath, his annoying ability to deliver ball after ball on the same spot added as much to the pressure as his in-your-face displeasure if the batsman had the temerity to hit him for four.

Whilst there is no denying the phenomenal ability of these two bowlers, their success, in no small measure, was due to people sitting in the commentator's box and the media enclosures who aided and abetted the batsman's downfall with their analysis till paralysis of the bowlers' collective and individual abilities. Batsmen predictably ended up making horrendous errors of judgment and finished up looking silly, like Atherton often did, to the obvious delight of Aussie fans. When I looked at the recent IPL auction, with Kieron Pollard being bought for a staggering $750,000, I just wondered if there was a similarity between what happened on the cricket field earlier and what is happening now under the hammer and also analyse what has generally been happening with IPL since its inception.

Giving IPL its due

Make no mistake about it, India runs the cricketing world, much to the chagrin of some of our less fortunate cricket boards. India has the eyeballs, the sponsors, the money, the ability to brand and sell anything, including the weather forecast that precedes cricket matches, and just about everything that makes the world go around and everything that can make its detractors go around the bend. Often enough, India has made no bones about its clout and has blatantly flaunted it. But even diehard critics and the prophets of doom have had to concede that the IPL has been a marketing coup that showed the entire world a thing or two about sports marketing. It is a real concern though that IPL may hasten the demise of test cricket, but let us resist the temptation to set the cat amongst the pigeons just yet and stay with the marketing of IPL. IPL demonstrated the ability of its creators to build a brand in a very short period of time, create and deliver value even as it commanded a phenomenal premium for its offerings — whether it was television rights, franchisee bids for the teams or its ability to make players from all over the world drop everything and come running to India. Interestingly, some of them, such as Collingwood and Owais Shah who were constantly complaining about player workload, did not even get a game despite travelling halfway across the world!

It's a brand new world

Kieron Pollard, who was sold for $750,000, to Mumbai Indians
IPL has been all about brands, sponsorships and celebrities of varied hues. It has seen the emergence of unlikely businesspersons in people such as Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty from the world of entertainment, a charismatic business leader in Vijay Mallya entering cricket, Nita Ambani and a range of companies from media, infrastructure and cement, all of whom have forked out enormous amounts of money. It has also seen some of the office-bearers of the BCCI as owners of teams which might upset the purists but in Indian cricket, as we all know, anything goes, including the obnoxious behaviour of people such as Sreesanth and Ajit Agarkar. The bidding for the players has been a high-profile event where ordinary mortals such as you and I can witness how the rich and famous bid huge sums of money for the superstars of the T20 stage just the way they might bid for thoroughbreds! The IPL, quite simply put, is a heady mix of entertainment, glitz and glamour, with some cricket thrown in somewhere in the middle! But it is working or has been working for the people involved, including teams from Australia and the West Indies who have come to India, won and made an enormous amount of money in the bargain? Of course, if media reports are to be believed, the winning team from New South Wales has not been paid, but should we waste our time with needless details such as these?

Get ready for the next edition of IPL

The next edition of IPL will hit not only Indian grounds, Indian crowds, and global television audiences but also an online audience through YouTube. One of the characteristics of the IPL brand has been innovation even if one were to ignore the strategy break which was a poorly disguised attempt to sell more commercial time! Who knows, there may soon be pink balls! But in all fairness the brand has tried to innovate constantly and really showcased the enormous marketing acumen of the people who have been the brains behind this amazingly successful venture. They have been able to smell money anywhere!

A word of caution

Having spoken of IPL's tremendous strengths and offerings it is perhaps worthwhile to sound a word of caution to people who are placing enormous bets on the event and continue to do so. Clearly they are being carried away by the moment as they seem to be awestruck by the aura of IPL and are not placing as much emphasis on the possible return on investment that they seem to be making without so much as batting an eyelid! Starting from the franchisee bids for the teams, IPL has been all about premium pricing. Franchisees too ended up paying phenomenal sums of money, not only for the players, but for Indian stars with iconic status, many of whom will certainly not play for their country in the T20 format of the game.

The pricing for the television spots has been extremely high and some of the initial sheen, in my view, at least, is bound to wear off thanks to the phenomenal amount of cricket that is being played across the world, all of which is being shown in India, including the KFC big bash. But my biggest bone of contention has been the often reckless manner in which team owners have been buying cricketers. Many of the big-ticket items have been poor buys. Names such as Andrew Symonds, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Flintoff, Kieron Pollard and even Shane Bond come to mind. Shane Bond is an amazing cricketer, with an astoundingly straight action amidst a generation of varying degrees of crookedness, but to pay what he is being paid for delivering four overs defies logic. Whilst I am happy for the benign policeman whose pension must be adequately provided for, I have nothing but scepticism about the outcome which might turn out to be a worse buy than the highly priced Ishant Sharma. I wonder if teams and their owners are succumbing to the aura and the excitement of the moment, the glare, the media attention, all of which does not make for sensible decision-making.

A prediction about the IPL ahead

Soon it will be IPL time and old foes will lock horns again, some of them with reconstituted teams. Younger legs will replace more tired ones and a new lot of retired and ICL players will make their debut, such as Damien Martyn and Shane Bond. The Pakistanis will be missing and have left no one wondering about their displeasure. Only the retired Australians will be here. But it is just preceding the T20 World Cup and just after a crowded season where everyone was playing everyone else. The Under 19 World Cup is happening in New Zealand and many young Indians will soon be tempted with money, big money. Yes, it is all waiting to happen. But my suggestion to people who are going to put their money where their mouth is, is to keep their hands carefully inside their pockets. Evaluate every opportunity with the care that it deserves. IPL is McGrath and Warne several times over in the magnitude of its aura. Bring back old fashioned Yorkshire wisdom to your decision-making lest you play a shot that Geoffrey Boycott would brand as “rubbish”.

(Ramanujam Sridhar is the CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly. Branding On Indian Turf".)

Learning from the Idiots

3 Idiots as a marketing phenomenon..

Aamir Khan is no idiot. Well, that certainly seems like a `no brainer' but let me clarify based on my own experiences. Nearly two decades ago (although it seems like just yesterday), I used to be the head of the Southern operations of a large advertising agency and TI Cycles was one of our best, if not one of our largest, clients. One day we got a call from the client asking us if we could come over to discuss something. Agencies are normally pretty good at obeying instructions, so we promptly landed up at the client's office. There were two young men from Bombay (as the city used to be called in those glorious days) nattily dressed as MBAs usually are, making a slick presentation on `in film' placement. They were describing a scenario with great gusto.

The film, they said, was about two schools in a hill station. One was a government school where ordinary people studied, including the hero. The second school was the upmarket, private school with rich (read spoiled) kids. The two schools were bitter rivals and the high point of their academic life was the annual sports day, which featured a cycle race as the show piece event. Here the pitch got interesting, as they said the film would feature the BSA SLR (the brand made and marketed by TI Cycles) which the hero would ride. He would win the race against the 16-gear sports bike ridden by his rival, a snooty kid from the elite school. The bike would be featured prominently in this climax scene with logo shots, tight close-ups showing the features of the bike . the works. The heroine would hug the hero (and, if we wanted, the bike) after the race.
You get the picture! They offered this package for Rs 5 lakh, I think (though my memory for numbers is no longer as reliable as it once used to be). The client baulked and sought our opinion. Now agencies are extremely protective of their turf (read budget) and this was money going straight from the overall advertising budget. So we hemmed and hawed and the client declined. That movie was Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, one of Aamir Khan's earliest hits. Simply put, we had missed a wonderful opportunity. But I realised even then, though I had no idea how successful he would become, his ability to market and monetise ideas.

Learning from filmi types

Gary Hamel, the renowned management guru, was of the view that companies are better off looking `outside' of their industry if they are to learn rather than look at their own peers and competitors. As we tend to look down at the creative ability of Bollywood, we often underestimate their great ability to come up with marketable ideas and their capacity to create excitement around the films they produce. I realised the wisdom of this statement again when I saw Aamir Khan's 3 Idiots which, incidentally, has been shot at the IIM Bangalore campus, an institution that has made a tremendous difference to my career. Let me quickly reassure you, dear reader, that I am no film critic and my observations will be restricted to the tremendous marketing initiatives and learning that the film provides.

Hype - a double-edged sword?

We live in a world of hype and nowhere is it more in evidence than in Bollywood and Kollywood! Yet one has seen instances where the films do not match up to the tremendous pre-release hype and end up as flat as last season's beer. In films, marketing and life, if one may add, success is all about delivering expectations. 3 Idiots was no exception to the pre-release hard-sell and publicity. The build-up was phenomenal. Hype can and often is a double-edged sword, it is like good advertising for a bad product as it can make the product go downhill faster. But thankfully in the case of 3 Idiots, the film was interesting, justifying all the pre-launch publicity. But there is more.

Excitement is the name of the game

3 Idiots did many of the usual things that films do prior to their launch. There were promotions on TV, star appearances with the stars walking the ramp, appearances at showings of the film (nearly causing a riot in Bangalore), online contests, game shows, invitation to three school officials from a small village who took their first flight, to seat butts in multiplexes so that people could photograph themselves like the protagonists in the movie, to customised merchandise designed by Pantaloons.

Now while it is quite easy to create excitement, more so for films in a film-crazed country, the challenge is to sustain it. 3 Idiots certainly was able to do it. The greatest news-making event (though I am not sure if it was planned) was the controversy regarding Chetan Bhagat and his book Five Point Someone on which the film has been based. I have something in common with Aamir Khan (finally) as I too have not read the book but then I am hardly a hero!
In case you have not been reading the papers or watching TV over the last few weeks, the bone of contention was simple. Chetan Bhagat believes (perhaps rightly) that he has not got the credit he deserves for the film as his name came at the very end. The producers believe they have paid him the money and adhered to the terms of the contract. Given the track record of film producers when it comes to authors in the past, this is, perhaps, not unexpected. Without going into the rights and wrongs of this, I will just borrow a phrase from Vir Sanghvi's column where he gave the example of Slumdog Millionaire and unlike the people involved in that project, in the case of 3 Idiots the producers acted without `grace'. But the audience was titillated with people taking sides, writing about it in blogs and giving television interviews. Not surprisingly, Chetan Bhagat's books flew off the shelf. I am reminded of what a wag had to say about the highly visible Vodafone campaign when it was first launched: "It increased the price of pugs in Mumbai, definitely." The media had a field day, particularly when the producer who lost his shirt at a press conference told an inquisitive journalist to "shut up!" Oh, did the film get publicity or what!

The power of public relations

Producers are getting smarter at promoting their films as we know. Recently the film Paa had slides in multiplexes with lines like "If you don't switch off your mobile phone I will tell Paa," and another which said "If you don't stand up for the national anthem I will tell Paa." Cute! Evidence too, of the value of integration that agencies can be good at. Yet I do feel that agencies do not realise the potency of public relations as a discipline and what it can do for brands. The publicity that 3 Idiots has generated has been phenomenal. Everyday there has been a talk show or a feature on one aspect of the film or the other. Is the quality of our education bad? Does it prevent our children from being innovative? Does it encourage mugging? All these thoughts that were aired in the movie were discussed in the media and people got involved.

Everybody had a point of view; after all, all of us have been to school and watch our children struggle, don't we? The film has ragging scenes which, in my opinion, eulogise ragging, leading to the discussion on whether the film encourages ragging and if films such as these should be permitted? Throw in the earlier controversy about Chetan Bhagat and whether authors get a raw deal and you get the total picture. The film has not been off media for a single day and has constantly created interest, involving them and engaging them. Fantastic!

Engage, not merely integrate

Today we live in times of clutter and that, as we know, is an understatement. The old rules of the game "let's try to reach the consumer in as many ways as possible through integration", may not do. The mantra has to be customer engagement and the film is certainly an example of what savvy marketers can do and mind you, they are talking to every single Indian, not some niche audience where it is probably easier to create a strategy.
Yes, all around us are examples of failure and success, at times from the unlikeliest of sources. But are we ready to notice them?

(Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO, brand-comm, and the author of Googly - Branding on Indian Turf.)

Image Source: StoryFlakes

Not a memorable year for advertising

The advertising industry seems to no longer have an affinity for storytelling. As advertising moves down the value chain, inventive marketing is taking charge..

On a wintry morning in Bangalore as I sit wondering how advertising and marketing were in the year gone by, my mind wanders as it usually seems to do on wintry mornings (and just about any time). This time my undisciplined mind went to a commercial of the early Nineties for Band Aid, made by Johnson & Johnson. A kid has hurt himself playing football and his father who is a doctor (incidentally the model looks amazingly like Bhaskar Bhat, Managing Director of Titan Industries) tells him of the need to use Band Aid and how the injury should not be left open and the boy repeats the messages mechanically, his mind obviously on something else. Both of them leave the frame and as we expect the commercial to end the boy comes darting back into the frame and shouts, ‘ Bhoolna math match jeet gaya!' (‘Don't forget we won the match!').

Strikingly, perhaps the most significant recall factor of 2009 for me is the fact that India is the No. 1 test team in the world and was also the one-day leader for approximately 24 hours! Of course, being the karma yogi that I am, I shall resist the temptation to talk about the BCCI and its enormous capability to botch up anything and its phenomenal foresight in scheduling a colossal number of two test matches in the next 12 months for our all-conquering team. I shall stay with the yearly review that you are so patently and ardently (!) waiting for!

The mother of all crises!

The US and the Western world would like to forget 2009 in a hurry and wish it would end soon but the happenings in September 2008 spilled over for most of the year and had far-reaching implications for many countries, including India. Let me stay with the impact on advertising during the year that is chugging to a painful close. I think the year served more than ever to remind us of the fact that the truly Indian agency is a rarity and every second agency is part of a global network. The headquarters of global agencies panicked, and how! It is fair to say that India in real terms was not as badly affected as the rest of the world. But this did not prevent extreme reactions.

Many years ago I went to Hong Kong for a DDB Needham global conference and country after country presented. The order was usually North America, UK, France, and Germany and somewhere towards the end was India. India was not in the picture. Thankfully that has changed; India is much higher in terms of importance and visibility. But I wonder how many of the agencies' heads here in India realise that or, more critically, have the courage and the will to take on their global bosses? Although it seems a bit outspoken, I wonder if many of the agency bosses in India are in the last stages of their advertising careers and do not wish to assert themselves or take the trouble to educate their network partners on how we were not as badly off as the rest of the world and why the same cost-cutting strategy should not be adopted here.
India was administered the same medicine as the rest of the world, never mind the fact that it did not have the same degree of sickness. There was a ban on recruitment, travel, training … you get the drift? Agencies for once took their eyes off the headline and focused on the bottom line.
I daresay agencies treated talent in a harsh manner, to put it mildly, and let a number of people go. It is perhaps correct to say that the industry has alienated a whole lot of talent which was unable to understand or appreciate the steps being taken. In a sense it has been beneficial as it has spawned a few start-ups of disenchanted creative people who quite rightly want to do their own thing. Of course, agency heads, like their clients in the IT industry, kept parroting that they were only asking non-performers to leave and were improving the quality of their talent. I did feel sorry for the people in the advertising business, some of whom lost their jobs, forgot about raises and were not even trained during the year as all budgets were frozen.

The media struggles too

If advertising is ailing can media be far behind? Media has become the truly lowest common denominator and television is the primary offender as media woos eyeballs and revenue. Television seems to be going the David Dhawan way and we seem to revel in the era of ‘manufactured reality'. The Raakhi Sawant show is a case in point. People, it seems, are avidly switching on to things that you love to hate.
Thankfully, cinema, which people used to castigate readily, is moving up in creativity, technique and a lot of young talent is moving into it. What about news channels and their enormous capability at branding non-events as ‘breaking news?' I guess one of the commercials for the Hindustan Times where an anguished mother has a child in hospital thanks to defective medicine while an intrusive reporter asks her obnoxious questions best sums up the pathetic state of the channels.

About newspapers, the distressing trend of ‘paid editorial' is spreading like the AIDS virus. Recently when we were speaking about possible PR coverage for one of our clients, a prominent challenger newspaper, not the leader as one would suspect, asked “Why do you want PR coverage for this client? In any case they are not advertising in our paper, surely our readers are not the target audience?” I think the newspaper industry needs to step back for just a moment and consider its very reason for being. The world has enough products and services that are marketed mindlessly, often without the slightest consideration for truth, honesty and the consumer. Must the newspaper be just another product like these or must it stand for truth and fairness?

What about creativity?

The advertising industry seems to have lost its penchant for storytelling. Of course, the Zoozoos were a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and often depressing creative environment.
Mind you, this is not to ignore some isolated campaigns which still stood out from the clutter. But this has been a lean year for creativity as perhaps it has been for Ishant Sharma who was the greatest thing that happened to Indian fast bowling not so long ago.

There were very few campaigns that made one stand up and cheer as David Ogilvy would say, or make one wistfully say, “I wish I had written that.” There was the trend of some brands such as Idea Cellular and Tata Tea trying to tap into the social consciousness of the country, particularly of youth which may have some implications in terms of future possibility.

Some of the digital agencies used the freedom of the medium to provide outstanding creatives.
If one were to sum up the mass media creative, we probably delivered a plateful of advertising that one did not want. There was too much advertising and too little engagement, as an expert said, and advertising runs the risk of killing the reason why we are watching the media.
I think this is affecting the customer adversely. Have you ever tried to watch an interesting Hindi or Tamil movie on TV on Sunday? More than ever advertising needs to remind itself that at the best of times it is an interruption. People do not switch on the TV to watch the ads or buy a newspaper to see the ads, unless, of course, they want a job or wish to sell their apartment.

The advertising of today which tries so hard to be different is actually getting commoditised. While a good trend is that people from advertising have moved to films and are directing noticeable, popular films - the most visible of them being Balki and his second film Paa – clients too must realise that unless they give their agencies elbow room, the best of them will drift away to pastures where their creativity is recognised and rewarded and that will be disastrous for the industry as a whole.

Innovation the name of the game

Obviously advertising is moving down the value chain and is becoming more low-involvement as a career, which is in fact affecting the overall perception of the industry. Tata DoCoMo revolutionised the mobile services market with its per-second billing. Where is the innovation from advertising? I know that agencies will talk about roadblocks that they have created for Volkswagen and Hindustan Unilever. My take on this is slightly different. Are agencies being self-indulgent or are customers noticing these innovations that agencies are so proud about?
And as a prospective customer I am taken aback at the advertising for the Volkswagen Beetle here in India.

Will I pay over Rs 22 lakh after seeing this ad or even ask for a test drive? Is this aspirational? What a fantastic opportunity to work on an iconic brand! Has the opportunity been seized? I wonder. I remember seeing the room that Bill Bernbach used to work from in Madison Avenue.
It was like entering a shrine, so much was the aura of creativity around the man. The key question in DDB in those days whenever a campaign was being designed was to ask themselves the question on the lines of ‘What would Bill say?'
We have no way of knowing what Bill would have to say about the creativity of Indian advertising in 2009, but something tells me that the advertising legend who created campaigns which conformed to the 3 Ss of ‘simplicity, surprise, smile' might have for once been ‘stumped' for an answer!

(The writer is the CEO of brand-comm and the author of ‘Googly: Branding on Indian Turf.')

Image Source: NorthMediaHigh