Change, the name of the game

(this column of mine appeared in Deccan Chronicle on Friday, September 13th, 2013) 

 “Child Bear sold here” is an innovative and evocative signage that one saw in Bihar.

Before the animal lovers get ready to key in a volley of protest, let me quickly clarify. It was really a sign meant to cue your taste buds and to be read as “Chilled beer sold here”! Yes, you can be creative with spelling as well cant you? But this piece is not so much about etymology but about marketing strategy, so rest easy.

My mind goes back to the early nineties when we used to do the advertising for Kalyani Black label beer which was warming the hearts of Bengalis. United Spirits, in many ways the pioneer of beer marketing in India, had an ambition which seemed like a pipe dream to me at that time. “Why should people drink beer only during the summer months’ they asked. “ Why can’t beer be a yearlong product even in Bangalore” asked the head of marketing.

I shivered in the December cold, having come as I had from the sun baked and dusty plains of Madras as my home town used to be called those days. And yet like any advertising professional, I nodded sagely even if I thought he was talking crap like most clients still do. But I must confess that he knew a thing or two.

Now isn’t beer consumed even in the middle of winter in Christmas and New Year parties? It is being consumed in crate loads come rain or shine. It has not happened by accident but by careful promotion over the years. A clear long term strategy and persistent execution has made this change possible.

Let’s change the way you eat 

Probably around the same time another marketer, a leader in the world cereals market was asking “why can’t we change the way Indians have breakfast?” It seemed like another pipe dream. How could the Madrasi give up his “ idli vada” and how could the north Indian give up his “ aloo paratha?”

The doomsayers were right as people resisted and had breakfast cereals only when they were sick! It certainly looked like Kellogg’s had bitten off more than it could chew in more ways than one. “This is India” crowed the Bombay club and the multinational company too realized that India was just another country that they could crack like Philippines or Mexico.

Less expensive Indian brands thrived as people bought the concept from Kellogg’s and the less expensive cereal from Indian companies. But what has happened today. The vast Indian middle class has taken to breakfast cereals even if it has taken some time. People are now talking of oats. Unthinkable, it seems. Not really.

Another long term strategy followed by pain staking execution, promotions and trials coupled with the increasing health consciousness of an increasingly affluent and aspirational middle class has opened doors for this category.

The joy of giving

India’s leading watch brand of the last two decades was doing something pioneering too. It saw people gifting all sorts of things – saris, jewellery, shirts, perfumes, even watches and said why can’t we get Indians to gift Titan watches? It launched the “joy of giving” campaign, created the pair watch for gifting to couples and did that consistently for years on end.

Today, gifting accounts for a small 53 per cent of Titan’s annual sales. Again the first campaign might have been a “happy accident” but it was the work of a savvy marketer to put advertising rupees behind the concept year after year and reap the benefits for two decades. An interesting development though.

Today you can safely gift Titan to an older person, though a younger person might prefer Fastrack.

Gifting? What a brilliant concept in hindsight? And how many other brands have gotten into the gifting bandwagon following Titan’s pioneering example. That’s not all There are many other examples of moving people in a different direction and getting them to buy.

Who can forget the future group’s “ sabse sasta din’ on Aug 15th and January 26th getting India to shop on traditional holidays? Or Viveks new year sale in Tamil Nadu that has since become a way of life? How can one forget the Tamil Nadu retailers’ great honeymoon with Aadi ? The month that was a traditional shopping ‘ no no” has become a great opportunity to sell clothes, durables, talk time, just about everything.

Yes, you can move consumers to change.

But people are like you and me. Apathetic, lethargic, promiscuous even. They need to be cajoled, pampered and worked on .

Not for nothing did David Ogilvy say “ the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife”. And having been married for 31 years and having lost most of my hair in the bargain, I can tell you with confidence, that marketing like marriage is not easy.

Hang in there my friend.

Ramanujam Sridhar is CEO of brand- comm and director in Custommerce an organization dedicated to developing customer service in the country.

A gentleman with a bat

David Ogilvy the advertising legend wanted that rare breed for his advertising agency “gentlemen with brains”. The greatest gentleman that ever trod the cricket field – Rahul Dravid called it quits from all forms of cricket at a farewell press conference at Bangalore on Friday. Even as encomiums pour in from all and sundry from different parts of the world, I thought I would write a few words about Dravid the cricketer and the person. His deeds on the cricket field have been well recorded. The nickname “the wall” was earned after years of playing some of the finest bowlers in the world in every cricketing country in the world and even as Indians earned the justifiable nickname of “lions at home and lambs abroad” Rahul Dravid stood head and shoulders above his more celebrated and written about colleagues – as he simply batted better abroad. More than his batting was his selfless attitude of team first, something that individual record obsessed Indians never fully understood. When he first declared the Indian innings with a desire to win a cricket match when Sachin was short of his century (though he was truly dawdling at the crease), Dravid copped a lot of criticism. But he soldiered on – always taken for granted, never truly appreciated to the extent that he should have been.

Read more »

Momentous days for the communications industry

Stellar outing: The F1 event showcased India’s event handling capabilities much more favourably than the Commonwealth Games could. - Photo : Rajeev Bhatt

On October 31, I was at Lucknow to celebrate a landmark birthday of my classmate from IIM Bangalore. It was a unique experience to be in Mayawati's kingdom, but I shall resist the urge to talk about statues and parks with huge, forbidding walls and stay with the events that India and the world witnessed around that time.

The media in Lucknow was showering praise on Mayawati for helping organise the F1 event, taking place in Noida at that time. Although it was largely a private sector initiative, the papers, in Lucknow at least, spoke in glowing terms about the support that behenji had provided to make the event a great success.

Read more »

A century with a difference

Bill Bernbach, who, in a land of supersized products, urged people to ‘think small’ when it came to the “ugly German car that made waves in post-War America”. _ V. SREENIVASA MURTHY

Remembering ad man Bill Bernbach, whose 100th birthday it was earlier this month

For some time now, a billion-plus Indians have been waiting for a century, actually a century of centuries from the little master Sachin Tendulkar, with bated breath initially and later with increasing restlessness, that now lies frustrated.

Read more »

Embracing Gen Y

...continuation from last week "Of older marketers, young consumers", how older marketers can communicate with their young target audience, a different beast altogether..

The average Gen ‘Y', if research is to be believed, changes its jobs an average of 29 times and the average time in one job is as long as 1.1 years!

With an eye on the future:Candidates line up for a written test and interview being conducted by top BPO companies. These jobs have brought about a sea change in lifestyles and mores.

People of my age on occasion have difficulty in remembering the names of their own children, so more for my benefit than for yours, dear reader, let me quickly summarise some of the key points we addressed in the last issue (November 4, 2010) on the subject of young customers. The biggest challenge facing marketing in India today is the fact that heads of marketing are in their forties, managing directors are in their fifties while the customers they are wooing are in their twenties! What is it that makes these twenty-somethings tick and how can marketers use this knowledge to woo them?

India's youth wants to improve itself by education and keeps attempting the IIT entrance and the CAT, even if the odds are stacked against it. Others wish to look better - an insecurity that the fairness creams market literally lives and feeds off. Older people wish to appear young too, mothers get tickled pink when someone says that they look like their daughter's sister and fathers go out to pubs with their young sons. The space, which was exclusively youth at one point in time, has now become more inclusive with older people too jostling for elbow space and attention to the chagrin of their younger wards.

Reality shows and attempts to acquire national celebrity status through programmes such as Indian Idol are common, particularly in people from smaller towns, and it is not uncommon for youngsters to drop out of college to prepare better for these shows and then they do go back reluctantly to their old, mundane lives. We also spoke about the ability of youth to multitask, their ability to be connected 24/7 and finally of how different their sleeping habits were from older people. Young India sleeps late, to put it mildly. But is every young Indian coming home with the milkman after a night of revelry or is something else happening?

The BPO revolution sweeps young India

The BPO brigade is a million-strong today and the people who work in this sector have no alternative but to synchronise their work timings with that of their counterparts in the US or the UK, if not Venezuela. It is not uncommon to find people working from 11 p.m. at night till 7 a.m. the following day. To confuse the issue, there are also some companies that call themselves KPOs. While KPOs claim that their work is not as mundane and dull as their BPO counterparts, it still warrants unearthly times and my limited understanding of the difference between these two ‘O's is that those in KPOs cop less abuse from their customers! Abuse notwithstanding, this sector like no other demonstrates the tremendous change in terms of the opportunity that presents itself to educated youth.

Of course, the word ‘education' has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It basically means an ability to communicate in English and it is not uncommon for household help to put their daughters into classes to help learn and improve their English.

It is not uncommon for people to start work early and significantly young India believes in the value of work experience even while in college as the fact that you have worked in events during weekends and in your spare time reads well in your bio-data and denotes a seriousness of purpose. It is not uncommon to find college students hanging out at golf courses handling the registration of old fogeys and providing them their high point of the day even as they make a few cool bucks. Yes, young India wants to move up in life, look better, earn more.

Of course, there are social implications as well. The BPO culture is something that has its own implications in terms of ‘thank God it's Friday', quick money and a lifestyle that is very different from what the average middle-class Indian is exposed to in his or her own home.

Rather than going into a needless harangue on the falling moral standards, I think it probably makes sense for us to say that the BPO pie presents an interesting option to the marketer of people who probably live at home and have a fair amount of disposable income with a propensity to spend and often experiment with risky stuff that people in more traditional jobs might baulk at.

Parents live in fear as they wonder what their children, who go to work after they have gone to sleep, do. Remember the Motorola commercial where the parents worriedly ask the kid who has a new flip phone whether he is doing something that he should not be doing?

What is the big deal about change?

Old India was reluctant to change and often paranoid about it. It worked in the same company for 37 years and left it only because it was forcibly asked to at the age of 60! It might have hated the job, lived in dread of the boss but still had the hypocrisy to make a virtue of this fear of change. They lived with the same person not because they loved the person but merely because the possibility of leaving the person, while it certainly must have crossed their minds, was not acceptable to society.

While today's generation ‘Y' is not exactly the opposite, it certainly has a different outlook to work and relationships. The average Gen ‘Y' of today, if research is to be believed, changes its jobs an average of 29 times and the average time in one job is as long as 1.1 years! Of course, it does pose a counter question to employers whether they really understand this generation or are too willing to write them off as unstable and “like that only”.

Forget about jobs, people at least in the cities get into and out of relationships with the ease with which cricketers change from flannels to pajama cricket. My generation used to go into deep depression if the girl in the bus stop did not look at them at 8.15 and swear eternal love to someone who had the misfortune of smiling at them, while this generation wants to “move on”. The Fastrack commercial where the guy and girl return all the trinkets and gifts given by each other when they break up (without too much heartburn) is perhaps an indication of the times that we live in.

They are unafraid too of showing their emotions and maybe the Fastrack bag commercial with Genelia and Virat Kohli where the saucy Genelia finds a new use for her bag is a newer side of generation ‘Y' that may shock the “oldest member” but I don't see young India caring too much about us.

On a more serious note Gen Y does not seem to think that marriage is sacred either — marriages tend to break up a lot easier than before. They often seem to expect a lot more from relationships and people and have neither the patience nor the inclination to see things through. Who knows? Maybe they just don't have the energy to go through the charades their parents go through in front of them day in and day out!

So where do we go from here?

Generation ‘Y' is here to stay, rule and buy. So rather than merely accept them, let us embrace them! And here, of course, I speak figuratively. We do know that they have the attention span of nanoseconds and get bored easily. (At times they remind me of some of my clients.) So we need to engage them, not lecture to them. The communication principle of “be quick, be friendly, be gone” comes to my mind. And yet I find most advertising dull. Generation ‘Y' has a sense of humour and is willing to laugh at itself and most certainly at the older generation. The challenge for us is to entertain even as we sell.

David Ogilvy might have thundered “People don't buy from a clown”. But the only thing that we know today is that there are no rules, though you must certainly know the rules before you break them! Each young Indian is different - the student of St. Xavier's, Mumbai, is different from the student of Bishop Heber's College in Tiruchi even if they are of the same age and study the same subjects. The person in Ranchi is different from the person who lives in Boat Club Road in Chennai. Gen Y is saying “I am not just a bl***y demographic” and I do hope we are listening. Generation ‘Y' is saying “I am wired” while it secretly seems to be saying that we have our wires crossed! Generation ‘Y' is saying “I am not a scaled down adult”, “Neither am I your unrealised ambition”. But to me, at least, Generation ‘Y' is also saying “If you engage me, I could be your customer for life”.

Customer for life! What an entrancing concept! Let's view Generation ‘Y' not only as our future but the present and future for marketers. What we need is a change of attitude. But are we ready?

Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO, brand – comm.
Read my blog @ http://www.brand-comm.com/blog.html
Facebook: facebook.com/RamanujamSridhar
Twitter: twitter.com/RamanujamSri