Quote featured on Afaqs: Thoughts on Dabur's latest

When Dabur's bold ad about ode to brave and beautiful women commercial came out, there were mixed reactions from experts in the marketing and branding arena.

The quote below highlight my thoughts on the idea.

"Ramanujam Sridhar, founder and CEO, Brand-comm points out that the reference to hair care is subtle because one can see photographs of the lady when she had long hair. Though the ad catches one's attention, Sridhar is not sure if he would share it online. "It is not stark enough to provoke action or a change in attitude. To my mind, a truly effective commercial in this category must provoke either an action or a change in attitude. It must rouse me from my normal apathy. This one has the beginning of an idea that has lost its way in execution," adds Sridhar."


Read the full article here: Dabur Vatika's ode to brave and beautiful women

MTR vs Maiyas: Bangalore and Beyond

As a true blue Bangalorean, this is a market share battle that is close to my heart (possibly in the stomach region!)

An interesting piece in Business Today, on the Maiya's brand and how it will compete with the MTR foods business that it started and sold. Although the market is big enough to accommodate the two and more, I feel distribution and other factors will play a deciding role.

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.

The Land of Bedouins lures Indian brands

Although the GCC region is fast becoming a haven for Indian marketers, there is still a long way to go before the Indian brands can reach a pinnacle and be ‘the’ preferred choice for Westerners and Arabs.

Zipping down Sheikh Zayed Road, one of UAE’s busiest, biggest motorways, with six lanes in each direction, I have always felt that life here is always on the fast lane. It’s the same feeling you get when you land at the Dubai International Airport in Garhoud for the first time. It is the place where tens of thousands of individuals of different nationalities mingle every day. It is also the place of luxurious serenity. As you step into the airport, the magnificence and the opulence around you can’t be ignored. With large duty-free shops and food courts, the wealth of amenities and services on offer, the Dubai International Airport is the pinnacle of luxury, reflecting the true warmth and generosity of Arabian hospitality.

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10 Brands that got marketing right in 2012

As the clouds of the return of the economic slowdown loomed large in 2012, the business sentiment remained dull throughout. That directly impacted the marketing initiatives of brands too. At the time of the year, when everyone is coming up with the ‘Best’ & ‘Worst’ of the year list, we at Pitch too tried to shortlist best of the marketing initiatives. The struggle to come up with our own ‘Top 10’ list began from thereon.

Reaching out to experts to know their favourites, resulted in comments like, “Despite all the talk and the hype when I sit back and think of the year gone by, there has been very little that has made me stand up and cheer.”

Kiran Khalap, Co-founder, Chlorophyll, could list only three – Flipkart, Satyamev Jayate and Gujarat Tourism.

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Who after Tendulkar and Dhoni?

In Indian cricket's brand landscape, once you get past the big two, there isn't any one name that commands universal attention.

A man walks past a billboard featuring Sachin Tendulkar, Mumbai, March 19, 2007

Brand Sachin: Tendulkar's consistent on-field success has translated into endorsement deals throughout his career.

It is no surprise that MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar are the two Indian sportsmen - and the highest-ranked cricketers - to feature in Forbes magazine's list of the top 100 highest-paid athletes for the period June 2011 to June 2012, having made $26.5 million and $18.6 million respectively. India is cricket's biggest market and Tendulkar was India's first national sporting brand, while Dhoni has arguably been better than any Indian sportsperson at spinning on-field success into endorsements.

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Masterchef Sanjeev Kapoor: A perfect recipe for marketers?

“I personally take all my brand endorsement decisions. I am the first point of contact, not the last one. So it goes without saying that I delve into depth and detail about the brand, product, everything. I would never endorse a brand if I didn’t believe in it” – Masterchef Sanjeev Kapoor.

He came, He cooked and He conquered the hearts of women of all ages and kinds. Sanjeev Kapoor mastered the art of Indian cooking and won both domestic adulation as well as international acclaim for his recipes for a perfect gastronomic delight. He is not just an icon for food connoisseurs, but also the marketing world’s favourite chef since his Khaana Khazana days on Indian television. He has been associated with many brands such as Natura Diet Sugar by Sugar Free, edible oil brand, Sweekar, Sapat Tea, and the recently announced association with Tata i-Shakti range of pulses.

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Time to move on?

I have always been an admirer of Fastrack’s advertising. Let me take you back in time to the launch of the brand. Titan Industries, as the market leader in the adult watches category, thought it appropriate to target the youth segment. Hardly earth-shattering given the size of the youth market in India and the enormous opportunity it presented then and continues to present even today. The fact that it had great genes and was an offering from Titan were great factors working in its favour. The brand leaned heavily on its lineage and the initial campaign (if my memory serves me right) had a series of four TV commercials featuring hip, sexy-looking watches in the backdrop of things that were really cool, like a bottle of Sprite, a girl in a bikini shaking water off her back to a can of Cola with the tag line “Fastrack cool watches from Titan”. The signature tune of Titan that people had started to hum by then was whistled as the background score to the commercials. The brand was launched with a bang and started carving a niche for itself.

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Building the perfect property

When competition overwhelms the market and brands find it difficult to differentiate on unique attributes or price, it might be a good idea to invest in building a property?

When one thinks of Coke three things come immediately to mind: the Coke brand mark, the iconic bottle and the colour red. These are powerful attributes and provide instant customer recognition when used in combination or even individually. While Coca-Cola has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades to build these attributes, their success is not purely a result of time and money. It is thanks largely to the company’s understanding of one of the basic principles of branding — building strong product attributes that work as powerful differentiators.

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Consumer connect is key

With a generation obsessed with mobile phones and new technology, the question uppermost on everyone's mind probably is — to borrow a phrase from Samsung — Next is What? That also sums up the way Sumsung has been stoking the consumer’s curiosity before every big launch.

So months before the Samsung Galaxy Note was launched launched in India on November 2, 2011, the company set the ball rolling in the media. Looking back at the strategy, Ranjit Yadav, country head, mobile & IT, Samsung, says a number of things came together to make the launch successful. For the first time in India, Samsung conducted a multi-city event on the same day and at the same time to announce the launch. While the main event was hosted in New Delhi, audiences in Mumbai and Chennai were connected via video conference. This was followed by on-ground consumer events at variousmalls across the country wherein the audience was given the opportunity to playaround with the S Pen and explore the smartphone’s potential.

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The king of great moves

Chess offers good prospects for marketers, who could well be addressing a section of intelligent, high networth individuals in the future.

One evening, last week, as I was returning home after a long and taxing day, my mobile phone rang. “Viswanathan Anand has won the world championship.” My wife's uncle was literally shouting in excitement and tripping over words as he made this dramatic announcement. I hastily moved my phone further away from my ears till his tone became normal. He continued, getting back to his favourite refrain, “You never write about him or chess but keep writing about useless, overpaid cricketers.”

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Will India go nuts over doughnuts?

The humble looking ring-shaped friedcake or the doughnut, which till now was one of the least fancy items in a patisserie, has found its own special place in the Indian confectionery market. The recent launch of popular US based chain Dunkin’ Donuts in India has turned the spotlight on the gooey fritter.

Moreover, its entry has brought intense competition for Singapore based Mad Over Donuts (MOD), India’s first doughnut chain, set up in 2008. MOD until now had a fairly monopolistic status because except bakeries and patisseries, there were very few exclusive doughnut brands in India.

‘Dough’ing differently?
Though both Dunkin’ Donuts and MOD offer classic, savoury and fruit flavoured doughnuts, have approximately the same number of doughnuts in their range, and are also similarly priced; the two are positioned differently. While MOD claims to cater to all age groups across categories, Dunkin Donuts is positioning itself as a ‘hang out’ zone for the urban young.

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I am no longer a BlackBerry Boy

Vodafone's advertising for its services on the smart phone sends signals loud and clear that it doesn't care for customers of his age, says our columnist.

The criticism normally levelled against advertising is that it makes us buy things we don't actually need. My family has consistently proven this to be true as we never seem to have place, however large the house is. Several years ago, a cake of Nirma premium soap landed up as part of my mother's shopping list. I asked her why she had bought it and she looked at me strangely and said, “I liked the ad.” That soap remained unopened in her house forever. She often complained to me how backward Bangalore was as some brand of dal which was advertised on Sun TV was not available here. So it is hardly surprising that advertising continues to run in my blood and influence my brand choices. After all, what little success I have got in life is because of advertising!

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Will IPL 5 be a damp squib?

Too much cricket is leading to fatigue, and falling viewership.

Deepavali used to be the highpoint of my childhood. Your importance was directly proportionate to the rubble of crackers in front of your house, and I used to spend several days and nights in anticipation of the cracker bursting, something that today's kids and even adults seem to have given up due to a variety of reasons. I remember, though, that often, thanks to the preceding heavy rain in the city, the crackers that we expected to make the most of fizzled out, much to our chagrin and embarrassment.

I am reminded of this as I see all the build-up to the IPL, whether it is the reams of coverage in daily newspapers, interviews with the Gilchrists and the Lehmanns of the world or news that Sachin Tendulkar has joined the Mumbai Indians training camp. Ads and radio spots are flooding the channels reminding people (as though they needed reminders) about the big event around the corner. What will be the fate of IPL 5, whose first match would have just been aired the night before you read this piece? I wish I knew but I can hazard a few guesses.

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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

IIMB Alumni to honour ISRO chief Radhakrishnan, Sridhar, Damodaran

The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) Alumni Association will honour Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K Radhakrishnan, marketing communications expert Ramanujam Sridhar and valuation expert Aswath Damodaran with its Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2010.

The prestigious awards are given by the institute every year to former students who have exceptionally excelled in their careers and have made significant contributions to society.

"Each of them has the distinction of being outstanding in his education at IIMB and has achieved great heights of success in a variety of arenas," a spokesperson for the association said about this year's awardees.

The awards will be conferred on the institution's foundation day on October 28 at the IIMB campus here, she added.

Dr Radhakrishnan belongs to the 1976 batch of IIMB's flagship two-year post-graduate programme (PGP) in management. Apart from being an outstanding space scientist, who is one of the brains behind Chandrayaan-2, India's second lunar mission, he is also well-versed in Carnatic music and is a Bharatanatyam dancer.

Mr Sridhar (PGP'82) has been associated with advertising firms like Mudra and Quadrant and is the founder and CEO of Brand Comm, a marketing communications company.

He has also penned brand building books like "One land, one billion minds" and the sequel "Googly. Branding on Indian Turf."

Prof Damodaran (PGP'79) is regarded as an expert on the subject of valuation and has authored several books on equity valuation, corporate finance and investments. According to Business Week, he is one of the top 12 business school professors in the United States. At present, he is a Finance Professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

According to the spokesperson, the winners of the awards are chosen through a process of nominations by the alumni members of the association and a committee selection of final winners by a team of senior faculty at IIMB.

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.)

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