Flashback 2014: How many billions do you have?

A few years ago Fastrack the iconic youth brand did a fantastic campaign with a sign off “how many you have?”The cheeky tone of voice represented the jauntiness of the youth brigade which had this phenomenal urge to move on. This phrase might well be the catch phrase of today’s entrepreneurs whose twist might well be “how many billions do you have?” Yes, if one attempts to do a review of 2014, one must remember that while several things happened in the year which had a tremendous impact, not the least of it the elections, the most significant happening has been the emergence of the billionaire entrepreneur with VCs beating a path to his front doors.

A brand called Modi

Though Modi’s election strategy and on line blitz has been arguably done to death it would be almost impossible to ignore it when one is doing a review. One saw again the power of the “personal brand” in winning an election and leading the nation. The operative word was “strategy” and we had a mix of young kids on sabbatical to famous business leaders pitching in. Not to forget the importance of the online medium as a tremendous media to influence, engage and finally motivate voters to vote out “the hand” and vote in “the lotus”. The power of “WhatsApp” in UP might well have an alternative headline!

She shops for grocery too

Whilst change seems such an inadequate word to describe what is happening to the Indian consumer, that’s the operative word as people not only buy books, music, movie tickets and mobiles, they buy grocery too! What a sea change it has been with the advent of the smart phone! And while Flipkart’s “big billion day sale” might have made the founders get some egg on their faces, there is no denying the fact that the online shopping habit seems to have spread in no uncertain terms to the smaller towns as well. In fact the “un metro’ as some people might call it could well emerge as the next big opportunity as a consumer base as the cities get increasingly crowded and more difficult to woo.

The year of the full page ad

When I was wet behind the ears in advertising and that was ages ago, a full page ad in the Times of India was an event. A phenomenon if you will. A talking point even. Not anymore. Today the full page ad is more common than the quarter page ad of my times.  Not that the ad is any more creative! Newspapers are anxious to give away everything including their mastheads and the only thing that has lost out is the creative.  Still on the subject of creative what was the breakthrough ad of 2014 on TV? Something that made you stand up and cheer? I am searching for campaigns like Airtel, Vodafone or Fastrack of earlier years. Another interesting trend was the emergence of YouTube as a serious medium.

Brands get discounted

A distressing sign has been the discounting of big brands in the online medium and that is a shame. Here are the big brands like Nike, Adidas and Levi’s who have spent years in building their respective brands and yet what is happening online? Some big e-commerce major is discounting these very brands to build their business and valuation and the consumer is laughing all the way to the bank. For who would not like to get these brands that I would give an arm and leg for at discount? And right through the year to boot! I wish though that somebody would think about the implications of this. Like the BCCI, we shouldn’t end up killing the golden goose.

The consumer is finally king
 

How often have we heard this statement about the importance of the consumer to the business or MK Gandhi’s famous lines on the subject which have almost become part of the furniture in most organizations. Today that is changing, thanks to the power of the social medium. Today consumers go to Facebook or Twitter to vent their ire and the results are there for all to see. Companies must respond and soon to customer complaints. Though one does wish that consumers would use their new found power judicially and not get completely carried away as they have on occasion.
So let’s cut to the chase. How was the year? It was exciting. It provided tremendous opportunities and learning. It was the year of the entrepreneur and let’s hope 2015 will continue to build on the start that the year gone by provided them with.

And before I forget, here’s wishing each and every one of you a phenomenal year ahead!

Time for a strategic break-out?

The IPL in its brief yet chequered history has claimed many firsts. One of them is the strategic time-out. This break which the cynic claimed was merely to sell advertising space had logic in its conceptualisation. Teams could huddle, strategise, motivate themselves and come back with renewed vigour. Leading credence to this theory was the fact that batting teams generally lost wickets in the first over after the break. Be that as it may be, the time has come for the governing body of IPL to step back strategically and consider the last few weeks and the learnings thereon to prepare for the future.

For, in a nutshell, this IPL has been like no other. Whether it has been the number of last-ball finishes, tweets by owners about the character of women, celebrities exchanging fisticuffs with security guards, players being suspended for spot fixing, team owners rushing out to remonstrate about umpiring decisions, or a number of prospective teams suddenly losing their way to enable the hitherto lacklustre Chennai Super Kings to make it to the play-off stages, decline in TRPs or a drastic reduction in the IPL's brand's value, you name it – every possible controversy has happened making one accept reluctantly that this has been a season like no other and for the sake of the IPL, one hopes that seasons like this don't happen again.

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Fill it, shut it and forget the advertising

In the mid eighties I used to be the account executive on the Ind-Suzuki brand as it used to be called those days and used to watch the work of our competitor Hero Honda with fascination and ill concealed admiration. Hero Honda launched a four stroke bike (to the disapproval of my erudite friends in TVS) clearly positioning the new product on fuel economy. The ad campaign which I can still recall had the tag line “Fill it, shut it, forget it”. To put it mildly the consumer forgot all the other brands (well almost) as the new campaign and the new brand took the market by storm and continues to rule the two wheeler roost two decades later. The Hero Honda Splendor has been an enduring brand success, built on a product which works brilliantly in Indian conditions and on the Indian psyche (fed and nurtured as it is on fuel economy) and is an excellent example of clear, single minded communication that has been consistent over the years. Hero Honda, the company did many things right and as a former executive of TVS Suzuki confessed privately to me “the best thing I did was invest in Hero Honda”. Competitors know the value of the company they are competing with right? Just as any team that played Australia in the early 2000s would tell you what it meant to beat them and the collective ambition of the entire cricketing world was to beat them and when they did it rarely it was a cause for wild celebrations. Let’s return reluctantly to our brand story. Suddenly (though it has been brewing for some time now) the two companies have split and Honda will soon launch two entry level bikes even as the Japanese giant is building a new factory in Andhra Pradesh and looks to beefing its distribution presence.

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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.
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