Marketing needs more representation in company work: Ramanujam Sridhar

The positioning of a brand is focused on ‘how’ you say it, rather than ‘what’ you say. It is advertising that is expected to provide the difference as not everyone can have the first mover’s advantage in business. In an interview with Pitch, Ramanujam Sridhar, Founder and CEO, Integrated Brand-comm talks about the importance of being innovative rather than being repetitive by identifying a differentiating factor in the offerings. Excerpts:

How is the world of marketing changing? What are the new trends in marketing?
Marketing has constantly endeavoured to produce something ‘new’ or ‘exciting’ since the early days. That is the very nature of the beast. So, rather than landmark trends, such as the ‘era of positioning’ or 360 degree communications that have ruled the roost for some time, the last few years has seen the emergence of the ‘digital revolution’ that has dominated marketing discussions. India, which traditionally follows the West, will see this as the next continuing trend. Related to this trend will be the desire to ‘engage’ the consumer rather than to lecture her.

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Marketing Innovators: When innovating makes business sense

The term innovation simply connotes something “new” or “different” making the consumer say, “hey, how about that”. How often is innovation carried out in the marketplace and an even more difficult question to answer is – “when was your last innovation?” While Pitch is on a look out to find the top five brands for its category – ‘Marketing Innovators’, it has shortlisted twelve most powerful candidates for the grand awards’ night of Pitch Brands 50 Awards- For Excellence in Marketing, presented by ABP News, in partnership with Percept to be held on June 12 at Leela Kempinski.

While more than 20 brands made it to the shortlist after going through a comprehensive shortlisting process of Pitch’s editorial team, 11 were selected to go to the next level. As the award night will decide the top five winners, let’s take a quick-peek look at the 11 names that went to the jury.

While the jury was chaired by Ramesh Jude Thomas, President, Equitor Consulting, other jury members included marketing professionals and professors such as Rahul Sen, International Brand Advisor; Ramanajuam Sridhar, Founder and CEO, Integrated Brand Comm; Subroto Chattopadhyay, Chairman, Peninsula Foundation; Sunil Gupta, Marketing Partner, South Asia, Results International Group; Ashok Pratap Arora, Marketing Professor, MDI

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Old & beautiful

In May 2008, mobile handset maker Motorola launched a television commercial for its MotoYUVAw270 variant that showcased a father trying to mimic his teenager son’s carefree, freaky way of speaking with his girlfriend on the phone. The TVC opened with the father coming back from work and finding his son setting up a date with his girlfriend via his handsfree. Post his conversation, the son leaves the room and the father is alone with the MotoYUVA. He immediately picks it up and tries to imitate the son by speaking in to nobody on the other end in a sing-song manner alongside making some awkward dance movements. The film ends with his son and wife discovering this wild side of his and he moving out of the room embarrassed.

In May 2011, telecom brand Airtel launched an ad in which an old grandfather is shown narrating a story of his young days to his teenage grandson. The grandfather tells the young boy that a goon called Kanti Lal Godbole from Kishen Ganj had kissed his wife, or the boy’s grandmother, before their wedding. The grandson promises he will help the grandfather avenge Godbole’s delinquency. He launches a search for the man on, where else but social networking site Facebook, finds hims and takes his grandfather to him. The grandfather, on finding the man with his wife goes ahead and plants a peck on her cheeks. Score settled, the duo runs away from the scene.

In August 2012, Prolife Product teamed up with ad agency Curry Nation to launch a television commercial for 18 Again, a vaginal tightening gel. The ad showed a middle-aged woman making sensuous salsa moves to ‘I feel like a virgin’ number, along with her husband. The ad ends with the oldest lady (presumably, the mother-in-law) of the house trying to find out more on the product ‘18 Again’ by typing in the URL – www.18again.com- on her computer while her amused husband looks on.

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Made-in-India Globetrotters - Establishing international footprints

‘Jahan Jaaeyega Hamen Paaeyega’, meaning ‘wherever you go, you will find us’ – is the message sent across by our very own Made-in-India brands, who are making a mark in almost every part of the world. This is what Sharad Sarin, senior marketing professor from XLRI, has to say about ‘Globe Trotters’, one of the ten categories of the Pitch Brands 50 Awards – For Excellence in Marketing, presented by ABP News, in partnership with Percept to be held on June 12, 2013 at Leela Kempinski.

While more than 20 brands made it to the shortlist after going through investigative –scrutiny of the Pitch’s editorial team, 10 were selected to go to the next level. While the jury has locked five winners, let’s take a quick-peek look at the 10 names that went to the jury.

Sarin further said, “With changing times, Indian companies are establishing their presence almost anywhere and everywhere. Earlier, it meant geographies inhabited by ethnic Indians, societies with limited economic and social resources or countries near to India.”

While the jury was chaired by Ramesh Jude Thomas, President, Equitor Consulting, other jury members included marketing professionals and professors such as Rahul Sen, International Brand Advisor; Ramanajuam Sridhar, Founder and CEO, Integrated Brand Comm; Subroto Chattopadhyay, Chairman, Peninsula Foundation; Sunil Gupta, Marketing Partner, South Asia, Results International Group; Ashok Pratap Arora, Marketing Professor, MDI.

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Brand IPL has seen it all

The Indian Premier League has been a hot bed for controversies right from the start. From one player slapping another to a owner getting banned from a stadium, players getting caught in rave parties to teams getting scrapped and now — cricketers getting caught in spot fixing — one can say that the brand IPL has seen the best and the worst of all.

Not surprisingly, these controversies have hit the brand equity of IPL. Advertisers and experts say that the brand needs to urgently take some measures to clean up its image, else the equity will further be dented.

“Incidents like this leads to loss of credibility. And this is not the first to hit IPL. Owners and organisers need to show it to the audience that they are making efforts to clean up the mess, else the opportunity to be a fast growing global brand will take a beating,” says Sridhar Ramanujan, CEO-Brand comm.

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Loyalty programme | A brand is a lot more than a trade name

Malavika R. Harita, CEO of Saatchi Focus Network, spent the first six years of her career at HMT Watches. She was fixated on the brand. Though she moved on from the company, the love story continued. Her mother still wears the HMT watch she gifted her when she got her first salary in 1982. But now Harita looks depressed when she hears about HMT, as an inept management has destroyed the iconic brand and the company is on the verge of a shutdown.

So what is it that makes people like brands? Harita is an expert in branding, who knows how brands are created as a marketing tool. Still, she is not spared from its influence. Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults, likens brands to human beings, who take birth, grow, flourish, live, die and eventually decay. Even iconic brands, with whom we have grown up, follow the pattern.

Many brands that have a bit of history attached to its name have become a thing of the past. The iconic magazine Reader's Digest recently filed for bankruptcy. Legendary music company HMV has faded into oblivion. Earlier last year, Eastman Kodak, which revolutionised photography, filed for bankruptcy. Vimal, which was at the forefront of the textile revolution in India, was shut down by Reliance Industries earlier this year. Dunlop Tyres also shut operations recently.

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Sensory consumerism

Japanese scientists have developed a 'smelling screen' that allows you to see as well as smell the coffee or food displayed on it. It works by feeding odours from vaporising gel pellets into four air streams, one in each corner of the screen. The smell of Johnson’s baby lotion connects Jayanti Shroff, 43, to her daughter’s childhood instantly. “It has developed its signature years ago; the recall and association are instantaneous,” Shroff said. This signature baby products smell takes people back to their own childhood.

Software engineer Amulya Batra, 29, says, “The smell of coffee beans when I’m out on the roads or in a mall invites me to have a cup – I turn into a potential customer for the nearby coffee outlet.”

“In India, marketers are finding different ways to use smell. Coffee companies use the ‘beans’ aroma outside their outlets or in the mall, which instantly lets you know there’s a coffee shop nearby,” said Sandeep Kapoor, founder, RelioQuick, an integrated marketing communications agency.

“For a coffee chain like Tata Starbucks, the aroma of coffee lends our stores a strong and inviting appeal. A brand’s experience is not just about the medium but also about something less tangible and beyond the product offering,” said Sushant Dash, senior director, marketing and category, Tata Starbucks Limited.

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Time the sponsors cracked the whip

All year round

It was the perfect battlefield. The enemy was there, the viewers had taken position, the ammunition was all ready, even the timing was right – a scorching summer. Only the two warriors refused to go to war. The sixth season of the Indian Premier League tournament with beverage maker PepsiCo India as the title sponsor would seem to have presented the perfect opportunity for Pepsi and its arch rival Coca-Cola to take digs at each other. After all, the ad war between the two is legendary with the two rivals brands known for their aggressive comparative advertising which poked fun at each other. But Pepsi has launched its marketing blitzkrieg at the start of the season sans any fireworks. Coke, in turn, seems to have given the tourney a cold shoulder and is quietly going about doing its own thing. So has the fizz gone?

The fizz is still there but it is now directed at the market instead of each other. In the last decade, as the market for aerated drinks matured, so did the manufacturers, who now prefer to concentrate on building the category. To start with, both the players are looking to reduce their dependency on the summer season, the peak season for their sales, so much so, that this year they began advertising as early as January. Coca-Cola India hit the first salvo with the launch of its brand campaign, ‘Crazy for happiness’.

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Its scam time folks!

Is India the ‘scam capital’ of the world? It’s a fair possibility given the variety, size and frequency of scams that keep hitting our country! The ingenuity of our scam czars over the years make me wonder if a special award could be instituted like the “king of good scams”. Scams that come readily to mind include Nagarwalla of SBI fame, Harshad Mehta, the big bull who sent stock prices and investors into a tizzy and several interesting projects that bred and nurtured scams like Satyam computers, 2G, the commonwealth games and the most recent chopper scandal. The advertising industry has its own share of scams even if these scams don’t run into billions of dollars or consume reams of space in newspapers and magazines. These scams that sadly occur all too often in the industry serve as hot topics for debate in agency smoking rooms (that have more people in them than they should) and in the pubs that agency people love to frequent, suffering as they do from the misconception that creative output is directly proportionate to alcohol intake. However, the advertising industry in India recently experienced the “mother of all scams”.  The  scam ads created for Ford Figo by JWT India had the industry agog as the agency’s Chief Creative officer Bobby Pawar and several others lost their jobs overnight and everybody in advertising had a point of view on what should be done or what was wrong with them. So here is the view of someone who has spent a small matter of 30 years with this frustrating and yet rewarding business of advertising.

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Netas slug it out on social media

Senior leaders of Karnataka open accounts on Facebook, Twitter just weeks ahead of elections, aiming to record the highest hits. Most have hired professionals to manage their profiles.

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Side Role

How John Abraham survives in Bollywood, with a combination of hard work, canny marketing and average acting skills, and why he has never endorsed underwear.

He traded his dream of playing football at the national level for the safety of an MBA degree. In that, John Abraham perhaps made the best decision of his life. The actor's decade-long career is built on a series of smart marketing moves that have made him into a brand largely unaffected by his stock at the Bollywood box office.

Brand consultant Ramanujan Sridhar says, Abraham's image as an Everyman is his greatest asset. "What he lacks in superstardom, John makes up in endorsements. He comes across as a regular middle class guy who is successful today, which makes him an aspirational figure among young urban Indians," says Sridhar, who believes this image has been carefully worked on for years.

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Figo controversy stirs ad industry

That social media is a double-edged sword is a fact well established. But the leak of the controversial Ford Figo advertisement and the fiasco around it has reiterated the power of the social media, which brings with it as many risks as advantages.

Advertisers have for long been celebrating the reach of the internet and viral marketing, but the extent of damage the medium could bring wasn't something that has hit advertising agencies on the forehead.

The leak of an ad for Ford Figo depicting former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and a car trunk full of gagged and handcuffed women has created a fury to the extent that the head of the advertising agency JWT India has lost his job over the incident.

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The Times they are changing...

The winds of change in Advertising.



Havells House Maid Ad.

Havells Registrar Office.

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Who is your brand's custodian?

"Brands are like pieces of fine crystal - they take time to create and are easy to break" - Mike Isaacson



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Wrestlers endorsing brands on the mat after Olympic tackle

The new found fame of internationally acclaimed Indian wrestlers might be in commercial peril as talks signalling the demise of the ancient Greek game wrestling from the Olympics progress. According to marketing experts, the proposal to remove the sport from the world’s most celebrated athletic event may hold back companies from tying up or renewing endorsement deals with these wrestlers like Sushil Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt, who have emerged from small towns as national brand icons.

While Kumar has represented for brands like Mountain Dew, Eicher tractors and National Egg Coordination Committee, Yogeshwar Dutt has been the government’s face in public awareness campaigns.

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India Inc sees a spurt in Oct-Dec ad spends

CHENNAI: After a year's relief, advertising by FMCG companies is back, and with a bang.

The advertising spends of FMCG and retail companies have gone up significantly in the December 2012 quarter compared with the spends in December 2011 with some companies spending upto 80% more on advertising this fiscal. Godrej Consumer Products for instance, which spent about Rs 58 crore on advertising in the December 2011 quarter dished out roughly Rs 107 in December 2012 and Colgate-Palmolive (India) gave about Rs 99 crore for advertising in 2012 compared with Rs 68.94 it had set apart last year, data from CMIE showed.

"Companies went slow on advertising last year due to the lull in the economy and when they re-enter after a break, it has to be strong," said Harish Bijoor, an independent brand consultant. Globally, companies went slow on ad spends last year but Indian companies are now showing greater confidence in advertising," he said.

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So you want to be a Brand?

Can a person be a brand? Definitely Yes!


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Young ads to sell luxury to old

Why Luxury Brands use youthful imagery to woo older customers.




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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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