On a Sunday morning I suddenly get a call - "You have to take a 5 mins session for some school children on marketing !!"
Marketing ?? I OK it !
after playing CS for half an hour I start thinking abt what i should be speaking ...
Very impressed by myself I sketch a plan
I will start by asking which is the latest movie on the box office ... asking them how they know it .... and kick starting with promotions 4th P of marketing ..... then steadily explain all the other Ps
I reach the place on time to find out everyone is in formal wear ..... and the school children were not from the 8th or 9th class ...... they were 10+1 & 10+2's from some of the best schools across India.
I was then suddenly asked to begin blabbering
I started off as I planned ..... but the answers I got were
" Karz is the latest movie " . .... " It is through promotions by the producer"
I had to think of a back up plan ..... I tried driving them to the other Ps
but they replied ..... "there are 4 Ps ..... product, price, place and promotions" !!
( I wouldnt be shocked if someone stood up and said .......these are defined by Kotler ..... whereas some people also believe in 7 Ps and those are ...... )
I was now feeling trapped due to underestimating these kids.....
Luckily I could give them some fundas on how STP is employed .... ( I couldnt speak on high profile stuff like surrogate marketing etc etc) ...... and by the time i was done with I was told that my time was up !! (Thank you !!! i whispered)
Later I heard that these kids had raped a person who was taking the seminar on Operations by preempting him with all his fundas
Even though the IIP data released today shows a major increase in production of consumer non-durables (FMCG) ....... the FMCG index at Nifty lost 26.27 points or 1.32%. Tata Tea, Nestle, UB and HUL were the losers.
This raises a question-mark on the sustainability of this kind of growth currently experienced. Common sense dictates that if the downturn were to persist, which it will for many months at least, the price-hikes and the efficiency generation initiatives would not be able to bring in the same amount of growth. Rather we stand at the danger of end of growth and the beginning of a decline.
TechnopakAdvisors, a retail consultancy, had predicted that the FMCG sales have a danger of declining at about 10%.
What would one expect on the performance of FMCG companies and the economic downturn ?
A drop in sales (obviously for non-essential items) and hence a drop in profitability ?
Revelation, the profits of FMCG Co.s is rising at a rate of 17-20% in the first half of 2008-2009.
Wondering how? The sales have taken a hit ... but are still growing at a reasonable pace
But the bottomline is soaring .. majorly due to the various initiatives taken by various companies.
For example HUL clocked a 34% increase in this quarter. This was done majorly through price hikes of about 5-10% to compensate for the increase in raw material costs.
Nestle and Dabur have revisited their sourcing programmes and are now undertaking intelligent buying. Dabur is buying material on future exchanges for non-essential items to flank bulk buying.
Several Cold-drink and beer companies are using tin cans instead of metal cans to reduce the overall cost without significant impact on functionality.
Col-Pal has initiated an effort of cutting down on SKUs to reduce the packaging and and other costs.
Godrej Consumers has relooked its supply chain and transportation of materials to reduce about Rs10 crore per year.
Some consumer product companies not only reduced the weight of their product but also introduced newer re-engineered products of smaller quantity. Wipro Consumer launched a new soap at Rs 6 weighing 45gms, otherwise it would have cost Rs 16 for 100gms.
Similarly Coke has introduced a 350ml PET bottle for Rs15 for most of its brands.
Firms on the other hand could not cut down much on Advertising and Promotional expenditure due to fierce competition.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
An interesting Outdoor campaign by Anheuser Busch InBev to launch Tennent as the strongest beer in India.
Another OOH on agency faqs which I found particularly interesting. Uses the hype created by Gajini to its own advantage .....
But I would definitely like to research on whether people pay enough attention to the creative copy to realize it is not the cliched Amir Khan and there is certain meaning to what is written on the person's body.
The Amrutanjan advert which was recently launched targeted at the South can be said to be truly non-traditional. This experiment was done by the Mudra team with a launch of a set of TVCs which resemble the reality shows like MTV Bakra and Candid Camera
A new campaign which was run by HUL in collaboration with Yahoo!. The launch of Axe Dark Temptation was done by hijacking the Yahoo! homepage for 24 hours. The campaign was aimed to engage the target audience of Axe and inform them that November 2008 is being celebrated as Chocolate Month in India. As part of this activity, members of the audience could send free chocolate packages to girls, if the latter were ready to accept them.
With the rise of consumerism, we observe a rise in consumer preferences and also observe that consumers have become more discerning in terms of identifying the product offerings. These changes have a huge impact on the way companies develop their marketing and communication strategies. As the traditional frameworks like AIDA(Attention Interest Desire Action)do not have the capacity to incorporate this change there is a need to revise them.
Previously, the marketeers used to define brands and communicate the aspects of the brand to the consumers. The success of this implementation was measured by the gap between the brand positioning (what the marketeer/brand manager desires as the image of the brand in the minds of the consumer) and brand image (how the consumer actually perceives the brand). Then the relevant steps were taken to minimize this gap by intensifying the promotional activities to change the brand image in the minds of the consumers
But presently, the marketeers have realized the importance of the consumer’s perception. It is so because the consumers are continuously defining the brands and redefining them in order to make it coherent with their routine experience with the brand. Due to the difficulty in changing the brand image in the minds of the consumer a more elaborate strategy is desired wherein the marketeers can define the brand with the collaboration of their consumers.
Engagement marketing is where there is a two way communication of information between the consumer and the brand. Unlike the present context where the consumers are passive receivers of communication through various kinds of media, here we invite the consumers to help evolve the brand by actively involving themselves in the production and co-creation of marketing programs.
Hence the underlying power of engagement marketing lies in the concept of involving the consumers in a two-way communication.
The AIDA model advocates that initially a the marketeer should grasp the Attention of the consumers, then arouse the Interest in his brand, creating a Desire for the product offering and ultimately leading to Action (purchase) towards the brand.
While this model seems to be all encompassing and logical at the same time, this is also termed as Interruptive marketing by several marketeers as it advocates intruding the consumer’s mind and taking control of his/her decision making process.
Moreover, the channels of communication have been growing rapidly with a high degree of fragmentation observed in them. The most effective mass communication medium i.e. the television has observed a decline in various forms
1.Mass TV audience has been declining in several countries
2.Viewers find TV commercials more intrusive and less satisfying
3.TV advertisement clutter has been constantly increasing
This framework on the other hand enables the marketeer to build a stronger relationship and sense the evolving consumer needs to develop more relevant product offerings. The engagement marketing framework advocates engagement of the consumer to co-create the decision making process and elements of the brand with him. The direct result of this will be a more focussed communication plan which is more consumer oriented as it has been formed on the basis of inputs provided by the consumers themselves.
The goal of communication through this framework is not only to recall or repeat the message but also to allow the consumers to live through the message. Here the engagement involves a subtle and subconscious process which aids the consumers to combine the ad’s message to their own association making the brand more relevant to the consumer’s personality.
This framework goes in hand with the research findings that consumers first engage with the ads on a personal level and then recall the ads i.e. consumers process a lot of information on a subconscious or emotional level first and then engage their rational mind to lead to action.
Hence this concept advocates that marketing communication becomes a fabric of entertainment, by enhancing the experience of the consumers but not interrupting it. This has been realised through various mediums of communication in the modern world in several ways
1.Leveraging consumer generated content for building brand loyalty (recent Dove campaign in US)
2.Reaching consumers through mobile marketing strategies (BMW mms campaign in Germany)
3.Using social networks to create new advertising opportunities (Dell’s Digital Nomads)
4.Continually driving customer engagement through rich, interactive experiences (Tohata Mobile Gaming campaign)
5.Leveraging viral marketing techniques to turn occasional visitors into brand evangelists (The blogs written by companies and book authors to engage consumers)
In Florida the Obama campaign has spent 2 million dollars in a new voter registration campaign with Project Vote, which has signed up 145,000 new voters. The total new registered voter number in Florida is about 430,000 so far (with approx 7.5 million people voting in Florida in 2004).
What the Obama campaign has offered to new registered voters in Florida - and bearing in mind, many of the registration drives were young adult voter -oriented, and held for example at university campuses - is now a series of free rap music concerts with Jay-Z and Wyclef Jean. If you are a new voter in Florida, and want the free tickets, you only need to give the Obama campaign your mobile phone number. And you will be told, that you will be contacted on election day with a reminder.
This is engagementmarketing. It is interacting with the target customer (prospective voter in this case), and having a dialogue, a give-and-take, an honest bargain. We ask for something (your support, your phone number) and we give you something in exchange (free rap concert).
The news article reported it costs on average 14 dollars for a campaign to sign up a new voter on average. Its a lot of hard leg-work, going from door-to-door, having staff at shopping malls, arranging events at college campuses, etc. If at that point the voter is not asked for the phone number, it would be a very heavy effort to try to get back to them later, and try to get their mobile phone number.
Florida is one of America's retirement states, and has a very large population of retired people. As we've reported here, American senior citizens are still very unfamiliar with SMS text messaging, and are only very recently getting onboard with mobile phones as such. It means Obama's campaign has a particularly strong advantage in using the "youth method" of communicating - SMS text messaging.
There has been an increasing growth of addicted hard-core gamers on massively multiplayer fantasy wargames like World of Warcraft, Lineage 2 and Everquest, with literally millions of active gamers online. The multiplayer gaming activity is very compelling especially to young male adults - the kind of customer that the spicy snacks brand Tohato wanted to appeal to. So they launched the award winning World’s Worst War campaign, as a mobile multiplayer online advergame.
Tohato launched two new extremely hot spiced snacks brands in Japan, Habanero and Satan Jorquia. Each package had a 2D barcode, and customers were invited to fight in the war by joining in the army for one or the other brand. And gamers who could recruit more gamers would be promoted in the army, so the game had a strong viral element.
The game ran for several months over 31 battlefields, and soon over 100,000 gamers were interacting daily in the game. The brand even provided a daily news service to report on the war - who had been promoted, who had died bravely etc. The game generated such passionate involvement that gamers would collect at social networking sites like Mixi and Facebook to plan their strategies for the upcoming battle.
This is certainly one of the best examples of a clever engagementmarketing campaign this year. It is an MMS campaign, by BMW, in Germany. It was tightly targeted, timed, personalized - and was the text-book engagementmarketing.
Here is how it worked. German winters require snow tyres. So if you bought a car in the summer months, you would have summer tyres on the car, and would need winter tyres. BMW had the required info on their recent customers, what car model, what wheel types, and could therefore figure out which winter tyre model would fit the car of any given customer. Best of all, they had the mobile phone numbers. Obviously BMW focused only on those cars that were sold that year between spring and autumn, because if the owner had had the BMW for more than a year, the owner would have bought winter tyres last year, for last winter..
So BMW designed an MMS campaign, where they customized the picture of the car to be the model of the car that the customer had, and the colour of the car, with the wheel rims that the customer had bought. Then BMW virtually fitted the suggested winter tyre for that car and wheel. And this image was to be sent to the customer.
So when do you buy winter tyres. Not when its the summer. But when it really starts to feel like winter. Because this was mobile, BMW had prepared the campaign, and waited for the exact right moment. The day the first snow started to fall in Germany, that was when the MMS messages went out.
And best of all, the MMS message included a link to come to BMW's mobile website, to select alternate tyres (and wheel rims) to upload to the tyre simulator, so that the customer could experiment with other variations and see their prices and compare.
A conversion rate from messages sent, to actual tyre purchases made at registered BMW dealers, of 30%
This portion success demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be, when you make something as basic and quaint as "trust" a core competency. Threadless succeeds by asking its customers to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees.
Trustworthiness is especially important at Threadless because the company's most important asset, its vast online community is managed collectively. Threadless employs no moderators, and no single person or group is charged with keeping the community happy. Nor, technologically speaking, is the social network itself especially advanced. It lacks many of the features found on MySpace or Facebook. There are no virtual friends, no messaging features, and no status messages. Users' profiles are made up of their blog postings and their submissions.
But what Threadless lacks in flashy features, it makes up for in steadfast dedication to staying close to its customers. Both its founders spend much of their time cruising Threadless.com, posting comments on blogs, inspecting designs, and tweaking the website. They publish their instant-message addresses and regularly query the public about changes to design or contest policies. On Threadless, if people see something they don't like and want to talk to its founder, they get to do it.
This rabid engagement propelled the company through four years of phenomenal growth, beginning around 2004. The user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million -- with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins.
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