You must buy the Tata Tiago - Lio says so. Or else!

Imagine this about 3 decades ago - a typical ad agency brainstorming session. It is eleven o'clock at night, and outside it's raining like it only can in the Bombay monsoons. The meeting room is filled with leftovers of a samosa, Maggi noodles dinner and somewhat bedraggled account exec and creative types who'll get passed over by any fastidious cat. The ashtrays are filled to overflowing. The glasses and the bottle of Old Monk are all empty. Nobody has any money to go any buy another OM, and in any case the booze shops are all closed. And worst of all, we're supposed to present ads to the Bossman tomorrow morning, and there's nothing to show - nothing at all worth a d***.

That's when our Creative Director would open up and speak those golden words of wisdom which have resounded in the offices of ad agencies since the days of Pompeii: "Let's put a really pretty bimbo in the ad, and the client will love it. Make sure that she shows a lot of thorax, chest and midriff and we'll get approval."

Sex sells. Right.

Decades have passed, and the bright minds of Indian advertising have found something else that sells even better.

Celebrities.

I can imagine the conversation happening in the ad agency at another eleven o'clock at night brainstorm meeting. Of course, no ciggies, no Old Monk in the conference room. Now the CD says, "Stick in some celebrity mugshot in there, and we'll get approval."

In a seminar some months ago, a highly respected Professor of Marketing in one of the top business schools in the US gently hinted at his sense of surprise at the popularity of celebrity advertising in India; in his view, no other market uses celebrity advertising as much as India. One can easily believe it - we need Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, and other assorted film, TV and sports stars to sell us anything from flipflops to payment banks to travel booking sites and shopping sites, etc.

Is it because Indian consumers really believe that celebrity endorsement means that the product is a better, more reliable product? That Salman Khan actually uses Bahamas flipflops? Maybe they do - going through a few hundred assignments from MBA students over the years have convinced me that the writers of such assignments really believe that celebrities bring credibility.

So, all the things we were taught about the vampire effect, and matching brand values with those of the celebrity are perhaps old hat. Perhaps, sticking a celebrity into the ad is a hidden confession of the lack of ability to think of a strong creative idea, and hence an easy escape route.

So, the idea is that when the finest footballer in the world, Lionel Messi, exhorts us to rush out and shell out Rs 4 lakhs for the Tata Tiago, we should be doing just that. Maybe the Tata guys are right - according to this, Tata Motors received over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago by mid April. Sales were perhaps not as spectacular, if this is to be believed, but it's early days yet.

Tata Motors receives over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/51877959.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Tata Motors receives over 1 lakh enquiries for new Tiago

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/51877959.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Or is it just fanciful thinking? Car buyers in the Tiago category may not care at all about Lio or any other celebrity endorsement, but are more concerned over mundane matters like "Kitne deti hai?"

I've tried to get stats from my friends in market research about the role that celebrity endorsement plays in advertising and the specific areas of influencing consumer behaviour, but no success - their data is of course for privileged access only. Perhaps a reader of this post may wish to point me to some data which is in the public domain and does address this question.

A question of ROI

Makar Sankranti 2016 is just done and dusted. Pongal and Bihu is over. And soon we can look forward with eager anticipation to being regaled by a genre of stories which hit our media every spring and summer - large-scale cheating in school and college exams. For those with short memories, here's one such happening from March 2015.

For those who believe that this is a peculiarly Indian behavioural trait, or at best a third-world phenomenon, please be prepared to be corrected. It's pretty common in Stanford too. Yep, that's right - Stanford. Here's proof that I'm not hallucinating - check this out. And no, it isn't limited to Stanford - it appears to be pretty widespread - see here.

Since cheating appears to be a universal, and universally appealing phenomenon, my curiosity was aroused and I did some Google research as to why cheating is so widespread. I finally came to the conclusion that it's all a question of ROI - return on investment - and hence purely economic.

Let me explain. A child needs to pass in school in order to get into college. A college degree is essential in order to get a job. A job is essential for livelihood, marriage, etc. etc. Hence the economic connection is clearly demonstrated. QED.

Economics also tells us that risk and return are directly proportional - the higher the reward, the higher is the willingness and propensity to take risks. However, time has shown us that at the highest levels of reward, there is precious little risk. We just need to look at what happened to Wall Street and global banks in the 2007/8 meltdown. They burnt up billions of dollars, bringing global economics to the brink of collapse through what can only be described as chicanery and fraud. But they got saved by taxpayers' money. And not a single executive went to jail for even a single day.

There's a lesson here for all of us - if you must cheat, cheat big, really big. Then the government will step in and save you. Amen.

Branding in the digital age - the merits of riding a tiger

First off, let me confess that I'm 64 and, therefore, a real real late-comer into the digital age. Thanks to pressure from my students, my son and his peers, and the countless nephews and nieces that I'm blessed with, I decided to jump into the deep end of the digital age and got myself accounts in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the last of which I've since discontinued.

What took me by surprise was not the behaviour that I noticed on such "social" media spaces, but in the e-commerce and m-commerce spaces. I would have sworn that we Indians would never buy clothes and shoes without going through our 'touch-feel-see' and 'trial' routines - but thankfully I had not taken any vows about it, since I would have to eat crow, and large quantities of that indigestible bird.

On closer study over the last few years, I noticed some significant changes in the way consumers, particularly young consumers in India, interact with offerings, messages and brands. This has significant impact in the way marketers need to go about creating strategies and tactical plans in order to bring their brands emotionally and physically closer to their consumers.

A New Paradigm

Changes we've seen can perhaps define a new paradigm in consumer behaviour, but let's go ahead without caveat:

1. The consumer today has far more choices than she had in the past. That's of course a given, but it also means that power is now more assuredly in the hands of the people, and not in the hands of the manufacturers and/or channels. 
2. The consumer today can and does bite back, and hard. Had a bad holiday experience? You will go onto FB and create a shindig. The product you bought off Amazon is not up to your expectations? Sure you'll yell and scream - and you'll get heard too. 
3. Consumers are learning faster than ever, and much of their learnings come from other consumers. So, you don't just have to satisfy one consumer but a whole community. Word-of-mouth has never been so powerful.
4. The consumer's attention span has become shorter in most cases. If you want to tell her something, make it quick, fast and straight. But, you can't be boring - you must engage, entertain, excite her at the same time. "Buy me because I last longer" is still a good message, but now you must prove it in a fun way. Exhortation has to give way to excitement. 
5. At the same time, the consumer is prepared to spend more time in search, evaluation, and post-purchase validation. In an article entitled "Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places", the author writes "In the June 2009 issue of McKinsey Quarterly, my colleague David Court and three coauthors introduced a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands: the “consumer decision journey” (CDJ)...Their research revealed that far from systematically narrowing their choices, today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond." An interesting sidelight was that consumers today spend a lot more time in the post-purchase stage than they did earlier. 
6. Consumers' relationships with brands can fracture quicker than ever, but if cemented strongly can last for much longer - in other words, the marketer can move the consumer to such a stage of satisfaction that she can become an advocate and brand ambassador. Here, I don't mean 'likes' in an FB page, which is a meaningless word in that context and totally without validation. What I do mean are consumer feedback without incentives, or sometimes incentivised post facto. 

Riding the Tiger

So where does that leave the marketer? Does she have to unlearn everything that she's acquired over the years? No, not really - but she must be smarter at picking up nuances from the consumer universe she's dealing with. Let's look at a few guidelines which may be useful:

1. The first fundamental rule of brand management has not changed - if your proposition is not addressing a need or a want, go back and start all over again.
2. The second fundamental rule remains the same - be differentiated and be relevant to the consumer's needs or wants.
3. Don't think 'product', think 'augmented' product, and better still, think 'possible' product. Consumers are already doing so, and so are your smarter competitors. 
4. Mass media is not dead, yet. As long as mass markets exist, the validity of mass media will remain. However, how a marketer needs to carefully blend and manage how mass media communication (one-way) meshes in with the two-way communication in other consumer engagement spaces, particularly when many consumers are engaging with each other over a single brand acquisition issue - think of it as a multi-way conversation in a multi-verse. 
5. Time has shortened. The consumer decides faster and adopts or jettisons brands faster. The marketer must deal with faster decision times and ride this tiger in order to build a successful brand today. 
6. The consumer is teacher, professor and mentor - always and forever. Alexander Pope's dictum "The proper study of mankind is man" has never been more true.

The good old-fashioned virtues of solid product performance, excellent after-marketing, caring for the consumer and showing that you care, building trust and confidence - these are still highly valuable today, perhaps even more so, in a highly fragmented market space of multiple choices. I venture to suggest that these virtues are permanently desirable for a brand.

The marketer who works towards building these virtues will build very strong brands indeed.

Society for the Care of Political Leaders who've been whipped at the Hustings

I saw this picture recently in a newspaper, and my heart bled.

For a minute I thought that these were refugees running away from the depredations of those evil Bokacho.... Haramza... militants in Nigeria. I was reaching for my wallet for a hefty 10 buck contribution towards their board and lodge, when I looked more closer at the picture.

And my heart bled even more. Here they were, the erstwhile political leaders of our Nation, who'd been kicked out of their cushy jobs by the populace.

And these are not the only ones - the list is pretty long: Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid, Arvind Kejriwal, Farooq Abdullah, Arun Jaitley, Milind Deora, Gurudas Kamath, Priya Dutt, Praful Patel, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Raj Babbar, to name just a few.

No more privileges, no more power - what will they do for their daily bread, since they've stopped earning theirs by honest toil many decades ago? Nobody's going to give them any bribe or hafta any more. No Arnab Goswami will call them to the studio and shout at them "the nation wants to know...." Death, where is thy sting? is the question that most of these leaders are asking themselves. 

I believe that what our country needs is a NGO focused on the care of politicians who've been busted by their electorate. Three square meals totalling 50 bucks a day, unless the fellow stuffing his face happens to be the sardar fellow called Ahluwalia in a blue turban, for whom the ceiling is fixed at 28 bucks a day less 10% TDS and 12.36% Service Tax.

So, here I am, setting up this NGO -  Society for the Care of whipped Political Leaders (aka SCPL - Scalpel - which is a nice mnemonic).

Of course, not all of them will need the services of my NGO. This gentleman thought he'd get a solid job doing what he's good at - this is a service which will never go out of fashion.

But he found there's a smarter way - he quarreled with the judge at the court, and became a guest of the nation for a couple of weeks. The food is better, the housing is superior - all modern conveniences are available, including HDTV, etc. And of course, the neighbours are all upper-class, moneyed types. Great place for networking for future prosperity.

And there's Arun Jaitley, who's got friends in high places. He's already got a job, with the promise of being sneaked into the Lok Sabha in a perfectly legal way, and his appointment will be regularised post facto.

But there will be many takers for my little charity. And come the state elections, there will be many more. I wonder where I'll house them.

I'm looking for like-minded and generous souls who can contribute towards this NGO - we'll have entertainment evenings when the recipients of our charity can reminisce about the great work they've done for our country, how the bureacrats used to quake in their chappals, and how rotten the current government is. I hope that some of their colleagues who've won at the polls will come in and hobnob with the inmates and talk of the ballot boxes they've stuffed together in their callow youth.

We are choosy, though. Not any old leaders whose rear has been kicked can come in - we reserve our charity for the deserving rich and criminal. It will be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for Mani Shankar Aiyar to enter the kingdom of Scalpel.

The Case of the Rubber Swords

My contacts in China inform me that Indian political parties have placed large orders for rubber swords, with immediate deliveries. There's no mystery in this - leaders of various political parties who've performed abysmally in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections will fall on their swords, and then hope to bounce back.

Some leaders have taken 'responsibility' for the disastrous performance of their parties and resigned/threatened/promised to resign, and two have actually done so. Imagine their plight if they discover that the swords they are prepared to fall on actually do have sharp edges, and can eviscerate them and end their political careers.

Tarun Gogoi, the CM of Assam, has promised to resign within a week, beginning May 16th. The poor fellow needs good secretarial help - obviously his current staff are not capable of preparing a proper resignation letter for the boss to sign. There is every reason to believe that he is waiting for his rubber sword to fall on. If anybody would like to volunteer for the task of writing a good resignation letter, please get in touch with me - I have an inside line to Shri Gogoi.

Stalin resigned, but then bounced back. He must have got his rubber sword express delivered - he must have ordered wooden swords from amazon.com, though there is a rubber knife available here.

Nitish Kumar, the Bihar CM, has resigned, but is waiting for someone to take out his rubber sword from his dhoti. God forbid if his followers take him at his word, and replace the weapon with one with edges.

The Maharashtra CM is waiting for his bosses in Delhi to send him a sword to fall on. He is a worried man - he has inside info that the bosses have ordered a proper katana, and not a rubber one. I am told that he's ordered a steel body armour which he'll wear when he's told to fall on his sword.

Since Sonia Gandhi and her son have both taken responsibility for the debacle of the Congress Party, there is a strong expectation that they'll also fall on swords. I understand that various flunkies of the 'firstest' family of India are trying out various swords on which mother and son can fall, and then resurrect themselves on demand from said flunkies in the party. I have it from reliable sources that the reason why Rahul Gandhi had gone AWOL from the farewell bash for the exiting PM was not because he wanted to insult Dr MMS, but he wanted to personally try out various swords from a wide variety of soft materials. In an unpublished interview with a very senior correspondent, who shall remain nameless, Rahul said that he wanted to ensure that his mom and he had the softest landing possible - he didn't trust any of his party members, and did not want a Swordgate after the new Government came into power.

And no, the very senior correspondent is NOT the one who screams about the Nation Wanting to Know.

Shameless plug for Mountain of the Moon - my translation of Chander Pahar

The book is now available as ebooks, here:

• for Kindle, at Amazon - here
• for Android, at Google Play - here 
• and at Flipkart - here 

Hope you buy the book, and hope you enjoy reading it.
 

Teaching the girl child

Isn't this just wonderful? Got this some time ago from a friend - and I look at it regularly. Now you know why the status of women in the cowbelt (not that it is much different elsewhere) is what it is. Now you know why there will be many more Nirbhayas before women in our country get to equality with our men.

Now you know why deifying Indian women as Kali, Durga, Shakti, Bhavani, Saraswati, et al are great ways to hide the truth from them. Now you know why Ram will eat kheer for decades, while Sita is told to work, Geeta is told to bring food for dad, and Meena is told to help mother. Now you know why our education perpetuates slavery of women in our land.