Appropriate Hoarding in Temple Town of Puri

Sachets and their role in increasing category penetration

Sachets are perhaps the most important innovation to happen in the Indian market in the recent times. They say that litmus test for a real good innovation is that after it is executed it seems very simple and apparent, that is true for the use of sachets in India. Another reason could be the fact that we are naturally used to buying in smaller quantities be it buying cigarettes in sticks, oil in loose , one just needs to go to the hinter lands to see what can be sold in smaller quantities.

The overall role of small packs in increasing penetration of categories like shampoos in rural India is an old story.

A few days back saw the small packs of Hershey's Syrup. My guess is that this is an adaptation for the Indian market. Will surely promote the trial of the product especially in India where familiarity with the category is low.

Flipkart's Big Billion Day Sale - Sale with no Logic?

Typically every festival season marketers burn the mid-night oil to come up with block buster offers. For many years this responsibility was shouldered by LGs Samsung’s in the Durables Business and then the Mobile marketers, which lined up new products and offers during the festive season, but this year it is the ecom firms which are hogging the limelight or should I say the front pages of newspapers (albeit through full page ads)….

This post is specifically about the flash sales and the one-day sale model which flipkart has been using. They have had a series of flash sales for the Motorola and Xiaomi mobiles. Today morning they have tried a similar model with the one day sale model where they have ridiculously priced products up for sale like a Samsung Tab2 for 1,390, hand blender for 1 and so on

And this was backed up a fairly aggressive TV and print campaign and obviously numerous reminders on Facebook and where not...

But even at 8.02 AM in the morning what you can see is "Sold-Out" for these products, I think flipkart is playing with fire, what does it want to do with this kind of sale, create awareness? Then let them be warned, these limited stock deals create more heart-burn than any long term customer loyalty and if they think consumers cannot see through their tactics then they are again very wrong.

Do they want to clear old stocks,  or do they just want more people visiting their site??? Hopefully they are mature enough to think beyond the eyeballs model.

And even before the event I can see a lot of negative posts about them on social networking sites and even in the earlier flash sales , I could read more negative

comments than good experiences being shared.

I use to be a loyal flipkarter till some time back, but have shifted out to their nearest competitor, but even then I am worried about the direction which flipkart is going....

Co-Creation in Indian FMCG Domain

50 lakh prize money and 1% on the turnover , is the new promo campaign for anyone who comes up with a new flavor for lays, this is in essence the idea of co-creation wherein you are involving the consumer ( one of the stake holders) of your product into it's development. This is actually an extension of Frito-lay's effort to increase the involvement of the consumers, earlier they had the 'fight for the flavor' campaign where they wanted people to rate flavors ......

Incidentally when I was looking for more info on the topic I came across their blog, http://fritolayindia.blogspot.com/, which shares the happenings in their office here in India. It was good to see the blog and the posts , for ex- it had a post where the MD clarifies against the rumor which was floating around on the web, that if you were to burn Kurkure it would turn into plastic and therefore is harmful for health....

Coming back to the main issue of co-creation, it has also been used by Maggi noodles where they are asking consumers to share their experiences with the brand thru the website http://meandmeri.in/, out of which some of them are later converted into ads. I think the idea here again is to bring the brand closer to the users and tap into the feelings about the brand maggi, and because you make the users partners in the process you increase the authenticity of the brand experience.

When the idea of co creation was introduced around a decade back,very few of us could see the relevance and the wider application of the idea, the examples here are from plain fmcg products, if one were to look into the Internet domain then the number of examples are numerous....

Emergency Contraceptive Pills , are they being marketed too well???

The topic which I will touch upon today is something which marketers would generally avoid discussing .... the ethical angle in marketing. We one could also call it the dark side of marketing .....

Marketing is very powerful and quoting what was told to spiderman "With great power comes great responsibility" :)

We marketers should also be fully aware of the responsibility which comes along with yielding such a powerful force on consumers. The case in point is the aggressive promotion of emergency contraceptive pills which is happening in the country currently.

The fact that they have been made into OTC (over the counter) drugs by which it means that they can be sold without a doctor's prescription and companies can directly communicate to consumers is one which has lead to the issue. The two companies , ipill of Cipla and unwanted-72 by Mankind Pharama ltd are promoting their brands through aggressive ads which can be seen on many TV channels during peak hours and this has lead to....

..a spike in the sale of these pills in many cities across the country, like this report from Lucknow says that there has been a 40% spike in the sales of these pills over the last six months and the increased usage has been seen in the 16-35 age group, report.

There has been a lot of media reports on the side-effects that these pills and how this promotion is increasing the rampant use of the product. This report in Indian express shares the increased and indiscriminate use of these pills by teenagers , report.

There has been public discontent about the content and frequency of these ads too, like this report in times of India tells us, report.

The negative fall-out of this sort of all out ad-campaign would be an indiscriminate use of these pills (seen as a substitute for other means of preventing pregnancy), leading to two other problems, one this could lead to reduced usage of condoms by their partners, increasing the chances of transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted disease and the second more complex problem would be the one linked to the continuous usage of these pills leading to long term problems with women in terms disturbed menstrual cycles and problems in conceiving. Though many of the side-effects are mentioned along with the product but .............

Just to reinforce my point , I will quote directly from Marketing Guru Seth Godin's Blog post "Is Marketing Evil?"

"Marketing is beautiful when it persuades people to get a polio vaccine or wash their hands before doing surgery. Marketing is powerful when it sells a product to someone who discovers more joy or more productivity because he bought it.....

Marketing has more reach, with more speed, than it has ever had before. With less money, you can have more impact than anyone could have imagined just ten years ago. The question, one I hope you'll ask yourself, is what are you going to do with that impact?

........Just because you can market something doesn't mean you should."

This debate can be extended to the sale of many products like cigarettes, liquor, fairness creams and cola drinks. But maybe somewhere we should be able to a line ???? Not sure if many of you would agree with this line of thought..............

New Sale Occasion - Independence Day

Over the last few years we seem to have developed a mini-discount season during Independence day period. I think the credit for identifying this as a occasion for sale should go to the Future Group's Big Bazaar which decided to use the occasion to organize sale during this period a few years back. Now other have caught-up with the idea so much so that even local retailers have also started their own sales during this period.

A Shopping bonanza for consumer and the fact that it does not revolve around something alien to us like, Mother's Day or Father's Day...

Marketing Condom....

Most of us think of marketing in the context of soaps , toothpaste ...and so on, but the concept has much wider applications, when this idea was first mooted by Kotler and Levy in the late 60's it met with a lot of resistance, but then over the years the idea has been very well accepted,......

A recent exmaple of how various elements of marketing have been put to use to promote the usage of condom has attracted a lot of attention. The mass media campaign of BBC World Service Trust in its last phase has introduced a mobile ring tone, " condom a cappella" which has become a instant hit not only in India but world wide. The ad associated with the campaign



A visit to the website http://www.condomcondom.org/ gives a good overview of the overall campaign. This I think is a very good example of the varied application of marketing ....

More of the story, Link

Axe Chocolate-man Ad Banned

I & B Ministry has banned the "chocolate man" ad for Axe. The ad has been regarded as "indecent, Vulgar and repulsive". Though I am not a great fan of the earlier ads of Axe, but I don't find this particular ad to be in any way more or less repulsive than the earlier ads.....

Ended up digging youtube to find the "chocolate man" ad



At times banning the ad has the opposite effect, people would seek out and see the ad just to find out why it was banned and in effect attracts more eye balls,,,,

iPhone launch and Endorsements for Olympians

Last week I had written about the launch of iPhone in India and the prospects of the Beijing medal winners getting the attention of corporates, after that we had many articles written about both of these ,so thought will compile them ,

iPhone launch didn't receive the same reception as it did in the US, though it is not a fair comparison , but even then the response was very poor with less than ten people waiting to buy the phone on the event of the launch. The reasons are many , one is that the price is quite high, at Rs 31,000 it is pretty expensive and the novelty associated with the product is no longer there as many people have either used or seen the product ( the segment which can afford that expensive a phone)...and this has given clues to the other mobile marketers on the right price needed to attract Indian consumer,

Links, High price takes the shine off Apple's iPhone launch,
iPhone still an Indian Dream
Nokia,Samsung plan cheaper touch phones,

Olympic Medals winners are being valued at a combined worth of Rs 2.5 crore, Hopefully this would actually translate into some endorsement money for these players... and also a interesting link on how Advertisers failed to capitalize on the Olympic fever

Links, Admen Eye Olympian Opportunity
Bindra and Vijender may become new brand icons
Olympics: Advertisers miss to rake in moolah

Petroleum Price Hike and Marketing.....

A few weeks back I was talking to one of my close relatives who had stayed in UAE for a long time, he said the people there were comfortable with the concept of car pooling. He said many a times 5 people would form a car pool and that would reduce both the fuel expenditure and the amount of driving one has to do... he was lamenting the lack of car pooling in India... ( UAE is oil rich and we are oil poor!!!!!)

And similarly one can observe the reluctance that people have towards using Mass transport systems to go to their offices , agreed that the facilities in mass transport are not up to the mark, but how many of us are willing to try them , personally when I had to travel to the new airport in Bangalore I used the special air conditioned buses of BMTC to reach the airport and found the service and comfort to be much higher than taking a taxi ...

This resistance among people to go in for car-pooling is a mind-set issue among us Indians, as most of associated cars with prestige rather than a means of transport and same is true to certain extent with use of Mass transport system (though this might change with improvement of the services) where most people would find it below their dignity to travel on a bus to their office...

But what role does marketing have to play in this scenario? We have concepts like Demarketing which can be applied in the current context, which basically looks at how one can reduce or limit the demand for consumption of a specific product or a service on a permanent or a temporary basis.

And with the increased awareness in environmental issues and the hike in petroleum prices it might be the right time to come up with a hard hitting campaign to promote the use of car pools and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels....

Infact one of the reasons why opted for using the mass transport (BMTC Buses) to reach the new airport in Bangalore was driven by the numerous 3/4 page ads by BMTC announcing the services, with routes timings and also a brief note on the environmental benefits of the service , giving emission or other equivalents of using the bus vs a taxi....

New Ice Cream Flavour and Biscuits

I was watching the TV during the IPL and saw two products which have been recently launched and are linked to TV shows and tournaments,

there might be more like this ....


1. Panchvi Pass Flavour at Baskin Robbins ---- Based on the new quiz show hosted by SRK, in Star


2. Parle 20-20 butter and Cashew Cookies --- linked to the obsession we all have had for the last couple of months with 20-20 cricket..


On the face of it , the strategy looks good. Capitalize on the hype that a TV show or a new cricket format is creating, but then what happens when the hype goes down. Would the companies continue to promote these new flavors or variants or is it enough to be there when the show is on , as the 26 episodes planned for Panchvi Pass.....

Consumer based Brand Equity

When one reads about the cases and histories of major brands in the developed one realizes the time and effort which goes into building a Brand, and the kind of valuations which the brands get in many of the cases the brands of the companies are valued many times more than the total physical assets of the company.....

But one needs to realize or question where does this equity reside, within the company? in the marketing department? or within an individual in the organization ( Maybe a Steve jobs........). The truth is that though the some of the source of equity would lie in all mentioned above , the marketing department of the company, the dynamic brand manager and so on........... but brand equity mostly lies in the minds of the consumers who use the brand. Though it might sound very obvious but marketing implications need to be carefully assessed.

In Indian context one finds many of iconic and old brands entering India and not making much of an dent with consumers, the other day I wanted to buy a lemon drink, asked the guy for Sprite, he gave me 7up, I drank it reading the new POP of Mountain Dew hanging in the shop.

Most of us would actually have a preference for Limca (for or against), but we are insensitive to the other lemon drinks. Which emphasizes the point which I had made earlier on the consumer held equity, because Limca has been there in India for longer than most of the other brands and we have been exposed to its communication campaign from the pre-lib days, we perceive it to be different. But it is not same with Mountain Dew, about which I have written earlier also...

And that is why one can see the older brands going in for a change in the logo and design of the brands, Ex- Godrej.....with the hope that they would be able capture consumer equity with the newer generation of consumer, who don't connect with the Brand as their parents did.....

A related article which came in Business World talks about how old brands are being revitalized, Link

Consumer Promotions : Are they really relevant?

Though we have been talking about increasing accountability of marketing expenditure and working on metrics to show the return on marketing investment not much progress has actually been made. We have not moved much further from the era when people use to claim that half of the ad expenditure is waste but no one knows which half. I thought of relating the issues of results to expenditure on consumer promotions as quite a substantial part of money is spent on consumer promotions.

I would like to share examples of a couple of consumer promotions schemes which I found to be either inappropriate or inadequate. I am regular Bru Coffee drinker, and I buy 50gms every month. Last moth they were giving a free air-tight container was with 50 gms pack. Same day evening I found that along with the double pack of Britannia Biscuits they were giving a plastic bowl free (which is a weakness in Indian consumers which has been exploited by marketers for a long time), free is something which is hard to resist so obviously I took the free gifts from both the companies. But then later on I thought what was the benefit of running the scheme, I buy the same brand and same quantity, so why did the company give me free gifts,

Consumer promotions should either encourage the regular buyer to buy more quantities or attract new ones. Schemes where in free buckets were given with 5 Kg packs of detergents made sense. In these schemes at least they could lock-in a customer for a longer time, hoping that he will get used to the brand and when the scheme is withdrawn he might still continue with the brand (though the advantage is lost when all other player come up with similar schemes).

Maybe best consumer schemes would one which would force the consumers to switch brands, so that you are able to increase market share based on consumer promotions. There are examples of these kind also, but far and between and gets copied very fast. One which I can remember is the "Britannia Khao World Cup Jao Campaign"...

But I guess such schemes need a lot of original thinking and effort so the easy way out is the examples which I have mentioned earlier....and by the way this time I got a free coffee mug with the 50gms Bru.....

Brand building - Dove Way

Traditionally one would find that ads of a soap would emphasize on making the user beautiful either directly or indirectly through the use of celebrity endorsements . But the series of ads used by dove is very different in the sense that the ads challenge the concept of beauty as has been traditionally seen. The Dove Evolution Ad has won two Grand Prix Advertising awards recently. On the web page it says "In a world of hype and stereotypes, Dove provides a refreshingly real alternative for women who recognize that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes".

The Dove Evolution Ad



They have recently launched the Dove "Onslaught" Ad



The details about the brand, its standing in the US market as per their website

• the world's number 1 cleansing brand
• sales of over € 2.5 billion a year in over 80 countries
• outsells all other skin care bars combined in the US
• over 1 billion showers taken with Dove products in the US each year
  

All these campaigns are part of the "Campaign for Real Beauty", which has a website of its own with a host of activities linked to the brand....

So the question is what is dove up to ?
It has managed to create enough buzz in the market place with its campaigns which have been recognized by both the industry and consumers as being some thing different.....

This ad has been discussed by many bloggers, link

Changing Marketplace - Two-wheelers

The dynamics of the Indian automobile market is changing, especially the two wheeler market. In the pre-liberalization era the market was dominantly a scooter market with the market share of scooter touching 70-80 percent of the two-wheeler sales . That changed with liberalization and the ratio changed and it was the motorcycles within the category whose sales dominated the product category. The company which rode the changed preference of the consumers towards motorcycles was Hero Honda, with their best selling Splendor and CD 100 they were able to witness unprecedented growth in both their top as well as bottom line. The change in consumer preferences were driven by both the fact that motorcycles were more fuel efficient and also were technologically superior. The introduction of Honda Activa did revive the scooter segment, but it could never reach it is previous levels. As of 2005-06 data the motorcycle sales are 85% of the total combined scooter and motorcyle sales, which is reverse of what was there 15 years back.

The latest sales figures for September show that there is a fall in the sales of two-wheelers as whole. Though the market leader Hero Honda has shown a small growth but they are cannot be compared with the phenomenal growth that they have had in the last few years and at the other end TVS motor company has shown a substantial drop of 29.04 percent in the overall two-wheeler sales and in motorcycles the drop is to the tune of 49.53 percent. The economy as a whole is doing very well, if one were to look at the sales of consumer durables and also the sales of cars (Though in cars there is a expectation that may be there would be a decline in the near future), so why is this decline in the sales of two-wheelers?

One of the reasons when one reads the newspapers is the rising interest rates and the tightening of finance from company's end for the 100 cc segment. But the market has also witnessed a shift in consumer preference from 100cc to the larger 125/150cc, as can be seen by the success that products like Pulsar, Discover have had in the market place. Companies are claiming that their new launches in the next few months would shore up the sales, but then one wonders if the lowered interest in the segment is due to poor marketing effort by the major players, in terms of new launches, campaigns ................... Hopefully the companies will pull up their socks and ensure a better performance in the upcoming festive season

More TV Channels more choice more confusion...

We are witnessing a world of which is getting increasingly fragmented. We have moved from an era of mass marketing where Henry Ford could sell as many black Model Ts as he wanted, to an era where mass customization and micro-segmentation where every marketer wants to be able to address needs of individual customers. Though not many have been able to reach the magic formula of being able to serve the individual customer profitably. If we were to look at one area where there has been a tremendous fragmentation, it is the traditional mass media, specially TV channels. Close to a decade back we just had one channel Doordarshan, and as a marketer if you wanted to reach the consumers across the country and you had put your ad in Chitrahaar then your job is done, you would have reached your target customers and media planning was a very nice and an easy job.

But today...........to quote from a recent news item "An astounding 200 channels have hit the air since 2000, taking the total number to 326. (There were only six in 1991, when the satellite TV had entered India’s orbit, and 48 till 1996.)" This proliferation of channels has added an estimated 48,000 minutes of new advertising time every day converting this into 10-second spots, that’s 288,000 new spots a day. Now lets imagine the life of a media planner in this situation, with each of these channels attracting a smaller and smaller group of consumers, making reaching them more complex and costly. Though if one were able to get the exact data on the viewer ship maybe we could manage to reach them more effectively. Some time back I had read that Google wanted to integrate its google maps, Wi-fi and ads. It wanted to target individual consumers who were browsing the net in a given area, to be targeted with specific ads for that locality and link it to their search. For example if one were browsing the internet sitting in a CCD in MG Road in Bangalore then through google would be able to target ads of the nearest shopping mall or announce the special price menu in a nearby restaurant or announce the happy hours of the nearest pub....

The Impact of the world cup win...........

I am one of those who has stopped watching cricket especially after the performance of the team in the last world cup. But i made an expectation yesterday and went on to watch the last half of the match, and was pleasantly rewarded by the rare Indian victory. It was not only me who was benefited yesterday , the sponsors of the Reliance Communications, Nokia, Pepsi and the sports broadcaster ESPN-Star Sport had a windfall gain . In the 50-over version of the game when the Indian team exited in the first round many of the advertisers and sponsors wanted to renegotiate the ad-rates. There was a lot of debate of the merits of having a more flexible arrangement depending on the performance of the team. But with yesterday's win in the twenty20 World Cup tournament the Indian team and players are back in the reckoning, in the next few weeks we will find new brand endorsement deals being struck. But the bottom line is that for marketers who want to bet on cricket to make their brands a success in the market place it will remain a gamble, unless the team starts to perform more consistently.

But just to give an idea of the gains that ESPN Star Sports made in the Twenty20 tournament, an estimated Rs 200 crore, out of which 110-115 crore came from ad sales alone. The ad spots for the final was sold for an all time high of Rs 7.5-10 Lakhs per ten seconds, and the TRPs are expected to be in the range of 15-20. Some food for thought indeed..........