Converting Brands into Verbs the Marketers Dream....

This post is triggered by the new ads of Flipkart, which end with "Ab sirf shopping nahi, Flipkart Karo" Wanting a brand to represent a category and becoming generic is at one level, most of us would say zerox karo even though it is a cannon photocopier. It works in the company's favour when the category is nascent, as the online shopping world is today, but then what would happen later when one flipkarts a book from a infibeam.com? Taking into the next level is to push the brand to become a verb, Internationally Fedex the letter kind of things… Despite the possible negatives in the future, it is a marketers dream to become generic for the category and even become a verb... Some other companies which have been trying to do this is Cadbury's with " kuch meetha ho jaye" or "Shubh Aarambh", “Tanda Matlab” Coca Cola Campaign some time back.......

Good Timely Ad

Value of Brand Dhoni !!!!!!!!!

I thoroughly enjoyed the world cup success and was quite impressed with the overall team performance and especially Dhoni's role in the success. I think many of us have always have been waiting for that one individual who would come true on the big match day and win matches for us ( like the Aussies have always had and even with Pakistan at time).

My first tweet after the world cup victory was how many ads will I see dhoni in :)

My fear is proving to be right , the endorsements rates have sky rocketed and quoting from live mint article "

Dhoni charges Rs. 6-7 crore per endorsement per year and already endorses around 19 brands, including Sony, Pepsi, Reebok and Big Bazaar, leaving only a handful of categories such as financial services and four-wheelers he is yet to enter. That may happen now.

One report in economic times says the endorsements rates might even cross 10 crores...

I have never been convinced about the over use of celebrity endorsements and I think we will hit the peak in the next coming months in terms of Dhoni & team endorsing products across the range.. and the focus will be back on cricket , which had actually changed with the some success in other sports

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Saw this ad in the front page of Lucknow edition of TOI, could not make much sense....

Save Our Tiger Aircel Campaign - Leveraging CSR

"Save our tiger campaign" is one more of the recent campaigns which has generated a lot of buzz . The interest is because it has managed to touch consumers emotionally on the issue of saving our national animal. My interest is more in the CSR angle to the campaign, as it is a campaign by Aircel in partnership with World Wild Life Fund. Actually there have been many more campaigns in the recent past which have tried leveraging social issues to work in favor of their brands, and the Tata Tea Jaago Re Campaign would top the list. Others which come to my immediate memory are, Idea trying to leverage issues like saving trees and 'walk-when-you-talk', Nokia and old mobile...

Though earlier I have been critical of the disproportionate benefit that companies are able to derive out these sort of campaigns, or as put bhat in his post on the issue 'advertising in CSR skin' but now with more and more companies adopting a similar approach, I think one needs to look at the situation more dispassionately. I have made an attempt here,

First and perhaps the primary stake holder in such campaigns would be the company, and though the direct benefits are difficult to pinpoint (which would be true for any ad campaign), but the impact on recall (as in the case of aircel) and awareness would the bare minimal expectations that they would have. For brands with high awareness, they can hope to build a positive brand association , as maybe the case with Tata Tea. Infact Tata Tea has reported growth in the market share across the last few years when the campaign has been running, but then how much of that can be attributed to the Jaago Re Campaign?

And next is the benefit to the cause which they are supporting , be it the tigers or corruption or saving water (HUL had a campaign where they spoke about saving water) . Specifically if one were to look at the save tiger initiative, with many initiatives over the years that have not yielded much results I see so no harm if some wants to make one more attempt, but then saving tigers maybe more of a operational/policy issue than some think linked to increasing consumer awareness . Though the idea would be that increased awareness would mean stronger policies which would help save tigers. But .....

If you look issues like increasing the awareness with regard to voting rights and making it easier for the younger people to register for voting is some thing more concrete.

One thing which is favor of these kind of campaigns is the ease with which these campaigns can be extended on to the Internet, through websites and communities and making it more interactive...

Coming back to the issue of why this sudden interest in linking your brand with a social cause. I think it is driven by the fact that today the traditional ways of differentiating your brand are becoming harder to sustain, and brands are desperately on look out for issues through which they are able to hang of consumers attention.

Rin Vs Tide ad, ethical ?

It took me some time to actually believe that HUL was directly comparing Rin with Tide. Digged the ad out of youtube to see it again and then today's ET had a new item on the same. Link


Not that sort of comparison has not been done at all , Complan vs Horlicks ad controversy is still fresh in our minds. Many years back it was pepsodent versus colgate ads (but even then no direct mention of brands), and it is said that it took the marketing heads of both the companies to sit together to end the money being wasted on comparative ads.


But at a very fundamental level, marketing as an activity which is 'relative', firmly anchored against competition , be it USP or differentiation the point of reference is competition. And what has been happening till now is that companies avoided directly naming the competing brand , but use a similar coloured or looking product in their ads. But in the Rin ad the line has been crossed and HUL has very clearly shown the competing product. And people like Harish B who writes a popular blog on Indian brands, observed that by naming Tide in the ad directly 75% of the time in the ad was devoted to Tide than Rin. Link for more on his post on the issue.


On the legal front praveen , points out the small disclaimers during and at the end of the ads, should help HUL's case in the courts, but then raised the question of why such an ad in the first place. Now that P&G has gone to the court against the ad, other resort would be to go to ASCI , the body which looks into these kind of issue, but it is more of recommending agency, with no regulatory authority..


On the issue of whether it is right or wrong, ethically yes, we question the ad, but then how right or wrong is it to use a similar looking product without actually naming the competitor? or other forms of comparative advertisements that we have been seeing. But as they say too much of anything is bad, even too much of attention or focus on competition is also bad as in the process you might lose focus on your own customer???


Lastly an observation on the maturity of the blogsphere in India, there are more than 5-6 blog posts on the issue , since the ad was aired, so I thought I should also jump into the discussion :). There are discussions going on the issue on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites ...

Celebrities and their contracts, Vijender Singh and Saina Nehwals enter multi-crore contracts...

In my earlier posts on the topic I had written how marketer had started looking at using celebrities endorsements better by tie-ing up with the celebrity beyond advertisements to other activities which he is involved in, and improving product placements link

I have also been against the limited imagination that marketers have had in picking and choosing celebrities, sticking to a limited number of people out of Bollywood and cricket. Infact the day Abhinav Bhindra won the gold in Olympics I had written about the possibility of him getting a endorsement in the tune of at least a couple of crores. The latest data from Business Standard shows that after almost of year, he is getting contracts worth a crore a year, but the surprise is Olympic bronze medalist Vijender Singh who has become one of the country's highest paid non-cricket sportsman, with an estimated contract in the tune of 2-3 crores (though Infinity which is currently managing Vijender Singh is said to have objected against the new deal with perpect, Link)

Though the cricketers are commanding much contract fees, but the trend is encouraging and the fact that we have started working with celebrities beyond cricket and bollywood is a positive trend, As it helps break the clutter and also hopefully encourage youngsters to take up new sports ...??

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..............

Changes in Indian Ad Sphere- Tata Tea, CondomCondom and Anil Ambani Group's Media Campaign

Typically one sees the role of advertisements in persuading the consumer to buy a product or a service, but this, though a dominant view is in many ways a limited view also, because the advertisements is a form of communication which can be used to even to promote an idea or just inform people and we can see many examples of this in the Indian market today.

Most of what we see on TV sets today falls into the pure-selling end of the spectrum and the obvious is not what would interest people, but here are the exceptions ....

In the recent past we have seen ads being used to promote ideas and inducing change in habits like the one on usage of condom , by BBC world service trust . I had written earlier about the campaign too (link) and the website also shares the impact of the ads, quite an interesting read, link . Similarly there is the Bell Bajao Campaign against domestic violence.

The recent campaigns of Tata tea "Jaagoo Re Campaign" falls somewhere in between the pure-selling and 100% philanthropy. They have a series of ads, which started with issue of increasing awareness among youth towards voting, to the latest one against corruption in the country. Now though these campaigns are not directly about the tea, but the product also makes an entry into the ad, though at a later stage.

The third category of ads, like the one being used by the Anil Ambani Group, where they have made use of large press ads to question the issue of costs involved in developing Krishna Godawari (KG) gas basin by RIL. Through these ads they are trying to share their side of the story with the common man and somehow also bring him into the equation. These kinds of campaigns have been done in the past , when companies have felt the need to share their perspective with common man, as was done by the Private Airline operators in the country some time back.

Though these kind of ads form a very small part of the ad world but I think they show the versatility of the purpose of advertisements.....

TCS Generation Web 2.0 Trends

The results of TCS Generation Web 2.0 Trends a nation wide survey covering 12 cities and over 14K kids 12-18 years old is just out. There has been a lot of coverage on the results of the survey, the summary of the findings are there on their website, link.

I thought will try and look at some of the finds and draw out implications for marketers. The survey covered kids from 12-18 , some of whom are already buying products and services but in the next 5-10 years these are the kids who will form the nucleus of the society, so the survey provides good pointers to the marketer on what he should focus on from the communications perspective.

The survey covers four areas, information access, social networking preferences, future education mindset and career interests and youth and technology. I will focus on the first two aspects that is information access and social networking preferences,

The first finding of the survey that google is the most preferred source of information does not come as a surprise, followed by print and TV. Though the trend in mini-metros is still more towards TV , but I think this will change in a very short period of time. Implications galore for all marketers, having a website is not sufficient , ignore SEO marketing techniques at your own risk, presence on google is going to make-or-mar your brand and company.

Internet access through mobile is maximum in Kolkatta (24%), and with mobile becoming indispensable , we would see its usage increasing and mobiles have to integrated into all communication campaigns and the current one-off attempts are not going to be sufficient.

Blogging is also catching up very fast, Bangalore named blogging capital of India with 66% students being part of it. Monitoring of blogs and reactions on them which are being done in the developed market need to replicated in the country, both to understand the consumers and safeguard your interest in the marketplace.

Social networking sites like orkut and facebook are quiet popular, and the question is do you watch the reactions and questions raised by your consumers on the various communities on your brand which have been started by consumers themselves on these sites??

There are many more insights which the report brings out, which should ring a warning bell in the minds of Indian marketers into the future they are walking into, the consumer in 2020 is going to have media consumption habits which are going to be radically different from what we see today....

Is Marketing in India Also Entering the ROMI era

Return on Marketing Investments (ROMI) is a concept which has gained a lot of attention in the last few years, and rightly so. The basic idea behind ROMI is that one should be able measure results of investments made in marketing (read as ads and promotions). On simple terms if I were to spend 1 crore on a TV ad what would be the proportional increase in sale that you can guarantee me??

The difficulty with this idea has been though very good on paper, but how to translate it into practice. Because we have to measure the results in the marketplace , which is not a closed system, marketing expenditure is only one variable in the scene, many other would be operating and influencing the results. A sample of what all can influence your marketing expenditure/investments - competitor reaction, overall economy (monsoons), slow down, .....

I think the problem with the concept has been that we are stuck at two ends of the spectrum, in terms of arguing that you give me a straight forward relationship between the marketing investments and results and at the other saying that it is a creative process and we are not in control so you cannot hold me responsible for results. There has to some effort made to strike a balance between the two positions.

Earlier days it was said "I know half of my ad expense is a waste, but I don't know which half", we have moved on from that situation and there has been a lot of effort in developing marketing metrics, one good resource is "Marketing Metrics:50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master"

What is the status in Indian market? According to recent news HUL and Coke India are planning to link ad payment to sales. In the news item a Coke official is quoted saying “This model is about paying agencies for results, not activity,” . From the news item it is clear that the idea is still in conceptual stage and it would be some time before some clarity on how it would be implemented.

One more interview which adds to the discussion would Branding Guru John Philip Jones interview where he shared his thoughts on short, medium and long term impact of ads, and many other issues. Interview.

Maggi Noodles India the journey continues..

I have been sort of following up on 25 year celebrations on Maggi Noodles in India, and in the Sunday Times of India saw the print ad which sort of follows up on the Meri Maggi theme where consumers write back on their own stories with the brand, a very good way of bringing out how consumers have developed a very close bond with the brand in the last 25 years. The campaign has a 360 degree coverage , spanning web, OOH, TV , Mobile and newspaper. Thought will share the print ad with my readers,

My earlier post on Maggi Noodles, Link

"Meetha" Cadbury Dairy Milk and "Thanda" Coca Cola

The latest series of ads of Cadbury show the context of pay day and eating of Cadbury Dairy Milk. A visit to their web page gives us some idea of the thought behind the campaign.

Directly from the website - Sanjay Purohit, Executive Director - Marketing, Cadbury India Ltd said, “This new campaign takes the concept of celebrations to yet another level. With Pappu and Miss Palampur campaign, CDM created a space for itself during the big, community celebration moments. This commercial keeps the core promise of happiness while introducing another 'moment of joy' in one’s life. The new commercial highlights the celebratory occasion of payday, which is an important event in the life of every middle-class Indian.” For more visit Cadbury India.

The second ad or rather series of Ads which I found interesting is the Aamir Khan series of "Thanda Mathlab Coca Cola". Most of us would remember the series, both because of Aamir Khan and the good story lines behind the series. A link to one of ads for those who would like to refresh their memory, link.


The basic idea I felt behind both the campaigns is to go out and occupy a distinct space in the consumer's mind , and as has been said before if you are able to occupy a distinct space in the consumer's mind then it become very difficult for a competitor to dislodge you, the essence of positioning. And it might be easier done if one is able to capture a word in the consumer's mind which already exists , in the case of cadburys that word is "Meetha" a generic to represent all and any kind of sweet. Similary in the case of Coca-Cola the attempt to build an association with the word "Thanda" which means in common parlance any drink which is served cold , be it the ubiquitous lemon based Nimbu pani or a soft drink. The only problem with this approach is it is long term and one has to stick to the same message.

Maruti Vs Hyundai Ads

I wanted to write on the Hyundai ad where it did a comparison of Maruti Suzuki's Ritz in the beginning of the month, but then somehow it slipped out of my mind, but now with Maruti reacting to Hyundai's ad by coming up with a comparative ad of A Star Vs i10 a few days back forced me to comment on it. link

Competititors reacting to each other's ad seems to be a futile exercise, because the focus of these ads is not the consumer, but a competitor and all you are trying do is to counter whatever was said in the earlier ad . A waste of resources and energy , which does not help in anyway the decision making process of buying a car.

Infact buying a car in India, especially at the entry level tends to be more involved and long drawn decision than in the developed context. For many of us it still means a substantial investment and the information we seek is much higher. Does this sort of mud-slinging contest of ads help in anyway the consumer wanting to buy a car? It may help massage the ego of a few in the companies but ....

This sort of reactive and comparative ads is not something which is new, Pepsi Vs Coke, Colgate Vs Pepsodent or the more recent Horlicks Vs Complan, and even for Hyundai and Maruti this is not new....

Claims in Advertisments

I have been observing the claims made in few of ads on the air these days.


The first is the ad of Safola Heart , though the brand is well promoted and the website backing up the brand is also well-designed and informative but the claim made in the ad that 36 people changed just their cooking oil to Safola heart and with nothing else changed their cholesterol levels have come down.


Next is the Lifebouy ad where they claim that a whole building which started using the soap had lesser incidences of children falling sick versus a building where lifebouy was not being used????

Something similar is being claimed by Horlicks in it's ad saying children who drink Horlicks, are taller, healthier and so and on...and to cap it they also claim that it is proven....

As a someone who has some background in research I find it very difficult to accept any of these claims being made by these well-known companies and brands, and the details of any of these claims/Experiments made by these companies are not in public domain, easiest would have been to make them available on their websites so one could check the authenticity of these claims...

I also visited the advertisement standards council of India to check out the existing norms, but could not get much of that also...

Measuring fairness through meters

The fairness cream category has seen a lot of activity not only in for women but also for men's fairness creams. With the entry of many new players into this huge segment, untapped segment ( untapped because it is literally owned by the market leader F&L) one can see some small time innovations coming in...



Garnier White Cream was the first to come up with a meter to measure skin tone, so that one could measure the fairness level before and after use of the cream. Though the idea did not appeal me much when I first saw the ad but now slowly I find it has been adopted by fair and lovely and Vaseline. Copying though raises ethical issues it also indicates that the idea is good enough to be copied.............


The utility of the meter is that it is making fairness more tangible, beacuse typically even if the cream were to work it would happen gradually and the users will not be able to know the impact unless they have something to benchmark against and this is where the fairness meter comes in.

L K Advani a la Obhama !!!!!

With the general election clouds gathering in the horizon, all political parties and their leaders are gearing up for the Mega Event. Historically the role of marketing in an election campaign inIndia has been quite minimal, especially when seen in the context of the US Presidential elections. But the advantages of the leveraging social media and technology to connect directly with people has not gone unnoticed and our political parties , their leaders are trying to ride on the technology wave especially to connect with the 100 million first-time voters who would start voting from this general election.

Though the attempt to connect to people directly is a very good idea on paper, but how does it get implemented is some thing which needs to be seen. All across the internet on most of the websites that one would visit regularly one can see the campaign of L K Adva

ni BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate . I was tempted to write more about it after I read Gaurav's post almost a month back, but resisted it. But the fact is that wherever you go on the net , blogs, websites you have the banner ads of  L K Advani's election campaign floating, estimated at 200 websites. So thought as the blog is supposed to share observations on what is happening the Indian market I thought I should share some of my thoughts with readers.

Starting with what is good about the whole campaign, the idea of having a well designed webpage, a blog and book are something which fits into what is needed to start a campaign like this. But there are a series of negatives which I have observed in the campaign,

Firstly,  I am pretty disappointed at the level of creativity, which can be seen from a 'We Can Do it' to a  'Its Possible' tag line in the banner ads , through this sort of campaign you would want to connect to the younger consumer who are net savvy and this is the best you could think of. How much time does it take to see the similarity ????

At the second level I also see the approach towards the campaign seems to be more of an extension of their mass marketing intrusive approach. With banners ads all over the net they are trying to do what a typical mass media guy will do buy all good spots on the TV and Radio and keep sending the same message over and over again, but that is where social media is different. Though the idea of creating a buzz is right but you cannot create buzz in a Blogsphere by forcing your presence across internet by putting banner ads all over, I see more negative fall out this than anything else... 

But hopefully from a marketer’s angle the campaign would improve with time and realization of how to operate in the internet domain would evolve, and will have more observations to write.

Tata Tea and Jaago Re Initiative

I have been trying to document cases wherein marketing principles have been applied to non-typical contexts in India. One of the more recent cases which I had observed and documented was the promotion of the usage of condom . The campaign is is very well designed with website , games, mobile ring tones and a mass media campaign all revolving round the concept. link to my earlier post.

In today's post I would try to document two more similar on-going initiatives. The first is the Jaago Re campaign in which they are promoting voter registration across the country and targeting the younger generation of first time voters. The campaign revolves around their website http://www.jaagore.com/ which facilities the process of voter registration by enabling voter registration online for the first time in the country. The website claims to be a 'one-stop-solution to all your voting needs'. And they have managed to get 320,000 youngsters registered through the website.

This campaign is also unique as it is being promoted jointly by an NGO 'Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, and a corporate 'Tata Tea". Tata tea is providing the funding needed to run the mass media campaign and leveraging the concept Jagoo Re to differentiate their tea brands. According to the company the campaign is a good fit to their attempt to umbrella brand all their tea brands. It seems like a win-win situation , with the brand leveraging a social cause for promoting its brand and the cause getting the funding it needs.

Link to the two TV being in the initiative 1st ad & 2nd ad

The second campaign which I have noticed in the Bell Bajao Campaign , which is a campaign which urges people to take a stand against domestic violence. This TV and radio campaign has a strong back up with the website, http://www.bellbajao.org/. The links to various TV ads used,

Testimonial Ad, link

More in the series, Ball ad, Milk ad

It is good see the wider application of marketing in areas of social and societal concern, hopefully this would just be the beginning .................

Segments in Indian Market - Communication Perspective

Found a very interesting video of the changing realities in marketing and branding,

But when one sees  Indian market, we can bifurcate consumers into three segments (three to limit complexity)

Segment 1. is the segment which the video is talking about, people who have gone full hog and embraced new technologies and are 100% at ease with Internet , spend a disproportionate amount of time on it. Consumers in this segment would typically be either the upwardly mobile Sec A1 consumer or the techno geek sort of person, though demographically also this segment would be different as they would be much younger than the other segments.

Segment 2. would be one which is still stuck in the old paradigm of marketing , still spending a lot of time on the TV and slow on adopting new technology. These would be consumers in semi-urban and non-metro markets in the country. The choice for them though increasing is not as extensive as the segment 1 consumers. 

Segment 3. are the rural consumer, who by sheer numbers form a very large market, and are actually stuck at a level below even the consumers in segment 2, with many of them in media dark regions, and low literacy levels . They need to accessed through pre-mass media communication strategies, be in through the use of long infomercials run on vans, or the the use of demonstration and wall paintings in appropriate places.

Maybe we can try conceptualised these segments as a funnel, with the base being the rural consumers who need to be approached with no-frills basic communication, the center being those consumers who are still stuck in the mass communication days and the tip being the upwardly mobile consumer who has totally adapted to the new technology and cannot live with it. 

So for a marketer this increases the complexity of his job of reaching out to consumers, depending on the segment his approach has to to vary ......

Hoardings a Forgotten tool!!!!!

In this era of digital marketing most of tend to ignore the age old means of communicating, be it innovative POPs in retail stores or hoardings. We tend to exist in two states -  either of total denial, or total acceptance .Whenever we see something new coming up we want to ignore it till the last moment possible and then we jump to the next stage of going over-board with it. Maybe there is a middle path which we should try to follow.

Amul has been emphasising on hoardings from a very long time. I don't think there would be any one of us who at some point of time,  wouldn't have seen a Amul Hoarding and smiled at it.They continue to use it as they have been doing it, and with  the latest one they have again been right on target...

One of the positive fall outs of these contemporary hoardings is the positive PR it generates in media, this specific hoarding is generating a lot of buzz.....