Brand Integration and Bollywood

Smell the Fevicol

By Harish Bijoor

Brand-integration in Bollywood has surely come out of the closet. And how!

One has traversed an entire 360-degree movement here. From the days of yore when brands had a prominent Pan Paraag banner on a college stage when a filmi ‘jhatka’ was running, to the appearance of a packet of Red Label tea on the drawing room table, to the cut-out of a brand being crashed into by a zooming car in which the ubiquitous villain (now dead) was racing, we have come a full circle. The subtle gave way to the overt and the overt gave way to the subtle.

My contention is a simple one. Subliminal however works. Works better than the overt. The subtle rules. Works better in a more long-term manner of speaking than the overt and crass brand placement efforts that have given brand-placement an entirely terrible name for itself in India.

Look at it this way. Brands cannot be forced down people’s throats. Brands can be guided seamlessly into psyches by patient, constant, slow and subliminal effort. When something is pushed down a throat, it has the habit of being noticed and has a habit of being re-gurgitated back out, rather fast and swift. Reverse-peristalsis.

When you place a brand in a film with care and subtlety, it has a habit of staying there. The Aston Martin in a James Bond film is there, but is there with a clear context of placement. The Aston Martin does not shout. There is a FedEx in Castaway, but there is a clear context to it. It has not been forced into the plot, certainly not as forcibly as the effort of Fevicol in Dabangg 2.

See the success of an accidental brand placement versus a conscious one. Zandu Balm in a Dabangg was a big, big hit. And in the beginning, Emami went after the filmmakers for infringing on their brand.

From Hollywood then we have a similar case when the makers of Louis Vuitton went behind Warner Brothers, the makers of The Hangover2. The brand actually gained by the casual and the irreverent mention of a Louis Vuitton (pronounced wrongly with purpose) by the irrepressible Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Nevertheless, whether it is Hollywood or Bollywood, the best brands seem to respect forced and paid placements over the spontaneous and un-paid. And this is where the error lies. When you as the brand custodian control brand placement in a film, you make it as forced as forced can be. When a creative mind uses it accidentally in a script, the best use really happens. The most spontaneous and the most real.

Fevicol in a Dabangg 2 looks as forced as forced can be. There is so much discomfort in the lyric. There is so much discomfort in the meaning of it all as well. And most importantly, there is discomfort in the intent of the filmmaker and the marketer as well. And it shows. The consumer is not a moron. The consumer is your wife! And hopefully your wife is not a moron! Marketers need to understand this. Understand it before we stifle the goose that is actually laying the golden eggs. At least it was. In the past.

If the debate is over the subtle versus the shameless use of product placement, as of now, the shameless seems to rule. Everyone is out to force the worst out of product placement. Everyone is out to force the most. Everyone wants to milk the most. And not too many are concerned about context.

This sin is really a two-way sin. We need filmmakers with spine who insist on context when looking at product placement deals. We equally need marketers who look for proper context when studying scripts and options. We need to avoid the forced. We need to tread the path of the subtle and avoid the one that is in the eye and in the face. That era of brand-placement is done with. It worked when the masses thought like the masses. Today, the masses think like the classes. Consumers are really tired of attempts to poke them in the eye, in the gut, and in the groin equally. There’s been just too much of it.

Wake up and smell the Fevicol.

Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter @harishbijoor

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Branding Brand Bengal

How to re-position and build Brand Bengal?

Touch Branding Brand Bengal

By Harish Bijoor

The rise of Mamata in West Bengal is possibly the best thing that has happened to Bengal. I do not say this with jingoistic political fervour.  Instead I say it with realistic pragmatism. This pragmatism is related to one simple word: change.

Brand Bengal has been static for far too long. Brand Bengal has seen just no change for far too long. Time for change. And what better an opportunity than now? There is a change in political leadership (after eleven long years), political party (after 34 longer years) and political ideology (after the longest number of years).

Brand Bengal is crying to be re-positioned. This re-positioning needs to be all about change. Change that is radical, and change that delivers and touches the lives of people in a meaningful manner.

Let me look at colors first. From red to green. From the Marxist traffic-stop red to a Trinamool fresh and alive green. I do believe the colors themselves tell a story. A story that needs to be taken to heart and taken ahead in terms of actual ground level delivery by Mamata and team.

The election euphoria will die down, grass-root level realities will bite, the economy will bite, the dissenting sets of folk in the opposition will bite, and the expecting patient masses will bite as well.

In a political democracy such as ours, the masses will give its leaders time. But this time will run out slowly but surely. As will the patience of the masses. What Mamata has to therefore do is pitch deep in with a 100-day program that delivers. Delivers stuff that can be seen, touched, felt, smelt and experienced.

My advise then, is a 4-point active touch programme for the first 365-days.

1.     Touch Kolkata. Touch Kolkata with a clean Kolkata campaign where you will involve party cadres and the community alike. The party cadres are fresh with the positive energy of the recently concluded elections. Harvest this energy right in touching and thanking every Kolkatan by cleaning up his area physically. With his help. And with the active support of the ground level cadres. Tell the Kolkatan that the end of the election is just about the beginning of governance. A clean message to convey as well.

2.     Touch the top 80 small towns of West Bengal. Touch it with a campaign that has the party cadre going all out to involve the young in the work force who are looking for work. Build a plan to link the best BPO outfits of India to go into the interiors to source manpower that is education-ready but has no actual job-opportunity to fit into. Make a model of it.

3.     Touch the top 600 villages of West Bengal as well. Again with the active party cadre. Touch the top 600 villages with a plan to educate the children who just don’t go to school. Focus on the girl child, where the problem is worse. Touch these villages with the torch of education. Marry this with a pilot mid-day meal scheme that focuses on nutrition. Make a model of it.

4.     Touch the next level of 1800 impoverished villages from the worst districts. Out here, use the cadre to actually help out with a programme that focuses on health delivery to all. Put together a robust preventive health-care programme, even as the focus remains on curative care. Bengal must boast of a zero-tolerance to sickness. Use PPP from the best Pharmaceutical companies that are waiting on the wall of such a  participation. Make a model of it.

The focus of every initiative is touching people. The touch of Mamata?

Most governments when just elected get besotted with governance that is related to what happens at the top. Mamata must be different. She must touch everyone when the iron of the elections is just very, very hot. She must be able to convey to the people that she means business. If Mamata does not run fast in the first 100 days she will find it harder to run faster thereafter.

Re-positioning Brand Bengal will happen not in one day, not in a hundred days, but possibly in all of a thousand days of positive touch and feel oriented governance.

My definition of a brand is a simple one: The brand is a thought. Brand Bengal is a thought. This thought needs to be leveraged with positive inputs that actually touch people every day and tell them loudly that there is a government that is working all the while. Working with the goal of delivery in a better life to the common man at large. A life they can see, touch, feel, smell, taste and experience.

True-blue branding is really not about image. It is really about experience. I do believe Mamata can and has the ability to deliver this experience. An experience that will rise above the rhetoric at large of positive governance.

People at large are simple people. People want action and not words. There have been enough words right up to the election. Now that the elction is done with, and now that the government is in place, people really want the experience.

Re-positioning brand Bengal will happen in the experience of governance the people of Bengal will feel for a start. Brand Bengal has two aspects to it. The first aspect is what Brand Bengal means to those who live in Bengal. The second is all about what Bengal will represent to everyone else who does not live in Bengal. The first task to attempt is Internal branding. External Branding will follow seamlessly thereafter.

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Harish Bijoor is a brand-strategy specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Brand Modi

Brand Modi

Modi In, Modi Out

By Harish Bijoor

My favorite brand names in the world are 4-letter word brand names. I wrote a research paper on this some eight years ago. I researched out some 2000 plus brand names from across the world, and the conclusions were simple.

If you are starting afresh in the world of branding, start with a 4-letter word brand name. 4-letter brands are crisp, quick to recall, long enough to be remembered and not short enough to be forgotten. 4-letter brands that have two syllables in it are even better. Even a baby can remember and articulate it. Tata. Bata. Pepe. Fila. And now, Modi!

Modi the brand has surely much more to it than the semantics of brand name itself that is crisp, curt and definitive. I therefore explore Brand Modi in this piece from two perspectives. Firstly an intrinsic view of Brand Modi. A view that emerges from his immediate turf of action, success and paranoia even: Gujarat. The second perspective would be one that comes from the rest of the geography outside of Gujarat. An extrinsic view of Brand Modi, if you will.

Narendra Modi the brand has therefore two avatars. An avatar that is seen, revered and respected within Gujarat (by a majority of course) and an avatar that is felt, perceived and acted upon outside of Gujarat.

The view from within is therefore a strong view. A view that is relevant today, with elections n Gujarat round the corner. A view that has been seeded, nurtured and cultivated by all the careful pieces of good work the CM of Gujarat has ensured across two successive and indeed very successful terms of governance.  Two terms that have turned the tide of sentiment in Gujarat. Brand Modi not only did good to Gujarat in real terms, he succeeded in showcasing all the good as well.  The point is simple. In the world of branding, you must not only be good, but appear to be good as well.

Narendra Modi has played the branding game well. The classical marketing bit has been played out to good advantage in Gujarat. A keen understanding of the market, its demographics, its needs and wants, and more importantly its desires and aspirations was handled first. And having understood it well in terms of both numbers as well as the soft sentiments that drive people in an electorate at large, Modi put his Business Plan for Gujarat into motion. 

He looked at the basics, and approached it all with panache. Just as good work was going on in the realm of irrigation and infrastructure development, he put together the cosmetics right a swell In came the wide roads, in came the movement towards world class sanitation, and in came all the publicity that accompanied it all. Every piece of development had the unmistakable Modi stamp to it. And gauss what, if you peek keenly at the various advertisements that the government would put out, everything was Modi-centric. The government of Gujarat meant Modi and Modi meant Gujarat. This singular focus has helped build brand Modi to what he is today. Within Gujarat. In many ways, Modi is a regional party within a national BJP. And the regional is more important than the national in this case.

Modi did it well. He researched sentiment, he made plans, got them implemented with an iron fist, show-cased everything that was done carefully and subliminally even, and finally used the tool of celebration as the icing on the cake of achievement. Modi brought  “Utsav” politics to the fore. “Vibrant Gujarat” was for a macro audience that comprised NRG’s (Non-resident Gujaratis) and people of foreign origin alike, and every “Utsav” whether it be a  “Rann Utsav” or a “Bhadrapad Ambaji Fair”, was for an audience that was of a more local hue

The idea was simple. Research, plan, implement, evaluate publically and celebrate it all with festivity and pomp. Government moneys and sponsorships alike from all over backed the plan to the hilt. Gujarat has not seen a deficit in its funding plan for a decade now for sure. Thanks to Modi.

Modi within Gujarat is a brand par excellence. A brand that is seen to be decisive, very Gujarati, and very much about development and taking Gujarat onto the path of prosperity and glory.

Modi outside of Gujarat is however an issue. What Gujarat feels about brand Modi is possibly not what those outside of Gujarat feel of the brand at hand. This is where the debate begins about the relevance of Modi on a pan-India platform. Do a dipstick around your own circles of influence. The moment you talk Brand Modi, in comes the stigma of Godhra.

Take the dipstick around to deeper markets still, further away from your own circles of comfort. Take it to your maidservants and drivers, and I am afraid the talk is of divisive politics. The talk is of a certain degree of emotional if not physical ghettoisation. What Modi lacks in brand image terms in terrains outside of Gujarat is the inclusive feel of an entity that can carry an entire nation of divided people along.

Keep taking this dip-stick deeper and deeper into the gut of the Indian nation, or for that matter take it to overseas markets where the Modi brand is known, and you will find the response typical. The response sticks with one dominant memory alone. People outside of Gujarat, sadly do not remember the development that Modi has contributed to within Gujarat. That geography is far way, and so are the positive strokes.  People sadly want to happily remember the negative more than the positive. Particularly people, who do not partake of the positive touch directly, are in the habit of sticking on to the negative. And that is Brand Modi’s undoing when it comes to his ambition in national politics.

In many ways this is totally unfair. Narendra Modi is a CM who has delivered on all his promises and more to the State of Gujarat. He has tried hard to undo every negative aspect to his imagery post the Godhra-riots. While he has succeeded internally in the immediate geography of his immediate influence, externally, the challenge remains.

But, and that is a big but, brand Modi’s imagery outside of Gujarat is totally different from what it is in Gujarat. If Narendra Modi has plans to dominate national politics, there is a need to demonstrate to the rest of India what the can do in terms of inclusive politics that does not depend on divisive language, tone, tenor and decibel.

Unfair. But true. Sadly, the brand is a perception. And perception is more important than the truth in this space.

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The author is a brand-strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Indian Premier league Cricket is here...

IPL 6 Alive

By Harish Bijoor

With the IPL season 6 poised to rear its noisy head once again in weeks if not days, it’s time to take stock of cricket. Time to sit up and smell the cricket. And there is plenty going to be around to smell, sniff and get high for sure.

IPL is now a snotty young brat of nearly 6. In terms of sporting formats, and most certainly in terms of formats the game of cricket has gone through, these are clearly still early days. EPL Soccer has been in its current avatar for 17 gangly years, and America’s favorite Super Bowl format is a late teenager as well in its current format, with its lineage of the AFL and NFL sport that started in 1960.

This snotty brat of nearly 6 has gone through many a tumult over these years. What started as an experiment literally is today a format that gets in the mega bucks, as it gets in the mega eye-balls into the category.  The movement of IPL is however still young. Team franchise owners have done a lot, but lots is left to be done as well. Time to sit up and take stock then.  There are teams and teams. Nine of them in this IPL version 6.0. Shut your eye then and think of an IPL team. Which one comes to your mind first?

Without getting prescriptive or generic, the one team that comes to your mind first, is possibly the best marketed team across the last six years of this passion movement called IPL. To some it is the Kolkata Knight Riders. Never mind that they have never ever won a season except the last, Shahrukh Khan does it for you! And never mind that he is not a cricketer. This is not cricket anyway. Its’ cricketainment’. A cusp movement where Bollywood meets cricket and where Bollywood and cricket together meet Indian business.

To yet others it is a Mumbai Indians in Blue. Sachin is the darling cricketer of the nation, and he does it for you. And to more, it is a Chennai Super Kings. Dhoni is Captain India, and Captain India is captain of CSK. Two wins in five years makes it all the more irresistible a team, Dhoni and all.

But guess what, these are still early days. The cookie is still crumbling and the dice is still rolling. As Season 6 kicks off, the one who markets his team the best is the one that wins the stakes at the end of it all. Remember, this is a business. In this business, it is really not about how much you bled in terms of bottom-lines over the last five years, it is all about how you will go laughing all the way to the bank at the end of it all as a Franchisee. This is a business that revers eye-balls above all else. The one team that gets the biggest set of eye-balls is the one that has won at the end of it all. What’s worse and bitingly real is the fact that the team that wins the season is not necessarily the one that gets the biggest eye-balls at all. Ouch.

Creating a team that is totally rich in its passion content as far as cricket lovers and consumers are concerned, and nurturing a brand that is rich in eye-balls is a challenge in itself. This challenge needs two very clear points of recognition. And these two points of recognition need to be imbibed totally into the DNA of teams that are serious in creating brand properties that will attract the right valuation number when you are ready to sell and exit. If at all.

Point 1 is a simple one.

The Marketing reality of IPL is dictated by consumers. The biggest reality is the fact that IPL teams are not owned by Franchisees, but are owned by viewers and passionate fans of the game who get off the pedestal and become more than just mere viewers of a game. The Kings XI Punjab is really not owned by Ness Wadia and Co. The team is really owned by a whole bunch of passionate Punjabis clutching onto their Lassis and their Whiskys alike and enjoying the game and living vicariously through their team players on and off the field. Mostly off.

Recognize team ownership clearly and gear your every marketing activity with this in mind.

And Point 2 is even simpler.

IPL is a seasonal game. This is a game that wakes up in summer and slumbers even before summer has slept. This is a game that lasts all of     weeks. The event aspires to harvest the passion of 800-million plus cricket lovers in India and possibly a Diaspora audience of every nation-affiliation of another 200-million. The event is a 2-billion eye-balls event. Remember, most of us have two of this each.

IPL is a format that is alive for 8 weeks and dead for most of the remaining   44 weeks in a year. This seasonality factor must not be taken as a game holiday period by teams. Teams that do this lose out. Team management and the very process of managing the IPL brand is a forever process and needs to be recognized as one. Brands that take breaks, break for sure.

Recognize the continuity of your brand and keep your marketing activity alive right through the year.  Your plan needs to be one that understands clearly that there is a game on the field, and then there is a game on television, and then most importantly, there is a game on in the lives of people, who are forever alive, sadly unlike your attention to the brand.

I think these are two important pillars the individual teams need to build their brands on.  These are basic brand foundation points.

If I look around the 9 teams in the game that have attempted to do this right, I pick far and few names. The one top-of-mind name that comes close though is the Chennai Super Kings teams. This is one team that seems to have imbibed the ethos and has attempted to keep the spirit of the team alive. Not perfect, but getting there in a meandering manner for sure.

What do I find right with CSK? Let me list them out as I see it. Two things and more for sure. Ideas all other teams can run with. Ideas that will help populate the game that is IPL in a more meaningful and intrusive manner than now.

1.     Team ownership is clear. The brand idea is simple. Fans own the team. Fans don’t run the team as yet, but there is a semblance of offering fans this chance. Look at the way they have asked fans to upload videos on the team. There is a semblance of interactive marketing at play. Every visual mnemonic they have chosen and a whole host of pre-event publicity campaigns on television have chosen to incorporate the language, the lingo and the rustic aura that is typically Chennai for a start and Tamilian till the end. The ability of the team to weave into its DNA its very sets of viewers and fans is a step totally in the right direction. One that will pay rich dividends.

The team needs to do a lot more though. Team ownership needs to be precipitated and pushed deeper for a start. CSK needs to look at forming school level clubs across Tamilnadu for a start. Cricket clubs that meet regularly not only to play the game, but to discuss, disseminate and do lots lots more with cricket than has been attempted thus far.  The team needs to also drop its Chennai focus and delve deeper for a start into Tamilnadu as a whole, and possibly in later years even deeper into the Tamil Diaspora that populates India and the world at large. The game to an extent has just begun for CSK. But well begun for sure guys!

2.     Seasonality of the format is being tackled. The initial attempt of taking the CSK team off the 20:20 field, and off the television has been handled well. The ‘Junior Super Kings’ school tournament in Chennai is an example of good intent. This needs to be driven into the hinterland of Tamilnadu and the Tamil Diaspora for sure. Let’s remember, the more passion you build into the format, the more it delivers. Events such as the ‘JSK’ allow brands to get off the pedestal of the ‘not-so-intelligent’ box and walk into people’s lives intrusively.  Teams that want to be in the reckoning of consumer lives right through the year, and not for just ten weeks flat,  need to do this. More of this. Quizzes, essay contests, fashion-shows and what not for sure.

As IPL teams mature, we will see lots more of what CSK is doing being done by every other team. As teams vie to vest their teams with 100 Million Dollar valuations for a start, team managements need to remember that valuation does not necessarily accrue by a team’s performance in the season at all. A lot can happen outside an Eden Gardens a  Mohali or a Dharmshala. In fact a lot does happen outside. The real action for IPL teams is outside. Outside and inside the homes of millions of fans who actually own your team. These fans can take you places, and these very fans can take you to the cleaners as well, if you the Franchisee does not do it right.

IPL has a format that has two quotients. One is what one waits to watch for eight weeks. This is packed with the passion for the team, the passion for the player, the passion for the mega spectacle of cricket(made even more mega by the broadcaster)  and the yen to see live the Big A (and Mrs. Nita Ambani of course), a Preity Zinta, Sharukh Khan, Vijay Mallya and more.

The second quotient is one that happens after the season is done with and wrapped up. This begins just the week after. This begins, thrives and lives in the lives of the fans of the teams in question. This will translate into a lot more as we go through the years ahead. While most teams have got quotient 1 right, quotient 2 is something teams need to think about and invest in.

Even as I close this piece, I hear that the CSK team is ready to launch its comic book avatar dubbed the “Lion of Chepauk”. What do we wait for next then? “The Loins of Punjab” in a comic book avatar from Mohali? Touche!

The author is a brand-strategy specialist  & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter @harishbijoor

Brand India Ahead in 2013

Get Inclusive, Or Get Excluded

By Harish Bijoor

The Mayan era is done with. And looks like all of us have survived it. And how.

As the year 2013 dawns, what’s ahead for us in Brand India?

Plenty ahead, provided the mindset is to reap the plenty. Read a lot in those words, as this ‘peek-ahead’ piece of mine is all about reaping the opportunity that lies in the largest of the masses rather than the old approach that has held us in good stead over the last several marketing decades of “reaping the niches”.

The year and indeed the decade ahead of us in marketing terms is all about looking at market opportunity with a different set of spectacles altogether. If I were to summarize it all for the Twitter-Gen of today, I would put it simply in 31   characters: Get inclusive, or get excluded.

The idea is a simple one. An old one as well. One berated by many a thinker over the decades, but seldom listened to by a nation that was plucking the low hanging fruit of market opportunity that lay with those with early-money in their hands.

Now however, since that opportunity seems to be drying up, time to think different and look at the masses with a keener glad-eye than before.

The world is today all of 7 Billion people. 1.2 Billion of them reside in India. Maybe a lot more than that as well, as I firmly believe our population fact is an understatement rather than a statement.  Of the 7 Billion in the world, as much as 5 Billion are people a typical marketer would put outside of the active branded consumption mindset. This mass is really, really large. This mass is one that is growing not only in terms of size, but aspiration as well. The opportunity ahead is therefore in this big mass. 

If you look at India in particular, this mass could be as large as all of 840 Million people. 840 million people waiting on the precipice of a brand buy. 840 Million people who have a rather skin deep penetration of brands today. And most of these brands that have penetrated their lifestyles may be in the realm of telecom, telecom services, and basic FMCG products. Imagine the opportunity ahead as this mass booms in terms of aspiration to buy and aspiration to consume. Imagine the opportunity ahead as this mass moves from products to services. From the basic to the value-added segment as well. The opportunity ahead is large. Very large.

Look at India today. In many ways modern India has been built by brands that started their early work in the first few years of the last decade. Look at telecom. Telecom brands have helped place 942 million handsets in the hands of as many as 670 Million people in India. The halfway mark has been breached. Look at the telecom service providers who power these handsets with basic and value added services. Look at every FMCG player in the market who has quietly built a super-structure of active consumption of brands. India is a nation of 1.2 Billion bellies and bladders. As many bellies, that much the opportunity for food. As many bladders, that much the opportunity for every kind of beverage.  And guess what, the Indian at large has not only belly and bladder. Add to it thirty-one other body parts that crave for branded solutions. The hair for hair oil and hair dye alike, the skin for moisturizer and vitamin creams alike, and lots lots more.

The real opportunity ahead is looming large, and lies in India’s under-penetrated categories. The opportunity lies equally in rural as in urban. Our big asset is population. And population is an asset that delivers slowly. Its time to deliver has come. The marketing and brand fraternity needs to wake up to this opportunity and leverage it to advantage.

There is a problem though. The opportunity is out there in terms of numbers, but this opportunity can be leveraged only by those who do believe in ‘market creation’ exercises, rather than ‘market reaping’ processes that have dominated past decades. Time to change that mindset altogether. And this is difficult.

Markets of the future that lie in the realm of the bottom 5 Billion of the world population opportunity, will need to be created, rather than reaped. And that is a mindset that needs to dominate 2013. Create first. Reap later. The era of Instant gratification for the marketer is over.

The trends that will dominate market creation activities in the years ahead will be aided and guided ably by systems and processes that are falling into place. The UIDAI Aadhaar, its financial inclusion goals, its real pan-national roll-out and the tools of schemes such as the DCT (Direct Cash Transfer) scheme of the government of India, will all help and spur the movement of market creation. 

Think of it this way. Till now, as much as INR 3,50,000 Crores was reaching the bottom end of the market as subsidies and transfers what were less efficient and leaky in its delivery pattern. As the subsidy regime gives way to DCT, it simply means one big thing for the salivating marketer in India. When subsidies are doled out, the consumer got kerosene and had to use it. The consumer got rice and fertilizer and pesticide alike, and had to use it or re-sell it at suboptimal prices. Now, if DCT kicks in finally, it means there is that much money in the bank accounts of the consumer. This money will find its way into consumption. And this consumption is going to spur market opportunity further. As more money hits consumer wallets at the bottom of the pyramid, more expenditure happens. And as more expenditure happens, a lot happens.

As India becomes an opportunity that is getting bigger and bigger, marketers need to however remember one big trend point to tread carefully for the years ahead.

The marketer needs to get inclusive. The marketer needs to think of the masses that are larger than what he defined to be his masses. The marketer needs to reach out to potential consumers and non-consumers alike. Every brand offering needs to have two avatars. One for the potential buyer and one for the non-buyer. The marketer needs to molly-coddle the non-buyer as well today, with the hope of him being a vital part of his future market. Marketers that forget this basic tenet will get excluded from consumer mindsets.

In the future, you cannot depend on your advertising to buy markets. You will instead need to depend on your good market creation work to put together your markets. The India Marketing Rubik’s cube is in your hands. You need to create the right picture on every side of the cube. Every side. Not only the one side you were comfortable with all these decades.  You need to get more and more inclusive.

In short, get inclusive. Or get excluded. Touché.

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter @harishbijoor

Brand Narendra Modi

Modi In, Modi Out

By Harish Bijoor

My favorite brand names in the world are 4-letter word brand names. I wrote a research paper on this some eight years ago. I researched out some 2000 plus brand names from across the world, and the conclusions were simple.

If you are starting afresh in the world of branding, start with a 4-letter word brand name. 4-letter brands are crisp, quick to recall, long enough to be remembered and not short enough to be forgotten. 4-letter brands that have two syllables in it are even better. Even a baby can remember and articulate it. Tata. Bata. Pepe. Fila. And now, Modi!

Modi the brand has surely much more to it than the semantics of brand name itself that is crisp, curt and definitive. I therefore explore Brand Modi in this piece from two perspectives. Firstly an intrinsic view of Brand Modi. A view that emerges from his immediate turf of action, success and paranoia even: Gujarat. The second perspective would be one that comes from the rest of the geography outside of Gujarat. An extrinsic view of Brand Modi, if you will.

Narendra Modi the brand has therefore two avatars. An avatar that is seen, revered and respected within Gujarat (by a majority of course) and an avatar that is felt, perceived and acted upon outside of Gujarat.

The view from within is therefore a strong view. A view that is relevant today, with elections n Gujarat round the corner. A view that has been seeded, nurtured and cultivated by all the careful pieces of good work the CM of Gujarat has ensured across two successive and indeed very successful terms of governance.  Two terms that have turned the tide of sentiment in Gujarat. Brand Modi not only did good to Gujarat in real terms, he succeeded in showcasing all the good as well.  The point is simple. In the world of branding, you must not only be good, but appear to be good as well.

Narendra Modi has played the branding game well. The classical marketing bit has been played out to good advantage in Gujarat. A keen understanding of the market, its demographics, its needs and wants, and more importantly its desires and aspirations was handled first. And having understood it well in terms of both numbers as well as the soft sentiments that drive people in an electorate at large, Modi put his Business Plan for Gujarat into motion. 

He looked at the basics, and approached it all with panache. Just as good work was going on in the realm of irrigation and infrastructure development, he put together the cosmetics right a swell In came the wide roads, in came the movement towards world class sanitation, and in came all the publicity that accompanied it all. Every piece of development had the unmistakable Modi stamp to it. And gauss what, if you peek keenly at the various advertisements that the government would put out, everything was Modi-centric. The government of Gujarat meant Modi and Modi meant Gujarat. This singular focus has helped build brand Modi to what he is today. Within Gujarat. In many ways, Modi is a regional party within a national BJP. And the regional is more important than the national in this case.

Modi did it well. He researched sentiment, he made plans, got them implemented with an iron fist, show-cased everything that was done carefully and subliminally even, and finally used the tool of celebration as the icing on the cake of achievement. Modi brought  “Utsav” politics to the fore. “Vibrant Gujarat” was for a macro audience that comprised NRG’s (Non-resident Gujaratis) and people of foreign origin alike, and every “Utsav” whether it be a  “Rann Utsav” or a “Bhadrapad Ambaji Fair”, was for an audience that was of a more local hue

The idea was simple. Research, plan, implement, evaluate publically and celebrate it all with festivity and pomp. Government moneys and sponsorships alike from all over backed the plan to the hilt. Gujarat has not seen a deficit in its funding plan for a decade now for sure. Thanks to Modi.

Modi within Gujarat is a brand par excellence. A brand that is seen to be decisive, very Gujarati, and very much about development and taking Gujarat onto the path of prosperity and glory.

Modi outside of Gujarat is however an issue. What Gujarat feels about brand Modi is possibly not what those outside of Gujarat feel of the brand at hand. This is where the debate begins about the relevance of Modi on a pan-India platform. Do a dipstick around your own circles of influence. The moment you talk Brand Modi, in comes the stigma of Godhra.

Take the dipstick around to deeper markets still, further away from your own circles of comfort. Take it to your maidservants and drivers, and I am afraid the talk is of divisive politics. The talk is of a certain degree of emotional if not physical ghettoisation. What Modi lacks in brand image terms in terrains outside of Gujarat is the inclusive feel of an entity that can carry an entire nation of divided people along.

Keep taking this dip-stick deeper and deeper into the gut of the Indian nation, or for that matter take it to overseas markets where the Modi brand is known, and you will find the response typical. The response sticks with one dominant memory alone. People outside of Gujarat, sadly do not remember the development that Modi has contributed to within Gujarat. That geography is far way, and so are the positive strokes.  People sadly want to happily remember the negative more than the positive. Particularly people, who do not partake of the positive touch directly, are in the habit of sticking on to the negative. And that is Brand Modi’s undoing when it comes to his ambition in national politics.

In many ways this is totally unfair. Narendra Modi is a CM who has delivered on all his promises and more to the State of Gujarat. He has tried hard to undo every negative aspect to his imagery post the Godhra-riots. While he has succeeded internally in the immediate geography of his immediate influence, externally, the challenge remains.

But, and that is a big but, brand Modi’s imagery outside of Gujarat is totally different from what it is in Gujarat. If Narendra Modi has plans to dominate national politics, there is a need to demonstrate to the rest of India what the can do in terms of inclusive politics that does not depend on divisive language, tone, tenor and decibel.

Unfair. But true. Sadly, the brand is a perception. And perception is more important than the truth in this space.

The author is a brand-strategy specialist  and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Coca Cola and CSR Branding

 

Good work Branding

By Harish Bijoor

Coca Cola has got its act right. The guys behind the scenes, Muhtar Kent downwards, are a force to contend with in the world of CSR Marketing. CSR Marketing is today a new sub-science of the world of marketing at large.

CSR Marketing is not an Oxymoron anymore. In fact it is the best thing to do when you are a big brand with a big footprint of consumption all across the world. Brands such as Coca Cola, Marlboro, Dettol, and indeed every other mega brand that touches billions across the world can and do use a bit of CSR in their marketing approach.

Take the history of CSR in the world. It began in many ways when marketing companies looked around themselves into the environment. They looked first at their Corporate bottom-lines and discovered profit. And having discovered profit, and having invested that profit and splurged it around into everything that was possible, from the realms of personnel training, corporate junkets, corporate jets and more, profit had to find its way into society.

In many ways, if you view the evolution of CSR in any country, you will see that it is the last thing that a corporate enterprise does. When profit oozes from every orifice of the organization, that’s when CSR bounces and bounds.

Visualize  a large vat. Imagine moneys that go into CSR as moneys that go out of a small little pipe vent right at the top of the Vat, much beyond and after the Plimsoll line of profits has been breached. In many ways visualize this Vat with a small little vent opening right near the top brim. If you visualize it this way, you will also realize that if these profits did not find their way out (into society), the vat would itself be in danger. Danger of bursting as well. Therefore, CSR expenditures typically have been “safety valve expenditures”. When profits have been obscene, they find the way out. Ouch!

That hurts for sure, but then that has been the history at large of most corporations and the CSR movement. With a few exceptions.

Let me trace this further. In the beginning corporate organizations look after their immediate physical environment. If you had a factory in Jamshedpur, you looked after the people in the eco-system around. Then the mindset to CSR changed. You started thinking beyond geography. You picked causes. And when you picked causes, you picked adjunct causes to the industry you belonged to. If you were a tobacco player, you looked at health. If you were a marketer to kids, you looked after under-privileged kids. Subliminally, if not overtly, the connect always existed.

And then came the era of obscene CSR marketing. I have been witness to CSR efforts during the recent Tsunami that hit Indian shores. I have personally seen large trucks carrying water and supplies. Many of them chose to emblazon themselves with the brand names and logos, literally telling the people all around the source of where the help came from. One savvy corporate organization even had ‘savvy marketing-think’ where they had the top of the trucks emblazoned with their brand logo. This was ostensibly for the media helicopters to catch when they hovered around the area under distress. How far can one go! How far must one go!

And then there is the latest evolution of it all. The Coca Cola India ‘Support My school’ campaign with NDTV is a classic example of it all.

I like this campaign as it picks a cause that is universal and big. It is about kids and their right and need to education. It picks rural and small town schools. It takes valuable resources to points of need. It is not shy and does not use subterfuge as well. It talks to its audience without resorting to the ‘in-the-face’ tools of advertising. It helps build future customers.  In that way, it gives and takes. It gives resources today to get a nation of school-children going. It takes subliminally. It takes when it impinges its brand name all across, and plants a soft thought of an otherwise hard brand in the minds of impressionable kids.

I do believe this is fair. I do believe no corporate organization must invest its money into CSR without  purpose. Do remember, corporate organizations are run by stake-holders of share-holders and employees among others. The purpose of a corporate organization is profit. The organization must aim at profit in all their ventures, whether commercial or CSR oriented. In however making this profit happen, nothing wrong if good money can chase good causes such as this one. I do be believe Coca Cola has cracked this code with this and other initiatives in South Africa where the company is aiming at getting water-positive. After all they consume so much of it. Only right that they focus on the biggest issue that faces the planet: water!

The point is a simple one. CSR makes eminent marketing sense. Companies make their moneys from people. When you focus your profits back into the very same people who help you make money, the marketing cycle is complete. CSR is really the new advertising of the future. As people tire of inane advertising that aims at awareness and trial, people will give positive brand blessings to those companies that invest in good work that leads to trial and use of product or service.

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Twitter @harishbijoor

Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com