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 Tihar Jail

Brand Tihar Jail

By Harish Bijoor

Now you are going to laugh about this.

We run a monthly monitor of brands  and brand names that make a mark.  Across seven geographies. India included. We do it every month on the 7th, rain, shine, hailstone or Tsunami.

And guess what? This month’s biggest brand in the bag as far as India is concerned is not Bata which went into a revamp mode, not the generic sounding “2G”, which beat “3G” hollow, thanks to all the negative publicity the scam brought home. Not “IPL” which just about concluded on a high, and not “Wild Stone” and every other deodorant brand that went berserk spending money establishing the status of a girl-magnet brand, and not twenty other brands that you and I have been watching on television tell us what to buy and what to use.

Instead, what has floated up in the top 5, along with everything else I have just referred to, is an institution brand. Not the IIM, Ahmedabad. Not any of our IITs. Instead, the top brand in the minds and psyches of Indians at large in the month gone by: Tihar Jail!

Wow! Not bad for Tihar Jail. After all of 53 years of being around, Tihar Jail has attained the status of a mega brand. A brand with a very high recall value and a brand that floats amidst the top 5 brand names that people in India have been thinking about in the month gone by.

How does this happen?

I define the brand simply: The brand is a thought. A thought that lives in people’s minds. If you were to buy this definition of mine, every thought that lives in a consumer mind is a brand. To an extent the thought of your Dad floats along with the thought of Amul butter and possibly 800 plus brands that live top-of-mind in an average consumer’s mind.

In our minds, there are really no partitions that divide brands and keep them aside as brands of people and brands of products and brands of services and brands of institutions. And if that is so, Tihar Jail in Tihar Village in the West of Delhi, today floats top-of-mind with the best brands that live and thrive in your mind.

What does this mean then?

The Jail already has its products. Time for Tihar Jail to monetize this opportunity. With its host of celebrity guests biding time, this might just be the time to get things going. Time to get its logo right. Time to establish for itself the status of a brand with a logo, a color, a slogan and more?

This is a brand that needs no advertising for sure. Thankfully. The brand has been built bottom-up, and totally with inputs of generations. Just goes to show that brands are built with positive strokes and brands are built with negative strokes. If AIIMS is a brand built assiduously over the years, so is Tihar Jail. With different strokes!

Let’s then welcome Tihar Jail to the hall of brands.

And what’s the last bullet to bite? Or the last shovel of salt to swallow?

A merchandize store at Tihar Jail? A place one can buy Tihar branded T-shirts, mugs, shot-glasses and more? As souvenirs of a brand that has arrived?

Or better still, imagine a Pub owner who thinks up a Tihar Jail theme pub?  Wait for more. Brand Tihar Jail is here.

Touché!

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

Twitter.com/harishbijoor

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Consumer-connect and Re-branding

Ensuring Consumer Connect while Re-branding

By Harish Bijoor

Re-branding is in. Every brand, at some point of time or the other, needs to look at it as a process. A process that will bring back the zing, and more importantly life.

Re-branding happens due to many reasons. A change in management, a change in the brand-manager who wants to make an impact, sagging volumes, a crisis that has gotten the old brand into a mire, a buy-out, and many more reasons indeed.

My two big reasons for a brand re-launch however:

1. Fatigue: When a brand has been in the market for a while, and when it has seen and been through successive generations of consumers, the brand looks and feels jaded. Fatigue has set in. It is this tipping point of fatigue that jolts brands to consider a re-positioning or a re-branding exercise.

2. Competition: Competition is the ever-changing format in which brands live and thrive. Most brands are able to remain contemporary, relevant, original and innovative enough to fight competition. However, there comes a time when the competitive framework has changed rapidly and the old brand finds it difficult to sustain itself amidst aggressively young offerings. It is then time to consider a change and re-positioning exercise.

The process can be as scientific as you want it to be. Product re-design, advertising re-design, branding re-design and positioning re-design are all metric-driven processes.  Every bit of this is basis brand strategy and long-term brand sustenance norms that are critical aspects we consider.

Every one of this is based on customer perception, expectation and aspiration. Customer profiling is a key part of this exercise. This profiling takes into consideration the existing customer, the lapsed user, today's new consumer and tomorrow's new customer as scenarios painted by specific scenario-extension tools.

The process is reasonably scientific and depends on acute sets of sociological matrices that are put together for the brand and its plan.

As one wades through all this science, it is very important to remember the one big factor you must never abandon in your re-branding initiative: Consumer connect.

Consumer connect is the most precious part of the DNA of your brand. You exist at large as a brand basis this one facet. The consumer is the most important entity in your re-branding plan. His and her connect with your brand is umbilical. It needs to be nurtured as such. It needs to be handled with the kid gloves it deserves and demands.

The consumer is essentially very visual, very aural and finally very written-word driven. In that order. In some categories such as food, beverages and even retail, the consumer is very smell-oriented as well. The fact and point to remember is that a re-branding exercise needs to take care of its brand sensorials carefully before unleashing it out on the consumer. Do also remember that this consumer of yours is status quo oriented, and she hates change. Change in the way her brand looks, feels, sounds, smells and at times tastes. You on the other hand, want this change to happen, be seen, be accepted and replaced in the consumer-connect profile of your consumer. And you want that desperately. To an extent you are swimming against the tide of what your consumer wants. And you want to obviously win.

The biggest common mistake and in fact the lowest common denominator of a mistake marketers make in a re-branding exercise is the weightage they give to the written word that communicates re-branding, and the lack of weightage they give to the rest of the brand sensorials and brand experience parameters. The classic example I can quote is the re-branding of Indian Airlines to Indian. A fair bit of money was spent on media communication, and excited, I bought a ticket with anticipation. Every experience of mine, from the point of checking in, to the point of entering an aircraft and being greeted by the airhostess on board, was just the same. In fact worse from the last time I remembered using the airline. No change. No effort to cue the new. Re-branding is certainly more than re-painting the tail of an aircraft with a nice-looking logo. Remember, you have excited the status quo oriented consumer with promises, and you have let her down at the first instance possible. With a thud. You should have let the sleeping dog lie quietly in the first place.

Consumer connect is therefore the essence of a re-branding exercise. If your media brand has undergone a name change, and you promise that nothing has changed except the dog-tag label, make sure that your promise is sustained. Make sure there is just not a whiff of change that the consumer will look for, now that you have sensitized her.

Consumer connect is a sensorial process and initiative. You take it for granted when it is there. You miss it sorely when it dissipates. Don’t let it.

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Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Is Brand IPL affected by negativity?

IPL: Love, Sex and ‘Dhoka’

By Harish Bijoor

I define a brand simply. My definition: the brand is a thought. A thought that lives in people’s minds. To that extent, IPL is a thought. A thought that lives in millions of people’s minds. A thought that is positive, a thought that is negative, and a thought that is even mixed-up in what it conveys.

IPL Season 5 has allegedly had it all. Love, sex and ‘dhoka’! Lots of love with the WAGS all around, lots of sex which none of us want to know about, and if one is to believe the match-fixing allegations, ‘dhoka’ was there as well!

Let’s give it to IPL then. What Lalit Modi created from scratch, is today a 5-year-old toddler that is more than toddling. IPL is today a big brand property. A property that packs significant value in the sphere of ‘cricketainment’. This is just not pure cricket for sure. The purist fan of a 5-day version will baulk when he or she sees the kind of innovation that this game is all about. This is really a cusp of cricket and entertainment. The ultimate heady cocktail of the two. While cricket is the national religion of India, Bollywood is the national way of vicarious living. In the smallest of towns and villages of India, men and women live through the lives of their Bollywood stars. No wonder then that Rakhee Sawant is an icon in Tier 2 India among middle class women, who would otherwise never ever dress the way a Rakhee Sawant does, or better still dance the way she does, or worse still talk the way she does!

IPL married the realm of cricket with Bollywood. IPL brought a Vijay Mallya and a Mukesh Ambani to cricket stadiums across the country. IPL had politicians rubbing shoulders with film stars and film stars rubbed shoulders and more with cricketers and cricketers with bookies and bookies with I don’t know who else. IPL to that extent is the heady cocktail of every mover and shaker that makes for business, cricket, politics, cinema and more. IPL is therefore an amalgam of people we have never ever seen together, all living a happy and unhappy life forever.

Never mind whether your latest film was a flop, you were there. Never mind if your business was tanking, you were there. Never mind if your government was going down the chute, you were there. IPL somehow had everyone who wanted eyeballs converging on this one little space called IPL. The brand therefore happened. And how!

The downsides of IPL have been many. We have had spats on and off the field. Names such as Luke Pomersbach came to the fore in hotel room spats, allegations of match-fixing had cricketers being grilled, after-match parties had their own bits of fracas going and one rave party got busted.

Is this all needed and necessary? Is this all part of the IPL-brand toolkit? 

I do believe it is. Let’s remember IPL is not cricket. It is ‘cricketainment’ at large. Every incident makes the game that much more memorable. That much more heady. Take a heady mix of last-ball finishes, add to it cheer-leaders who bring glamour and glitz, shake it all up with a Preity Zinta, a Vijay Mallya, a Shah Rukh Khan or a Priyanka Chopra(till recently)! Stir it with bits and pieces of controversy. And what do you have? IPL!

The point I make is a simple one. IPL is a frivolous brand. Not a serious one. Controversies and negative brand strokes are bad for serious brands. Controversies are bad for Satyam and Reebok and Adidas. Controversies and bickering and rave parties are all a part of the DNA of the frivolous brand. Frivolous brands need and seek out controversies. All this makes for IPL.

What next then in Season 6 of IPL? Obviously more of it.

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

Twitter.com @harishbijoor

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Chicken and egg retail

The Chicken and Egg of Retail

By Harish Bijoor



As we get excited with every data bit and byte that hits at us on the front of the Indian economy at large, and the emergence of modern retail as the ‘manna from heaven’ solution that promises to tie up an efficient supply-chain that links the deprived back-end to the craving front end of Indian consumers on a consumption spree, we forget something basic.

Yes, India is growing. Yes, the prognosis says that India will be a USD 7 Trillion economy by 2020. Yes, we will be the third largest economy after China(which will incidentally be at the USD 16 Trillion number in 2020) and the US(at USD 21 Trillion!)
And yes, the latest census proudly tells us that we are all of 1.21 Billion people now. And yes, the spending power of the Indian is on the morph. But, as I have already said, we keep forgetting something basic.

The basic then: Indian retail is chasing the Western dream a bit too much by rote. If at all Indian retail needs to be relevant, original and innovative in terms of appeal to the Indian at large, we need to be different. Different on the one acid-test scale that every human being looks at the buying, selling and intermediation process at large. With Integrity.


In the several marketing summers I have lived, fought, sweated and thrived, there is one insight that has held me in good stead. This is the insight of Integrity branding.

Integrity branding is all about saying the simple truths in your brand communication process. Stick to the tone and tenor of integrity and you can’t do no wrong!

Let me look at it in a manner of detailing the concept at hand. The point is simple. All consumers are essentially truth seeking animals. Yes, all of us lie in some small manner or the other. These are really the small lies that make the fabric of our modern day lives. Small lies that ward off the inconvenience of a lie-less society.

Despite all these small lies, we are essentially truth seeking as consumers. When you buy a toothpaste, you expect honesty out of the entire exercise. The consumer-brand interaction process is a relationship. A relationship quite like the many relationships we go through in our social lives.

When you get into a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, or let me be politically correct and say member of the same sex even, you expect just one primary thing out of the relationship. The truth. There is no relationship you get into expecting dishonesty and the lack of integrity.

Very simply put, consumers get into brand relationships based on the expectation of the truth. But does she get it? And how much of it? And how frequently so?

My belief is that the brand that offers the most of the truth most of the time in this continuous relationship is the one that succeeds. The brand that fails on this count is an utter failure right away, or on the path of a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom round the corner.




Let me illustrate this with an example. Let me choose my favorite gourmet table bird for this example, the chicken! Let me take three of them.

There are really three chickens in our marketing lives. And remember, all of us are marketing people, since there are only two kinds of people in the world. The “marketing person”, who markets to others. And the “marketed-to person” at the other end!

Imagine three chickens out there. Each of the chickens is a manufacturer and a marketer. Each of the chickens has done something they are very good at. Each has laid an egg. And each of the eggs looks alike.

Each of the marketer chickens takes a different path to market their respective eggs.

There is the first chicken, which I call the “Shy chicken”. This chicken looks at the egg it has laid and finds the product quality to be all of 100. It then stands up, looks at the target audience of potential consumers and whispers with a decibel of shout that is at best 2 on a scale of 100.

This chicken’s whisper is heard by very few of those in the target audience. Even those who hear of it, hear it as a faint whisper. The promise offered by the whisper is just 2 on a scale of 100. Those few who hear the whisper actually come to see the egg, lured often by the under-shout that creates quite a bit of mystery in the consumer at hand.

When the few consumers actually arrive to see the product, there is great joy. The consumer expectation of 2 is rewarded with a delivery of 100. The positive strokes offered in this purchase is +98. The negative of this approach of course is the fact that it scores very low on consumer awareness scores.

Look at the second chicken then. This is what I call the “honest chicken”. This chicken looks at the target audience and shouts out the product offer with a shout level of decibel 100. The shout quality is equal to that of product quality.

The pros of this approach is apparent. Awareness scores are good. Everyone has heard that the chicken has an egg to offer. But there is a problem here. Consumers do not necessarily respect honest chickens. When the consumer has heard the full story, he does not want to see the egg at all. There is just no mystery. Only a few arrive to see the egg, and these are the only ones who actually need an egg. And when they arrive, they expect 100 and get 100. No positive strokes and no negative. The potential of a buy is low as well.

The third chicken is waiting. This chicken finds the competition hot. This chicken gets onto the rooftop and shouts with a decibel value 400. The darned chicken has laid an egg but shouts as if it has laid an asteroid! The awareness scores are terrific. The entire town lands up to look at the phenomena. The expectation is 400. The delivery is 100. There is a negative stroke quotient of -300. And nobody buys!

All these three chickens and their respective approaches are out there for the marketer to choose from. Each of us makes this choice every living day. There are variations available in the gamut of 0-400 in terms of shout levels. Different marketers choose differently.

But guess what, the chicken that shouts with a decibel of 80 is the one that succeeds the most. Also, after 400 what? Back to a decibel of 2. In a market where everyone is shouting at 400, the one chicken which whispers the least is the one that is heard and trusted the most.

Think about it. Which chicken are you as a marketer? And which chicken are you as a working person? And which chicken are you as a person living in a family of your own?



The author is a brand-domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., a consulting practice with presence in the markets of Hong Kong, Dubai, UK and India.
Email:harishbijoor@hotmail.com
Follow me on Twitter.com/harishbijoor