Thursday, September 15, 2016

Consumer Maange More!

The times are changing and so is the customer. The culprits are technology and the Internet. Thanks to them, things are changing at breakneck speed for marketers as the Internet and the technological revolution has made the consumer want more and more and there seems to be no stopping. In the early days, it was all about identifying the needs and wants of the consumer and trying to satisfy those needs with the right product. That product was then wrapped around an alluring message highlighting the benefits of the product and how it would change the life of the buyer. That’s all changed now. Today, it’s no more just about the product, its benefits and the branding message; it’s about the ability of the brand to connect with the consumer, to build a lasting relationship with the consumer. And that has become a difficult task for the consumer of today is insatiable and ‘maange more’ before he trusts you with his loyalty. Consumer maange more value Marketing was all about building a brand and giving people value for money. That’s not enough today. The consumer of today wants more than just ‘value for money’. He also wants to know what values you as a brand stand for. More than 80% of consumers believe that a good brand is one which places equal emphasis on both business profits and societal issues. Your brand should stand for a purpose beyond profits. It should have a purpose driven brand story. Responsible consumption is the buzz word today. With our world being plagued with problems like global warming, water scarcity, obesity etc., the consumers are becoming aware of the role companies and brands can play to make the world a better place. By supporting brands with a strong purpose, they feel they are doing their bit too to make the world happier, healthier, greener and cleaner.

Take the case of Kissan. It decided to source sustainably produced tomatoes, which not just differentiated the brand but soon made it the number one ketchup brand in India. The Lifebuoy brand of soap ran a campaign called “Help a Child Reach Five”, which focused on teaching children how to wash their hands correctly as India has the highest number of child deaths due to diarrhea and pneumonia. The brand developed a hand wash which could change its color from white to green in 10 seconds – just the time required to kill most of the germs. Children wait to see the color change, which is not just fun but life saving too! The brand showed its commitment to a purpose, a cause, and was loved for it. Nike’s “Find Your Greatness” campaign went beyond celebrity athletes and urged people to find greatness in everyday people. It struck a chord with the viewers and inspired them. Brands are moving on beyond just showing the benefits of their product. Rin is a good old brand which for decades has promised ‘Chamakti Safedi’. That’s not enough to stay above competition. Rin has gone a step ahead. While clean clothes give you confidence, Rin has gone on and started a Rin Career Academy, training people in key skills which give them confidence. Skills like speaking good English, dressing appropriately for a job, handling an interview. Rin has shown that it is totally committed to building confidence. That’s a purpose which goes beyond profits. Patagonia is a brand that makes money by selling clothes, yet when it launched its ad campaign, it was all about encouraging people to repair their old outdoor garments. The ad provided a lot of tips and tools to help the users fix their own gear. It even offered to buy back gently used garments. Marketers at Patagonia are very clear that it’s the era of unconventional marketing. A brand that can market itself as one supporting a cause, supporting sustainable development would be noticed and liked much more than a brand that made fabulous, yet ‘harmful to the planet and its people’ products. To show how committed it is to its purpose, Patagonia established a $20 million venture fund to invest in socially and environmentally responsible startups. Whole Foods is another brand that has shown that it stands for sustainable development and sensible consumption. It has a concept called “Community Giving Days” where 5% of that day’s net sales are given to local non-profits. All through, consumers have been let down by their governments, their leaders, their NGOs who have failed to bring about a positive change in their lives. These consumers are now looking up at brands who have the power, the money, the creativity to help change this world for the good. These are the B Corps – ‘Benefit Corporations’ – who are going to rule in the future and its their marketing campaigns that the consumers will like, and share and believe in. A purpose-driven brand also has the most positive and motivated employees who are proud to say that they work for a brand that believes in something beyond profits. LRXD is a full service agency but it calls itself the ‘health and happiness advertising agency’ for it took a policy decision to primarily work for brands that helped make life better. Made Movement, an agency founded in 2012, decided it would work for brands that provided jobs to people in the US. Their purpose made them reject work from a lot of big brands, but they say life has never been better for they have a reason to wake up every morning and come to work. According to a 10-year-long study conducted by Millward Brown and Jim Stengel, brands which focused on a higher purpose did not just build the deepest relationships with customers, but also achieved the greatest financial growth in the 10 year period of the study. It’s no more about what you sell; rather, it’s more about what you as a brand and an organization stand for. So give the customer not just a great product but a great product that also does great things and he will be your greatest fan and friend! Customer maange more speed The consumer wants everything now and if you want his loyalty, you need to cope up with his demands. Take for example the purchase behavior of customers. Gone are the days when he would wait for the shop to open and buy. Today, he wants to buy whenever he pleases (thanks to e-commerce) and add to that the fact that he wants his shopping delivered at the soonest. While shopping online, a delivery period of two to three days was acceptable some time back. Now, he wants same-day-delivery. Soon, he would want everything delivered at his doorstep as fast as a pizza. The consumer of today not just shops any time of the day, but is texting and messaging his friends at all hours. Soon, he would want to text and receive texts from companies. A recent survey by Corvisa (a cloud communications provider) found that 77% of consumers were okay with getting text 



messages from companies and in fact liked it if the companies texted them about things like fraud alerts, payment reminders, sales, discounts, promos etc. If you as a marketer can use this tool to engage with your customer, there is no better way to build a long lasting relationship. He texts you like he would a friend and you text him back – that is the speed of communication you should be prepared for. Gone is the concept of ‘contact during office hours only’. If you want to retain your market share, you need to behave just like your customer wants you to or else some other young brand will replace you. Speedy deliveries, speedy text responses will see your profits speeding up! Customer maange more connection Marketing is no more a ‘one-to-many’ style of communication; rather, it’s now all about one-to-one. From being a monologue – where the marketers spoke and the consumers listened – now, it’s a dialogue. The consumer speaks and the marketer is expected to listen and respond if he wants to build a long lasting relationship. Not just that, the customer also likes to be spoken to about things he enjoys. Hence the rise of ‘programmatic advertising’. One ad, however brilliant, will not work any more. Soon, marketers would be expected to customize and make multiple advertisements to suit the tastes of different types of customers, and technology is making it possible to do this. Programmatic buying identifies users and groups them according to the sites they browse and then offers them advertisements and promotional materials of products and services that match their habits and tastes. There is growing evidence that consumers are getting bored and irritated with advertisements that don’t interest them. With the help of technology, now marketers can identify the choices of the target consumers and place their ads in front of only those who are interested in that particular product or service. Brands like Nike, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Kia Automobiles are using programmatic buying to micro-target their audience and send them ads customized to suit their tastes and build better connections with them. The Future As a consequence, the whole environment is changing. A marketer needs to look beyond his marketing campaigns and promotions and focus more on the very tech-savvy consumer and his overall experience vis-à-vis the brand. Be it the online visit experience, the in-store shopping experience, the purchase experience and even the post-purchase experience, he needs to understand the big data, its analysis, interpret the results wisely and make the required changes to help improve these experiences. As marketers, you need to find out who are the social influencers, and try to make them your ‘digital brand ambassadors’. As a vigilant marketer, you also have to keep track of conversations happening on the social media. Thanks to the developments in technology, today’s marketers have a huge amount of data detailing the digital lives of their customers, giving them extraordinary power. They can now run sharply focused campaigns, reach their target audience much more accurately, respond to disgruntled customers with greater speed, get deep and accurate insights into the purchase patterns of their customers. Everybody wants to do good, but then, not everybody can. If you combine your business profits with purpose, you don’t just win a lot of goodwill from your customers, but you also help them satisfy that latent need within them of giving back something to the society, which is very fulfilling and satisfying. Soon, no one would care about the S&P 500 list or the Fortune 500 list; but they would demand a Helping the Unfortunate 500 list, for the latter would be a list of companies who would be making a difference to the planet and not just their balance sheets. So go ahead, use technology to understand your market better, add a purpose to your marketing campaign, unleash your creativity and delight your audience like never before, and give him more than the conventional dose of marketing. Give him a dream and a hope of a better world!

Brands & Billionaires Of Tomorrow Will Be Built On The Internet


Of the nouveau billionaires on the block, the ones causing maximum disruption are those running technology firms; by RAJITA CHAUDHURI
Anybody can be a Billionaire
The annual list of the world’s billionaires is out. There are 1,810 billionaires in the world today (down from 1,826 last year). However, what’s interesting is that approximately 65% of these are self-made billionaires. Billionaires of today are not necessarily those born with a silver spoon; rather, today, like never before, the world is seeing the birth of billionaires who have started from ground zero and made it to the top. Out of the whole list of billionaires, 198 are new to the list; and of these newcomers, a large portion has come from the fields of manufacturing, real estate and technology. Out of these three fields, the one that’s causing the largest disruption is the field of technology. Take a look at the newcomers on this list and you will see that most of them are heading companies that are rich in technology and not physical assets. The newcomers are Pinterest cofounders Evan Sharp and Ben Silberman, Flipkart cofounders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, WeWork cofounders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey etc. In fact, look at the guys at the top: Bill Gates has been at the top for 17 years out of 22 years, Jeff Bezos has moved up from the 15th to the 5th spot, Mark Zuckerberg has moved up to the 6th spot. This just goes on to prove that technology will be the game-changer of the future. Technology has a lot to contribute towards making the world really flat. While America used to be the hub of a large number of billionaires with New York boasting of the largest number of billionaires in the world, things are changing. While at 79, New York still has the largest number of billionaires, Hong Kong is fast closing in with 68 billionaires. Interestingly, out of the top 10 cities with the largest number of billionaires, 6 cities were from Asia this year and New York was the only American city in the top 10. Most of the billionaires of the world are today from the Asia-Pacific region and not from the United States. Add to this the fact that out of the newcomers to this list, the maximum were from China. So while earlier it was oil, minerals, real estate, which were responsible for creating billionaires, today technology is making billionaires faster than ever before. Huge developments in technology are also key reasons that more and more of the young guys are challenging the biggies in the business and disrupting things like never before. The Internet has opened the doors and given access to knowledge, finance, people etc to an extent like never before. Look at the new and hippest brands of today – Airbnb, Snapchat, Uber, Flipkart, Dropbox, Snapdeal, Ola Cabs, InMobi, Zomato – they all have young guys at the helm of affairs taking on the world armed with just a powerful idea. All these companies mentioned above are “unicorns”. This means that though they are private companies, yet they are valued at $1 billion or more. For example, Uber is valued at $62 billion, Airbnb $25 billion, Ola $5 billion etc. This is something that was considered unthinkable before the Internet revolution. That a company like that could really exist, was considered a myth –hence Unicorn!
The billionaire mindset: Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid to dream big. Don’t be afraid to fail big either. Don’t be afraid of criticism. The whole world will tell you how it cannot be done, so relax. All you need to be sure of is that you want it to happen and you have to want it real bad. In fact, the easiest way to know that you have a great idea is when everybody says it won’t work. Be sure you have hit the jackpot. All great ideas were called stupid at the start, but the people behind the idea never lost faith in themselves or their ideas and made it happen. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t know how to make your idea happen. If you need to learn a particular skill – it’s right there on Google. If you need to know how Harvard and MIT are handling a particular course – it’s right there on edX for free. If you have acquired all knowledge and now need to make an app, a website etc, again you can access numerous resources on the Internet for free and make one at almost zero cost. Your prototype is ready, but now you need the funding. No worries. Just as the social media has changed the way we connect with friends, it has also changed the way we raise money for a business idea. The concept of ‘crowd-funding’ is growing in popularity and more and more entrepreneurs are reaching out to people on the social media platform to fund their ideas. Sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGO, ProFounder, Buzzbnk, 33needs, AppBackr, CauseVox and numerous more have helped so many ideas come to life. You don’t have to be a technology giant to compete with Apple watches. The company Pebble proved that twice. Once in 2012, when they had an idea for a watch and went to the site Kickstarter with their idea. 85,000 people loved the idea and pledged money to help Pebble realize its dream. The company raised more than $10 million (10,000 percent of the goal). Then again in 2015, when they wanted to improve the features of the watch, they went to Kickstarter again looking for a funding of $50,000. In less than an hour, they could raise $1 million, and by the end of the campaign, they had got more than $20 million funding from numerous people across the net. Hiral Sanghavi, a frequent flier, had the habit of forgetting his neck pillow on flights. So one day he and his wife Yoganshi Shah decided to develop a travel jacket that would have a neck pillow, an eye mask, gloves, blanket… everything. They went to Kickstarter looking for $20,000. They landed up with more than $9 million. From smart watches, to wireless headphones, to 3D printers… all kinds of ideas have found people who were interested in them and supported them. As I said earlier, you don’t need to be born with a silver spoon to make your big dreams come alive.
What you don’t need today You don’t need piles of cash, you don’t need a rich uncle either. You don’t have to go to Harvard or get a degree from a famous place. You don’t need any infrastructure to house your company. You don’t need staff as you can find numerous virtual assistants at a fraction of the cost and without any hassle.
What you definitely need You need to believe in you and your idea. You need to be able to articulate your idea well. As the saying goes: “You only get one chance to make a first impression”. Be it a meeting with an angel investor, or a venture capitalist, or a presentation on Kickstarter, you have to be very sure that your idea sounds interesting and investment worthy. If you are not articulate enough, you can lose out even though your idea had a huge potential. You need to have a great network. You need to know how to significantly make your presence felt online. You need to know the way to get the attention of your niche audience in this very crowded space. Once you have mastered these things, it’s just a matter of time before your name appears on the next Forbes list of global billionaires. Great passion, a clear vision, a concrete plan, a mind blowing pitch and you are ready to count your millions!… Or billions, if you may!!!
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