Author name: Shubranshu Singh

Every era has its torch-bearers who illuminate us with new and fundamental thinking in various disciplines. Marketing and communications seems to have lost this defining characteristic of intellectual activity. It has been so for a few decades. In the past one hundred years, business management, in all its forms, has formalized as a field of formal study and professional pursuit. It has almost managed to create a special class of business managers mostly armed with a formal MBA degree. The most externally focused in this class were the marketers. They shaped social norm and created magic. Throughout this period, the most exalted position has been that of an academic, professional, veteran or achiever who earned acknowledgement as a Guru. The dictionary definition of one was “…an influential teacher or a popular expert”. Synonymously, it was about being an authority, maestro, pundit, ustad. These walls have had names enriched with a halo: FW Taylor, JK Galbraith, Elton Mayo, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, Peter Drucker, Rensis Likert, Theodore Levitt, etc. Even when it came to reflections on society and how it is shaped by forces of change, several thinkers were able to enlarge the boundaries of the field. Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, David Halberstam, Thorstein Veblen and Richard Hofstadter are names in mind. As marketing and communications came into mainstream consciousness, several thinkers developed, defined, shaped and critiqued it. Ernest Dichter, Stanley Marcus, Coco Chanel, Vance Packard, David Ogilvy, Michael Sandel and Bill Bernbach all have left their signature on the theory and application of marketing despite being a very diverse set of individuals. But from the late 1970s there has been a withering away of new thinking. In the ensuing period, founders and value creators flexed more marketing thought muscles than any designated guru. Be it Steve Jobs at Apple, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA, Richard Branson at Virgin or Bill Gates at Microsoft – these names are indelibly linked to new exploration, new industries and new brands. THE CRUCIAL YEARS The crucial connecting years till the present day saw the rise of technology, ubiquitous Internet, millennials and Gen Z consumers who arrived on the business map. All this happened without deep thinking being articulated. When industrialization made mass goods available, a new discipline of management and then marketing emerged. What emerged in the information economy? In the main branches of marketing and marketing communications, tactical finesse and short term horizons seemed to kill depth. Self-promotion overwhelmed the gurus. Most became one trick ponies. Commercial exploration via books, seminars and corporate consulting became the norm. When the Internet changed the world forever, Marketing was seen to be resisting even adaptations for this new world. Inertia beat IQ. There was a need for an inductive approach to accord higher status to expertise over academic merit alone. What happened was that cynicism vetoed experience. As a practising CMO and business leader, I concede that no elusive gurus can flourish if they are insulated from market forces and real consumers. Profound thoughts need to be landed in bazaars/ marketplaces. I also appreciate that institutionalized settings like Aspen, Davos, Cannes Lions and TED bring certain mobility to ideas. I am looking to find where the lacunae exist and this is what I can see: 1. Explosion of commerciality has eroded trust: The sheer growth in content means ideas get copied, parodied, diluted, corrupted. Bad ideas gain strength and become worse! Good ideas get lost in the cacophony and seem mediocre. And great ideas. Alas! We don’t seem to be thinking great ideas for a while. Ideas that move the world. 2. Marketing is the domain of the ephemeral, the short-lived, the quick fix-ers: Vibrant thinking is confused with style, confidence and fluency or articulation. Output from the media conglomerates, creative agencies and digital hotshops is all in a flux. Exodus of talent away from conventional marketing has accelerated in the new millennium. Ideas simply don’t have the muscle to keep running on the commercial treadmill. Formulas get preferred. 3. Not enough originality and experimentation: We seem to be junk food bingers. Everything immediately sating is welcome. Anything to chew and digest is avoided. As an industry, communications is not arming the dreamers against the realists. 4. Availability of press button info has made respect for erudition shallow: Everything is looked at here and now. There is no retained learning. Craft is shallow. Everyone has an elevator to go up an ivory tower. Marketing main form has got perverse, splintered and fragmented. A short burst of messaging, a few million e-mails, social messaging, a few catchy images, a few smart taglines, hashtags galore. 5. Dialogic learning has been reduced to capsules of downloads: Degradation is natural. Everything is an immediacy of sorts hence, nascent development is a casualty. 6. Commercial platforms get everybody onboard: We are living in a material world. Everything is ratecarded. One has to strain to imagine which independent assessment can be relied upon. Once a strenuous commerciality is backing a thought, it gets amplified in every farthest corner of the social/digital sphere. It is as ridiculous as an entire book being judged by blurbs on its front and back cover. But this is how things are. https://www.impactonnet.com/more-from-impact/where-have-all-the-gurus-gone-6149.html

How shallow and short term commerciality is killing big ideas in Marketing Many Successful practitioners of management and marketing science have reduced it to hyping single words like ‘creativity’, ‘thinking’, ‘strategy’ or unwieldy combinations like ‘consumer mindedness’ or ‘excellence in execution’. There are even more cringe worthy motherhoods such as  “Keep an ear to the ground”, “Think like your enemy”. Sigh ! Business is the fundamental substrate of modern society and marketing is its cementing element. Both need very detailed elaboration. What modern capitalist society is seeking from its marketers is not a better tagline or a shinier neon sign. It is looking for core ideas. Capitalism needs solid platforms that organize and operationalize value and wealth creation. The rising trade of damning opinion journalism against consumerism as well as consumer fickleness or apathy is because there are no big ideas that have emerged. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Apple is the last marriage of technology, design and an organizing, advancing idea for the enterprise. In my opinion Facebook and google/Alphabet don’t have it despite enormous and awe inspiring valuations. Overall, media vehicles have added to the cacophony. Ideas are poorer, more blurred, easily drowned in noise, dropped prematurely or simply not primed up enough with investment. Where we need to be planting oaks, we have a quarterly bonsai forest instead. Additionally, there is an intellectual establishment of some gurus, certain consultancies, and tech-mavens who make a fetish of ‘singular ideas and focus’. Therefore only a few pre-vetted ideas see the light of day. All of these are blessed by this establishment and then templated into ‘workbook’ and ‘manuals’. Those CMOs and business leaders who buy into the “idea of the year” are then putty in the hands of this establishment because even their objections are listed in the ‘manual’. Developing these manuals, conducting the workshops, iterating the charter is a lucrative and growing industry by itself. This playbook peddling idea elite is doing a disservice to the business world. I am not suggesting that one should discard or ignore conventional wisdom irrespective of its merits. Nor am I saying that there is a virtue in deliberately discounting the importance of credibility and reputation. I want us to celebrate more ideas – brave ideas, atypical ideas and ideas that buck prognostications of eventual doom. I wish we celebrate bold ideas that can make a future. The international marketing and economic order need to be fundamentally seeded with bold big ideas. If one sees the world of Economies, State Policy, and International Affairs we note that there are a dozen practitioners and thinkers always leaning in with precious commentary. Henry  Kissinger statesman and former Harvard academic Paul Krugman –New York Times, Thomas Friedman – New York Times, Robert Kagan  – Brookings institution,  Francis Fukuyama – Hoover Institution,  Jeffrey Goldberg – The Atlantic these are all examples that have no parallel in the world of marketing ideas. By the way, this is doubly revealing since marketing is a domain of ‘always on’ action and relatively low entry barriers and still, sadly, thinking and ideas are in acute short supply. We need ideas – Ideas that are forceful Ideas that are catalyzing Ideas that are not pleasing Ideas that change things Ideas that create movements Ideas that unsettle Giant Multinational corporations and agency networks cannot abandon the watchtowers to look for ideas outside. Enough is not happening within. When I say idea, I do no mean a script, tagline or key visual. Those are merely artefacts and outputs serving various brand building objectives in a 360-degree campaign. What I mean by an ‘Idea’ is the spectrum of intellectual outputs and opinions that find expression and advancement because marketers and business builders adopt them. Of course, marketing being a social science obviously weighs competing potential ideas subjectively but more and more it is clear that the marketing role, right up to CMO is about dashboard management, facilitation, and managing messaging up and down the value chain. It does not seem to be about penetrating ideas that public intellectuals would ponder over. Ad agencies have starved the planning function because revenues are poorer and anything that looks like it’s not directly bringing in a client’s purchase order is subject to cuts. Therefore what is happening is that confidence is trumping intellect. Agency thinking is lapsing to becoming a conduit for second-hand ideas. Smart phraseology is masquerading as wisdom Recycled ideas get poorer results, panic and frenzy then lead to digging a bigger hole. Charlatans and bogus intellectuals advance even poorer ideas into the marketing mainstream right up to the caviar and champagne gatherings on yachts in a blue corner of an empire where the sun is setting. Fast.  

Indian consumers are upgrading in larger numbers than ever before. It is good for business, society and the overall economy. Our traditional demand structures being what they were, life stopped at the middle end of the spectrum. Consumption at the top was fragile and insubstantial. But in a few significant ways, the traditionally bottom weighted consumption proved a blessing because masstige options presented a horizon which prepares brands for a fulfilling relationship between consumer needs and consumer goods.  Nirvana may lie in the middle, after all. Masstige trumps the conventional logic that the higher the price, the lower the volume because this mid category is x times the price of the lower segments and y times the volume of the luxury segment.  Masstige brands defy the familiar. They lift above into uncharted territory with the traditional price volume demand curve being their southern frontier. Masstige opens up new ground to the relationship between needs and wants; between volume growth and profitability ; between affordability and aspiration.  Uptrading is a boulevard of progress, delight and achievement.  Within it, Masstige is the bright stretch. It defines ‘aspirational yet accessible’. It allows for an emotional surge through purchase. A neologism for ‘mass prestige’ , the sector expanded along with the space between mass and class in post liberalization India. New prosperity in the upper middle allowed trickle down and climb up consumerism. Everyone had some aspiration where a masstige stretch was possible.  Hence simultaneous uptrading in a few categories and downtrading in others was known to happen. The key for brands was building emotional engagement . Masstige meant intimate esteem and involvement rather than sheer status and bragging rights. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] However the emotional high is not to be taken as the insistent qualifier of masstige.  That would be fallacious. There is a definite laddered appeal.  Design, technology, quality, functional performance, reliability and longevity all have their places at the various rungs.  The end effect is that it has larger appeal than mass and more access than luxury.  It gets consumers to skew disproportionately.  What masstige leaders do : Create new mind space and consumer definitions Change the rules in a category Grow their bracket and the market  Masstige can cannibalize the conventional brands that offer neither a price advantage nor emotional benefits. First they gain sales traction, followed by share and profitability.  Why has this uptrading, upgrading and expanded interest in masstige arisen ? The one lumpsum reason is affluence. A certain class of Indian households had more discretionary wealth available to spend than ever before. In a uniquely diffused way, all Indians were better off in the 2 decades after 1990 but there was also concentration of spending power in the upper middle and middle class. As a total , they commanded the biggest reservoir of ‘ready to spend’ liquidity . The family size in this class was smaller, net incomes were higher in per capita terms meaning that there was more per person available to spend. Women were equal consumers too. This entire cohort was better traveled, possessed of higher sophistication, exposure and discernment.  But deeper down there are societal and economic forces of a more nuanced variety.  Indian masstige growth is fueled by : Urban expansion and suburban clusters Consumerism as a sign of advancement Intensified emotional sensibilities that are expressed via brand choices The consumers who upgrade are responding to emotional urges. They want to consume with a gusto and feel good about life. They feel they have earned the right to do so. On the demand side, the demographic, cultural and compositional trends are inexorable. Therefore, professionals with new skills and capabilities are gearing up to satisfy this demand . Brands ,both Indian and global, are catering to this emerging consumer. Marketers are spending more on retail and media promotions. Specialty retail has emerged in every vertical.  Global supply chains have emerged in sourcing, manufacturing and distribution. The ones who flourish in the masstige market have some unique characteristics They are consumer sensitive top down and bottom up. They operate outside conventional econometric models.  They go for innovations that shift the equation – higher price, higher volume. They look at operations as ‘brand first’ but delivering a quality product  or service experience They stretch the brand but create, define and maintain a distinctive character They attempt to create lifestyle and culture. Whereas elitism and luxury was traditionally aloof , cold, expensive, bespoke and entitled it is not so with masstige which is intimate, accessible, premium and mass elegant with touches of finish and craft.  Limited not exclusive is the mantra.  It is not about exclusion but admission based on achievement.  Strength to this phenomenon.  

The presentations made in the board room always have it rightly worded.  To turn ‘available yet disinterested prospects’ into ‘acceptor enthusiasts’ or better still ‘ evangelical advocates’ has been enshrined as a consecrated objective. Yet, it doesn’t quite translate from lip service to on-ground action. Where attempted, too many conceptual errors or last mile execution fractures lead to break down. The time has come for Indian marketers to face the customer loyalty challenge face forward. The market has become Darwinian. Without customers there is no business. Since all customers were, at some point in time, unconcerned and brand agnostic how does this journey from ignorance to awareness, evoked need, purchase, satisfaction, delight and eventually evangelism happen? I note four crucial stages that can be mapped in the loyalty journey: Reaching ‘available’ prospects Pulling them in with ‘total’ communication Making the acceptors turn into shoppers and ensuring conversion to brand owners Delighting owners into advocacy and making them part of a community. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Marketing has a full suite involvement at each of these stages. The essential part of the functional deployment includes, but is not limited to: Market research, listening and Insight Concept development Awareness built  via advertising and effective media planning PR and Influencer management Activations and Shopper marketing Loyalty is relatively the most underdeveloped field of routine marketing especially in terms of rising above the ‘offer’ inducements. Loyalty is no longer about building followership via discounting.  It is not about interested commerciality or being tethered to a proposition. Instead, loyalty is about all the extras. The extra preference, extra spend, extra privileges, extra reward. These in lump sum make the ordinary relationship, ‘extra-ordinary’. Loyalty is an evolutionary process and has various grades. The highest stage is lifestyle adoption and active membership of community in terms of brand lore and ‘purity’. Next best is prideful association and repeat buying. The intermediate level is of the enthusiast who listens to and engages with the brand via a two way dialogue.  The lowest is the ‘herd’ loyalist or the ‘kidnapped customer’ for whom price sensibility , extra goodies, finite time incentives tilt the decision in your favour. The escalating grades of loyalism benefits brand and business in the following ways : Conscious commitment and repeat purchase Ability to gain data and hence actionably ‘mass-customise’ Gain high value, concrete references Insights to specific trends Expanded relationship and openness on part of customers when new products and services are introduced. Repeat and Ritually coded engagement Price protection Bastion against competitive attack It is the weighty responsibility of the largest brands and companies to lead this agenda. Instead one can see that’s not the case . In fact, innovators seem to be doing more. The smaller players seem to try harder.  The leaders need to wake up and take charge. Old world brand power in an Oligopolistic framework will rapidly diminish. Navigating the ever more complex business landscape  with international competition, intensified regulation, tapering growth must preoccupy business minds. One has to break the mould and fashion a new method of loyalty driven stabilization and growth. Wizardry and flash growth is no longer possible. Loyalty will demand product quality, rationalization of resources, prudent investment in R&D and skill development. In a world where business life spans are shrinking, where growth plateaus lead to oblivion and where markets demand being on a 24/7 treadmill, loyalty is truly the big deal. It is an area where new, visionary objectives are sorely needed to guide the marketing strategies of the very uncertain future.  

Brands are concepts. They live as much in the minds of individuals, aspirants, consumers, brand users community and the collective mass of society as they do in the brand books and marketing frameworks of the brand managers and their partner agencies. The brand as an amalgam of product, concept, idea and narrative is what gains reputation. The gloss and veneer of a favourable reputation is a precious thing. It is what is referred to as ‘that immortal part of myself’ by Shakespeare. Devoid of the favourable impression and repute, what remains is inconsequential. Brand management dictates a set of prescribed activities. Done right, it yields awareness, approval, sales and share. But stellar performance doubled with higher esteem is gold dust. Not everyone gets it. Its alchemy is shrouded in mystery. Why brand image waxes and wanes even for ubiquitous brands is not understood or deconstructed enough. When on a high trajectory, brand belief can reach the innermost recesses of our minds. When discarded, it becomes cold and passé’. As a knowledge discipline, brand management will need to evolve by roaming across diverse often unrelated fields of knowledge. This deliberate pluralism of context can help to build the cognitive diversity and cultural complexity required to understand brand esteem and repute. The routine will not help. A kaleidoscopic eclecticism is demanded. It should encompass sociology, economics, communication, cognition, anthropology, semiotics and other fields of learning. Since messaging riding media is often misconstrued as the bulk of brandbuilding, let me also address informational cascades – Less said is better. Noise erodes brand persona. Turn for a minute to the two parts we have been taught regarding brand benefits – the emotional and functional. Let us knock off functionality here as an objective but merely hygiene criterion. To be good is ‘par for the course’. It is not an esteem builder. Brand halo is not explained without emotion in the mix. Even the social transmission of brand esteem is about a propensity to like it, be proud of it and celebrate it but not about its rational attributes at all. Emotional conduits to esteem are sub-rational and non-rational. The matter is made more complicated by the fact that brand life-cycle and consumer lifespans are not on the same scale. A brand may live 200 years and prosper or it may attain fame and be finished in a matter of a few years. The sociologist Norbert Elias had developed a theory on the rate of change of social norm linked to the cycle of evolution. This evolution is not merely biological but also societal. Figurations, modes of consumption, normalized activity – all these create need, consumerism and esteem. The rational process of esteeming repute is impossible to codify. That halo, esteem, fame is beyond calculation of self-interest. This also means brand esteem is intimately linked to social esteem as well as to vanity and contempt. For example, one society may value technology whereas another may value craftsmanship. One may chase material exhibitionism, the other may revere erudition. This discipline is phylogeny, which refers to ‘the evolution of traits at the level of a societal collective’. Lastly, we move to the task of communicating merit, esteem, haute stature. As early as in 1899, in The theory of the Leisure Classes, Thorstein Veblen had said that ‘consuming is an act of status building’. What X does by consuming is to signal that he has means and merit. The interaction of consumption with personal belief leads to something bigger than the consumer and the brand (Think of brand ambassadors, influencers and communities). Much of what makes repute is empirically unobservable. It is flourishing mostly in the mind and imagination. Of course, cognition matters. Common acknowledgement heightens esteem. But there is always bespoke merit. There is always higher ground. Everyone who cares for music does not decipher classical music. Likewise, everyone who perceives signs is not decoding it fully. A story well known to you may be totally unfathomable when narrated in another language. A deep scar on someone’s face may convey physical violence but not that the person is an aggressor or a victim. That we deduce. A thick accent will tell us that folks are American, Australian or English. But, it is no reflection on their ability to speak English fluently. That assumption triggers in our mind. Therefore, judgement, esteem, repute happens in other people’s heads. It builds on intrinsic merit but may not be reliant on it exclusively. A checklist on the matter as we close this article: • Repute is beyond tangibles. It is always coupled with emotion. However, it lifts above controllable factors and goes into the collective mass as lore. • Esteem is perpetually in a flux. It is always dynamic. Waxing and waning. • Be unintended in your acts and repute can be damaging. Be too controlling and repute gets stultified. • It is like a flow of current or fluid. A reservoir is no guarantee of additional social capital. • Be sharp and controlled in communication. Less said is better. Be coherent and eliminate noise. • It is more important for brand owners to know what they are not as a brand than to know what they stand for. • Be consistent. Reputation is like a postal small savings account. Keep depositing. • Honour yourself as a brand. The judgement of others will follow. https://www.impactonnet.com/more-from-impact/the-magic-of-esteem-6026.html

The much quoted Michael Porter said, “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” This applies to media planning in toto. Any media mix can be understood through four prime considerations: Reach:Where more is good. Reminding as many consumers as possible before purchase Frequency: Where often is better. Focus only when there is a new and complex message aimed at changing behavior/habit SOV: Where outshouting is religion. Gets into focus in a compelling competitive scenario Steadiness: Where continuity matters. Reminding consumers every day The traditional model of the FMCG inspired world was to emphasize maximizing of reach among the target audience and building continuity except where a radical change of behavior or habit was required. Alas! That world is now no longer the real world. It has crumbled and blown away due to multiple factors. The factors blowing in the change include: Optimism that makes consumers see beyond the conventional Youth as the vast majority of new media consumers A technology-enabled and intermediated way of life Breaking down of traditional habits [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget]

Walmart is paying $16 billion for a controlling stake in Flipkart, breaking into India and securing a tactical advantage in its global battle of attrition with arch rival Amazon. This is the highest price any foreign company has paid for a stake in an Indian company .The day of the announcement, Walmart stocks plunged some 4% and wiped off $10 billion of its market capitalization. The concern is perhaps on account of elusive sanity in chaotic P&L scenarios It is the largest acquisition yet by the Walmart where it has essentially taken over the company. With a certainty of continuing losses it can only be seen in longer term rational constructs , as a peek into Walmart’s future. It isn’t an isolated move. There are synchronous moves on its elsewhere such as selling its British unit, Asda and its traditional supermarkets.  So much has been written about the deal and every facet that it strikes me as odd that everywhere a presumption has been made on the reasons why the deal was important.  It is as if that’s a given.To my mind it requires a spelling out.  [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Flipkart had net sales of $4.6 billion vs Walmart’s of $485.8 billion of revenue. But India, has 1.3 billion people, and on its way to becoming one of the world’s top five e-commerce markets within the next five years. Walmart is betting on the fact that India’s e-commerce market, will zoom from $38bn in 2017 to $200bn by 2027. E-commerce is not even 5% of the retail market in India. This is imminently set to grow, exponentially , as crores of smartphones light up with cheap internet access. Flipkart is, in some ways, India’s Amazon -started in 2007 by two college mates and former Amazon employees – and like Amazon, it began life as an online bookseller. Flipkart got its business builder market innovations right whether cash on delivery or its early focus on mobile phones, whereby in 2016 it became the first app in India to reach 50 million users. It had expanded with great energy acquiring the fashion e-commerce company Myntra , mobile payment firm PhonePe.  With 100 million registered users , 100,000 plus registered sellers reaching 800+ cities and makes half a million daily deliveries it is a scaled operation. The company sold products worth $7.5bn fiscal ending March 2018 – a growth of 50%+. Its net sales, were worth $4.6bn. From this deduction note the bite discounting takes away on gross revenue, a real bonfire of vanities fueled by real cash. Mutual benefits outlined in press releases claimed that Flipkart will leverage Walmart’s diverse retail expertise, merchandise supply-chain knowledge and financial strength, while Flipkart’s talent, technology, customer insights and agile and innovative culture will benefit Walmart.  In many regards the deal is rightly criticized as the capitulation of Indian interests to foreign capital . Here India and China are at a wide departure in approaches. China, where more than 700 million people are online, homegrown online giants like Alibaba and local retail chains like Sun Art rule the roost even though Walmart physically entered China in 1996 and operates some 400 stores now. The Indian e-commerce market, beyond retail, is also in the thick of internecine warfare between foreign players and local brands. Most of the market leaders have foreign funding – from Softbank, Alibaba, Naspers etc.as in the case of the taxi aggregation market Ola vs Uber with a common shareholder in Softbank. Paytm, which dominates the busy mobile payments market, now faces competition from Google, Facebook and Paypal. The online travel market has the PSU IRCTC, up against MakeMyTrip funded by Naspers,  Ctrip amongst others. The precedent of this deal now allows capital to also throw a hungry look at omni channel retail opening to majority foreign ownership. Multi-brand retail chains can own up to 51 percent of their investment in India, and single brand retail is now up to 100 percent provided single brand companies get 30 percent of its goods sourced from India. So Online ownership is thought to be a sane precursor to the whole sector being opened up but it’s a circuitous and ‘later than sane’ approach. If Walmart had $16 billion to invest in India, the money would’ve served Indian consumers better had it gone into stores on ground. There is a real need for private capital to strengthen the agriculture supply chain and create new skilled jobs . Alas, only in e-commerce is this sector inflow made feasible because of its permission to be defined as a marketplace or a platform to buy and sell goods.  Markets change when habits change. Capital arrives fastest when opportunity is infact a branded habit. India will see many more such deals. Question is will Indian enterprise flourish as a result?