Author name: Shubranshu Singh

Simply Speaking: With Holi around the corner, explore the magic of colour

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Henry Ford had a belief that ‘machine’ blue and ‘eggshell’ white were beneficial for ‘order and morale’. Italian has three words for blue, but Swahili has none. Colour was at the heart of the first and only ‘propaganda vegetable’—the carrot. Read on for more on the magic of colour [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Note to readers: I’m intrigued by information such as that eight percent of the population is left-handed, that giraffes only sleep five minutes every twenty-four hours and so on, which is useless but important! In the eighteenth century, German aristocrats kept glass-fronted cabinets that displayed curios. They called it Wunderkammern. This column is one such thing. In an unmarked field, it is easy to wander. I want to open windows to glimpse views rather than a whodunnit or a how-to-do-it. I have a licence to be long or short. To be structured or abrupt. This column has no beginning, middle or end. It’s a journey without a destination. Simply speaking…   **** Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet. – Paul Klee We see the world in colour. This enriches and colours our lives. But how do we relate to colour? When and how does colour enter our language? This week, we shall explore how colours have entered our culture, usage and language slowly in a process rich with history and fusion. There is a popular myth that the Inuit Eskimos have a hundred or more words for snow. In fact, they have no more than we do for rain in Hindi. William Gladstone thought Homer was colour blind because of his paltry use of words, describing colour. Colours existed before man or any life form. But in cultural terms, their entry has been a glacial process. Ancient Greeks had no word for blue. Even until the Middle Ages, there was no English word for orange. Chaucer referred to it as ‘bitwixe yelow and reed’. Today, although we can differentiate millions of shades, our vocabulary has, on average, about thirty words for colour. Test yourself if you feel otherwise. According to anthropologists who analysed 98 widely differing languages, colour words are acquired by cultures in a strict sequence. This was documented in Martin Gardner’s book ‘Order and Surprise’ published by the Oxford University Press. The study showed all languages have black and white. If there are three words, the third is red. If there are four colours in all, then next are green or yellow. Then follow blue and brown. If eight or more, then purple, pink, orange and grey are added, in order. However, the more we explore language and culture, we see it isn’t so black and white (pun intended). An African desert tribe has no word for green, but six for red. Italian has three words for blue: Celeste, Azzurro and Blu. Swahili doesn’t have any, so Bulu was coined from English. Creek and Natchez American Indians use the same name for yellow and green, as do the Highland Scots for blue and green. French has two words for brown: Brun and Marron, but there isn’t one in Mandarin, Japanese and Welsh. The Inuit Eskimos also don’t have a word for brown, which isn’t a surprise. Contrary to myth, they have at least seven words for white. There is a tribe in the New Guinea Highlands that still speaks a black and white language and distinguishes colours in terms of brightness. Fascinating. In Anglo–Saxon, black is Blaece and white is Blac. Hence, Blanch, Blank, and Bleak mean what they do, derived from the latter word. Associations with colour are impassioned, illogical, and deep-rooted. There is an old story about packaging trials of a detergent in three packs of different colours. One yellow, one in sky blue, and one in yellow and deep blue. A panel of housewives was asked to try them out. They judged the powder in the yellow pack as corrosive, the blue one as too mild, the yellow and blue just right. The packs all contained the same powder. Dr Max Luscher diagnosed personality disorders through colour associations. The Luscher colour test assumes that an unconscious choice of colours reflects a person’s focus on certain activities, moods, and personality traits. His conclusions were that dark blue appeals to people motivated by security. Blue-green is associated with constancy. Orange-red seems to be related to activity. Henry Ford famously said, “you could have a car in any colour you liked so long as it was black.” He had his reasons. Apparently, only black enamel dried quickly enough to be used on the conveyor belt. This baked enamel coating was called ‘Japan black’, a lacquer or varnish so named due to the history of black lacquer being associated in the West with products from Japan. Its high bitumen content provides a protective finish that is durable and dries quickly. This allowed Japan black to be used extensively in the production of automobiles in the early 20th century in the United States. Five thousand men continuously painted in the vast Ford plant in Detroit. Henry Ford also believed that ‘machine blue’ and ‘eggshell’ white were beneficial for ‘order and morale’. They are still the company colours. There is a fascinating account of all this by Alexander Theroux in ‘The primary colours’, published by Picador. Author Dorothy Parker painted her living room in nine shades of red: Pink, vermilion, scarlet, crimson, maroon, raspberry, rose, russet, and magenta. Pianist Glenn Gould’s favourite colour was battleship grey, while Matisse is said to have loved ‘the delicate transparent pinks of baked shrimp shells’. Green has always been considered, natural, calming and restful. The Romans prized it highly. Pliny wrote that ’emerald delights the eye without fatiguing it’. Nero peered through an emerald while enjoying lions devouring men at the circus. Theatres have a green room so that actors relax from the footlight glare. Green was also Oscar Wilde’s colour, always wearing green carnations supplied by his florist Goodyears. L Frank Baum imagined the Emerald City in ‘The Wizard

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Storyboard18-Simply Speaking: Hook, line, and sinker — the magic of brand names in language

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Successful brand-verbing is a wonderful outcome for a brand. But it’s elusive, probabilistic and dangerous at the same time [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Note to readers: I’m intrigued by information such as that eight percent of the population is left-handed, that giraffes only sleep five minutes every twenty-four hours and so on, which is useless but important. In the eighteenth century, German aristocrats kept glass-fronted cabinets that displayed curios. They called it Wunderkammern. This column is some such thing. In an unmarked field it is easy to wander… I want to open windows to glimpse views rather than a whodunnit or a how-to-do-it. I have a licence to be long or short. To be structured or abrupt. This column has no beginning, middle or end. It’s a journey without a destination. Simply speaking… “In many ways it is language that makes us feel human. Ours is a world of words. Our thoughts, our world of imagination, our communication, our rich culture all these things are woven on the loom of language. Language can conjure up images in our minds. Language can stir our emotions–sadness, happiness, love, hatred. Through language we can express individuality or demand group loyalty. Quite simply, language is our medium.” – Richard Leakey Origins Language—brand interactions have not been studied enough, if at all. For a brand to mean something, it needn’t do something. That said, the strongest brand equities often manifest in language as action verbs. At an advertising level, Nike’s direction to “Just do it” or L’Oréal telling you to try its products “Because You’re Worth It” work because they relate to consumer’s usage of the brand. But only a very few brands enter language as verbs. Those that do end up owning substantial mind space and generically represent a vertical, product group or consumer need. Action-based branding is an exalted creative process too. Why is it that brands such as Google and Uber became verbs, but not others like Microsoft or Apple? We ‘Xerox it’ but we don’t ‘Canon it’. We ‘Uber it’ but not ‘Ola it’. We ‘Google everything’ but never ‘Yahoo’d anything’. What’s the secret that a few brands go up the action ladder but not others? To be a verb brand, a specific, regularly executed action has to be owned. So, ‘to Google’ means searching on the web, ‘to Facebook’ is socialising within your network. I have heard ‘email it to me’ being used the same as ‘Gmail it to me’ but it’s not quite there. Sometimes a brand can colonise an area of activity as it flourishes and creates a synonymity. The process of Xerography was invented in 1938 whilst Xerox as a company came into this world of copying in 1959. Prior to this, words such as facsimile and photocopy were in vogue but eventually the brand name Xerox came to mean photocopying. Despite mammoth success worldwide, there is no ‘to Vodafone’ or ‘to Boeing’. This is so because a brand must be universally known and the actions must be unique, frequent and differentiated. Listening to downloaded music qualifies on all grounds except being unique. I do feel for Walkman as I think it lost out despite qualifying thoroughly. ‘To Uber’ hasn’t become generic but defines ride hailing whenever you do use it in language. To buy a Bisleri in India could mean any packaged water. Yet, you are buying a Bisleri to quench thirst, not simply ‘to Bisleri’ though—in its recent advertising—camels are shown doing so in the middle of a desert. ‘To Hoover’ represented vacuum cleaning per se. Amul is the taste of India perhaps but actually it was “doing Colgate” that came very close to owning brushing of teeth in rural India. Before it went bankrupt, there were billions of Kodak moments but you didn’t ‘Kodak it’. Visa may own payments by card but we ask for a bill, we don’t ‘Visa it’. This seems a credible reward in terms of consumer esteem but can be a devastating loss of value in a legal-commercial sense. After all, the value of a brand is estimated by subtracting a company’s assets from the capitalisation. That’s worth tens of trillions of dollars put together perhaps. All of this rests on exclusive ownership in the eyes of the law. Naturally, corporations are nervous of losing rights to names or brands when the danger isn’t from counterfeiting or robbery, but language. The problem is bound to arise when the brand name becomes the general name of the thing or activity-like hoover. That is to say when brand names appear printed in lower-case letters without a capital. This is the fatal moment when they legally pass from being names of things, to descriptions of what those things did or do. Thus, passing into everyday language and thus becoming public property. This happened to cellophane when the courts judged it to be the name of the material rather than the brand. The result meant Du Pont lost exclusive rights to the brand name. Other casualties include aspirin, escalator, kerosene, lanolin, zipper, yo-yo, linoleum, thermos, milk of magnesia and shredded wheat. Even Monopoly lost its monopoly. In 1982, after 47 years and 85 million sales, the law ruled that Parker Brothers who owned the game must share the name. The successful action was brought by economics professor Ralph Anspach, who had invented Anti-monopoly, a game in which trust-busters seek to break up the multinationals. Successful brand-verbing is a wonderful outcome for a brand. But it’s elusive, probabilistic and dangerous at the same time. Whether it happens thanks to a first mover status or via new market creation, it is nevertheless a Darwinian triumph because two brands never earn brand action verb status for the same thing. https://www.forbesindia.com/article/storyboard18/storyboard18simply-speaking-hook-line-and-sinker-the-magic-of-brand-names-in-language/74253/1

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Storyboard18 | W.H. Auden perhaps spoke for marketers when he said ‘great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings’

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How can marketers attain simplicity in a world awash with complexity. Simply speaking, it’s complex. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Authenticity is the sensibility to see oneself without illusion. It leads to adopting those technologies which make a positive difference to how the organization works. (Image: Marija Zaric via Unsplash) “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.” – Donna Haraway Marketing breeds complexity. Such is its nature that complexity manifests itself internally first. Projects, committees, portfolios, bureaucracies often grow weeds more than flowers, leaving little time, resources or mind space to innovate. Yet innovate we must, else it’s a slippery slope to extinction. Nora Bateson said “the opposite of complexity is reductionism. Simplicity is complexity with grace.” I wholeheartedly agree from a marketer’s perspective. The ask is wickedly simple. We need to separate what’s needed from what’s not – across technology, data and people. If it’s not delivering value, then it’s not a priority. No matter what the strategy, vision and brand purpose – less is more.  If only doing this would be as easy as stating it! In the brick-and-mortar era, marketers knew exactly how to drive traffic to stores. Marketing spend was simpler, more efficient, easier to measure and much less costly. What you did was what all competitors did as well. Then, the universe of competitors became vast, attention spans narrowed, marketing turned “always-on” and it became harder to reach customers. Today, the running cost of digital marketing is controlled by Google, Facebook and Amazon along with other powerful players like Apple. There is a rapidly growing form of digital marketing in which advertisers pay marketing companies called “affiliates” or “publishers” when a specific predefined action is completed; such as a sale, lead or click. All this brings greater complexity and cost. What should we keep in mind in order to attain simplicity and avoid complexity? Be authentic – Don’t adopt tech for being au courant  “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” said Goethe. Technology solutions give a competitive edge to one’s marketing. But the best fertilizer for the weed of complexity is technology for technology’s sake. I propose a new definition of ‘authenticity’. Authenticity is the sensibility to see oneself without illusion. It leads to adopting those technologies which make a positive difference to how the organization works. This must be seen considering the organizational culture. Will the culture adopt, adapt and change? If not, all technologies may be superfluous, ineffective and become tools for complication, not simplification. First, be realistic about your needs, then evaluate from the available tech landscape what the candidate technologies may solve for. Scarce resources are wasted on acquiring, working, incorporating and instructing personnel to use technologies that don’t contribute net value. Data is the north star Data can drive every organizational decision. But everywhere there is a problem of plenty. Data has a flood on the supply side but a drought in processing and utilization. In order to make use of data – pooling from many sources, de-duplicating it, harmonizing it and bringing it together to derive insights is the key. But people dance to the noise as much as to the signal. Let me tell you an open secret, without the right data you can’t judge the impact of data! It cannot be done alone – Think of a partner ecosystem. Shift transactional tasks that don’t need judgement down the priority ladder. Innovate for workforce agility. This is where partners come in. Develop stretch capacity plans to get to a model for handling demand peaks. As captain of the boat, look at the horizon not just beyond the bow. Future-ready means in the next hour, rest of today, tomorrow, next month, quarter and year. But it’s also fifty years from now. The boat will be best navigated with an eye on the horizon. If you merely gaze at the bow / boat, you will end up going round and round in circles. Think of the new consumer motivations  Beyond the traditional criteria of price and quality, the how, why and from whom people purchase goods and services is changing. Ease, convenience, service, personal care, trust, reputation, product origin, and now health and safety matter. It must factor into how brands connect with consumers, but also how marketing teams are organized and work. Your team should be set up to listen and adapt to what customers need. The reality is that as people’s mindsets and buying patterns transform, marketing must follow. Complexity arrives because of ignorance. When you don’t know what matters, everything matters. When you don’t know what to measure, everything is measured.   [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Disparate platforms also contribute to the fragmentation of user experiences. It is a toxic form of complexity. (Image: Dan Cristian Padure via Unsplash) Think of Consumer Experience needs before platforms Given a plethora of shiny new marketing tools that are constantly being ballyhooed, thousands of vendors with shiny new tools come promising superior targeting, improved conversions, and better efficiencies. To avoid the many, it is seductive to buy into the idea of a single, heavyweight, unified digital experience platform to serve as the hub of all digital experiences and running the full portfolio of websites and digital properties. But it is a road to failure because of the cost, intricacy of implementation, and rigidity of the massive platform so chosen. On the other hand, disparate platforms also contribute to the fragmentation of user experiences. It is a toxic form of complexity. Every touchpoint platform becomes a silo, to be managed independently which can’t share resources, and must be secured and controlled on a one-by-one basis. Consumers don’t care about your plumbing. They want water in the tap. Whatever form of digital and off-line marketing you do decide to invest in, there must be substantial testing, trailing,

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The CX revolution – We live in a time whose idea has arrived

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[siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] An experience revolution is now underway compelling businesses and brands to manage around the delivery of outstanding experiences By Shubhranshu Singh “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo I dare to paraphrase this with reference to the subject at hand. We live in times where a pivoting business idea was awaited. That idea arrived because of the call of the times. An experience revolution is now underway compelling businesses and brands to manage around the delivery of outstanding experiences. Technological advancement and the demand of the times we live in are shaping not only how and what we buy, but also how and where from we work. It is also shaping why , when and how we interact with others. Inside corporations this revolution is taking CX beyond the Chief Marketing Officer’s or Chief Operating Officer’s purview and into the board room as a priority for the CEO. However, many organizations remain inertial, inflexible or ignorant. One major change they are unable to internalise is that the pace of change and benchmarks are no longer sector specific. Consumers compare their brand experiences between different companies in entirely different spaces. I switch between apps like Zerodha, ICICI Bank, Licious, Amazon, Netflix in a single day, even within an hour. My experience benchmarks are fluid. The fundamentals of CX are now widely in place. But that is also the challenge. Designers plateau after initial incremental improvements. Go to any fashion site and you can expect a similar presentation and details. All bank apps will allow similar functionality. Expecting ultra-fast, online check-out with minimal clicks is also hygiene. In fact, ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ born to enable a smoother buying experience for customers is now gaining acceptance across. Can it remain a differentiator for long ? Sure sellers want the least amount of friction in their customers’ buying journey and developed markets like Europe are showing the way. That a Swedish operator Klarna has a $45B valuation is something noteworthy given the size of economy and user base. More than 20% of Sweden’s population is using Klarna. This phenomenon is also likely to be a rage in India given the poor availability of structured credit products and the proliferation of smartphones and cheap internet. The BNPL revolution is here now and all players from big banks to apps are onboard. But experience demands more. What next ? Given this base effect, how does one consistently differentiate oneself? That requires end to end commitment which a CEO as Chief Experience Officer must drive. Every C-level executive leading front (and back) office functions needs to be committed to transform customer experience. There are three clarion calls of this revolution: 1. The customer is above all – When in doubt, navigate by following the consumer Obsessively looking for unmet consumer needs is critical for growth. The deeper you go, the shallower you feel. But, usually marketing runs Consumer Insights and is its main internal consumer. Historical data and market segmentation can be a helpful snapshot of the market, but CX asks for a much richer, deeper, layered context about their lives, choices and needs. To be truly customer obsessed, companies need better ways to dig deep and uncover these needs. If you are not a listening organization, you can’t be a CX winner. Customers may say and do vastly different things. We all do. We change our mind and habits. The business process must be insight hungry, looking to gain this contextual, data-integrated understanding of customer’s unmet needs. The field of smartphone applications is wide open. A cursory glance at the leadership table shows diverse industries of recent vintage – almost all have been adopted widely due to superior customer experience. Meesho is an aggregator of smaller apparel brands. Tiktok sets social media content benchmarks for the next gen . Call of Duty has been revived recently in the mobile avatar. MX Player rules the regional and freemium content category. These have all solved customers’ requirements in their own ways. These are not entirely new or revolutionary offerings but rather exemplify a nuanced understanding of consumer needs that have been picked up and crafted in a niche way. In fact, most leading social media apps had pioneered one form of content but have adapted the other forms seeing consumer interest. Now, all social platforms have all kinds of content available, be it stories, image feed, video feed or short form vertical content. The Chinese fashion retailer Shien has beaten H&M in global searches in 2020 and is neck to neck with Zara now. The Shien app is the single largest downloaded app in the US, ahead of Amazon. All these point to the power of customer understanding and experience building cutting across borders. Integrating traditional market segmentation with contextual mindset research must yield what customers are likely to do and why. Getting it fast and getting to one and all is critical. In an earlier era, you could run segmentation studies for a year, debate it for six months and then choose not to act on it at all. Now it’s about efficiently and continually learning from customers. The savvy CX brands zoom into actionable outcomes and invite customers to design a future along with them. 2. CX is not a project, it is a purpose – Every day is about experience innovation, experience must grow ceaselessly An innovation culture that improves CX must change what you do, not just what you say. Experience innovation is not a tactic, it’s an organization wide commitment. That means the exceptions set the norm. Optimizing CX touch points is really stuff for beginners. If your commitment to excellence in CX is raised to a level of purpose, it will not be about a single app, service or personalized solution. It will be truly delivered when innovations are convergent, coherent, mutually amplifying and generate value in the experience. With the rise of the millennials and smartphones, we have seen companies

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Masters of CX – Part 2

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The future of marketing is customer experience but what is the future Of customer experience?, the author asks… The future of Customer Experience is a vast and always on digital transformation. The rise of the modern digital economy truly elevated customer obsession as the critical differentiator. Winners manage ‘experience in business’ rather than ‘business of experience’. Businesses which don’t prepare to boldly reinvent core experiences and make the leap from engineering-centred product development to customer-centric innovation will fall behind. Customer Experience transformation is never a solo pursuit. It requires coordination of strategies across leadership functions. The best marketing and sales organizations are centred around the customer. They rely on analytics, agile processes, and an iterative, experiment based learning culture to create more personalized experiences. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] This requires a difficult and painful transformation. Companies that win go beyond talking about customer experience. They concentrate on it, emphasise it, and transform it. They make things easy, attractive, convenient, enjoyable and relevant for customers. We would do well to take a couple of pages out of Apple’s playbook. Its value says all about the success of its customer experience program. Recently, it became the only enterprise on the planet to get to a valuation of $3 Trillion. That is more than the value of Walmart, Disney, Netflix, Nike, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Morgan Stanley, McDonald’s, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, IBM and Ford combined! It is even more than the GDP of India! This mind-numbing feat was achieved on the 3rd of Jan 2022, a remarkable 42 years after its founding. The value of the company really started skyrocketing from around 2003-04. That is the time that Apple started defining new customer experiences and laying out a new multi modal approach to accessing and experiencing its products. This applies in varying degrees to all the pioneers of the new economy. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix , Microsoft and Alphabet have existed on average for 29 years. But each of them has changed our lives in permanent ways by shaping how we live, work, shop and seek information. They have rebirthed customer experience. Salesforce’s ‘State of the Connected Consumer’ report from 2020 says experience equals product and service in weight behind a purchase decision. CX delight needs personalization with a self-reinforcing loop. Marketing is already moving from episodic campaigns to an ‘Always On – Always Available’ mode. Channels and platforms will fragment and mutate. Marketing and sales will move together more seamlessly. New Devices, tools and channels will be born. It is no longer good enough to just think about digital, mobile, social – it is time to think about Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Youtube and a hundred more platforms. Think Blockchain, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), 3D reconstruction, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), vision ambience, voice ambience, geolocation and the newly articulated metaverse. What we consider reality itself may be a programmed construct soon. But, listing to-dos is easier than actually doing things. The challenge is not of understanding but of delivering the required digital transformation. At minimum, it means willingness for a new operating models, making these reach scale, enabling the capturing of more data, and measuring the customer experience more accurately. At the management high table, it is emphasised that strategy will drive tech and not the other way around. Yet the world is full of knee jerk, trend friendly, tech-first, disjointed investments. The impulse to act on preferring discrete technologies can be compelling. There is usually no Chief Experience Officer. Getting to an intricate combination of solutions needs collaboration across silos and is hard to achieve. Folks think in terms of functions, departments, resumes and appraisals first. They don’t first think in terms of consumer needs and journeys. Digital transformation required for best-in-class customer experience must start with clarity of intention. Then comes the breadth and depth of change required followed by interfunctional lock in. But first, tech-agnostic conversations must rise above any plug and play solution based on an individual technology. Customer experience transformation doesn’t come in a box of Pringles. It calls for the very painful work of going to the heart of organizational processes and culture, how things work and the various facets of interaction with customers. Everything in an organization is interlinked. Platforms, assets, and processes often involve multiple digital and physical technologies securely working together. But, a bleeding edge technology today is legacy tech tomorrow. Digital transformation is like stepping into a deep river with both your feet. It is best that one foot be planted firmly on the business side whilst the other is exploring downstream technology and operations. To conclude there are two vectors for this transformation. 1. Experiences: Focus on optimizing interactions with users, whether they be customers, the workforce, or other stakeholders within the ecosystem. The strategic considerations include business engagement and customer experience management. The technologies range from mobile, augmented, virtual, and immersive reality to usage and behaviour analytics. 2. Insights: Assess what data, analysis, operating model, and workforce are required to enable organizational strategies. It needs a data first culture feeding into Business Intelligence. Today, Automation, Prediction, Human and machine teaming is allowing insights-based personalization, real-time optimization and deep learning. The future of marketing is experience. The future of experience is a melting away of boundaries between functions and even between customers and businesses. https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/the-future-of-marketing-is-customer-experience/88819548

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It’s ‘And’ Not ‘Or’

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Big hoarding or big data? The advancement of data-based precision marketing has made such questions real. The choices may be in synthesis, not selection [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Validation is naturally the first derivative of data availability. What is measured can be tested and proven. It has made the ‘marketing is science’ votaries more powerful than ever before. With rapid technological development, analytics has enabled real-time segmentation and the discovery and nurturing of precisely defined audiences. This leads to a futile debate on marketing priorities. That of targeted precision versus thematic broad reach. To me, it’s a no brainer, always maximize reach and use precision targeting down the funnel. Business is about maximising returns. The market matters more than marketing. Any the brand that aims to flourish must feed the mouth of the funnel better and then do a better job in landing conversions. There is no reason to be fixated on specific marketing modalities. After all, consumers live their lives unconcerned with a specific brand’s activities or media mix. It is not about traditional or new media. Both are needed. It is not about legacy channels or media innovations. Both have their place in the mix. Reach, impact, costs are good metrics to compare and assess. My experience is that this emphasis on making an either/or choice is due to confusion between the short- and long-term priorities. Those who are locked into sales metrics often see the world differently from those who chase brand equity metrics. This difference is in terms of scope of activity, tenure, periodicity and results. It has been a tripping wire for many CMOs. I don’t appreciate how segmentation came to be about targeting an individual. Data-driven, precision-targeting solutions are making it look like developing reach is against the science of seeking granularity. To call one-way ‘mass’ and another way ‘targeted’ is to confuse scale in the relative sense. What is targeted for Nike is mass for a Louis Vuitton. The issue with reach predicated models is wastage whilst targeting makes a habit of chasing those intenders who have the highest conversion value. ROI cannot be only about sales generation as they lead to a focus on buyers with a high likelihood to convert. It looks good for a campaign-specific evaluation on boosting sales but doesn’t grow the baseline. Brands have been built through advertising because they reached those who weren’t aware or didn’t care. I have seen renowned marketers getting confused between medium and message. They confuse the creative target with the prospect. Evolved customers are not swayed by offers or advertising. A brand needs to reach more prospects. But time and again, brand managers mistake their core segment with their media target. You might want to show young, adventurous, trendy riders in motorcycle advertising, but the likelihood is that a lot of your buyers will be older, plain vanilla commuters. If it hurts your vanity as a brand manager to reach prospects who are different from your celebrated core, you’re foolishly setting up for shrinking your base. Those who prefer to drink Red Bull need not be jumping from cliffs for the thrill. There are segments that are meaningful to a category, and they must be known in order to define your reach and structure media operations. The strongest brands build categories in their entirety. Ultimately, a brand’s target is the market, so targeted means should be used to boost relevant segments, manage budgets in lean periods, create an affinity specific campaign if so required. Today the media environment and technology are allowing us to find out more about who we’re speaking to, and thus make sure the message is more aligned with their needs. It is down to specific behaviours associated with an interest in your category, or even with different levels of category involvements. I saw this clearly as I led a Google Analytics implementation at Royal Enfield. But it doesn’t mean fragmenting campaigns for multiple sub-segments. A brand should own a big idea that resonates with many people. Then social/digital, always-on creativity can keep the content coming under an arc of grand meaning. For example, Dove owns body-positive feminism. Patagonia owns environmental concerns. Marlboro owned frontier masculinity. Consistency is key for branding and an addressable media world is not forcing any contradictions. Long-term effects are generated in fundamentally different ways from how short-term effects are produced. A succession of myopic, short-term response-focused campaigns or promotions will not succeed as strongly over the long term as a single brand-building campaign. A focus on short-term results will not maximise long-run profitability. Most short-term volume growth stresses price elasticity over the longer term. A clear distinction and a balance of brand based long-term, and activation-dependent short-term elements are needed. Creatively acclaimed campaigns seem to produce considerably more powerful long-term business effects than merely rational persuasion campaigns. The most optimal approach is to develop powerful thematic campaigns supported by resonant activations to drive short-term sales. And hence, it’s not ‘Or’ but ‘And’. http://bwmarketingworld.businessworld.in/article/It-s-And-Not-Or-/04-01-2022-416642/  

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Masters of CX – Part 1

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity /

Digital innovations which impact timeless aspects of value creation – accessibility, optionality, cost – reap the richest reward, the author writes…   The rise of a commercially successful digital ecosystem, fuelled by innovation, is the single biggest phenomenon in business in our lifetime. The word ‘innovation’ comes from Latin innovare for renew, whose root is novus or new. This makes people imagine that ‘new equals value’. To the contrary, digital innovations which impact timeless aspects of value creation – accessibility, optionality, cost – reap the richest rewards. What we call a digital brand is at the same time an idea, approach, platform, disruption and more. When we say Uber, Paytm, Swiggy, Zerodha we are calling out a brand but also an experience. A brand in the digital world is first an experience. If it is adaptive, intuitive and engaging it crystallises into becoming a brand. Often the best experiences become synonymous with a verb like ownership of the category. We will explore more of that soon. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] The rise of a digital economy is comprised of three distinct parts. First, the rise of asset light, app based digital business processes. Second, the flow of funding for such businesses. Third, the rise of the digital consumer with end-to-end online lifestyle. The net cumulative outcome of these is the commercial triumph of the digital economy we are now witnessing. Across Asia, a large, thriving, consumer facing tech sector has boomed. It can be geographically trifurcated as that of China, South East Asia and India. In India alone, 54 unicorns have been created in the last 11 years. Of these 33 have been valued as unicorns in the last 12 months. New contenders and excited investors are fuelling huge valuations. There were more than $27 Bn of foreign portfolio investments in Indian ventures in the past 1 year. Particularly when it comes to exit options and value creation via listing,India must closely understand the experience of South East Asian Ventures. Grab, the Singapore headquartered consumer tech giant listed on Nasdaq on the 2nd of December through the merger route with the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth Corp in what was the world’s biggest US listing by a South East Asian Firm at a staggering $40 Bn. This Super App construct from gaming to services to fintech has different versions but they are all asset light, platform based, low margin operators. They rely on massive communities of users with billions of transactions. The best known Asian movers were the Ant and Tencent ventures. The growth of digital money, accessibility, services and distribution models have accelerated this sector. And yet there is an immense headroom for growth. Online retail is still a single digit contributor hovering between 3 to 9% across Asia, as a case in point. Gojek and Tokopedia, now ‘GoTo’ is set to create a new benchmark early in the coming year by listing in the US with valuations close to $30 Bn . The pioneer in listing abroad was Shopee’s parent company- Sea Ltd. – that listed in the US in 2017 at close to $1 Bn. A player in the ecommerce, gaming and payments segments and it reaped rich rewards with a present net worth $122 Bn, it is the largest listed firm in South East Asia. That such giddy valuations ignore operational profitability is not even a subject of debate because, it is obvious that a profitable future will demand vast and quick consolidation. This also drives the rationale of a ‘one stop shop’. Funding creates a fertile growth environment and its eventual harvesting of returns may demand aggregation. In the digital economy, the brand is the business and the entire business is a brand. The app, process, technology all rolls into one brand. According to Hurun’s Global Unicorn Index 2021, a majority of unicorns in India are from the technology sector, be it EdTech, AdTech, FinTech, MedTech, Gaming or so on. In the next 3-5 years, there won’t be any sector of the economy that will not willingly embrace a digital changeover. This immense expansion will also give birth to enormously valuable brands. Indian ventures in the digital economy are also carrying a torch for brand creation. More than anything else, they thrive on Customer Experience based differentiation and ‘brand’ preference. Customer satisfaction rapidly percolates socially through online means and people make choices. No one cares to have 3 brokers, 4 tutors or 6 caterers. New age Indian unicorns like Byju’s and Cred are charting their very own journey as power brands. Digital India will come out as the winner as Indians come online. India stands just behind the US and China in the number of unicorns, however that may change soon enough as India has all the makings of a great future. In 2021, India is among the top 3 countries -the others being Indonesia and Brazil – in the world in terms of daily smartphone usage. It is the top market in terms of game downloads and is amongst the top few markets in terms of overall smartphone application downloads. The UPI network has enabled fast and secure payments and Indian firms have begun developing successful apps in the gaming and payments space that are witnessing record adoption. All these factors point to the endless possibilities. Creating truly leading edge customer experience requires business transformation. But given the inherent advantage of having a world leading IT industry, it is possible India goes on to become the most intensive digital economy in the entire world. Imagine the possibilities for Indian SaaS (Software as a Service) entities. They are mindboggling. Let us begin 2022 with that thought… https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/digital/masters-of-cx-part-1/88673998

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Storyboard18 – 2022 – Definitely, maybe: Brand builders, be mentally ready to compete with machines

Leave a Comment / Forbes India /

Predictions are a risky business. But we’re bravely venturing again to list the many ways things will change in the future. In these articles, we have industry leaders and experts trying to future-gaze and capture the transformative and disruptive ideas and trends that will ‘change everything as we know it’. (Or not.) In 2022, definitely, maybe 2022 – The year change will become the new norm. As we begin a third calendar year living with the coronavirus, one can say, without a doubt, that the world of consumer marketing has irrevocably changed beyond appreciation. A digital ecosystem has emerged in its entirety to span information, access, experience, transaction and has gained maturity, investment and scale. Living in a lockdown profoundly transformed the way we live, work and connect online. I see distinct areas of fast-paced change in 2022 relating to rising consumer expectations, evolving channels of customer engagement and the dominance of technology and data as a driver of strategy. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Everything online, ‘here and now’ Ironically, notwithstanding lockdowns and disruptions, expectations from service delivery and turnaround time went up more than down. No consumer is willing to wait. Everything must be a click away and available at the doorstep. As consumers live online, their expectations from digital experiences have never been higher. Every brand must think of being a digital-first business. In 2022, a return to normalcy will fuel consumer action but the new modalities of the transaction will persist and become better. Customer experience will be the key differentiator Modern marketing was all about building awareness, stoking interest, facilitating decisions. But capabilities across the board grew in a way that any differential advantages based on the product, price, promotion, and place were flattened. Now, positive cumulative experience alone suffices as a discriminator. Delivering a rich customer experience demands an entirely new way of operating and a wilful digital transformation at each stage. A more agile, collaborative, and customer-focused approach will be required. In 2022, consumers will expect an unprecedented degree of relevance and increasingly personalised customisation. This will call for tailored engagement based on experience. An Amazon-like buying experience will not be an aspiration but a hygiene benchmark. Get top rating or perish Reputation and reality have a complex relationship. A brand is a multivalent concept. Every brand is a reputation. Every reputation is a brand. Unfortunately, reputation is never entirely dependent solely on intrinsic worth. It is a social construct subject to the sensitivities and judgements of others. Such judgement is attestable in the form of ratings. Customers are digitally mature and geared towards online research for virtually every purchase decision. Research by Global WebIndex, reported for October 2021, shows that 57.6 percent of the world’s population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes and 6.7, is the average number of platforms used, per user, per month. At 5.29 billion unique mobile users, more than two-thirds of the world have access to a mobile phone. Therefore, ratings and external confirmation of information will become a majority norm. In 2022, group verified curation of consumer choice will become a crucial area of digital engagement. Moving beyond segmentation to hyper-personalisation Hyper-personalisation is possible and scalable now. It takes segmentation to another level and is a booster for engagement rates and ROI. The foundation is a profile of the consumer that is always improving. Tools can collect demographics, location, and browsing history to deliver optimal customer experiences in real-time, targeted to their preferences. In 2022, if you don’t have a business-relevant SVOC—Single View of Customer—you should worry about repeat business, brand loyalty, and advocacy. A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t effective in engaging with customers and prospects. AI will be used to provide uniquely personalised campaigns, rather than segment-based CRM marketing. Authentically inclusive marketing in a cookieless world Google described the end of third-party cookies as an important step toward greater privacy for web browsers. Apple has pioneered it in April 2021 with iOS update 14.5 and the new consent protocol called App Tracking Transparency which governs and constrains how apps and advertisers can use uniquely identifiable data like device ID to target, measure and optimise campaigns. Ad tech providers will be unable to accumulate and bring together datasets to target efficiently. Their working data and processing ability will decline in extent, accessibility and value. Ad targeting, buying and optimisation processes will be disturbed and restrained, especially for performance-oriented campaigns and custom audiences. Cookie data gaps will undermine attribution and optimisation. In 2022, ‘first party data’ will become ‘first prize data’. This is a tectonic shift. Artificial Intelligence everywhere Machine learning algorithms are all around us, whether seen in facial recognition, voice assistants, language translation, robotic process automation. AI has pervaded everything we do and will become recognisably ubiquitous in 2022. High powered computing, the internet of things, and 5G will make AI an easier to adopt means towards brand excellence. Fancy tech innovations aside, every company must look at its data strategy for execution at scale. Marcomm will need to become bespoke and fuel a cycle of tailored experiences. In addition, there will be the need for permission marketing given the changed scenario in data privacy and security. A final word 2022 will hopefully be the first year ‘after Covid’. But, notwithstanding, many existing capabilities will undergo convergence and affect society in a way that is much more than the sum of their parts. In 2023, customer journeys and personalisation programs may be run by AI algorithms and software applications or bots. As a brand builder, be mentally ready to compete with a machine. Shubhranshu Singh is vice president – marketing – Domestic & IB, Tata Motors. Views are personal. https://www.forbesindia.com/article/storyboard18/storyboard18-2022-definitely-maybe-brand-builders-be-mentally-ready-to-compete-with-machines/72481/1

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Brand reputation in the information age

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity /

Super abundant information has made us cognitively challenged. As individuals, institutions, groups, societies and entire nations we are more dependent on external judgments now than ever before, the author writes… Rousseau said “I’d rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices” but one less recognized paradox is that prejudices play a pivotal role in how we deal with information.  A brand is successful when society esteems it. We know that social judgement is a collective construct. The power to shape a brand’s reputation lies in the hands of others. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Super abundant information has made us cognitively challenged. As individuals, institutions, groups, societies and entire nations we are more dependent on external judgments now than ever before. We need help to evaluate and make sense of the information with which we are swamped. For thousands of years, our trust operated in a linear way. You trust A who, in turn,trusts B. Therefore, you trusted B even without knowing him. But these chains were brittle when it came to scalability. With the rise of internet-based information networks, there was a fundamental breaking away in our relationship to knowledge. Now, information is valued only when attested by many others. It needs to be rated and graded by several others. Even a pizzeria chases rating. Collective judgement was always a determinant of brand success.  Today technology has made it possible for an ‘always on’ collective intelligence to be at work which, though anonymous, is weighty. Intrinsic worth is not enough to warrant a fabulous reputation. Reputational build up is relational, dynamic and externally curated. Others make you who you are. That’s why Einstein is acknowledged as a great scientist, but we probably won’t know the Nobel Prize winner in Physics this year.  Fame is not the same thing as social attestation, but -for sure- it is the most recognised and glamorous facet of it in some cases. Amartya Sen, Virat Kohli , Gulzar – each a highly rated achiever – but their respective standing varies greatly where fame at large is concerned. We often mistake being famous with a positive reputation, per se. So, what creates reputation in the positive, confirmatory sense? Where does such judgement emerge from? The British imperialists adopted the Hindi word “Pucca”, literally meaning ‘solid’.  Being judged ‘pucca’ meant you belonged to their class, tribe, mentality and interest group. But in today’s world, peer-review is overshadowed by the influence of mass media and free individuals. Each one rates as if an expert or guru. We trust others because they are many. In that sense, reputation is, always, a meta construct. What we call reputation is, in fact, ‘a reputation of reputations’. Think about it, – a lot of what we dislike, adore or revere is based on second hand and unverified evidence, if any. This socially sanctioned belief system is manipulated by devious advertising, ‘fake news’ and other potentially misinforming sources – and may result in a breakdown of trust. If you want to probe deeply, don’t bother with evidence alone. Don’t see merely what is being said but also who is saying it, why and when. Such vigilance is in your individual interest just as its crucial for ensuring correct valuations, functioning of knowledge-based markets, development of robust institutions and surviving as a viable democracy. In an era of unlimited transmission of information and diffusion of sources it is senseless, if not impossible, to independently research the truth for ourselves. But if we keep our eyes on the interested network behind the content, we may manage to rank it, grade it and label it. In the theory of knowledge, it would be termed a second-order epistemology. Understanding how society esteems a reputation needs a traversing across sociology, psychology, marketing economics and information structures. Often, the reputation building is institutionalised. The Academy Awards, the Nobel Prize, The Padma Awards – we accept the institutional judgement and celebrate it.  A great example of personally disinterested collectivism is Wikipedia. However, the rise of tech enabled voices means that institutional rules have come under question. Collective wisdom is an accretive judgement. Beyond a threshold of group size, it is not deliberative but cumulative. Gossip often plays a role in origination and confirmation. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob” James Madison has wisely observed. Many minds can be wiser than one but just being numerous is no guarantee of superior output. Democratic deliberation must make full use of diversity inputs and remain unbiased to one sense of rationality. As a consumer, be sceptical. As a brand owner, be transparent. As a society, be vigilant. Never forget, your reputation precedes you! https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/brand-reputation-in-the-information-age/88306921

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