The Economic Times – Brand Equity

Where sleep is competition

Since the pandemic, Hollywood’s old formats have nosedived and turned belly up in commercial terms. The new ones are not growing fast enough nor making much profit. Cinema and Cable seem to be on a journey into the history books. As the Titanic sinks, Hollywood’s streaming businesses are not proving to be viable lifeboats. New platform content appears only a bonfire where value turns to ash. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] There was no business like the show business. It gave a much-esteemed soft power to a few nations, by itself no less significant than nuclear might. The change of technology or delivery modalities scarcely affected the primacy of the West. Its ability to export its culture far and wide was enviously acknowledged. Then decline set in. The rise of Asia made media a multipolar industry. And then corona shut the world down. Since the pandemic, Hollywood’s old formats have nosedived and turned belly up in commercial terms. The new ones are not growing fast enough nor making much profit. Cinema and Cable seem to be on a journey into the history books. As the Titanic sinks, Hollywood’s streaming businesses are not proving to be viable lifeboats. New platform content appears only a bonfire where value turns to ash. While Apple and Amazon invest in streaming as a loss-leader for their other businesses, traditional leaders such as Disney have seen erosion of market value by half. In November 2022, Disney sacked its CEO Bob Chapek, and brought back his predecessor Bob Iger from retirement. Catching a falling knife safely calls for luck. The industry is in long-term decline, as households swap expensive cable packages for cheaper streaming services, as well as free content on YouTube. Mark Bergen writes about this extensively in his book “Like, Comment, Subscribe – Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination”. Within a decade of its founding, YouTube had set the model for on demand, lightning-fast internet television and become the place for free online video. It remains the second most frequented website on earth behind its parent Google. A third of the world’s internet population visits it daily. That is staggering and it does not need genius to imagine the magnitude of the drift. Wish that could be said about good old network TV. Primetime audience on TV in America is about half of what it used to be five years ago. The three networks look like stunned dinosaurs. Since July 2022, Americans have spent more time streaming than watching cable, according to Nielsen. Only sports broadcasting makes the show go on but profitability is a huge challenge. To win subscribers, Hollywood’s biggest studios have ramped up their combined content spending by 50% since 2019. Amazon and Apple have been writing very fat cheques that have raised costs for everyone. Studios have pumped money mostly into established properties. No more do they have the appetite to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in global promotions and make a return from box office earnings over a relatively short period by establishing new IP. America’s ten biggest films last year were all sequels or parts of a running franchise such as Avatar or Indiana Jones. Entire new categories of entertainment will emerge or get hybridised. For young adults in rich countries gaming is bigger than television in terms of time spent. Hollywood has been slow to catch on, but its Silicon Valley rivals are snapping up gaming IPs. Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, whose games include “Call of Duty” and “Candy Crush”, is worth $69 billion, ten times what Amazon paid for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Movies based on games are becoming as popular as games based on movies. When “The Last of Us” came out in 2013, the hit video game’s premise seemed outrageous fiction. Imagine a fungus turns people into zombies, leaving society in shambles. It would have been impossible to turn to a viable plot back then. Cut to a decade later and it is a hugely anticipated HBO series going out to a world only too familiar with a pandemic. Over the past decade, as video games have become more vivid and complex, developers have used the medium to spin rich, character-based stories that rival film and TV in depth and quality. “The Last of Us,” for instance, is less about an outbreak and civilisational chaos than the father-daughter relationship between a smuggler named Joel and a 14-year-old girl named Ellie. While game-to-screen adaptations like the “Tomb Raider,” “Resident Evil” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchises have made enough money to warrant sequels, unlike comic books, the stories in video games have never been properly translated across media boundaries. For Hollywood it is a gold mine of intellectual property with a built-in audience of gamers thus far unexploited. Viewers should prepare to see more games onscreen soon: Other popular video game franchises with film and TV adaptations in the works include “Twisted Metal,” “Ghost of Tsushima” and “Assassin’s Creed”. Spurred on by the pandemic, which saw video-game spending increase by nearly a quarter in 2020, the games industry was worth more than $170 bn in 2021, in worldwide revenues. That’s about five times as much as the global box office. A shift towards subscriptions and cloud gaming could fundamentally reshape the landscape. Subscription gaming is growing fast, but even in five years it will represent less than 10% of game spending as per estimates. Streaming from the cloud is still less popular. Google will shut down Stadia, its cloud-gaming service. Amazon’s Luna service has yet to take off. Microsoft, which separately runs Azure, the world’s second-largest cloud network, is well placed for cloud gaming if and when it emerges. As of today, streaming services represent well under 1% of games spending. Cloud gaming aims to do for video games what companies like Spotify and Netflix have done for music and films – make them available on any device with an internet connection. For the gaming industry, that would be a revolution. The consoles and beefy PCs required to run modern

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Tumbling Tech : The slide to the bottom

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity / Shubranshu Singh

When Covid shut the world down, it was tech that kept it up and running. All things digital surged even as the rest of the sectors tanked. But then things changed. The Nasdaq composite, a tech-heavy index, shed off one third of its value. That is equal to India’s GDP. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] If ever there was an apt example of ‘nothing succeeds like success’ it was the case of America’s five largest technology companies. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta saw their revenues and profits grow at five times the rate of American GDP between 2011-2021. When Covid shut the world down, it was tech that kept it up and running. All things digital surged even as the rest of the sectors tanked. But then things changed. The Nasdaq composite, a tech-heavy index, shed off one third of its value. This loss of value totals a staggering 3 trillion dollars. That is equal to India’s GDP. Mark Zuckerberg was tech’s Don Quixote charging at the windmill, and Cervantes couldn’t have made a more dramatic loss come alive. Meta shed two-thirds of its value. ‘The Age of Social Media Is Ending’ – an article by Ian Bogost in Foreign affairs generated much interest. Those who were hyping the narrative of tech exceptionalism knew this was coming. Digital markets accessible via internet enabled mobile phones had been plateauing and maturing for long. Alphabet and Meta depend on online advertising for their revenue. The growth came from eating into the share of ‘old media’. Close to 70% of Ad spending in the United States – by far the largest market – turned digital. Then the base effect caught up. Novelty gone, the music stopped, and the party was over. Once the rising tide retreats, all can see that everything afloat was not a boat. Looking at Google trends – the term Facebook has witnessed fading interest levels from an Index 100 to Index 25. Two quarters in succession -July and October 2022 – Meta declared drops in revenue. This had never occurred even once in its history. If Big Tech had looked to the past, it would have got enough guidance to navigate into the future. Pioneering companies and brands get scale, concentration, ecosystem advantages and synonymity with entire verticals and processes. So it was with Tech: Google was search and Facebook, social media. Then the clock on the time bomb went ‘TikTok’ and Facebook’s user count began to experience gravity. When the times got tougher, the party under the marquee turned to bloody strife. Apple vs Google on privacy. Amazon vs Google in cloud services. Netflix vs Disney vs Warner Bros vs Apple vs Amazon in content. Netflix dropped 50% in terms of market value this year and rushed to pure play advertising with its nose bleeding. This coincided with headwinds ripping the roof off for digital companies. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates continuously to contain inflation. Tech companies turned unappealing because high rates erode the present value of promised earnings. Such has been the chaos on the way down that even the collapse of the cryptoverse, barely made headline news. Geopolitical tensions made China unattractive. ‘Friendshoring’ by Americans drove Apple to shift new production to India and Vietnam. It has lost more than a quarter of its market value within a year. Of these, the case of social media meltdown is most noteworthy. As social media companies grew their user bases into the hundreds of millions, the business applications of Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms began to take shape. Social media companies had access to some of the richest trackable user data ever conceived. Powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, map and manipulate our actions to a degree sophisticated algorithms learn our emotional vulnerabilities and exploit them for profit in possibly insidious ways. When did social networking become social media? When did it become “by brands, of brands and for brands”? The shapeshifting of the social space from ‘networking’ to ‘media’ might appear cosmetic, but the duality was irrelevant. Social networking, especially Facebook has come a long way from Mark Zuckerberg ’s original vision of connecting every person on earth to each other. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, , and other social media services thrived in the mobile app environment. Facebook began to place ads on its platform as early as 2006. Twitter enabled ads in 2010. LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok all have attempted to monetize their services through various forms of sponsored advertising. Technological improvements — specifically, powerful in-phone cameras — shifted the focus of mobile apps to video and images. In addition to written messages, end users could now broadcast in real time. But then branded content took over and community networking became an optional extra. Effectively. social networking has now migrated to chat applications like WhatsApp and Telegram away from the cacophony and forced feed of social ‘media’. As our lives moved online, social media platforms could predict our emotions and behaviours. They leverage these insights and auction us to the highest advertising bidder. But users aren’t just being sold grocery or shoes. The targeting capabilities of these platforms give anyone with a motive the power and precision to create disinformation on scale. Gloomy enough? Now toss machine learning into this concoction enabling deployment of tailor-made content targeting potential targets to a ‘segment of one’ level. Machine learning is at work to deploy the right ads, not to find like-minded people or a long-lost friend. The rules of engagement swung away from community to focus on content without our conscious consent. Social media platforms started monetizing reach . This is why the hype cycle started and now there is more content than community building on social platforms. Everything about us cannot be allowed to be commercially monetised. The required emergence of social networking 2.0 might just pave way for a much bigger and stronger ecosystem where smaller circles are the new reality Link: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/digital/tumbling-tech-the-slide-to-the-bottom/97018011?utm_source=linkedin_web&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialsharebuttons

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Extraordinary, the wisdom to junk the average: Brand Matters

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity / Shubranshu Singh

It is true that ‘what gets measured gets managed’, but the concurrent truism is ‘what gets averaged gets mismeasured’, writes Shubhranshu Singh [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] A bespoke suit from say, Henry Poole & Co, Saville row, London costs anywhere from INR three to five lakh A top-of-the-line fighter aircraft such as the Lockheed Martin F-35B or the Dassault Rafale, costs about Rs ten billion each. A bespoke suit from say, Henry Poole & Co, Saville row, London costs anywhere from three to five hundred thousand rupees. It takes a minimum of three to four sittings. There is a three-month cycle for getting a suit turned out. First basted fitting maybe six weeks after measurement followed by a forward fitting a month after that to make the suit. To start with, one must take an appointment and have a conversation. In contrast, the fighter aircraft’s fittings and cockpit are designed for the average man’s bodily dimensions. However, there is no such thing as an average human hand or an average human body. That we call average is merely a narrower range of dimensions. When you design a cockpit for an average man you were designing a cockpit not for everyone. Why is the world of technology, design and marketing besotted with ‘the average man’? It is because all business metrics, and especially averages, look to the middle of a market and that’s how the bell curve pans out as well. In volumetric terms for doing ‘business as usual’ we are well advised to stick to the average. But this will not suffice for game changing work. Innovation happens at the extremes. You are more likely to come up with a good idea from the ends of the range than from its central casting. Consumers who are out of the ‘expectation range’, present more opportunities to understand factors for acceleration as well as the barriers to growth. A comfort with the average suggests lack of intellectual exertion, mental comfort, incrementalism and even, smugness. Perhaps, by this measure, traditional market research may have dismissed more good ideas than it has originated simply because of its search for the representative average. It is true that ‘what gets measured gets managed’, but the concurrent truism is ‘what gets averaged gets mismeasured’. If everybody is conditioned to pursue the same narrow goal, in the same narrow way they end up assessing their results in a similarly narrow way. The choices made using average criteria cannot bring out the full spectrum business reality to light. Arthur Lewis won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. His 1941 paper on “two-part tariffs” for a business requiring customers to pay an entry fee to gain access to products they then pay for the actual product or service. This brings out the question of how wide bracket is a definition of the average here? Economist Walter Oi authored a paper “The Disneyland Dilemma,” on the theoretical conditions for when it made sense for the amusement park to charge guests an entry fee as well as separate fees for every ride—or in other words, whether the revenue from the additional tariff was worth losing those customers unable or unwilling to pay the additional cost of entry. In the end, Disney opted for just the one tariff. In semi-monopolistic micro-markets like Disneyland, food, souvenirs, and other offerings function as a profitable second tariff. Ever been thirsty at an airport terminal? You will know that businesses can get away with exploitative pricing in situations where consumers have no other readily accessible options. It will hardly qualify as a story for the average mapping of the consumer reality. The dharma for a marketer is knowing their audience. If a brand builder does not truly understand the different types of people being served, how is it to be determined who will respond to a product, service, or intervention at scale? Always think “How broadly will the idea work?” Brands travel across cultures, climates, geographies, and socioeconomic groups and will inevitably meet vastly different realities than in the preparatory pilots. To truly achieve widespread impact, a brand owner needs to also think about how the current consumers might differ from the future ones. The initial audience, test population, or test market segment—that yielded your early success may not be a representative snapshot of the larger group of people needed to make your brand a success. Look for biases, homogeneity, and myopic representation of population. Fitness enthusiasts will be the ones looking for a gym. No genius required there. But does the brand that is looking to be in the fitness business serve the core? Or is it about a non -enthusiast segment? How are gym plans being priced? With which segment in mind? Looking at the typical average can distort results. All marketers encounter the “selection effect” whereby test results are way more positive than the actual subsequent scale achieved. Regular gym goers are more motivated to improve their health and may dine at eateries with a healthier menu of options. They may consciously manage stress better. In these cases, you might incorrectly attribute improved health outcomes to the gym visits rather than the other healthy habits that such enthusiasts will inevitably have. This is the false positive we must be careful of. The case of the ‘New Coke’ disaster has now passed into marketing lore. In the mid-1990s, McDonald’s did extensive focus-group testing on a new item – the Arch Deluxe that turned out to be a deluxe failure. It happened because the people who participated in the focus groups weren’t a faithful reflection of McDonald’s customers. The burger enthusiasts who participated were an ‘average’ of McD’s core but the average person in the larger population went to simply get a Big Mac. Your initial audience may not be representative of the population of interest. These challenges have even shaken the foundations of social science, on any claims to universal findings about human nature. Joseph Henrich, an anthropologist did research in Peru with an indigenous Amazonian

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Brand Matters: Exceptional means make an exceptional brand- Red Bull

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Red Bull was very consistent in associating with and embodying all things extreme. It focused deeply on the extreme sports market. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” —Coco Chanel It is often claimed that the world of soft beverages is where the brand creates the most value followed distantly by a commodity product. You drink the brand not the liquid. Red Bull’s brand building has been extreme. It has been unrelenting. In the early 2000s, two Austrian entrepreneurs decided to dive head in and own a niche in the soda industry, unmindful of the massive barrier that the entrenched presence of global heavyweights Coca- Cola and Pepsi presented. Their optimism was so possessing that they overlooked one problem that their drink tasted terrible. Research after research validated that, at first taste, consumers found the taste horridly medicinal. The plans remained unchanged. What is more, in an act of chutzpah , the founders decided to sell the drink in smaller quantity per serve and priced it almost twice as much as Coke. All the data crunchers predicted a tragic outcome. They were all wrong. Today, it’s a globally recognised name generating $7bn in revenue each year. We know it as Red Bull. We must study and learn from Red Bull’s success against the odds. In branding opposite extremes can both be viable. The opposite of a great truth can also be a great truth. The converse of a great brand idea can also be a great brand idea. That is why it may be incorrect to judge Red Bull by Cola standards. The smaller size, thin can, medicinal taste, all seem to have -in fact- boosted its differential appeal. Pricing it above its competitors also positioned it as a speciality drink, in line with its perceived magical – almost medicinal – qualities. These features may be important. But Red Bull’s success, more than anything, comes down to its brand’s core value – Living extreme. No matter where and why you drink Red Bull – as fuel at work, pre party energy booster for an all-night out, or that bit of extra pep right before a big presentation – it is helpful to recall that at the start, the core target was a very small but aspirational minority : extreme sports enthusiasts. Red Bull wanted to own the transition between avocation and passion. From “I do paragliding” to “I’m a para glider”. It is the wilful transformation and its inherent appeal that Red Bull was targeting. Not just for paragliding, but for all adventure. Red Bull focused deeply on the extreme sports market. Beyond the screens and billboards, it embodied the active brand personality in its outreach in curating memorable experiences. These brand experiences were such that they aligned with their extreme traits that it wanted to own. It promoted and sponsored the X-Games– this is back when trendier extreme sports such as skateboarding, snowboarding and rollerblading were not in the federated International Olympic circuit. Red Bull was very consistent in associating with and embodying all things extreme. It’s been 10 years since Felix Baumgartner did the impossible and jumped from the edge of space all the way down to Earth. Carried up almost 39 kilometers high, Baumgartner then took the leap in a specially designed pressure suit and entered freefall before deploying a parachute to land safely back on the ground. Baumgartner also became the first person to break the sound barrier without any form of engine power. A new documentary is now depicting Red Bull Stratos in all its audacious ambition on its 10-year anniversary. Red Bull’s brand building has been extreme. It has been unrelenting. Going from success to success it hasn’t relied on the conventional 4 Ps. It is a lifestyle brand which happens to sell a beverage. Its product is subservient to its brand story, , and all aspects of branding tactics from messaging to brand experiences and customer touchpoints are consistent. If not the brand’s aura and excitement what is left? There are many substitutes to secure the same raw utility as you get from the product. There are now many copycats and other energy drink that taste better. What enables Red Bull to remain at the top of the pack is its strong bond with the consumer. RedBull’s extreme associations have been nurtured and never cease to deliver. In a brilliant extension to storytelling, Red Bull proposed that “extreme” doesn’t have to be restricted to sports and it began to expand its definition of “extreme”. Be it an athlete or a rock star or a young entrepreneur seeking venture funding – their product ‘vitalises body and mind’ for all . Red Bull is also a large publisher and its owned media -prominently led by Red Bull TV, social channels, events and partnerships – push this agenda all the time. Their advertising position is “Giving wings to people and ideas”. Marketing to the “extreme in all of us” allowed Red Bull to extend its identity base. The overt message to the consumer is that she will soar and triumph and Red Bull is the surge of energy that she needs. Red Bull hosts the Red Bull Festival which showcases a wide range of performers. For 30 days, across New York City, there is an experiential embodiment of the brand. What started as a drink for extreme sports enthusiasts has grown to become the drink for the “extreme” in all of us. In other words, Red Bull went deep, while also going broad. Without a doubt, there has been brilliant execution, but the most important step is the formulation of the identity itself. Red Bull going with “extreme” was a unique stroke of marketing genius, which checked all the boxes: it differentiated away from its competitors, it resonated with a core set of consumers and it was scalable to a wider audience. It also aligned perfectly with the functional features of the product itself. Foundational depth and solidity gave it

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A brand statement in a bookstore: Brand Matters

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Bookshops are constrained by physical shelf space, and offer a finite selection of books at a time. But an online seller can have an unlimited inventory, Shubhranshu Singh writes. The need of the hour is for physical book stores and independent retailers is to raise the experience quotient, he adds. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single book available at a time, for six days. Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single room with an event to gather every night. Morioka Shoten, a single room with a single book As we’ve know, Amazon and the rise of eComm devastated physical bookshops. Bookshops are constrained by physical shelf space, and offer a finite selection of books at a time. But an online seller can have an unlimited inventory. Books were a great choice for Jeff Bezos when starting off Amazon because all the necessary information about them could be easily digitised for the online experience. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] And, with the advent of the Kindle, books themselves became Amazon’s proprietary digital products. But is there nothing more to a bookshop ? The need of the hour is for physical book stores and independent retailers is to raise the experience quotient. If you were to walk into an independent bookshop almost anywhere in the world, you must have an experience of a lifetime. After all the bookshop experience is about the love of books and ideas. Have you heard of Morioka Shoten in Tokyo ? It has preserved the love of books but emphasised singularity…. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Morioka Shoten sells a single book at a time, on a weekly, rotating basis. For a week, everything in the story is dedicated just to that book, and that book alone. Morioka Shoten even curates its one room, minimalist space to fit the theme of the book, and the author often visits and interacts with shoppers. The author is the vice president – marketing (CVBU) at Tata Motors. Link: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/a-brand-statement-in-a-bookstore-brand-matters/95722981

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Advertising revenue – turning anti-social ?

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Big advertisers have led the stampede away from social given the impact of the economic downturn, inflationary contraction and supply chain breakdowns that burnt a hole in the pockets. Social media platforms, more than other digital channels, were the showy end of the brand building carnival online. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] The past few quarterly results and revenue guidance from social media players leave no one in any doubt that breakneck growth has stalled and may in fact, nosedive going further. That said, it is not yet concluded whether it’s on account of inflationary pressures, economic slowdown or inherent issues with players like Meta. In the merry go round of capital, innovation and enterprise – the accusations have begun to fly thick already. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai have hinted at structural issues in the global economy as potential spoilers going ahead. It is on social media platforms that the erosion in advertiser confidence is most evident. Per reports from industry analysts and eMarketer, US advertisers projected spendings on social networks will add up to USD 65.3bn. It amounts to a growth rate of 3.5 per cent, one tenth of what it was last year. Big advertisers have led the stampede away from social given the impact of the economic downturn, inflationary contraction and supply chain breakdowns that burnt a hole in the pockets. Social media platforms, more than other digital channels, were the showy end of the brand building carnival online. Billions were spent on fund sponsored fireworks aiming to build brands. That gusher of fund backed advertising has reduced to a trickle. As the world watches the US- China game of high strategy unfold, it is TikTok that seems to have advantage on US turf where social media success is concerned. Spooked witless, the incumbent majors are disrupting their models hoping for renewal. Short video rules social media. TikTok has demolished Instagram and Snapchat where audience acquisition is concerned. YouTube Shorts will start monetising early next year. Instagram persists in pushing Reels, its own short-form video format. The ‘blink and its gone’ media culture has inherent issues with its ephemerality. The time to serve advertising to audiences is shorter lived than ever in the past. With a rising graph, TikTok’s revenues are still puny compared to Meta. But the revenue always comes running behind a winning chariot. Watch this race. Amazon’s ad revenue increased by 25 per cent in the third quarter which rides on ecommerce ‘trade marketing’. The revenue figure at USD 9.5 billion is impressive at twice of what TikTok made in the same market. Ad spend on retailer platforms pose a competitive threat to social media platforms because advertisers reach consumers with the same modality of search and banner ads but closer to the point of purchase. Ad attribution is but one click away from the cash register. The privacy related changes such as those implemented by Apple took a USD 10 billion bite out of Meta but retailers do not rely on “third-party” data and hence are less impacted. ` Zuckerberg is the last founder at the helm of a Silicon Valley Tech giant. Perhaps he will be the last. (Subhranshu Singh is the vice president – marketing at Tata Motors. All views expressed is his own.) Link: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/advertising/advertising-revenue-turning-anti-social-/95217804

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Consumer-facing communication is about creating impact: Shubhranshu Singh, Tata ..

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Communication needs to provide for marketing effectiveness and driving of short term business results at the same time not loosing sight of long term brand health… [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] As we gear up for the India Communication Summit 2022, a special series has been introduced. It captures the opinions and experience of senior marketing leaders from diverse industries. It aims to bring out to our readers insights on how marketers see the PR industry and leverage communications to overcome challenges. In the first edition we bring Shubhranshu Singh, vice president – marketing – domestic and international business, Tata Motors Commercial Vehicles Business. 1. What are the major communication challenges that your industry is facing at the moment? Firstly, like in all industries and markets, consumer facing communications is about creating impact, memory structures, associations, beliefs, etc. In doing so, the brand will hope to create a positive predisposition that moves potential consumers to choose it over another brand. This is a continuous and long term project that involves message building, storytelling, repeated exposures, etc. In the automotive industry, I have managed the iconic Royal Enfield brand for close to 4 years and now head marketing for the domestic and international business for Tata Motors commercial vehicles business. Auto purchases are high involvement purchases and communication imperative is to talk to people long before they make up their mind to buy. Communication needs to provide for marketing effectiveness and driving of short term business results at the same time not losing sight of long term brand health. Automobile is a high intensity arena for innovation, new technology development, features led promotion. Therefore, new and differentiated always makes a bigger impact. Personally, I have always felt that the challenge in communications is to make the ‘new seem familiar and the familiar seem new’. 2. How do you, as a marketer, plan to leverage communications to face those challenges? One way of defining the communication channel is that it is comprised of 3 parts – one third in ideation, one third in strategy and one third in tactical execution. Communication is a comprehensive concept and there is no relevance of dichotomy between digital and traditional, print and television, owned or earned, etc. Therefore, all communications ought to be integrated and drive resonance. Since the challenge has been defined as using communication to build brand and business both, it should be relatively simple in terms of its end output. It ought to be able to answer basic questions such as ‘who am I targeting?’, ‘what is my target market?’ and ‘what is my position with reference to my target?’. This cannot be done by gimmicks, fads or reducing positioning to a random tagline. Communication led brand building is a lot more than a dribble of statements. I have always leveraged communication to create and sustain big ideas that empower and strengthen brands. 3. Does communication only become relevant during crisis management or is it better leveraged to achieve long term goals? Any crisis is only a part of the bigger spectrum of challenges to brand building over the longer run. Communication needs to always prioritize the long term while managing the short term. It needs to manage the short term attention building buzz – be it positive or negative – along with long sighted long term brand development. 4. Having been a part of different industries and having managed brands such as Visa, Royal Enfield, etc. globally, how different is the communications strategy across various industries and how can a brand manage the country vs global challenge? The purpose of Marketing is behavioural change. Every consumer, no matter which industry, is driven by similar human motivations. Therefore, marketing activities across industries do essentially similar things to trigger desired impact. It is obvious that if we won’t perceive something as attention worthy, it won’t register with us mentally. Professor Daniel Kahneman, the nobel laureate, classified SYSTEM 1 as being fast, automatic and reflexive mental processes versus SYSTEM 2 – slow, controlled and reflective. This much is true for all industries. Gaining attention and building differentiation means cutting through the clutter and being able to communicate in engaging ways and this depends a lot on local culture, category heat and consumer mindsets. I have managed global brands for India and South Asia and iconic global brands, globally. In building a brand across markets, you have to operate from a belief in leveraging your strengths and therefore authenticity, brand essentials and brand values matter a lot. A brand that tries to change as it crosses borders and tries to reinterpret itself for short term business will fail. https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/marketing/consumer-facing-communication-is-about-creating-impact-shubhranshu-singh-tata-motors/90947807

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

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity / Shubranshu Singh

[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

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity / Shubranshu Singh

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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Masters of CX – Part 1

Leave a Comment / The Economic Times - Brand Equity / Shubranshu Singh

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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