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The term bricolage refers to a shot in billiards which doesn’t turn out as intended but is nevertheless successful. It’s a very close to real life thing [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] As self-expression, advertising could be art with a commercial intent of changing perceptions and behaviours in a required way.  Image: Shutterstock  A grapefruit is a lemon that had a chance and took advantage of it. – Oscar Wilde Is advertising an art or science? Is more creativity more effective? What is scientifically proven creativity? How could that be measured? What is art and what is advertising? Does evidence-based marketing prove the impact? Art is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power’ or ‘the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance’. As self-expression, advertising could be art with a commercial intent of changing perceptions and behaviours in a required way. One of the acknowledged studies done for creativity and impact on advertising results was done by Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert at the University of Cologne. They published their results in June 2013 in the Harvard Business Review, in an article titled, ‘Creativity in Advertising: When It Works and When It Doesn’t’. They analysed 437 TV campaigns for 90 FMCG brands in Germany from 2005 to 2010. Using the definition of creativity as, ‘the extent to which an ad contains brand or executional elements that are different, novel, unusual, original, unique’, they developed five dimensions—originality, flexibility, elaboration, synthesis and artistic value—and tied those elements to sales. They found that more creative campaigns were considerably more effective. Specifically, ‘A euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign had, on average, nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a non-creative campaign’. In 1923, Claude Hopkins published his book ‘Scientific Advertising’, which made the grand claim that advertising had achieved ‘the status of science’ as it was based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures. As he put it, “Your object in all advertising is to buy new customers at a price which pays a profit!” We look for information, we look for evidence that fits what we already know or what we already believe, and we try to avoid information or evidence that we either disagree with or that doesn’t fit with our perspective. And if someone comes along and says, here’s the evidence, your natural tendency is actually to rehearse arguments against that evidence. This is known as the ‘backfire effect’, which describes how in the face of contradictory evidence, well-established beliefs don’t change but rather get stronger. What really makes a campaign successful? What role does luck or chance or randomness play in creative success? Paradoxically, the sophisticated mind does believe in chance. Alan Fletcher claimed that John Cage composed music by consulting the I Ching or showing the orchestra drawings and asking them to play whatever came into their heads. Jean Arp made unpredictable compositions by tossing pieces of paper onto a board. Jackson Pollock swung cans of paint to make artworks out of unforeseen dribbles. Damien Hirst throws dirt and grime into his vitrines so it can predictably rot into unpredictable scenarios. For sure, luck is not going to work miracles. A whirlwind can’t reassemble a house. A watch cannot be made by putting all the parts in a box and shaking it. The benefit of knowledge over the potential of chance is acute when chance must trump complexity. Of course, it all depends on how one defines chance. Mathematically speaking, if you thoroughly shuffled a deck of cards and whilst dealing they came up in four suits, each sequentially running from ace to king, this arrangement would be just as likely as any other. Chaos Theory proposes that the end result always depends on an initial condition. A popular analogy is billiards or pool where no two shots play out the same way. There is a word used called bricolage. The bricole was a medieval military machine for throwing stones. Nowadays the term refers to a shot in billiards which doesn’t turn out as intended but is nevertheless successful. It’s a very close to real life thing. There was a insightful article titled, ‘Beautiful Minds -The role of luck in life success is far greater than we realized”, by Scott Barry Kaufman in the Scientific American, March 2018. And it asked whether the most successful people in society are just the luckiest people? To shed light on this heavy issue, the Italian physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda teamed up with Italian economist Alessio Biondo to make the first-ever attempt to quantify the role of luck and talent in successful careers. To formally capture this phenomenon, they proposed a “toy mathematical model” that simulated the evolution of careers of a collective population over a work life of 40 years from age 20 to 60. They defined talent as whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities. Talent can include traits such as intelligence, skill, motivation, determination, creative thinking, emotional intelligence, etc. The key is that more talented people are going to be more likely to get the most ‘bang for their buck’ out of a given opportunity. All agents began the simulation with the same level of success (10 units). Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a certain number of lucky events and a certain amount of unlucky events. Whenever a person encountered an unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled proportional to their talent to reflect the real-world interaction between talent and opportunity. What did they find? The well known ‘Pareto Principle’ came true. In the outcome of the 40-year simulation, while talent was normally distributed, success was not. Almost half of the population remained under 10 units of success which

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

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

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

In the 1930s, the concept of brainstorming was proposed to bring creativity to problem-solving. In years since, it brainstorming has become hostile towards creativity. For brainstorming to be successful, asking questions and encouraging ideas will have to take the front seat One of us cannot be as smart as all of us. This is an axiomatic truth. But ‘corporate man’ is a hierarchical animal. Therefore, higher authority is assumed to have the necessary answers. Crucially, it’s presumed that those in charge also have the right questions. Developing an intensive approach to framing questions and finding answers requires onboarding as many folks as possible. It can make the difference between failing, surviving or thriving. *** [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Since Alex Osborn of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn came up with the idea of ‘brainstorming’ in the late 1930s, it has been a known process by which to wed creativity to problem-solving. Alex Osborn divided the mind into two parts—the judicial mind and the creative mind. A mind that imagines, creates, celebrates and another mind that prioritises, evaluates, judges and looks for ratification via evidence. Brainstorming was a method to encourage plentiful ideation while preventing premature judgement. Brainstorming was feted in the 1950s as a means to harness collective intelligence and multiply creative solutions. But, as method began to dominate the spirit, brainstorming became hostile to the creative process. Because it leads to the proliferation of ideas exclusive of merit. Nevertheless, brainstorming has genuine advantages at certain stages of problem-solving. For one thing, it’s an exercise that shows us that systemic rigidity, officiousness, and bureaucracies find it hard to free themselves of rational bindings.6 Brainstorming is about rapidly building up a flood of ideas. It must be in a short period, overseen by a timekeeper, where all ideas are written immediately where everybody can see them. Most important of all—no shooting down of ideas. No idea, no matter how preposterous, expensive, irresponsible, or even stupid it may seem, is rejected at the time it’s expressed. All ideas are put on the board for later consideration. Do one for questions. Do another for answers. *** John Maurice Clark said, ‘Knowledge is the only instrument of production not subject to diminishing returns’. But knowledge is not constant. It increases at a spectacular rate. Alvin Toffler published his most famous work—‘Future Shock’—in 1970 where he explained the phenomenon: “In the 500 years since Gutenberg invented printing some thirty million books have been printed; and an equal number has been published in the last five years. The quantity of information doubles every eight years. “ One cynic has suggested that as we find out more and more, about less and less, the point will soon come when we’ll know everything about nothing. The fact is that the mind thinks with ideas, not information. Therefore acquiring knowledge is useless unless one learns how to use it. A dictionary may contain all the words, but no one can tell a poet which to choose or what to write. *** Brainstorming is not spontaneous. It is a method and it needs disciplined learning. Brainstorming for questions is especially useful. If the group can ask the questions together, they will eventually find the answers together. When a group takes the questions as a given, it is unable to fix cognitive biases or venture into uncharted territory. Staying mindfully in a questioning mode doesn’t come naturally to people. They are conditioned from an early age to keep the answers coming. In Raju Hirani’s film, ‘3 idiots’, when Aamir Khan is forced to take a class, he concocts some weird names for what he claims are scientific processes and the students race against the clock to look for the answers in an ‘open book exam’. Just like that, we are conditioned to seek answers and not to question the questions. Every organisation needs a stronger culture of collective problem solving and truth-seeking—especially the successful ones. Saying that ‘success is the one thing above all else,’ convinces people to stop looking for more questions and answers. They drink the kool-aid and perpetuate the success formula. Powerful group dynamics of following the dominant voice or fears about how one’s ideas will be judged hinder original thinking and stifle the voices of introverted members. If you want to institutionalise and nurture brainstorming, prevent the vicious undercurrents of dominance by creating a safe space for all to offer uniquely different perspectives. One should always seek different questions from the lapsers, the rejects, the cynics, and the critics. They have their worldviews and come up with surprising, compelling questions as they have no investment in the status quo. In brainstorming, there can be no hierarchy. Everyone’s observations, personal stories, experiences, and judgements count. Seniors may not impose though they may do so defensively, as a value add or even as a prideful display of knowledge. To stop this is crucial but difficult. Stigmergy in human groups is driven by ideas. The disruptive questions are the ones that step outside category conventions. If questions can reframe the business challenge, it is a huge outcome. The questioning comes naturally to a child but is snuffed out by rote learning, competitive commitment to a ‘formula for success’ or adopting shortcuts because of external pressures. In social groups, dominant individuals inevitably emerge. Left unchecked, they find ways to build and perpetuate their power. One common way to do this is to silence and ridicule questioners. The smart, aligned, confident ones pose to have all the answers, never any difficult questions. Asking questions is made to seem like evidence of low IQ or worse, low EQ. Learning the convenient answers is committing yourself to mediocrity. In life, you’re going to be a success based on how good your questions are. We are in a world of frantic change, exploding knowledge, and interconnectedness. This is a world beset with existential issues like climate change, inequality, sustainability, and conflict. This is a world where questions count. Let’s brainstorm. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/enterprise/a-world-where-questions-count/

A product or service can be as complex as a Swiss watch, but it needs to be elegant and simple enough like the dial for easy use by the customer. Brands need to focus on cleaning the clutter to convert intenders into buyers Mastering complication is the highest test of marketing ability. Complex need not mean complicated. Simplicity wins. The reason why Google, Apple or Netflix have been so successful is reflected in their deliberate simplicity. A brand must be obliged to cut the clutter. Technical or quality differences are rare to find in our hypercompetitive world. What gives a superior differentiation is customer experience. Simpler is better. Like a Swiss timepiece, the complication sits below the dial face. Above it, there is only elegance whereas below it lies no nonsense, flawless, timekeeping. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” This is a guiding thought that all product managers, developers, innovators and above all marketers should keep in mind. Additions that complicate, follow the law of marginal futility! Feature creep is the commonest weed of digital marketing. In 2019, I led the program management for the launch of the new Royal Enfield website. The most important criterion was to weld together multiple country sites, features and utilities. The underlying complexity was transformed in the presentation layer. The user interface is simple, elegant and effective. Based on this, a Royal Enfield App and Make it Your’s – a personalisation configurator were subsequently launched with success and rapid adoption. As I implemented GA 360 across all assets and as I saw the interactions with a social media following that grew from 4 million to nearly 8 million between 2018 and 2020, I saw in real data terms that simple, actionable outcomes mattered to consumers. Merely ramping up messaging doesn’t help. Overloading with information at each interaction positively distracts and deters. One has to consciously be wedded to minimalism, think visually and always look to cut steps. As a part of leading a digital transformation, I have always looked for what seems to matter to consumers. What makes intenders into buyers once they are aware? I have evaluated multiple welding points for customer engagement – perception, price, consideration, promotion, buzz and many more. When it comes to the growing legions of digital intenders, what matters seems to be ‘simplicity’. The ease with which your brand can be searched, understood, compared, booked and purchased makes you win. To understand customers’ ease, marketers have to think in terms of customer journeys. Again, it’s much spoken of but seldom done right. When defining a customer journey, many companies focus on narrow episodes of a customer’s experience—the onboarding or payment process for instance, rather than on a broader concern or need. This focus on transactional touchpoints reinforces siloed ways of working. For customers, all of these touchpoints are parts of the same journey. Customer journey programs work only when they are cross-functional and front to back in scope. Discrete incremental improvements won’t cut it. Companies should take their cue from digital natives and reorganize change initiatives around the customer journey. Customer-journey-at-scale transformation, draws on the principles of human-centric design, agile ways of working, and the latest digital and other cutting-edge capabilities, while employing best practices in change management. The marketer’s job is not to own mindspace alone but to mould that into a decision by offering trustworthy information that makes the intender navigate the purchase ecosystem easier, faster and more confidently. One other common failure that breeds complexity is the inability to recognize typologies and cohorts. When data is abundant, it also leads to confusion. That’s why A/B testing and other optimisation experiments must focus on search paths, comparison journeys and purchase modalities. The most efficient way is for the brand to ensure, once logged in, the consumer has to encounter a minimum number of information sources and move smoothly to purchase. This is done via addressing use case types. Personalisation doesn’t mean breeding infinite complexity. The way to do this is to listen well and be data obsessed. Then one must actively triangulate. Social media activity, content effectiveness, clickstream performance analysis married to qualitative pick up. The derived actions must again be put in the iterative loop. It is about the endless iterations to a never reached perfection. Scotch makers have collaborated to marry the whiskey flavours to the map of Scotland. Any Karate student can be judged for ability by the belt she wears. De Beers categorised all diamonds via the 4Cs – Cut , Colour, Clarity, Carat. Apple dominated the MP3 market because iPods and iTunes were easy to use. A McDonalds has standardised menu, delivery, configuration and (PPP) price across the world. Finally, beyond comprehension, simplicity breeds trust. To repeat, customer experience is the proving ground for loyalty. Therefore look at everything with customer eyes. The key to the kingdom is Simplicity. Simplify to solve problems, save customers’ effort and time and earn their trust. It’s truly that simple! https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/simplicity-is-important-to-win-the-market/      

Once the D2C model soared, competitors and funding rushed in. But it’s not as easy as just building a product, web page and logo   Over the past thirty years a new class of ‘brand as dot com’ businesses emerged, starting first in America. The first dot com boom lasted through the 1990s and went bust before the start of the new millennium. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Then, with the inexorable rise of internet access and social media, an entirely new breed of brand-led businesses such as Warby Parker, Everlane, Dollar Shave Club, Casper and The Honest Company emerged as pioneers in what became known as a ‘Direct-To-Consumer’ (D2C) model. This model had a standard mix comprising of a borrowed supply chain, web-only retail, direct distribution and social media marketing. Abundant venture capital fuelled ambitious projects and turned them into real businesses. Though they were found in very different sectors and verticals, they shared a design philosophy, digital-first approach and a belief in differentiation aimed at disruption. It seemed like a derby of unicorns. Every idea raced to sky rocketing valuations. Expectedly, once the D2C model soared, competitors rushed in by the dozens. Financers were in a funding frenzy, salivating at the early success of a few standout brands. But digital media was mostly place where advertising money flew. The internet audience aggregation exercise got dominated by the likes of Facebook-Instagram and the price of social media advertisements made customer rallying both expensive and difficult. Unexpectedly or not, there did come a performance plateau. In many cases, it meant a decline in valuation if not revenues. A change is clearly happening all over again. Now, in theory, all business are ‘Direct-To-Consumer’ either wholly, substantially or partially. Folks see the digitally native brands that have scaled significantly in the past few years and think they understand what it takes—a commodity product touched by consumer relevance, perceptible benefits, some influencer marketing, always on social promotion and that’s it, job done! Not really. The factors that truly matter are: product differentiation, branding, a scaled distribution strategy and a defining, underpinning customer insight that endures. As William Gibson put it: “The future has arrived —it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In India, we see the rise of numerous D2C businesses some flying on hope and founded on delusion. A few have a credible basis and will scale up to create new industries. There are others who are challenging the entrenched but inefficient legacy incumbents within existing verticals. No matter how they are positioned, all D2C brands must navigate the transition from being digital, vertically intensive natives to mass, omni-channel players. They all face a difficult business arithmetic. This is so because competition is gladly catering to demand from smaller chunks of any market. Suddenly, niche market propositions are also being funded. Never ones to throw in the towel, established consumer mega-brands have also caught up, launching their own D2C lines. Earlier liberal investors have now turned tight fisted, given a report card of poor performance data. The big correction is that there is consensus on giving primacy to unit level economics. It is no longer about riding a typhoon of expectations or a hurricane of optimism. It is about the viability and result metrics. Consumers have moved faster than businesses. It has never been easier to reach consumers than now but never been harder to get their attention. It has never been cheaper to start a business, although it’s never been harder to scale up a business. What passed as disruption five years ago, will barely suffice as hygiene today. Earlier ‘being D2C’ was a wow factor. Today, consumers ask what is it that you do that’s different and why should you be believed? It will now have to be ‘Beyond D2C’. There are a few clear lines of action all players must undertake: ● Firstly, reliance on distribution via the internet has proven to be insufficient when it comes to any next ambition of scale. For greater access, the route is to become omni-channel. It may take the form of company-owned brand stores, placement in other retail networks, listings on Amazon or all of these. The important part is scaling up, preserving intimacy with the community and owning the storytelling. ● Secondly, a D2C brand faces a paradox. Without an intimate one-to-one customer relationship it is not ‘DTC’ but without massively scaling up the community, it can’t be viable. This underlines the importance of first party data capturing. When they are gratified and become highly involved, customers engage in a two-way relationship beyond mere transactions. It is vital to co-create new products and services since that establishes a relationship that stays undiluted by the scaling up of the community. ● Thirdly, focus on profitability through integration. To own nodes of value delivery on scale, it is now evidenced, is effectively more profitable than to rent. The margin boost from elimination of retail intermediaries is often eroded by acquisition costs and promotions. Backward and forward linkages are the right ways to increase margin whilst scaling up. ● Finally, prepare for the next tech disruption- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, distributed supply chains, very novel marketing strategies, and brand systems optimized beyond mobile web may again cause disruption and the innovators of today may seem out of place and out of date. For D2C to be sustainable as a model, it has to earn its leadership. India has more than 600 D2C brands, and a report by Avendus Capital estimates that the addressable market size for this industry will be $100 billion by 2025. Indian brands like Boat have really broken through the clutter and are already profitable. Others like Mamaearth and Licious are growing exponentially and look set to record profits soon. More such brands are catering to a burgeoning class of an estimated 190 million online shoppers in India. But, even the successful brands are gradually pivoting to an ‘online-led’ but ‘offline-supported’ model. This has already happened in the case of global brands as Bonobos, Allbirds, Harry’s etc. Contrary to what a few people would have you believe, a brand is not just a landing page and

When defending niche plans, it is fashionable amongst marketers to use Nike and Apple as examples of ‘pure focus’ in brand building. It is important to decode their success, if only to evidence that their customer acquisition is based very much on mass marketing. Nike is a great example of a deeply committed brand pivoting away from core enthusiasts, throwing its circle wider and doing so via brilliant communications. By 1987, Nike had fallen to third position behind Reebok and Adidas after more than two decades of strong credential building as a ‘running shoe specialist’ in America. It was seen as the maker of technically advanced, sleek shoes for athletes who wanted to push their bodies. But this niche bastion began to crumble when there was a transition from ‘running’ to ‘sports and fitness’ in a more general sense. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Nike till then was a successful but very narrowly defined brand. Its narrative was ‘for and about’ serious male athletes intent on winning. Nike was talking mostly to its devotees. Like with most deluded brands trapped in past success, corporate hymns and self-praise passed off as advertising. History doesn’t repeat itself in branding, it dies as a weak echo. ‘The law of marginal futility’ began to show its effect. Nike then made a defining change. It sought to being noticed by all. It made itself mentally available to more people. Nike squared the circle with the famous W+K campaign ‘Just Do It’. It was about the ability to feel a sense of exceptionalism accessible to all, not merely to gifted athletes. With this transition, Nike went from being an aspirational brand for a few to being an inspirational brand for all. Thereafter, it was about hope and effort. It did not make a distinction between encouragement and exhortation. ‘Just do it’ is for all, whether you are a couch potato or an Olympian. It was understood easily, everywhere and by everyone. Nike never looked back. This is also the journey that Apple undertook when Steve Jobs came back to save a sinking brand. Experienced marketers also fail to see that Apple is—where it matters—a highly successful ‘traditional marketer’. Steve Jobs moved every lever to expand share of market. He launched the cheapest iMac as a first portfolio addition. He moved beyond his loyal customer base. He kept product at the heart of all advertising and expanded physical access. It was not about rebel creativity. It was about a wonderful marriage of technology, design, utility and a relentless association building top of the consumer mind. Till today, Apple spends most of their money on traditional advertising—in particular TV and outdoor. Apple’s advertising is consistent and looks much the same as it did a decade ago. It is always product focused. Apple spends minimally on social media and almost all their online ad budgets highlight performance. In other words, they do contrary to what’s awarded, trended, and sanctified theory. That is what all greatly successful brands do. They make choosing and buying as simple as possible. But, to achieve this, they must establish collective meaning and be consistent in the associations they communicate. The price of establishing unique relevance through targeted messaging is that you end up sacrificing shared cultural meaning. Many companies are going too far in their veneration of specific data concerning the individual. Putting individual relevance before collective meaning is not some gold dust.   So, let’s establish that brand building is about: Common sense as opposed to complication Universalism as against individualism; and Well-defined as against fluid or amorphous. Being something to everybody beats trying to be everything to somebody!   Mass brands must always be: Appealing to common senseThe speed of technological change disrupts society in ways increasingly impossible to predict. In contrast, human beings remain unchanged. Underpinning all decision making, an important aspect of our unchanging behaviour is the fact we evolved to be ‘cognitive misers’. As such, the brand’s primary role is to reduce the cognitive burden. A brand simplifies choice, signals an identity and communicates a position everyone can grasp. Beyond making the purchase decision easier, brands can also have a symbolic value, enabling people to express their identity to others. Across every age and culture, we have hunted for ways to acquire social cachet; consumption has always been social, never private.In this view of purpose, the brand provides a simple way of choosing what to buy, conveying an identity and creating perceived value. To achieve this, the brand must establish collective meaning. Universal: The individual is less important than the entire group in establishing meaning. That is how brands offer a social dimension.Brands are in the business of anticipating and shaping mass behaviour. Humans rely on brands as ‘buying shortcuts’ based on shared knowledge and understanding. If a brand fails to demonstrate what it stands for amongst non-buyers, it risks losing the social dimension. Well-defined: A brand must not dilute its meaning chasing new things or by irregular communication. This requires the shared associations and meanings around the brand to remain consistent across groups of people. It has to have one unifying idea. Dove, for instance, is anchored in body positive feminism; Marlboro owns rugged frontier masculinity; and Patagonia conveys adventure and environmentalism. To remain effective, advertising must find new ways to repeat itself. Own a few things in the consumer’s mind and own them through repeated association. Build positive, habitual bias.   https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/is-preaching-to-the-choir-bad-marketing/