Reflections

The Covid– 19 crisis, in many ways ,throws light on the short term thinking that rules the business world. Brands face these short-term pressures.  Very few businesses realise that brand building is a ‘long game’   I do not mean to imply that good marketing should disregard the immediate environment. But, brand building is essentially a social, lifestyle and cultural effort. It takes several years ,even decades , to come into full effect.  The short term mindset is reflected via short-term metrics. When everything is judged by the result metric ; everything is done to get to that output which is counted. The first effect is to disregard what cannot be easily measured. Then ,to go beyond and to imagine that “what cannot be evidently measured simply doesn’t exist.” This is the consequence and a disaster great brands must avoid.  The world lives, grows and sustains over long generational cycles. Indeed ,the pace of change is quicker now than ever but that only means more will happen in a given period of time. It does not mean that we need to see things over short intervals of time.

I am reading about evolutionary psychology and how we humans have evolved to become the way we are. Exponential Growth is not something we are hardwired to compute, imagine or guesstimate  If someone told you to quickly choose between : 1) receiving Rs 5000 each day for 30 days or ; 2) getting 1 paisa on day 1, 2 paise on day 2 , 4 paise on day 3, 8 paise on day 4 and so on for 30 days …. I am sure most will choose to earn Rs 1,50,000/- We’d be making a mistake as the 2nd option gives us a crore. There is a story about King Vikramaditya who was very generous and proud of it. An old Brahmin came outside his palace and recited some poetry. The King called him and asked him what he wanted as a reward for pleasing him. At the time the king was playing chess. The Brahmin asked him for some uncooked rice. He said he would like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard and then on every subsequent square to double the number of grains of rice. The King immediately granted his request guessing it would take about a few handfuls at best. As the exercise commenced, the King soon realised that it would amount to more rice than was grown on earth ! Let us learn to compute well and to make our projections and plans with arithmetical rigour.

Who will get your vote out of these candidates ? Jack : Honest, smart, diligent, handsome critical, impulsive, and jealous. John : Jealous, impulsive, critical, handsome, diligent, smart and honest?? Most people will pick Jack. But the two sets contain the same information !  This is the ‘Primacy Effect’ , a cognitive bias that results in shaping outcomes based on what we see, hear or experience earlier rather than later.  The primacy effect is also prominent in decision making based on experience in a learning process also known as operant conditioning.  There is importance attached to the value of the first reward on our subsequent behaviour.  This is also due to how we evolved from the Stone Age when immediate and reflective thinking and reactions were life saving … Because of this bias – Nothing fails like success ! #information #knowledge #esteem #learning #reputation #psychology #bias

Consumer Marketing = (Attention + Cognition + Action) A brand is the sum of the product and its personality with all dimensions involved there. The moment you introduce the concept of personality you should think of the brand as a person looking to have a relationship with other people. If a person acted the way most advertisers do, they would find themselves isolated, ridiculed or worse , punched in the face !! This is because being loud, direct, pompous, repetitive is hardly the way to secure a long-term relationship. The better way is to start listening, be yourself and build the relationship slowly but surely . Along the way you’re hopefully remarkable, funny, relevant , profound or cool !! #marketing #brand #sociology #personality

A rookie brand manager and media planner together should be able to answer these questions : Should we be maximising reach or targeting of audience subsets ?‬ ‪Should our media effort address the total market or chosen segment(s) ?‬ Should we approach the market via Mass Marketing campaigns or Targeted customer outreach?‬ ‪What’s any given Media platform /channel’s utility besides giving us the widest reach? ‬ ‪Yet , the answers to these questions remain inconclusive even at the highest levels of marketing in mega corporations. This is due to excessive data and also scarce data ! ‬ Moreover, legacy systems, managerial inertia , baggage, risk aversion, ‘theory over common sense’ , delusions of grandeur, vested blocs and bureaucratic apparatus all contribute to this lack of clarity. #marketing #campaign #digitalmarketing #audience #targeting #influencermarketing #marketingstrategy #socialmedia #brandmanager # #socialmediamarketing

Marketing to youth is the most creatively fulfilling of all. This is because you are addressing people who are in the most intense phase of their lives. They are people who are experiencing -in the broadest way – things that will define who they are and what they evolve into. They are experiencing freedom and independence, exhilaration and discovering the world through a group of friends who often matter more than family. This intense development of self awareness , excitement , confidence and the feeling that they are beyond age and time….this is something only the youth have….. That’s why marketing to youth is very special. Only the exciting, authentic and spirited survive. #sociology #society #lives #marketing #people #feeling #softpower #youth

To create successful marketing programs for the youth, a brand or advertiser must venture deep into their world and contribute something motivating and substantial. Young consumers ignore those who try and associate superficially. They don’t appreciate brands casually being in their world. A variety of sub cultures: sports, music, fashion, gaming , raves, skateboarding, graffiti-street art, hip hop, punk, grunge ,Teds, rockers, mods etc have been the core areas of activity and engagement amongst youth. If a brand wishes to engage it has broadly the following ways in which to do so: it can choose to be a platform that allows for the growth and development of a given sub culture. It provides resources feeding back into the subculture or indeed glorifying certain parts of it. Or, it can choose to be the catalyst-promoter of a movement by itself. In any one of these above mentioned cases, the brand gets integrated and has an opportunity to contribute in a positive way. The thing to observe is what happens when a brand associates deeply with certain talent, movement, subculture – does it get amplified, strengthened or commercialised, dull, boring and eventually – dead? #youth #marketing #brand #millennial #personality #cultures #softpower

“A great man gets one sentence in the history books “ – Claire Booth Luce- In 1962 a conversation happened between Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce and President John F. Kennedy. Sensing that the President had too many competing agendas, she sought to focus him by asking him to think about his “one sentence.” A great man,’ she told him, ‘gets one sentence in the history books” for example, Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph. This is a profound thought for us all. What is your sentence going to be ? #reputation #brand #legacy #life #work

As a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and forcing thousands more into quarantine, the world -and life as we know it – changes. With disrupted daily life, closed schools, packed hospitals, and absent social gatherings, sporting events ,concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans ; life and society ,as we know it , gets put on indefinite hold… In 1947, when he was 34, Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French writer (won a Nobel Prize for Literature at 44, and died in a car crash aged 47) provided an astonishingly detailed and penetrating answer to these questions in his novel The Plague. Camus shows how easy it is to mistake an epidemic for an annoyance. He also wrote that in times of pestilence we learn that there is more to admire in men, than to despise I hope it’s true I hope it’s true .. I hope it’s true … #society #pandemic #precaution #cultures #lives #hope #human

King Lear, late at night on the cliffs asked the blind Earl of Gloucester “How do you see the world?” Gloucester replies “I see it feelingly ….” In Shakespeare's King Lear, there are several sequences which relate to the blindness of its various characters. Blindness that differs from one to another , because of what they are able to see or not see and also because of their nature. Pride,anger, jealousy, selfishness and ambition obstruct our vision… The world needs us to see with our hearts as we do with our eyes. To see ‘feelingly’. Without empathy, concern, kindness…the world will cease to be anything worth saving. We must remember this in these difficult times ….. #precaution #heart #vision #human