High Places

I spent some time this week at the Garudmaachi campus of High Places (www.highplaces.co.in), a company that offers outdoors based management development programs.

High Places is run by Vasant Limaye

Garudmaachi is breath-taking. This 19 acre spread nestles at one end against a camel’s back shaped peak of the Sahayadris and at the other end a peak that Vasant likes to call the Phantom Head.

Vasant has taken care not to disturb the natural habitat.

Accommodation within Garudmaachi consist of dormitory tents which while proving all creature comforts blend in unobtrusively ( for the “senior boss” types from the corporate teams that frequent Garudmaachi want more ‘conventional’ accommodation, High Places has ‘four-star’ kind of facilities just across the road from Garudmaachi).

Even the rappelling tower and the Burma bridge seem camouflaged so as not to offend the animals.

The quietitude of the place goes beyond a lack of noise to the silence of fulfillment.

Vasant was at IIT Bombay with me. I always knew him as the outdoorsy type and the original conservationist decades before the whole green hullabaloo started.

He missed scaling Kanchenjunga by a few hundred feet and his concern for preservation of nature reflects in every inch of Garudmaachi.

To my pleasant surprise however, on this visit, another facet of Vasant was revealed to me.Vasant the writer.

Vasant, I now gather, is a published writer with a compilation of his columns for a Marathi newspaper in its third edition, as also a couple of highly appreciated short stories.

And his fondest future project now is a book he is contemplating writing over the next year or so.

Vasant adding to the quietitude of fulfillment a note of mystery, narrating a story of his as we sat around the burning embers of a stove on a chilly night, is a memory that will stay with me for a long time.

Gandhi and Tagore

Gandhi & Tagore were contemporaries. Though they openly admired each other, their views on many issues differed dramatically.

Gandhi was an arch conservative and a nationalist. He believed that India’s progress lay in going back to our traditions and rejecting most Western mores and practices.

Tagore was a liberal and an internationalist. He believed that the essence of India and its progress lay in its assimilative nature that incorporated and harmonized influences from all quarters of the world.

Gandhi was a man of action.

Tagore was an artist who created out of thoughts, words, music and paint.

Tagore gained quick recognition and admiration in the West and then as quickly became a figure of derision and is internationally almost forgotten today.

Gandhi gained international recognition slowly but remains a much admired and cited world figure.

Paradoxically Tagore endures in the culture and daily life of Bengal and Bengalis while Gandhi’s influence in modern India’s culture and its daily life has faded away almost completely.

Tagore and Gandhi. The contrast, I believe, is multi-dimensional, fascinating and archetypical of the essential duality of life, nature and civilization.

The Politics of Technology

The cop out at Copenhagen should surprise no one.

It was a confabulation of the Establishment, by the Establishment, for the Establishment.

The Establishment is invested heavily in oil, coal and all other dirty technologies. You would not expect them to get to solutions when they themselves are the largest part of the problem.

It will be, as always, the innovators and the entrepreneurs who will solve this problem. They will do so by treating the carbon emissions problem as an opportunity. To the entrepreneurs and the innovators, the bigger the problem, the bigger is the opportunity.

The next two decades will see the coming of a new order, an order invested in renewable energy systems, ultra-efficient batteries and smart energy management.

The real action is in the trenches where this new order is fighting the Establishment, inch by bloody inch. Not in talk fests like Copenhagen.

The Beginning of a New Movie Era?

It is 2am in the morning of the 18th of December 2009.

I have just come home from a preview of James Cameroon’s Avataar.

Tomorrow the reviews will be swarming the media. I want to have my say before I read any of them.

Avataar, I believe, is a disruption in the science of movie-making.

It not just blurs but completely removes the line between live action and animation.

And in addition it is the first instance of the evolution of a film grammar which moves 3D beyond being just a technical gimmick.

I believe Avataar will be marked as the beginning of a new era in the science of movie-making.

What about the art? The content, I believe, does have soul but art is so subjective so let us leave the pundits and the critics to fight for the scraps as the world gorges on the stunning visual beauty of the film.

As I prepare to sleep I perhaps will dream about Pandora and its inhabitants and for a couple of days maybe the movie will tinge my view of reality.

In my book that is what a good movie all about.

Being a CEEEEO: The Yoga of Leadership

Early management thinking was premised on the paradigm of a military campaign.

Resulting in the hierarchical, command and control system that even today is followed by many an archaic business.

The cutting edge in management thinking however has since then moved on.

Thinkers like Peter Drucker started the process of liberating management processes from the confines of military-like strategy.

Over the last two decades, the world of business has increased immeasurably in complexity. There has been a tectonic shift brought about by unprecedented technological change and more importantly the rising primacy of business in human affairs.

Whenever things become too complex, Vedic thought seems to have the capacity to strip them to pristine simplicity. Ask the physicists.

So can we apply some yoga to management science?

There are two poles around which much management thinking today is coalescing: Leadership and Innovation.To my mind these are just two sides of the same coin.

In an increasingly interactive and instantaneous world, leadership needs to be rooted in the moment.

The yoga of leadership is to reflect the triumvirate of Creation, Conservation and Destruction with all three dimensions active and alive in every moment.

The yoga of leadership recognizes the principle of centrality. It is a mathematical fact that in an infinite universe every point is at the centre.

So also with every human being it is only the self that leads and only the self that follows.

The true leader therefore engages and enables everyone around her to envision and execute.

And as every person engages to enable everyone else to envision and execute, the resultant network effect will push not just the world of business but humanity itself to a new level of being.

The age of the CEO is past.

The coming age is of the Chief Engage and Enable to Envision and Execute Officer, the age of the CEEEEO.

And in the very DNA of being a CEEEEO is that you recognize that everyone around you is a CEEEEO. It is just that some know it and some are yet to catch on.

Without comment:

In Bed with the Media

Modern media has become a smoke and mirrors act.

Look at this shot taken by Harry Benson, a renowned photograph, on the sets of the Sean Connery movie Thunderball.



Consider the labyrinth.

An act for one "70 mm" camera becomes a piece of hot focus for a gaggle of another group of news-hound cameras which then finds play in the cool art of an avant garde photographer.

Reminds me of the lyrics of a John Mayal (if I remember right) song: “She was looking back to see if I was looking back to see if she was looking back at me”

Stumble

stum•ble
v. stum•bled, stum•bling, stum•bles
v.intr.
1.
a. To miss one's step in walking or running; trip and almost fall.
b. To proceed unsteadily or falteringly; flounder. See Synonyms at blunder.
c. To act or speak falteringly or clumsily.
2. To make a mistake; blunder.
3. To fall into evil ways; err.
4. To come upon accidentally or unexpectedly: "The urge to wider voyages . . . caused men to stumble upon New America" (Kenneth Cragg).
v.tr.
(Source: The Free Dictionary by Farlex)

When a word has multiple meanings, is it just a result of accidents in linguistic history or can one draw deeper meaning?

In the definition of ‘stumble’ how does “to come upon accidently or unexpectedly” relate to “miss one’s step” or “make a mistake”?

Can the relationship be defined through the concept of “serendipity” or is it also a statement of the adage of learning from one’s mistakes?

And what about “to fall into evil ways or err”, is that the result of not learning from one’s mistakes?

I stumble regularly.

Things are going smooth and suddenly a dark cloud of dissatisfaction descends on me.

In days past each stumble would mostly cause me to err and sometimes even fall into evil ways.

These days instead mostly I recover with a new insight into myself and the world around me.

Wonder whether this happy change comes naturally with age or is it one of the many symptoms of, like good wine, aging well?

PS I am in a stumble right now and this post is part of the process of getting back my stride.

Of empty roads and aimless drives

Very often, when my 20 year old son is home, we set out for a drive around 11 pm.

The traffic has thinned out, the city is into cruise mode too and seems to be grooving to whatever it is that is playing in our car.

Bombay by night has the ability to resonate with whatever mood you are while Bombay by day drives you hard tethered to your ambitions.

The work-in-progress suburbs are left behind on a surreal new bridge and the soft lights of South Bombay reflect the Empty Nest syndrome writ large.

A twenty year old gets hungry and we stop at a doughnut joint on Breach Candy. The tangles of young people hanging out there underline the middle-aged gentility of the neighborhood.




Next stop Mucchad Paanwala. Muchhad has now been a Bombay legend for over three decades and now employs a panwala’s dozen of similarly mustachioed gentleman who run a drive-in service that could have the making, I think, of another HBS case study on the lines of the dabbawalas.

I pull out my mobile and Mucchad preens and swirls his pride. The guy is used to attention.




We take the JJ flyover back home to Versova passing through the grittier parts of Bombay including Dharavi.The city continues to resonate to the music.

Bombay is not just a concrete maze, it is a state of mind.

As we get home around way past one, a quiet "good night" caps male bonding at its silent best.

Without Comment

"Hoshina noticed how, very gradually, all sounds disappeared. How the real sounds around him steadily lost their reality.Meaningful sounds all ended up as silence. And the silence deeper and deeper, like silt at the bottom of the sea. It accumulated at his feet, reached up to his waist, then up to his chest"
From Hakura Murakami's novel "Kafka on the Shore" (emphasis is mine)

The Rich Co-Mingle; the Poor Fight

Imagine forming a mutual admiration society and economic block with China, not being at odds with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and yes, being at peace with Pakistan.

Think about it and we see a contiguous and prosperous zone of 2.5 billion people.

Look around us and we see that richness is a corollary of peace and harmony. Be it richness of the soul, the mind and the body.

Because ’coming together’ in the principle on which the universe is built.

Energy (even the physicists do not know what energy is ‘made of’) of which everything in the universe is a manifestation, is in its essence, a concert.

Is it then worth then, as a nation, treating the finding of lasting solutions to our conflicts, within and without,as our largest most important economic project.

Perhaps the famed drive of the Indian entrepreneurial spirit is the boost our political and bureaucratic classes need to get-on with this vital task of nation-building.

Are the captains of industry, the corporate honchos, the media moguls and the opinion-builders listening?

They will when they realize it is key to not just fulfilling big ambitions but,in the long term, surviving.

Otherwise the rich will continue to co-mingle without us.

FMCG to FCCG to FSCG to FECE?

Those of us in marketing remember the times when “packaged goods” like soaps, toothpastes, shampoos, biscuits, soft drinks, cigarettes, beverages etcetera were where the best brains in marketing went. The somewhat wishful term for these sorts of categories was Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG).

The guys who marketed stuff like consumer electronics, household goods and even automobiles: stuff that people bought once in a while did not really, or so the “brand gurus” felt, get the whole thing about brands and how one built them to get people coming back to buy your product again and again, more and more often.

The consumer durable (that was what these sort of products where then called) guys just faked brand-building and so were viewed as at best second-class!

Over the last fifteen years or so things began to change. The FMCG categories became more and more consumer staples and the consumer electronics and the world of microchip-driven categories exploded.

Consequently the world of cutting-edge marketing passed to acolytes of Steve Jobs who were basically showmen who hyped something new every quarter if not every year.

The brand was a totem pole under which a circus of ever changing ‘items’ played. I like calling this category FCCG: Fast Changing Consumer Goods.

Over the last decade once again the mantle of leading marketing practice,as leaps and bounds in the access of high quality manufacturing technolgy dissolved the brand differentials based on quality and features, passed on to those who create differentials through service.

Once again it was Apple that seized the initiative. Without Apple Apps the sale of iPod and iPhones would have tapered off. This decade I like to call this age of marketing the age of Full Service Consumer Goods: FSCG

And, over the past couple of years, I believe, is emerging the world of Formal Ecosystems of Consumer Experience (FECE).

As data mining, data analysis, communication technology and consumer sophistication climbs to new levels, individuals will stop buying products or services.

Instead they will pay for life experiences and states.

And these expectations can be met only through formal coordination of a whole host of products and services.

For example tomorrow’s consumer will buy a health service that monitors his health every second wherever he is and seamlessly delivers the care he needs. A experience which only a worldwide ecosystem of monitoring device manufacturers, drug and drug delivery systems, paramedics, logistic providers, nutritionist, food suppliers, personal care suppliers and of course doctors and hospitals can supply.

Imagine what could happen as this paradigm is applied to all the major life needs: education, security, relationships, entertainment and so on.

This post is just a surface level analysis of these trends.

I believe these trends have implications for the marketer of every product and service.

For a deeper analysis of what it means for your brand and category and how you can take advantage of it, contact Aqumena, the marketing consultancy I have set up with two partners Vinay Hegde and ND Badrinath (www.aqumena.com).

I am allowed the occasional plug for my business, am I not?

Has Indian Media Lost Both Its Sense of Reality and Humour?

On Tuesday evening I was dismayed by what Vinod Mehta had to say on NDTV after the Manmohan Singh- Barack Obama joint press conference.

He went on and on about how they had not addressed, to Vinod's satisfaction, the issue of whether Obama will upbraid Pakistan enough and clarify/ apologize enough for asking China to keep an eye on the region.

Needhi Razdan, as is her wont, latched on to Vinod's point like a hungry dog worrying a bone. It was painful to watch the duo as they refused to give in to Shashi Tharoor's gentle pointers about real politiks and how it is not played out in the public domain to satisfy pouting, pontificating journalists.

The best of world media goes below the surface and comes to its own conclusion.

It is a mode of journalism that most of Indian media seemed to have left behind as they regress into being sour pusses with little to add in terms of meaningful analysis.

Vinod Mehta used to be an exception but alas looks like he succumbed to dotage (the Indian Express and Shekar Gupta are happily still holding out against this epidemic of silliness but for how long?)

As a contrast to the serious silliness that afflicts Indian media, I reproduce below a couple examples of how good journalism can get to the essentials of a complex issue.

Murakami and Ishiguro

I have never been to Japan. In fact I never have had a proper conversation with a Japanese, just the occasional professional meeting with Japanese expat managers.

However that does not prevent me from having two Japanese at the very top of my list of favorite writers: Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Murakami and Ishiguro in many ways are poles apart while embodying the same quintessential quality which I presume reflects being Japanese in spirit.

Both belong to my generation: the baby boom generation.

Murakami born in Japan in 1949 has lived in Japan all his life. He writes in Japanese.

Ishiguro, born in Japan in 1954, left it at age 5, didn’t visit it again until thirty years later, is a British citizen and writes in Queen’s English.

Murakami’s books (he has had 12 published during te period 1979 to 2009 all except the last available in English translations: the 2009 book, IQ84 will be available in English in 2011) gives play to a society’s pain and gain through a cast of characters who live on its margins.

His 2007 book ‘Kafka on The Shore” has a 15 year old who runs away from home, has a split personality and is obsessed by a prediction made by his father that he will be responsible for his (the father’s) murder and then will sleep with his mother and his only sister.

And a 50 year old who loses most mental faculties in a mysterious incident at the age of 6 and now lives on a government subsidy, completely ignored by his well-to-do brothers and spending his time using his one special ability: the ability to converse with cats.

“Kafka on The Shore” can be read as a meditation on the loss of Japanese family values but coming from an angle that simply refuses to make any value judgments while being written with a verve that would keep even a hard-boiled reader of pulp fiction engaged if only he (the reader that is) is ready to give up any preconceived notions about high-brow writing.

Ishiguro’s books (he has published 6 in the period 1982 to 2005) are always in the first person. The first-person point-of-view take on the air of an unfolding mystery as the protagonist gradually reveals fundamental character flaws that both hinder and define his life. The resultant pathos draws the reader into an intimate sympathetic relationship with the protagonist.

His 1995 book, "The Unconsoled", is written from the point-of-view of a famous pianist who is visiting an unfamiliar European city and is quickly loosing large chunks of his memory as he struggles to prepare and give the concert he has come for.

The sense of menace in this book, in my experience is matched only in the book “The Turn of The Screw” and the movie “Vertigo”.

Ishiguro and Murakami are very different. However every book of theirs is a labyrinth in which you are lost in while building it, turn by twisted turn, yourself.

Read them if you are inclined to invest in books. The ROI is high.

Two closing thoughts:

- Mumbai these days has a hoarding campaign running all over town. It read: “Help! MCGM to keep Mumbai clean!”!. This subtle transformation of a run-of-the-mill civic message to an appeal and a warning of impending doom is a rare gem. Here is a standing invitation for a drink to the copywriter who got this copy past some hapless English-challenged bureaucrat.

- In some corner of my conscience I do feel that I should not be doing this but here is an idea for the next MNS campaign. How dare the Mumbai IPL franchise be named Mumbai Indians! It should be immediately shift to being called the Mumbai Marathas. And while at it lets get that inveterate Indian- Sachin- out of the captain’s seat and get amchi Sunil out of retirement and in the saddle ( One more thought: Will the creation of Mumbai Marathas be the explosive issue that will give impetus to the rise of a new political force- the Konkan Nirman Sena?)

I/O Time, Core Time, Plug-Out Time

For many years I felt information/stimulus swamped and world-weary. Over the past few months I have discovered a solution.

I have learnt to parcel my waking hours into three kinds of time.

I/O Time is when I consume media or communicate with others.

Core Time is when I switch of all input and output channels and put myself in a ring-fenced processing mode.

Plug-Out Time is when not just all input-output channels but all processing is sought to be shut or at least minimized.

The reason why I used to feel swamped and weary, I now realize, was that by and large all my waking time used to be I/O Time. Watching, Reading, Listening, Browsing, Talking, Meeting, Presenting, Writing and so on.

Now I make sure 30% or so of my time is Core Time. And I find that not only do I now have a better angle of repose but the productivity and effectiveness of my I/O Time has measurably increased.

Plug-Out time is a state of being when you are ‘just hanging out with yourself”.

Many of us take classes to learn to meditate and then practice it hard and long. I now realize that trying is not meditating.

Trying nothing, being nothing, in other words being plugged-out is meditating. Mantras, breathing techniques, solitude etc. help but are not necessary. I know now that one can be plugged out, eyes wide open, waiting in a crowded airport lounge.

And sleep. What kind of time is that? Sleep time I cannot categorize. All I know is that I now sleep better with the three-way balance back in my waking time.

The Prison of Our Perceptions

In that rare film noir product from Bollywood, Kaminey, the protagonist Charlie cannot pronounce the Hindi consonant “sa” and substitutes it with “pha”. In a tense moment he tells a boss man “Main pha ko pha bolta hoon”. The boss man replies “ Abe ga…, pha ko pha nahin bolega to kya bolega!”.

That is a good example of the prison all of us live in. The prison of our perceptions.

Witgenstein a linguist and philosopher of the highest order illuminated this prison in another way. A woman walked up to him and said “ Sir though they say the earth moves around the sun, it sure looks like the sun moves around the earth” Witgenstein replied, “Tell me Madam what should the earth moving around the sun look like?”

The prison of our perception is different from other prisons in that there is just one person in it and the jailors are all missing! Get me? Sometimes I think words are the strong steel bars of this prison.

Just learnt from CNN that a frontrunner for the post of the President of EU is the current Belgian PM who writes haiku like poems. An example from his collection:

Wind blows through my hair
After years the wind still blows
Sadly the hair no longer does

I look forward to hearing more from this guy.

Got any of your own haiku to share with me?

Beyond the Brand: The Meme?

Meme: (me~m) n biology an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means esp. imitation (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
What does a brand that has done that, been there, go next?
In these days of viral communication it seems that becoming an “element of culture or system of behavior…passed on by one individual to another.. by non-genetic means” is well within the grasp of even relatively modest marketing budgets.
The question is why would a brand want to become a meme?
Well, simply because a meme is more powerful than a brand by many orders of magnitude. USA is a meme that still drives pop culture across the world. Milk is a meme, just ask any mom. India used to be a meme in the Middle Ages- fueling dreams of exotic mysteries and fabulous riches in many a buccaneer. Today the increasing soft power of India if husbanded well could give back to India the power of being a meme.
So will brand marketing now move on to aiming for the power of the meme? Well while the use of viral media is on the increase and the marketing chaterrati is talking about changing paradigms etcetera, I don’t think anybody knows how to make a meme happen through marketing. Maybe we need a new to discipline to be invented. Will a new Kotler soon arise?

The Poetry of Ted Hughes

I discovered Ted Hughes when I was trying to cope with difficult times. I loved Ted Hughes then because the poetry of Ted Hughes takes on grief and transforms it into a healer’s vision.
Ted Hughes was England’s Poet Laureate until he passed away in 1998.
Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 called Ted Hughes a voice that was simply “longer and deeper and rougher” than those of his contemporaries.
Today I find in Hughes’s poetry a universal vision transformed by a startling yet rooted perspective. In his poem, reproduced below, titled “The River” from the 1983 collection of poems titled “River”, every Indian will recognize the mythos of the holy river so much a part of Indian culture transformed by an empathy that sunders aside metaphors to grasp the cruel truth of Nature.

The River

Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on
Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils,
It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god.

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Monday Notes

What if Noah had charged the biggest moneybags of his day the BC equivalent of a billion euro a seat on the Ark? And planned to use the money to build the Ark and then leave the moneybags behind anyway. After all who needs moneybags after the Flood? To get the full story watch 2012, the latest catastrophe potboiler from Hollywood. And for a deeper understanding of the perils of being a moneybag read an earlier posting- The Value for Money- on this blog.
I had lunch at the Mysore Café in Matunga today and I recommend that you put savoring their Mysore Masala Dosa on your Bucket List.
Plan to settle down after I post this to watching the highlights of India get out of a hole on a day of good Test cricket. Those of you smirk at Test cricket can go take a walk. Or write me a mail on why you hate it so and I promise to respond.

Musings on a Saturday

This week’s November rains fell like happiness on a sunny day. Once again CNN got the weather forecast right and our weather guys managed, once again, an almost perfect negative correlation with reality. Why do we export some of the best engineering and science talent in the world and still have a woeful level of quality of engineering and science in our public life? At the surface the answers are easy and glib. Our public jobs pay poorly and therefore attract only the incompetent. Corruption is endemic and it kills all desire to perform a job well. However could it be that the nub lies deeper? Is it that the Indian genius is in the abstract and the ephemeral and not in the material world? That is why we can be the world’s best mathematicians and coders? That is why we craft best when we craft in homage to an idea? That is why we do shoddy work when it comes to planning and executing infrastructural projects or running daily humdrum services? Could it be that we can push up the quality of our public infrastructure and services by approaching them from a design context that is different from the way the Western world does? Worth some serious thought I think.
Last night I wrote a short story in my dreams. I dream two kinds of dreams. One kind is where situations and relationships that I have been through are twisted and represented in a manner that emphasizes and ratchets up an emotion that I did not consciously ascribe to them. The result is I wake up refreshed and with a fresh perspective of that situation or relationship. In the other kind of dreams I work. My mind writes furiously and somewhere I watch astounded. Pages of stuff- essays, stories, memoirs, poetry- spill out into the dream state! When I wake up from such dreams I wake up tired. I know my dream wrote something good and worthwhile but there is no way the waking me has access to.
Meanwhile my blog, as regular readers would have noticed, languishes. The novel I started awaits the third chapter as the protagonist, the lewd adept, stews and regularly castigates me. And as Aqumena gathers steam, my professional energies are deeply engaged in paid work and the tap runs dry on downtime professional essays for the blog.
Perhaps one way to populate the blog better is to turn to weekly column type postings like this one.

The Value of Money

Money. I have always had enough to meet all my needs and most of my ‘basic’ wants. But never have I had enough of it to take care of all the numerous fancies that regularly cross my mind and heart.
Until sometime ago I used to believe that the very rich do indeed fulfill all desires and therefore at least in that context must be very happy. After all don’t they say that you can never be too thin or too rich?
And then I met, after a gap of a few years, a couple I had known well. The couple had seen their annual incomes climb from being tens of millions of rupees a year to the stratospheric heights of thousand of millions. Chiefly as a result of the commodities boom that so characterized the period preceding 2008.
As Jyoti and I drove down, for a dinner appointment, to the seven-star hotel they were staying in, I looked forward to seeing the glowing transformation in looks and well-being that I thought immense wealth must bring.
As we drove back home that night I was in a mild state of shock.
We had a met a couple of individuals in despair. They had flown in that morning in their private jet and had shopped all day for diamonds without having the time for lunch. As they gobbled down dinner the worry lines on their rather haggard faces only underscored their talk:
“Of needy relatives who expected them to help out (can you imagine the greed!). Of cars costing thirty million rupees having been driven all of 300 kms in a year (where after all were the roads in this benighted country where one can drive such a car?) Of the armies of servants who ran their various homes across the world and who could not seem to fully conceal their feeling of unwanted intrusion when the masters came in, after a gap of months, for a short stay. And what of the Naxalite threat? Well the police and the security were taking care of that, though can you imagine even the police had to be paid what amounted to a regular salary? Of course, when they travelled, the private jet allowed then to fly over all that danger crawling on the ground though sometimes, one must admit, the weather they flew in seemed just as dangerous.”
What happened? Does really big money always do this? What is money?
At its core money is supposed to represent human effort.
Money represents a day’s physical labor or an hour’s use of skills honed over decades or the complex organizational skills and risk-taking abilities that is required to coordinate the efforts of large numbers of people.
However somewhere along the line (a few seconds after it was invented I suspect) money shed its representative context making it an entity by itself.
Individuals could accumulate it without any reference to the human effort they had exerted and to close the increasingly vicious cycle, they could then use it to distort the value of the efforts of other humans so that they could accumulate more money.
However human effort is an integral part of nature. Centuries of a system that distorts the value of an integral part of the web of life produces negative results. The increased level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and the resultant greenhouse effect are measurable and now much discussed and debated.
The increasing concentration of the value of the efforts of many in the hands of view is just as dangerous.
And just as those of us who have the largest carbon footprint become fat and sick, so also those of us who increasingly hoard and distort the value of the efforts of an increasing number of our fellow human beings become, at the core, miserable.
Not everybody who makes big money is a distorter. There is many a rich individual who treats big money as a reservoir of value to be dammed and converted to power that gives increased value back to others. In doing this, these worthies earn true respect and the happiness of quiet self-esteem.
It is only when money is seen as a possession for personal use that big money distorts not just the human community at large but very visibly the “possessor”.
Money represents a force of nature which when distorted produces disaster.
Pink Floyd, as is their wont, rocked to the true value of money even as they mouthed cynically the twisted role it currently plays in most human activity:
Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and your O.K.
Money it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money get back
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off my stack.
Money it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away

Break On Through To the Other Side: Chapter Two: Same Difference

I scrapped Chapter Two as I had written it two posts ago. Hated it on second reading. Nearly as much as Arthur did who, in his (her?) disgusted comment, advised me to stick to quadrants etecetra. Here is a fresh one. Arthur tell me how much you hate this one. I'll tell you the next time I read it. Sunder keep me going bro.
Chapter Two: Same Difference
After my father died, for a few years I felt very lonely. Not that he talked to me that much. Besides the occasional friendly cuff and grunt. He was a man of few words. Instead my time was populated by the dyad that my parents were. I celebrated as they laughed together and in their happy muttering in the quiet nights of our lean-to on the beach. I experienced tragedy in their occasional fights and catharsis when the happy mutterings resumed. When my father died the dyad was broken and it seemed to me my mother died too.
That changed.
A gull rested, in splendid isolation, on a rocky outcrop in the limpid light of a November morning. Its apparent loneliness drew me to it. I got close, closer when it suddenly turned and looked me straight in the eye. It was not just a kin it was my twin. The next moment I was soaring in the skies with the sea and the beach a single entity, nay the entire world a single entity spread right before me. Suddenly I was a whole flock of gulls flying in formation and it was not just the world that was one, the world was me.
Me, us, them, someone, no one, everyone, same difference.
When I came to that November morning spreadeagled on that rocky outcrop on that private beach that belonged to the Mafia Queen and which my mother, like my father before her, cleaned every dawn and dusk, my life changed forever. I ran back to our lean-to and for the first time in my life hugged my mother burying my head in her slightly damp midriff.
My collection of people started that day with my mother. Collect people? You must be wondering what that means. Names and likenesses in a scrap books with perhaps a strand of hair pinned at the proper place? Facebook friends? Networking cogs? No I just collect epiphanies.
People. Epiphanies. Same Difference.
Path to nirvana or recipe for being dysfunctional. Same difference.
And as I walked that moonlit beach I put my bitchy ninth ex-wife out of mind as I shooed her out from that sunlit Nariman Point conference room.
My mother had walked back to the house leaving me alone with the one hundred fifty thousand odd people jostling for space in my head.
And then I smelt her hair. The one I didn't marry. The one I never could divorce. Damp, breezy, mornings lit by a lazy, drowsy sun. Objective correlative: that's what John Fowles called it. The memory of a memory.
Two years ago, I let one of my nine dimensions slip into her bedroom as she slept with her husband of twenty years. The genteel snores of middle-aged peace. She of the lazy drowsy sun was not there. Never will be. Except here, here on this moonlit beach, an epiphany rising from the sea.
What tosh! You fool! Promise never to use the word epiphany again!
The bordello done up as a fancy bar in Dubai was just beginning to come to life. The Russians eyed the Chinese varily across the border while the hungry eyed both species like cats enable to decide between cats and canaries.
Bored I dimensioned into Lords, leaving my childhood friend contemplating exercising that flabby piece of meat he left untoned at the gym. Another session, another trainer. Same difference.
Just an aside. Dimensioned is not like teleportation. It is instead like a light moving from one spot on the stage to another spot, in my case, one from a total of nine.
Why do the English smell so bad? Is it the balti food that they now regularly ingest. Or is it just indifferent personal hygeine. Same difference old chap.
I turned to the English Rose bosoming next to me. What's the score? Who's keeping score? The guy on the other side had his hand digging deep into his checked trousers.
The son I never had adored Tendulkar.
I was a red cherry careening down at 147 kph into the good length spot. I was already smirking having swung a neat outswing parabola, landing on my seam and swerving in ever so slightly.
The smirked got wiped off my face, as I bounced of the tin on the edge of the square leg boundary. 106 for 2. Boy that felt good. Almost as good as being manacled in the pink bedroom of a whipper snapper Bollywood matahari.
Same difference? Perhaps. Pleasure does come in seemingly endless variety. Did I tell you about the year or so I worked in advertising?. It was like playing the piano in a whorehouse.
But then that's a story for another day.

Marketing 3.0: Marketing To Change

Meet any marketing person today and she will tell you how rapidly marketing is changing.

In the world's most competitive market-the USA, where arguably the discipline of marketing is most evolved, it is all about how the emergence of digital is destroying long-running shibboleths and paradigms of media and marketing .

Meet a marketing person in India and he will talk about the emergence of modern retail (there is now a pause in the march of modern retail but before we write it off please take your mind back to the time when mobile services seemed to be a dead-in-the-water category in value-conscious India) and the increasing fragmentation of the media.

However I believe that the paradigm shift that has come to marketing is not in about how people consume media, analog or digital or where people shop (traditional or modern), it is not even about changing demographics (aging societies in US and Japan or the youth-dominated societies of India and China) .

It is about a tectonic shift on how people across the world see themselves and their lives.

This shift is from lives and self-image anchored in stability to lives and self-image geared to change. My 75 year old mother, 3 months ago started ,for the first time in her life going regularly, to the gym in our apartment complex ! My 20 year old son with regularity cannot stand today what he deeply admired just yesterday. And I am quite sure that the marketing services agency business that I own and run, with two other partners, will change its business model every quarter or so, not because it will be badly run but because it will be well run.

Marketing 1.0 was about displaying the wares. With the emergence of mass manufacturing and mass media emerged Marketing 2.0. At the core of marketing 2.0 is the brand. The brand is based on the premise that if a marketer establishes a relationship with a consumer beyond the transactional, such a relationship will become the growth engine of the business. Implicit in the notion is that, in essence, the value system of the consumer seeks relationships. The track record of brands over the past six to seven decades suggests this was true.

However what if today's consumer does not seek relationships but instead seeks change, continuous all pervading change? Would not such a state call for a new kind of marketing?

Premised on the above argument I propose for consideration a new marketing framework. I choose to call this framework: Marketing To Change.

The framework I am now beginning to build is based on a framework for change that
John P Kotter proposed in his seminal book "Leading Change. Why Transformation Efforts Fail".

Kotter's model of change has been created with reference to businesses attempting to change to better meet business challenges.

The essence of the model are the eight steps to change.


Step One: Create Urgency

"If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself."

Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition

"To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition, or team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources, including job title, status, expertise, and political importance."

Step Three: Create a Vision for Change

"When you first start thinking about change, there will probably be many great ideas and solutions floating around. Link these concepts to an overall vision that people can grasp easily and remember"


Step Four: Communicate the Vision

"Don't just call special meetings to communicate your vision. Instead, talk about it every chance you get"

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

Recognize and reward people for making change happen.
Identify people who are resisting the change, and help them see what's needed.
Take action to quickly remove barriers (human or otherwise).

Step Six: Create Short-term Wins

"Nothing motivates more than success. Give your company a taste of victory early in the change process"

Step Seven: Build on the Change

"Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early. Real change runs deep. Quick wins are only the beginning of what needs to be done to achieve long-term change"

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

"Create plans to replace key leaders of change as they move on. This will help ensure that their legacy is not lost or forgotten"

The application to marketing of the above model would be to view the consumer as an entity whose purpose in life is to make change happen every minute of her life and the brand's and through the brand the marketer's objective is to enable the consumer in this purpose.

Lets see if we can then work out eight guiding principles of Marketing 3.0 based on Kotter's eight steps.

The "Create Urgency" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to record and reinforce the change she desires?

The "Form A Powerful Coalition" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to find and communicate with other people who are in the same frame of mind and do this as the frame of mind changes?

The "Create A Vision for Change" principle: Can he brand enable the consumer to find a pattern in the changes she experiences and desires that inspires her?

The "Communicate The Vision" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to megaphone the inspiration in order to reinforce it?

The "Remove Obstacles" principles: Can the brand provide outlets to withdraw and vent her frustrations as a step towards overcoming obstacles?

The "Create Short Term Wins": Can the brand set up a self-directed 'pat-on-the-back" system for the consumer?

The "Build on the Change" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to run a virtuous cycle between change and achievement?

The "Anchor in Culture" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to recognize her need for change in the need for change in the organization she works in and the society she lives in?

I agree that the above principles are abstract but that is where a new paradigm always begins. You will agree though that the above principles portend a completely fresh brand and marketing templates.

It is also clear that no one brand will embody all eight principles. In fact brands will be positioned by which principle or set of principles they embody. Going a step further maybe the product and service categories of the future will be driven by a matrix of the eight principles and everyday functional needs.

While the first stating of a new paradigm might be abstract but every valid paradigm must begin in reality. I have begun the search for looking for examples of Marketing To Change already happening in markets across the world. I invite you to join the search.

Break On Through To the Other Side

Creative writing has always been my first love. I have over the past decades started writing many a novel and then let each one of them wait for me to come back to them.

This time I intend going public with the act. I am going to attempt writing stories live on this blog.

My fiction writing style is in the fabulist streams of consciousness style and those who cannot digest that do not fret. I will continue posting blogs on brands, marketing etcetera in my usual style.

For those who you enjoy reading streams of consciousness, here is an open invite to help me write this. Post your suggestions in the comments section or email them to me and be sure they will create their ripple in the stream as it bubbles along. Also I will thank you in the postscript.

The title of this work of fiction I am now beginning to write live on the web is ‘Break On To the Other Side’. Jim Morrison fans will get the reference. It also signifies my attempt to overcome the resistance within me that has kept me from giving full play to my creative self.

Here goes.

Break On Through To the Other Side

Chapter One

Growing Taller

My mother grew taller as she aged beyond fifty. By then I was stuck at five feet two. How do you think I felt? We lived near a private beach. My dad’s job was to keep the beach clean. Pity he never did like the sea or think much about its salubrious effect. No wonder than that he died at forty. That left my mother with radiant good health and me.

The private beach belonged to a hot-eyed mafia queen. As my father’s body burned on the pyre, he walked up to my mom and offered her the job my Dad had. She accepted. Not surprising considering she had one thousand two hundred rupees in soiled ten rupee notes and me as the legacy Dad had left for her.

My mother loved the sea. She spent hours more than she really needed to tending to the beach. And with each passing day her simple underclass look began to subtly change. I can swear her nose started to straighten and, despite of her being a natural adherent to the truth, grow longer like Pinocchio’s.

I had no one else to share the wonder of this metamorphosis with so I shared it with her, talking to her about her in the third person. And this habit stayed with me. I lived now with two mothers. The one I talked to. And the one I talked to her about.

Decades later when I had a private beach of my own, my mother was six inches taller than me as we walked the beach on summery moonlit nights. And once at nineteen, at five feet two, I had been an inch taller than her. And that was not all. She looked twenty years younger. How do you think I felt?

By then I was an adept. Adepts don’t feel. They just do. Nike would have loved to have me as their brand ambassador. Only that I never wore athletic gear in my life and at five feet two, weighed ninety four kilograms.

Adepts live in more dimensions than the three that dear reader you live in. Unless you are an adept yourself but then adepts never, ever read anything at all.

As I walked down the beach that summery moonlit night with my taller, younger, much better looking mother I was experiencing wraith like rain falling across swathes of bare naked trees pulsing with the white light of far way lightening.

You do not get to own a private beach by being in one place at a time, especially if you were born to people whose job it was to clean one.

That bare-naked wood in the pouring rain was getting my bile up. Exactly what I wanted as I stared across the conference table at that long-nosed, impossibly thin aristocratic bitch who was trying to screw me out of a couple of million dollars more.

Once upon a time she had been good in bed but now she practiced the art in board rooms. I touched the button on the side of chair and imperceptibly my chair gained height as hers sank at the same rate.

Adepts love technology and never use magic when good old technology will do.

She snorted. She saw through this one. Apparently this particular invention of mine, as so many before, had been plagiarized and made sort of common place among the cognoscenti.

I had many secret admires or so I liked to believe. I was now out of those rainy woods and kicking back my heels in the plush push back seats of the neighborhood multiplex. They were playing my story there.

My mood improved. I even managed to smile at the bitch and gave her not just the couple of million dollars more she was haggling for on the divorce settlement but a couple of million more. She looked ready to give me a farewell blow job then and there but then I was walking with my saintly mother on my private beach on a summery moonlit night. Wasn’t I?

- To be continued... soon

The Death of Macho

Once in a while comes a take on the world that is breathtakingly simple as well as breathtakingly deep..
“The Death of Macho” by Reihan Salam published on the Foreign Policy website on 22tn June is one such event.
Reihan take is that “for years the world has been witnessing a shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one”
Foreign Policy (FP) magazine and now website has a track record for publishing seminal pieces of work. I would put Reihan’s work at par with Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” first published in FP many years before 9/11.
Reihan besides being deep is witty. For example, in support of his central contention he calls the current recession he-cession.
One of the trends Reihan spots in support of his thesis is the increasing emergence across the world of women as the leaders of their country. A corollary occurs to my mind: Did India, as in so many seminal shifts in history, take the lead in this one too? Did macho in India begin to die when Indira Gandhi became the ‘only man in the Cabinet’?
Humor aside, has Reihan unearthed something that heralds the coming of a world very, very different from the one we live in?
In Hindu mythology and even in Jungian consciousness, the female principle is of nurture. If nurture become the operative word in the world (it is certainly has not been for all of mankind’s history) will it produce a golden age or will global civilization wither and die in the absence of man’s aggressive quest for dominance?
To some the answer to the above question may be obvious. Others might dismiss it because it is based on what one of my erstwhile colleague used to call a “critical assumption”. Either way you would do well to spend some time reading Reihan’s magnificent article.

The Matrix: The Coming Era of Database Marketing

Happy to inform my regular readers that Aqumena is progressing well.

As we at Aqumena dig into a wide variety of client situations, I encounter epiphanies that I then catalogue for further delving into.

A blog posting is to me is the most useful initiation of further investigation as it potentially co-opts many into the act.

In our marketing analytics practice, we were discussing the promise of integrating databases including operational sales data, post-but media data, data from syndicated studies like the retail and consumer panels etc when this epiphany about the Matrix gripped me.

The thought is that as soon as we accept a database, a research study or a data stream as representative of reality we are in fact integrating the available data on to the entire universe.

For example if we accept the NRS (or the IRS) as representative reality consisting of say, 500 million people, what in reality it means is that we are fusing, assuming the sample size of the study is 100,000, to 5000 individuals in the universe of 500 million people.

Subsequently if you accept a consumer panel of 10,000 household as representative of reality you are accepting that every record in the panel represents 20,000 households in your universe consisting of 200 million households (on the formulation of an average household size of 2.5 members from your 500 million individuals of age 15+ represented by the readership survey).

Marrying the picture of reality that the readership study presents with the picture of reality the consumer panel presents is an unquestionably valid activity because both are true representations of the same reality.

Based on the same principles, a U&A study of 5000 sample size or a price sensitivity study of sample size 2000, as long as they are accepted as valid representations of reality, can be married to the readership and panel data, individual by 500 million individuals.

The marrying of data (variously known as data fusion, data threading and data integration) is done through complex algorithms that dance to accommodate and integrate such that each view of reality that a data stream offers is valid within the overall picture of reality that is being produced.

The technology of data fusion is a developing technology but there can be no quarrel with the basic validity of the concept of welding together various views of reality, as represented by valid data streams, into a comprehensive view of reality that gets richer and more detailed as the data streams increase.

The culmination of this simulation of reality is the Matrix, the creation on a vast computer database a simulation of reality in all its complexity.

In previous times computer power was a severe limitation to simulation exercises.
I remember trying to simulate a cricket match when I was a student at IIT, Bombay back in 1976. The computer was an IBM 360. It took me months to do what can be done today on a low-end notebook in about 10 minutes.

Today weather modeling systems, with increasing effectiveness, model trillions of individual parameters using supercomputers and an array of sampling protocols across the world.

Modeling systems that consist at most of 7 billion parameters (assuming a world population of 7 billion) based on an array of operational and sampling based data streams is well within the affordability range of a major global consumer company.

Modeling a consumer universe of 200 million people is well within the affordability reach of a large size consumer company in India.

Marry the Matrix to the addressability that the emergence of the Internet,the mobile phone and the RFID chip represent and you can perceive the dawn of the age of micro-marketing.

Bonfire of the Vanities

I have smiled at shallow triumphs

And long mourned the loss of what I did not own

I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires

I have constructed an ego built of my senses

And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery

I have looked for God in vain meditations

And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon

I have sought love in the cravings of flesh

When love was within and all around manifest

I have played to weakness when strength beckoned

And belittled myself to myself

Enough say I, enough this night

This Holi night, as I go back millennia

People hunched around an ancient hearth

A primeval force, pure and cleansing

This bonfire of the vanities

Mind your client’s business. The return of jolt selling to B2B marketing

As a consumer research and later an advertising professional I mostly think B2C market but I do B2B marketing.

I have worked at two large and successful agencies with diametrically different approach to selling their services (in the business of advertising you just don’t sell your services to potential clients but every major campaign or activity that you create and execute for a client is an act that succeeds a multi-step sales process).

One agency sells a final creative product. The starting point for it is the client brief. They rather scrupulously stay away from even probing the client’s business and marketing strategy.

Over the last decade or so, as the economy has boomed, this agency climbed the charts quickly and become by all reckoning the agency that represented the face of an advertising business that also boomed.

The agency’s creative product is constantly top class. And they did it by investing in resources and systems that were geared to converting a client-given advertising objective into breathtaking disruptive advertising that at the same time delivered on the objective fair and square.

I would call this approach to B2B selling as an approach that focused on the richness of the product-feature. It is akin to say an IT hardware selling on the efficacy of the machines in perhaps innovatively meeting clearly understood client needs expressed in terms of specifications.

The other agency made the client’s business its primary business. The top resources in the company were people who could and would sit at the table with the client company’s senior management and not just discuss the company’s business and marketing strategy but debate it.

The agency made its business to know everything they could know about the client’s business and market. Its middle and junior level would spend time and resources interacting with not just the marketing people in the client company but the sales people.

In many cases the agency co-crafted in many cases the marketing strategy with the client and crafted by itself the advertising objective. The agency than got on to creating advertising that met this objective.

The company’s biggest bottom-line contribution came when the agency managed to change the client’s perception of their own business! For example a client actually pulled investment in a new plant to manufacture the next generation of products as the agency proved to them that the market for the current generation still very large and profitable. Of course, this required a greater marketing and advertising thrust now instead of when the new plant would have opened two years later.

Such game-changing contributions allowed the agency to sit at the highest table with the client and enabled to make top dollar on that business.

Very many times the beginning of this game-changing contribution could be pinned to a seminal meeting where the agency’s top team delivered a ‘jolt’ to the client, a powerful marshalling of arguments that shifted client perceptions about their own business and established a fresh paradigm.

Not surprisingly, given the smaller share of resources and time allocated to the creative process, the agency delivered a middling-quality product (some will immediately argue that the best approach is to combine the approach of agency 1 and agency 2 but that would be, in my mind, asking uncle to be aunt too).

The agency did extremely well in the decade after liberalization that the Indian economy and companies were getting used to the new economic climate and testing opportunities, flexing muscle that had been until then in disuse.

Over the last decade or so, as company after company muscled their way to high growth under managements much more confident, this agency fell back to mediocre growth. It still was successful and but also-ran successful.

I would term this agency’s approach to B2B selling as a mix of solution-selling and consultative. It is what happens when an IT hardware company spends time and resources in developing along with the client the RFP, so to speak and then with the business locked supplies the hardware.

Over the last year the cycle has come full circle. The boom is gone and companies and managements should be searching for new paradigms.

But all indications are that most companies and managements are frozen in the headlights. They have cut out discretionary spending and frozen budgets whose principal strategy is cost-cutting.

Advertising agency budgets are being slashed and agency one- the ‘creative’ agency in the B2B product selling mode, by all reports, is also frozen in the headlights, busy with its own cost-cutting strategy.

Agency two is less talked about and more opaque. Some reports indicate that during the boom years the agency had nurtured self-doubt.

Its business and marketing strategy making and debating skills diminished as it flailed about to strengthen without much success its creative resources and product.

I do not know whether this agency realizes it,but with the “recession” the times are good for this agency to climb the market share chart and perhaps be the growth leader over the coming decade.

However it must go back to not just the old ways but raise the bar further by making the development and administration of the paradigm- changing jolt to its client’s central strategy.

To do so the agency will need not just to go back to the unmatched strategic capabilities it had in its heyday but surpass those by a significant margin by strengthening resources and systems that allow them to:

- Identify a problem that resonates well with management of client and target companies. For example, the need for a car company to escape the vicious cycle of unhappy dealers and falling sales.

- Develop the jolt point-of-view about the issue- one that links with marketing, sales and consequently marketing communication strategy. As a strictly illustrative example (jolt point-of-views do not come easy and certainly not in the process of writing an article) say the refiguring of commercial relationship with dealers with the marketing and sales budgets being entirely concentrated on micro-marketing programs in each clearly identified dealer catchments.

- Figuring out the jolt point-of-view is one thing, administrating the jolt is quite another. It requires B2B communication and presentation skills of the highest order and must therefore be consciously nurtured.

However the agency must be careful with not going for the jolt strategy where it is not applicable. It is quite likely that a majority of sell situations will be amenable to the jolt strategy. However there will be areas where it will be immune.

For example a start-up that is already figured around a disruptive strategy in a market where the established players are frozen. Or say in a “comfort-food” category that actually booms in a downturn.

It will be evident to the thoughtful reader that the jolt strategy will be relevant to a wide variety of B2B categories and marketing situation.

In fact think tanks are already at work on this facet.

My nascent perceptions on the difference between the business strategies of agency 1 and agency 2 were crystallized by an article that I came across in the latest issue of HBR (my immediately previous post was also based on a HBR article. This venerable repository has started humming again as it does in every structural transition).

If you have anything to do with B2B marketing read it.

In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers
by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffrey Moore
HBR.org March 2009

Brand equity is fine. But what about customer equity?

I believe the current economic turmoil is not a recession or a depression. It is a crisis of transition. Transition in the very socio-economic structure that will change, at the deepest level, the way we relate to each other and on the surface level the way businesses and economies are run.
One of fundamental changes will be the disappearance of “valuation” as a key metric. By valuation I mean the hypothetical sum of money that a potential buyer would be willing to pay if he were to acquire a business lock, stock and barrel.
This is because the business of buying businesses will largely disappear. What will remain is the business of building business and running business profitably. Those of us old enough will recognize this as the way things were two decades ago.
The above seismic shift will see the re-emergence of a marketing fundamental.
Brands don’t create wealth. Customers do.
Attracting and keeping the highest-value customers is the cornerstone of a successful marketing program.
This was the thesis of an article published by Robert C. Blatberg & John Deighton titled “Managing Marketing by Customer Equity Test” in the July-August 1996 issue of Harvard Business Review.
In 1996 the article would have been trampled under the rush of salivating CEOs and investment bankers dreaming about ballooning brand valuations. I suspect that over the coming years reprint revenues for this article will see a spike.
Simply put customer equity is the net present value of all the customers of a business discounted for marketing rate of returns.
And once concepts like brand valuations are put aside, the simple objective of a business’s marketing program should be to maximize customer equity.
Maximizing customer equity has two distinct and equally important components. Maximizing customer equity contribution from customer acquisition and maximizing customer equity contribution from customer retention.
The second half of the twentieth century was the age of the mass media. And as a direct result of this, it was also the age of mass marketing.
Mass marketing by its very nature has difficulty in measuring effectiveness of its various components and in building predictive models.
However increasingly marketing is becoming interactive with pervasive individualized media like the Internet, mobile phones and increasingly RF id triggered shopper marketing programs.
In this new age of interactive marketing it is now possible to tightly define objectives of specific components of a marketing program and measure effectiveness.
This then allows the use of “Decision Calculus” to design marketing programs and budgets to maximize customer equity.
This decision calculus works on models built on tracking cost of acquisition against percentage of target population acquired and cost of retention against percentage of current customers retained.
The calculus is based on identifying the levels of acquisition and retention beyond which the marginal utility is negative.
Disruptive events can change this calculus dramatically.
For example in the early years of the courier business, the courier companies used regular scheduled flights and had no real control over delivery and thus customer satisfaction. In that scenario the acquisition yield curve was far better that the retention yield curve and most of the marketing budget was devoted to customer acquisition. However as big brands like Fedex acquired their own aircraft their control over customer satisfaction increased dramatically. This resulted in a change in retention yield curves and marketing budgets shifted in favour of customer retention.
In the case of IBM the shift of the market from high-value mainframes to low-value microcomputers prompted a shift in the yield curves in favour of customer acquisition, prompting a dramatic shift in marketing strategy.
It is my belief that increasingly as Interactive Marketing replaces Mass Marketing model based budgeting will become the norm and the key metric will be Customer Equity.
The concept of Customer Equity will also add a new metric to Marketing Audits.
The true measure of a company’s financial soundness lies not in its P&L account but in the analysis of its cash flows. The marketing soundness of a company does not lie in its market share or sales growth but in an analysis of the Customer Value Flow.
In conclusion it would be worthwhile for marketing thinkers in India to start examining the concept of Customer Equity closely and evaluate their current marketing strategy in the light of this old but newly relevant concept. It will be great preparation for the times to come.

Thinking Beyond The Young: The Coming Bulge Cohort

Most marketers and advertising people in India today obsess about the young.

And rightly so, considering that more than 44% of India's population is in the age group 20 to 39 years. When you take the top 8 metros the percentage of 20 to 39 year olds climbs to almost 49%, reflecting the on going migration of the young to the cities.

However there is life beyond the young.

Harry S. Dent, an investment advisor, believes that across the world the age group of 46-50 are the marquee spenders and in fact tracks the number of people from age 46 to 50 in countries around the world, as a proxy for growth in consumer spending in each economy. (See Changing Global Demographics, H.S. Dent Publishing, 2007.)

Tammy Erikson, a Mckinsey Award-winning author in her blog post entitled "What Demographics Tell Us About The Economy" qualifies Dent's hypothesis in the following comment:

"Clearly looking only at the 46-50 year age group is a narrow cut at spending patterns - people typically begin to spend more throughout their thirties and early forties. However, an indisputable fact is that the big bulge of high-spending Boomers is moving out of peak spending years, replaced by members of the much smaller Generation X.

And, to add to the conservative picture going forward, members of Generation X have already proven to be cautious spenders. Between 2000 and 2004, the average U.S. household boosted its spending by 4 percent. But the vast majority of this growth came from Boomers; the spending of householders aged 25 to 34 did not increase at all and the spending of householders aged 35 to 44 increased only 1.8 percent, less than half the average rate."

Dent's hypothesis would have as look at the 46 to 50 age group while Erikson would want us to expand the segment to 40 to 50 year olds.

Erikson's analysis of the Baby Boomer Generation (those born between 1946 and 1961 in the US) and Generation X (those born between the years 1961-1981- the 3 year overlap with the Boomer's notwithstanding)is partially relevant to India.

Many market research studies have confirmed that in India as in the US, the young of the 70's & the 80's had a more liberal attitude to life than today's young.
However the difference is that in the US the Baby Boomer generation enjoyed unparalleled economic growth while the corresponding generation in India endured the wonders of the License Raj age.

However, I believe,the importance in India of the 40-50 years cohort lies not in generational attitude but in the numbers.

The 40 to 50 years cohort is about 14% of the all India population and 15% of the metro population. Within the 40 to 50 years cohort, the top end of the socio-economic classification in India, SEC A, account for 15%.

Are marketers paying enough attention to this key segment?

The archetypical 40-50 years brand is Raymond's, the high-end suitings brand. However a time-line study of Raymond's ads (partial archive of Raymond's TVCs)seems to suggest that the brand is keen to handover the torch to the young.

Is Raymond's falling prey to our collective obsession with the young?

The key to a brand are brand values

Brand values while being deeper than lifestyle symbols and attitudes are, by design or not, keyed to life stage.

One might argue that the Nike value of the "can-do" spirit is a value that transcends all life stage. However an equally valid argument would be that the 'can-do" value is keyed in more to the young than the middle-aged.Not surprisingly Nike's brand imagery is uber young.

Does that leave the market open for a middle-aged focused activity-wear brand? Now that's a thought.

The larger point is that brand loyalty does not guarantee a transition across age groups.

In fact it is almost guaranteed that brands do not transcend life stage as brand values unlike the eternal values are keyed to a life-stage.

Can a brand be keyed to eternal values? That again is a thought worthy of exploration.

However returning to the central argument, since brand loyalty will not almost always survive the transition to the next life stage, Indian marketers and advertising people must pay a lot of attention to building and nurturing brands focused at the 40 to 50 years age group.

Because today's young will be the next decades 40 to 50 years cohort and the 40-50 years age group will peak at about 30% of the urban population around 2020.

A Raymond's must preserve it's brand values that appeal so well to the 40-50 years cohort. It has a substantial market today and, hold your breath, a 200% explosion waiting to happen over the next decade.

And going by the same logic there is tremendous business potential for a few Raymond's in every product and service category imaginable.

This is an exciting product/ service and brand design and marketing task waiting to be undertaken.

And I am sure as this recession takes hold and many a marketer and strategist returning to the thoughtful mode (instead of the "follow-the-gravy-train" mode that had everyone hooked over the last decade or so) this great task will find its thinkers and doers.

The Discipline of Change

Change is the new greed.

About a year ago, greed was good with everyone. Then comes disaster and the only one who seems to have done alright in the past twelve months is Mr. Obama.

And what is Mr. Obama all about? Change of course. And hey presto, change is the new greed.

When greed was good money was, so to speak, the currency.

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay.
Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.
(excerpt from Money a number on the album Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd)

Now that change is the new mantra, the currency is earnestness. It is quite heartening how all our politicians this side of forty are suddenly in their mind harbingers of change.

So don’t be surprised as we have change all around us in a couple of months. Quite literally that is. On ubiquitous posters, wall paintings, TV, radio and press ads.

All of it funded, of course, by the abundant harvest of old greed even though the change is the new greed.

And change as the theme of the season will soon fall upon that other field, besides politics and advertising, that so depends on platitudes: management consultants and experts. What would you except after Satyam?

I am all for change. Really I am.

What makes me a cynical about the current brouhaha about change is that it is the page three types and the same old scoundrels in our country who are embracing it. This trivializes the theme and I am worried that this will delay the taking up this theme seriously by people who can make change happen.

Change is not an idea or even an objective. Change is a discipline.

When change is only used an empty slogan or a new peg to hang the same old platitudes on, it will swallow its users.

An embracing of real change over the past few decades has led to the China success story. In contrast the theme of change in Russia after the fall of communism has in a large measure been rhetorical and the negative results are clear.

Real change is a hard taskmaster. China has mounted the tiger of change (any allusion to Mr.Raju’s infamous tiger is unintentional) and if China gets off before the tiger is satiated it will be definitely be clawed badly if not eaten.

Change is the deepest theme of the evanescent world of Maya. Change is the dance of Shiva.

The makers of change start at the roots.

Mr. Obama started his campaign for change at the very roots of the political process. The roots of power in politics lay in your grass roots support.

There was a time when this support was built from where it should naturally be built. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the movement for India’s Independence are cases in point.

However most of current politics had got lazy, perhaps as most of current society.

This lead to politicians banked on inheriting the grass-root support of entrenched political parties and getting funds from entrenched special interest. The politics of the stagnant status quo naturally followed.

Mr. Obama started from the grass-roots. He and his team sweated in building a grass-roots army of volunteer neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Bringing into the political process individuals who otherwise would have remained clear of.

Mr. Obama and his team built most of his funding dollar by dollar through people donating in the tens of dollars.

There were of course many who donated in the thousands and even millions of dollars to Mr. Obama’s campaign.

But the strength of the ready army of small donors with no entrenched interest but that of change brought a better life for the many counterbalances and keeps in check the special interests of those who donated in the thousands and the millions.

This counterbalance is what gives Mr Obama and his administration the strength to stand up to the special interest of the status quo as he goes about delivering change.

But this is not the only reason why I back Mr. Obama to deliver on his promise of change. Not fully perhaps but substantially. It is because he and his team keep on, according to reports, hoeing the discipline of change after Nov. 4th 2008.

Consider this excerpt from an article by Joe Klein in Time titled “Barack Obama Promises New Destiny. Work Begins Today” about how Mr. Obama and his team set about the task of delivering change where the rubber meets the road:

Quietly, the Obama transition team reviewed every government agency "to find out which specific programs were working and which weren't." It was a terrifyingly brisk and comprehensive process, especially compared with the dust storm produced by the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, during his chaotic transition period. "During Clinton's transition, you had all these people writing ad hoc papers about what to do at this agency or how to deal with that policy, but that was an extension of how Clinton's mind works," says one of the many Obama aides who is a veteran of the Clinton Administration. "Clinton had this great horizontal intelligence. He could pull an idea from a meeting he had in northern Italy and apply it to spreading broadband service through Iowa. It was amazing but not exactly efficient. Obama is more vertical. He pushes the process along, streamlines it. We had one 25-to-50-page policy paper for every agency."

The discipline of change is not just about the willingness to go the root and work long and tirelessly to make change happen root and branch.

It is also about nurturing the integrity that enables one to choose the steep and thorny route over the easy short-cut just because that way is right. Consider this excerpt from the same Joe Klein article:

In the midst of the transition, President Obama was faced with a telling policy choice: whether to declare a temporary sales-tax holiday. His economic advisers loved the idea. It would provide immediate consumer stimulus, a direct jolt that might unclog the commercial arteries. The money could be easily passed from the Federal Government to the states, which administer sales taxes. But Obama resisted and finally rejected the idea. "He thought it would provide a temporary benefit, that it had no substantial or lasting policy impact," a senior transition adviser told me. "I think he was remembering the campaign, when Hillary and McCain favored the gas-tax holiday, which he thought was frivolous, and he opposed it for that very reason — if we're going to spend money, let's spend it on investments that will make us stronger in the future."

Will Indian politics find its Obama?

I believe we will find ours within the next decade. I also believe it is not someone we heard of today in the national press.

He is perhaps in politics already. Perhaps a grass-roots worker of one of our main political party dreaming the dream that will bring change to India’s politics.

I also believe that an Obama is waiting to happen to the world of business.

As the old verities fall in the world of capitalism, the new paradigm is not going to come from the very experts who failed us in the first place.

It is going to come from a group of outsiders who will revisit global business from the roots up.

When that will happen it will be another manifestation of the discipline of change.

Breathe, breathe in the air.
Don't be afraid to care.
Leave but don't leave me.
Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

(excerpt from the song Breathe from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon)

Security Consciousness

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (Opening lines from ‘The Second Coming’ by WB Yeats)

After 26/11 we have supposed to have increased security across India. One does see increased police and security presence. And the frisking and metal detectors have now become ubiquitous beyond airports to hotels, malls, multiplexes, clubs and even schools.

However does anyone of us feel more secure? I don’t. Almost everyone I know does not.
What’s wrong?

I believe that while our best security measures lack, as Yeats puts it, ‘lack all conviction’ while those who intend to breach our security when they can, as often as they can are “full of passionate intensity”.

We need to make security an integral part of how we think and how we behave. We need to acquire what Mr Chidambaran called “security consciousness” but left it to our imagination to define.

Modern society and every individual in it are passionately committed to the pursuit of comfort and convenience. As a result, comfort and convenience is the conscious and even sub-conscious objective of everything we design, every system we institute and every pattern of behaviour we adapt.

In contrast to comfort and convenience, the provenance of security is an imposed consideration.

It took decades for the world of business to make safety an integral part of product design. Society cannot now afford to take decades to make security an integral part of how we live.

There are no short-cuts to security consciousness. But unless we start today we will be forced to continue with security measures as they are today forever.

Measures that cost us not just billions of rupees but millions of productive man-hours in time lost to ham-handed inconveniences. Measures that will make our children grow up paranoid. And even after all this cost, measures that can fail anytime anywhere.

Security consciousness is an attitude. It is an attitude like thrift is an attitude. Once imbibed, security consciousness manifests itself in myriad ways.
The other key aspect of security consciousness is that it works in consonance with our other needs. Security that results from security consciousness does not result in loss of comfort or convenience but in fact enhances them!

Let me illustrate this with an example.

For years due to conventional security measures, waiting for your visa interview at the US Consulate at Bombay was a pain. The queue was long and uncomfortable as one waited for long periods at the mercy of the weather.

Then the Americans got security-consciousness. You now wait in air-conditioned comfort in a holding station a couple of kilometres away till your turn comes to get on to a high-security bus that takes you the consulate for the interview and then drops you back.

The experts tell me that the new arrangement is 30% more secure than the earlier one because it does away with the high-risk scenario of a crowd of people just outside the consulate building.

And of course it is 100% more convenient for all concerned.
In fact because the security that results from security-consciousness also enhances convenience, it ensures compliance.

The development of security-consciousness in a society is a multi-dimensional process.

Like all attitude inculcation it is most effective at the school level. Every culture needs to build its own security-consciousness curriculum for its school children because it has to be rich in socio-economic and cultural context. Basic templates will be provided by studying what the Americans, the Japanese and the Europeans do in their schools.

The second fertile area for the development of safety-consciousness is in our professional courses. Incorporation of safety-consciousness in undergraduate and graduate programs in engineering, design, medicine, architecture, administration, management would result in a rapid diffusion of safety-consciousness into the systems that run our society.

The third pillar of a security consciousness build-up would be that mother of all attitude builders- mass media and entertainment.
We all know how mass media can whip up emotions and paranoia. We all know the power of cinema to promote patterns of behaviour.

If mass media and entertainment could sit at a table and agree upon a security-consciousness agenda I believe that Indian media and entertainment has more power and talent than any other country in the world to convert this agenda into an attitude that will be widespread in our society.

In conclusion, I believe, if the world becomes truly security consciousness it will be the second coming of the age of true security. The first, of course, was in the Garden of Eden!

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Closing lines of ‘The Second Coming’ by WB Yeats)

2008 and The Culture of Merit

I am 2008. 

I believe I did a lot of good to the world. 

But as is the case always when you do good unbidden what you get is blame. So while the cheers that greeted my departure still resonate let me reason with you a bit. 

Is the fact that a world gone mad with greed has been restored to fiscal sanity good or bad? 

There is pain now but the fact is that the so-called economic meltdown is bringing back the culture of merit to the world of business and economics. 

No longer will the brilliant engineer cracking the next breakthrough in fuel cells feel belittled by the money and adulation showered on some ethics-challenged sharpie at Lehman Brothers. Is that good or bad? 

The culture of merit has been a long time coming but it finally arrived with me. It is no accident of history that I saw Obama become the most powerful man in the world. Bush Jr. was perhaps the epitome of a world bowing to the ever so common marriage of privileged sperm and bad but stubborn DNA. 

On the other hand, Obama symbolizes the return of merit to organized human effort. As for the continuing scourge of hunger, poverty, terrorism, corruption, war and worsening climate I had my fair share of all. But let me make a prediction.

A decade from now the golden age of a new flowering of civilization will be traced back to the return of the culture of merit in 2008. It will be the power of merit that will put away the despots in Africa and across the world. It will be merit empowered expertise that will finally get control of hunger, poverty and get humanity on the road to reining in global warming. And it will be merit-promoted understanding that will kill terrorism not at the hand of those who sought to wipe it out through military power but from within, by the very people who used to shelter it. 

And it will be the culture of merit that will make corruption untenable. So while you look forward to relief with 2009 remember the pain that I gave you was the kind of pain that is a harbinger of great gain.