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
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
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
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
Thursday, February 19, 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.
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.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
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)
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)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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)
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)
Thursday, January 8, 2009
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.
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