Mahābhūta Marketer

Cadbury Bournvita's new strategy - target the poor

2010-04-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Bournvita Advertisement #1

See the video ad for Bournvita above. There is something new about this advertisement. Some new strategy and something uncommon and unusual when compared with all the previous ads of Bournvita. I daresay this is a bit bold and experimental, which may go wrong, and could possibly damage the Bournvita's brand image. Can you guess what that is?

Okay, here is a hint. Look at this ad by Bournvita below and take a guess.

Bournvita Advertisement #2

Apparently this ad is targeting middle class and upper class families in India. The ad seems to indirectly suggest that Bournvita is for children belonging to rich families. I made that conclusion from the western dance performed by a dancer kid, Kabir. The kind of dress worn by that kid is surely not worn amongst poor families in India. And the ad is about cold Bournvita, so fridge is an obvious pre-requisite to prepare the drink. Tell me something, how often do you find a fridge in a poor Indian family? A family whose annual income is less than 30,000 Rs.

Now, coming back to the first ad posted at the top. A maid servant paints a Rangoli(a dry powder painting drawn in front of Indian houses) in a rich lady's house. Impressed, the land lady appreciates maid's Rangoli. Maid enthusiastically requests the mistress to come to her house in promise of showing a better Rangoli drawing. Mistress obliges and follows her maid to her house. Impressed again with the Rangoli maid drew in front of her own house, the mistress offers 50 Rupees as a reward to the maid.

As the mistress comes inside her maid's simple house, her kid is seen engrossed painting a toy model of a house. Mistress asks the kid whether he would like to become an Engineer in future. (As if Engineers were the only people who earn decent money, all others in other professions are good for nothing). In the mean time, the maid saves her reward money inside her closet.

The rich lady teasingly asks the maid if she was going to buy a Banarasi Saadi(a silk saree from Banaras) with the money. The maid sharply denies her telling that she saves a "part" of her money for the dreams of her child (indirectly meaning for her son's engineering education). The rich mistress catches her maid's words and curiously asks what the maid was going to do with the rest of the money.

The maid is shown saving 20 Rupees for a small sachet of Bournvita. A background voice explains that fulfilling dreams needs hard work and mental strength along with physical strength, which is obtained by drinking Bournvita, which is now available for just 20 Rupees.(Does this mean Bournvita is an engineer's drink? Or Bournvita is an absolute necessity for mental and physical strength of kids. Like doctors prescribe mother's milk to months old babies, Cadbury's seems to prescribe Bournvita for all the young children in India who aspire to become Engineers).

The kid now drinks Bournvita, with an expression as if he drunk some strong cocktail of Vodka, Whisky and Rum. He tells to her mother in delight, "When I become an Engineer, I will surely bring you a Banarasi Sadi", and the maid kisses him in response. (As if the kid would not buy a Banarasi saree if he became a doctor or actor). The rich lady is shown sympathizing for the kid's noble thought.

The whole point of the comparison of these ads is to highlight the change in paradigm of Bournvita promotion team. Years back when they started, they portrayed Bournvita as a drink of rich & middle class. Understanding the potential of market among the poor classes in India, and with their introduction of a smaller and economical pack of Bournvita, they targeted the poor class mothers who want their children to be educated, so that they lead a better financial life than them.

While I appreciate that Bournvita's advertising team highlighted that majority of maid servants in India are getting ambitious about their next generation, that they are keen on educating and making them "Engineers" in future, I condemn and disapprove Bournvita's attempt to brain-wash people, infusing wrong ideas in the minds of emotional Indian mothers.

This was commentary on this ad from a human angle. In a commercial angle, this is a well-thought advertisement which attempts to boost the sales of Bournvita by promoting it among the poor class of India. This is bold and an experimental advertisement. If this works out and strikes the right chord among the poor, this may be a good starter to get into minds of financially backward families in India and consequently enter that market. Though it may not make a significant difference, as this is the first of its kind advertisement among milk drink powder in India. A few more ads like the first one could change the established opinion that Milk drinks in India are for middle class and rich children. This advertisement is one of its kind, a pioneer in this market. At least I haven't seen any such advertisement from the competitors of Bournvita - Holicks, Complan or Boost making ads that target lower class in India.

On the other side, this ad could backfire, draw scorn and contempt of rich people. Advertisements are a reflection of human psychology. When an ad glorifies a product and their users, people vicariously imagine themselves as the stars of that ad. So if this style of advertisement is continued by Bournvita, they could lose their image among people who are currently buying the product - upper and middle class of India.

These are only my personal views. I hope I haven't offended any one with this view. Feel free to comment below.

Putting the principle of word of mouth to work

2010-04-06T11:27:00.001-07:00

This afternoon, I was in the happy company of my friend, sipping hot masala tea, brainstorming ideas to draw traffic to the blog I write -- Interview Mantra.

He casually suggested me to post interview experiences of people who cleared interviews with IIMs - top business schools in India., which could attract a lot of MBA aspirants to my blog. The main aim of any blog is to bring traffic to it, so why not post such interesting tips related to the niche of my blog.

This discussion eventually brought out the question, "How to draw huge traffic to my website?"

"Running a blog is like running a lemon juice shop at your home," I said to my friend as I continued, "Only your family members know that you give lemon juice for free. How would a person residing two streets away from your house know about your juice center and why should he come to your shop? There are millions of juice shops that offer lemon juice for free too."

"Why not advertise about your juice center in the paper?" asked my friend.

"Advertising would help me get few people, they will see the ad, come to my shop, take a cup of juice and go away," I answered. "How would I retain that customer? And how to get more people apart from the ones that read the advertisement, get influenced and take action to come to my shop?", I reverse questioned him. "Obviously, I want to harness the power of word of mouth. I want each of the customers who come to my shop once to tell others about my shop, influence them and visit my shop themself again."

So this is the challenge at hand -- How to use the power of word of mouth?

The simplest solution is "Give away gold for free."

Think about it, if I start giving away gold literally to every one who came to my shop along with the free glass of lemon water, that person would go out and tell to all of his friends, colleagues, relatives and neighbours and to every stranger that he meets on the road that there's a stupid guy giving away gold for free. That person who received gold from me would become my shop's ambassador and would continue to influence everyone possible. And whoever listens to him, would first evaluate his advertisement and then decides to try my shop out. Once he confirms that I'm giving away gold for free. He would greedily collect all the gold I give, and head towards his home telling everyone on the way about the free gold. So, this person who happens to be a new seed planted becomes a self-appointed brand ambassador for my shop.

Now, coming back to the actual context of a blog and traffic. To the original question -- "How to draw heavy traffic to my blog?". I should give away articles which are worth the value of Gold. Yes, literally.

Then, it shall not be a surprise when my blog becomes a blog with page rank 6. As of now, it's page rank is 3.

Technology and sole purpose of its existence

2009-11-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

Have you watched the blockbuster movie of 2009 - Avatar? I hope you enjoyed watching the CGI in the movie.

Now, imagine how would the movie had been if there were a lot more of computer imagery, but had no solid story, no quirky characters and no human emotions.

Would you have enjoyed that movie.. err documentary film? We don't want to waste our time on scientific demonstrations and dull showoff of advances in computer graphics. We want to watch a movie with a story, which has characters whom we can identify ourselves with. We want to laugh as the protagonist laughs and cry as he/she cries. So this 3d technology, cgi and other stuff should be used only as an enhancement, not as the essence of the movie. Technology only supports a story to make it more interesting. That's it. Nothing beyond it.

Let's discuss few more cases. If you are one among the 40 million proud owners of Apple iPhone or one like me who wants to own one, know how much people love the touch screen technology in an iPhone.

How would you like if iPhone had crazier technologies such as advanced digital signal processing using fourier transform and kaiser window algorithm?

Who cares what the heck of a technology is being used as long as it helps you solve one your problems, makes your life easy in some way or the other. Men want stylish gadgets which they can play with, show off to their friends, use them 24 x 7 to do their daily tasks, to connect with other human beings. We don't want to buy experiment kits from a research university. We would never love such tech gadgets which serve no real life purpose.

Why is science so highly regarded in this world? Just because all the human beings on this earth are geeks? Or is it because scientists and researchers in this world release some harmones that make them more likeable?

Let me hit the nail on the head. We like scientists because they invent products that help us live longer, help us earn money using them, help us watch & enjoy live telecast of our favourite sport. If scientists created products that serve no practical use to human beings, we don't want them(scientists and their tech products) at the first place.

I am simultaneously downloading a free anti-virus program while writing this article. I am downloading them because I, like all the other human beings on earth, am interested in researching how a virus(a computer virus not H1N1) works. I'm downloading this program for the natural animal instinct of reading geek computer code for every earthly activity. I'm kidding. The real reason for downloading this software is that I can save the crashed windows on my aunt's PC. Now, why am I trying to recover windows on my aunt's PC. Because she had stored poems her son wrote since childhood. She cares for the invaluable poems that her own son wrote than any other software in this world. So the only reason why I, being a normal human being, am dowloading an anti-virus to save my cousin's poems.

The bottom line of this article is to emphasize how fundamental it is, for any technology to serve human purposes. Every technology in this world exists just because it helps people directly or indirectly, and not because of their technical coolness. My previous self has motivated me to write this article. I was a person who just loved technology over everything in this world. When someone tells me that they know xyz technology, I would regard him/her as a guru and a super human. And when someone tells me they don't understand any technologies, I used to think of them as fools. How naive I was!

Technology would be nothing but a piece of shit, if people stop using it. Period.

ps: Having said all this, by no means do I intend to offend the tech guys. I myself am a graduate of electronics engineering and a software developer. I am not against people that work on technology but against the notion that technology is a winner irrespective of human use.

What is the difference between sales and marketing

2009-11-12T23:56:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I didn't know the difference myself until I read about it on the internet.

Claus Schwarm puts it this way in a thread at answers.startup.com :

Marketing is often confused with promotion.

There are basically two definitions of marketing:
In the "pragmatic" definition, marketing is a management activity covering fields related to revenue. This is typically summarized by the 4 P's: Price, Place (ie. distribution), Promotion, and Product.

As a management activity, marketing involves the steps that usually include measuring the 'Is' situation and the 'Ought' situation, constructing a plan to get from 'Is' to 'Ought' and controlling the effectiveness of the plan. Rinse, repeat.

Selling is a process to get leads sign a contract and becomes customers. Typically, this includes understanding the prospect's problems, presenting a way how the product solves these problems, deal with any objection a prospect mentions, and finally get the prospect to sign the contract.

So, they both deal with similar problems, but from different points of view: Marketing looks at the aggregate result. Sales often look at the individual results. Consequently, they may have different goals.

Whether they differ, depends on your distribution policy:

With direct marketing such as sales letters or web pages, you typically do not have direct contact with a lead. Then, marketing needs to adopt many sales techniques in the promotion policy. Thus, there's seldom any conflict between marketing and sales and it's not a problem to have one person do both.

With direct selling, a sales man has direct contact with a lead. Here, the goals of sales men may conflict with marketing goals, since sales man often like to deviate from marketing policies to close the deal. This includes lowering the price, adding free give-aways, etc. In a small startup, however, most marketing is done by the team, with the sales guy only does some additional promotion. As long as you have an eye on the general direction, there should be no serious problems in the beginning.

With intermediate selling, someone outside the company has direct contact to the prospect (retailers, affiliates, etc). They, too, may have an incentive to violate marketing policies (lowering the price, presenting your luxury brand alongside common brands, etc.). You often need to emphasize promotion to customers and a strict distribution policy to prevent such problems.

Your distribution policy finally depends on the product. Some need personal sales men, some do not. If you need separate sales men, it's often advised for marketing people to do sales from time to time, just to keep contact with the customers' wants and needs.

I liked Jarie Bolander's definition:

Sales is the advocate for the company. They are primarily focused on selling the companies products and services. The needs of the customer is secondary to this function.

Marketing is the advocate for the customer. They figure out the customer pain (e.g. needs) and try to fill them profitability with products. All other aspects of marketing (promotion, pricing and place) are all about telling the customer that the company can fill their need.

Would you like to add anything to what Claus Schwarm, Jarie Bolander said? Please comment below.

Why has Sachin changed his bat?

2009-11-11T16:40:00.000-08:00

Sachin Tendulkar is a world famous Indian batsman, who holds the record of scoring highest number of runs in one day and test match format of cricket sport. Sachin, recently accomplished a feat of crossing the mark of 17,000 runs in one day international cricket. He is believed to the world's highest paid cricketer of all time. He has changed the brand endorsed on his bat from MRF to Adidas.

What's in a bat?
I have seen Sachin play with MRF bat since my childhood from 1993. MRF paid a huge amount money annually to Sachin for using their brand sticker on his bat.

What motivated Sachin to change his bat?
It is believed by the brand industry experts that his contract with MRF came to an end and MRF chose not to renew it. Adidas was more than happy to find a free Sachin to sign a contract with him.

What did MRF get?
MRF benefited greatly out of the ten year deal with Sachin to use their brand name sticker on his bat. With that bat, Sachin achieved a ton of records. Every cricket lover knows consciously/sub-consciously knows that Sachin uses an MRF bat.

When young children buy a wooden bat, they insist that it has MRF sticker on it to make sure that bat scores runs like that of Sachin's. An internet surfer wrote "MRF logo looked better on sachin's bat. Maybe I am too used to seeing it."

MRF brand name went deep down into the people of India, it was on the tongue of every Indian who followed cricket or admired Sachin Tendulkar as a player. They had got what was most important for them, a brand name in India and parts of the world which followed cricket.

Why did MRF move on?
After ten years of being on Sachin's bat, people may have become ad blind. They might have stopped noticing it as much as it used to be noticed earlier. That's when MRF decided to move on.

What's in for adidas?
The strongest advantage that adidas has over MRF is that MRF is not a sport related company, it's a tyre company. So surely MRF benefited word of mouth branding by sponsoring Sachin's bat, but its definitely less when compared with what adidas can get out of this deal. Adidas is a sports company. Adidas logo on Sachin's bat would boost the sales of Adidas apparel and sports gear in the sub continent.

This deal is the best that Adidas can get in India. Every rupee spent in this deal will bring back at least double the amount money back to adidas in form of profit.

The Numbers:
There is no official record of how much MRF used to pay Sachin or how much Adidas pays Sachin for the bat. In my opinion MRF would have paid annual fees no less than 5 crores of Indian Rupees per year in the past and Adidas must have been paying no less than 10 crores of Indian rupees.

Comment below about how much you think Adidas pays Sachin at the moment.

A practical Marketing Lesson that I learnt - Design of a product

2009-11-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

This post is about an invaluable marketing lesson that I learnt from my personal experience. Back in 2006, when I was studying pre-final year of my under-graduation, I used to build micro-controller projects. I like electronics, gadgets and programming stuff.

I belonged to the stream of Electronics and Communication Engineering in a university in Chennai, India. I enjoy playing with electronic circuits in the college lab, building circuits on my own at home. It was lot of fun giving life to a dead electronic circuit.

I got better and better at the skill of building electronic circuits. I started to work on advanced electronic circuits that involved micro controllers. Micro controllers are amazing creations of man. Using them, you could add intelligence to a dumb electronic circuit.

Soon I realized that I could make money out of my hobby. I with the help of four friends started a Project Center that assists college projects to students. There was this project called “Hand-held Video Game” that we were helping out one of our college mates. The aim of this project was to replicate an old style hand-held (made-in-china style) video game. The game that we wanted to build was the famous Snake game that usually comes in Nokia Mobile phones.

This project used the latest technology, a latest micro-controller called AVR-32, which was pretty new in Indian market of Embedded Systems projects. I was very confident that this project would be the most popular one and most talked about project in our college. There is a great deal of technicality put into the project, so I thought it would be cool to boast about this project in the college.

I soon finished the project in a kind of raw, unedited draft. This is how it looked after completion. (Look at the picture). We took it to college for a review from our project in-charge and came back disappointed that nobody was bothered to look at or talk about this project. Some people said that our project looked like a mess and it sucks.

In a couple of days, my friend who owned this project, came with an idea of uncluttering this circuit and making it look neater. He went to a departmental store, bought few plastic boxes, cut the boxes to fit the LCD screen, fit the navigation buttons. I helped him with the technicalities, I got a customized Printed Circuit Board done for this project, we soldered the circuit. Finally finished the uncluttering exercise.

This is how the project looked after my friend's effort of organizing it. I was amazed looking at it. Suddenly the project started looking as if it was a timeless piece of invention. We took it to the college to test the reaction. And hey, people started loving this project, students and teachers talked about this project.

Nobody bothered to ask which technology I used, or how complicated is the code inside it. People were totally impressed by this cool looking project. When I went home and reflected on what made this project suddenly cool, it struck me that the outer look of a product is much more important the actual product.

Average users of any product do not understand the technicalities involved in the product. If an average computer user uses Microsoft Word, he has no idea what was the technology used to build it or how many lines of code was written to make word work. All he is bothered about is how it looks, how it works for him.

Take the case of any product, may it be a detergent soap or an ice cream, an average user looks for its features, look and design. So it struck me that design was Extremely Important part of selling a product. From then on whatever I did, may it be a blog or a website or a computer application or a greeting, I give utmost important to the design of it. I double check whether what I built looks visually pleasing or not.

I take the review of my friends, colleagues to make sure that the design looks aesthetically pleasing. This was one the first practical lessons that I'd learnt in my life.

Hope you liked it. Do add your comments about your thoughts on importance of design for a product.

Social Media Tips straight from Kodak

2009-11-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

Social Media is on fire, it lately caught the attention of world's hearts and minds (not the usual eyeballs and ears). Millions of active internet users have signed up accounts in Social Media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr etc. Following the users, businesses and corporates have started experimenting with Social Media. Few companies are trying to use it as a tool for Customer support, while few companies use it for fortifying their brand name, few companies use it to spread a word about their new products.

But this process of using Social Media by businesses is not yet standardized, it's still evolving. No company is sure about how this trend would go about in 2010. And not all companies have embraced this trend yet, as some of them think that Social Media is a passing cloud, or they think that Social Media is not worth the hype or that Social Media is not in a shape where companies can start picking it up and using it.

Kodak, being one of the early birds that embraced Social Media, has come up with a highly impressive Social Media Policy Guide for businesses. Kodak claims that this Guide is based on their experience of using Social Media.

This guide, a slideshare presentation, starts with a letter from Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer, Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company. Jeff says "In today's media landscape, it's vitally important to be where our customers are. The exciting thing about Social Media is it offers the opportunity to engage in two-way conversation with customers."

"What better you know how to best serve customers than to hear directly from them?", an excited Jeff asked.

Kodak as of date has 3 blogs, 7 official Twitter accounts, 2 Facebook pages, a Youtube account and a Flickr account.

As of date, Kodak's youtube channel has 690+ subscribers with over 134,543+ channel views. Kodak's facebook page has 44,488+ fans. Kodak's main twitter profile has 13,063+ followers. And this is just a beginning, Youtube has 375 million users in 2009, Facebook has more than 250 million active users, Twitter has 44 million users.

Just imagine, if Kodak could tap the ocean of people actively engaged in the social media, it could reach millions of users with least expenditure from its pocket.

Kodak believes that blogs are the heart of Social Media. Kodak uses it's blog, A Thousand Words, to notify about latest events, endorse products, share related stories, tips and techniques with its readers.

Kodak uses its Twitter profile to engage in conversation with customers, take feedback, promote its products and share interesting pictures with its followers. Kodak uses its Youtube channel to post video interviews, photo galleries, product review videos. Kodak uses its facebook page to collect feedback on events, news and products from its fans.

Kodak Social Media Tips

Hasn't your business framed a Social Media Policy yet? Do you have any tips that worked for you? Comment below.

Will Top Ramen Noodles catchup Maggi in Indian Instant Noodle Market?

2009-10-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Top Ramen Noodles is the second most sold instant noodles in India after the noodle market leader, Maggi.

Maggi has been the highest sold noodles in India. We may get tempted to think that Maggi is a brain child of India. But nope. It is a product of Nestle Brand. Maggi was invented in Europe by a person named Maggi.

Top Ramen Noodles is a non-Indian brand, belongs to Japanese company, Nissin Foods. Nissin claims that their company's founder was also the invented instant noodles in 1958, inspired by the plight of people suffering from lack of food. Instant Noodles became a hit all over the world since its invention.

So what are the reasons that Top Ramen Noodles could not match up with the growth of Maggi Noodles in India?

What are the steps Top Ramen Noodles is taking to get a bigger share of Instant noodles market in India?

What should Top Ramen Noodles do now to get to the number uno position?

Here are my thoughts:

One major factor for Maggi's success was its quick localization. I have been eating Maggi since my childhood, for about 15 years, I never knew that Maggi was a foreign brand until I read wikipedia just before writing this article. How many times had I seen the wrapper of Maggi Noodles packet? Many times! I like reading everything that's written on wrapper's, in fact it's my hobby that I don't even know about consciously.

So Maggi has a simple presentation of itself to people in India. Every common Indian knows the tagline of maggi - 2 minute noodles. And Maggi was famous in the flavor of Masala. Masala happens to mean spice in India. So to a common Indian, Maggi Masala sounds very logical and Indian.

Never did Maggi put any fancy English tag lines nor did it endorse its product as a foreign brand though it could have. It's almost like they hid their real identity of being a foreign brand simply by not revealing the fact neither in ads nor in the wrapper or anywhere else.

The ads that endorsed Maggi in the Television picture, a small girl and a boy waiting eagerly for her mom to cook and serve Maggi. Once served, they happily eat their meal and go to play. To add, there was no hint of foreign hand in the brand.

So they kind of Indianized Maggi, established as a brand that every Indian can identify with and buy that product without any hesitation.

Coming back to Top Ramen, the first big mistake was that it entered Indian market late, maybe a couple of decades after Maggi came. (This is my assumption, I remember that Top Ramen was always available since my childhood, but I have a feeling that Top Ramen came later). So, they lost the early customers of the newly found food, instant noodles in India.

The Second mistake that Top Ramen did was they never considered localization in the early stages. They were proudly boasting a funky English Tag line "Don't be a noodle, be a smoodle". This does not connect with an average Indian who speaks native Hindi.

The Third mistake that Top Ramen did was to name the base flavor as "Macho Masala" instead of just "Masala", which means spice in Hindi. To be honest, I didn't know the exact meaning of macho until I looked up the dictionary. They thought that the young generation would be pretty impressed with a fancy name. What their marketing team could not see was that it was not children who usually buy noodles, but it was home makers who buy noodles and cook for their kids. Such a basic!!!

I recently bought Top Ramen noodles and have observed many changes in the wrapper. Top Ramen surely seems to have realized, though late, that they are lagging behind in localization, in connecting with the local public. They have taken few corrective measures such as renaming the flavor from "Macho Masala" to "Masala".

Smoodles has been renamed to Smooth Noodles, again, they might have thought smoodles sounds cool, but they have missed a point. House wives may not understand that smoodles means noodles. And they might come to a conclusion that this is not an Indian brand.

They have a clear highlight in the wrapper design that reads "PRODUCT OF INDIA".

Top Ramen noodles has come up with a competitive price tag of just Rs. 9/- in comparison with the present price of Maggi, Rs. 10/-

I would suggest Top Ramen Noodles to endorse their product with popular Indian celebrities, such as Preity Zinta or the younger Katrina Kaif, or Deepika Padukone. They should remove the section that boasts of Top Ramen Noodles as a brain child of its founder from Japan. Push really really hard into the market to catchup with Maggi.

Their target market is the city and town crowd of India. It may take many years before Top Ramen can become a household name like Maggi, they may never be able to reach Maggi's position too!