With apologies to none at all
A very interesting article popped into my inbox this morning. It spoke about the role of product managers in consumer-facing tech companies. The article was triggered because Zomato had placed a live order count which a consumer can see after s/he places an order. You can see it here.
It seems that the feature was dissed on social media, mostly by the Product Manager types. Most were questioning the use of this feature. Did it help the consumer? How does it add value? Why is Zomato wasting time on features which do not help the user? You get the drift.
The author of the piece moaned the fact that product managers are becoming too bureaucratic. Everything that is build into a product today, has to be justified with metrics or some quantitative outcome. Everything has to be about productivity and efficiency. Unlike, say, Google which in the 2000s encouraged its employees to spend 20% of their time working on things, besides their projects which may benefit Google. Or the Google Doodles which are an intrinsic feature of the brand today.
The author said that product managers forget that some things can be done for fun. Or to give the product a cool quotient. That’s what the Zomato live order count was doing.
Fun? Cool? Let the consumer have an emotional connect?
Sounds familiar?
I may be a bit old-fashioned but isn’t that what a brand does regularly.
The problem is that new age products are just products. Not brands.
That’s why they are being run by product managers. Not brand managers.
That’s why the obsession with product feature which creates a better value for the product. Never mind if it will be copied soon.
You don’t believe me.
Ok, then. Here is a small test.
You prefer Ola or Uber?
Do you use only Zomato or Swiggy too.
Can you actually differentiate between Blinkit and Zepto?
I bet you use all these products that I mentioned above.
You have all these apps installed on your phones.
And you use all depending upon an offer or a cheaper option or just because someone gives you a better loyalty programme.
And I am not even getting into Vivo or Oppo!!!
So, the question is why are we building better products and not great brands?
Why are the new age products not building brands?
The easy answer is that the obsession with data and quantitative metrics, while being a welcome change from the days when marketers would struggle to gauge the efficacy of an advertising campaign due to lack of data, has made us jump to the other end of the spectrum. If anything cannot be explained by data then it’s of no use.
A product differentiates with its features. All the new age products and the products which have thrived due to the proliferation of data focus on this aspect.
But a brand differentiates in many other ways. It could differentiate with its pricing or distribution strategy. Air Deccan or Indigo and sachets do it well.
It could differentiate with its advertising and emotional appeal. Remember Amazon with Aur Dikhao campaign or Flipkart with kids acting as adults? Remember the Vodafone Zoozoo campaigns? Or Abhishek Bachchan with what an idea sirjee for Idea.
Or brand can differentiate with its service. In appliances, Philips has done an amazing job by harnessing local electricians to start service centres available in every nook and corner of the country.
And brands also differentiate on the basis of their personality. Coke is fun but more in a family way. It’s a bit more mature. A bit more real. Pepsi on the other hand is fun which is rebel. Fun which appeals to the non-conformist. Fun which is flamboyant and maybe even in your face.
That’s why the shift happened from product management to brand management. That’s why a Hindustan Unilever could have more than four brands of soaps. three brands of detergents, four brands of tea, three brands of skin care……… The difference was what each brand stood for and whom it targeted. And that helped HUL gain leadership in each of the product categories.
By having brand managers and not product managers.
These brand managers would build differentiating brands.
But the new age products, and I cannot bring myself to calling them a brand, are too focused on building better products.
Let me tell you for brand managers also the big challenge was to innovate their product regularly. In categories like soaps and detergents. And they would. But because they would focus on brand and not just a product, they would look beyond the packaging, or the fragrance or an enticing offer. Sometimes it would be just memorable advertising.
Fun anyone? Cool anyone?
Or sometimes it would be combination of packaging and pricing.
Godrej No1 launched Buy-3-Get-1 free, not as a promotion but as the only option available. It was a win-win for everyone. The retailer would gladly tear the combined pack and give individual soaps to consumer. Remember, he had one soap free so on that he would get full MRP as his margin. Or he could sell the one piece below MRP. So, even the consumer was happy.
Brand building is also strategic. Jio launched not with the conventional pricing strategy of talk time plus sms plus some data but with data-led pricing. Calls and smses were free. The strategic thinking was that data was the real deal, not talk time. So, the whole product was built around data. And the product was turned into a brand with data lead pricing. And with the brand being free for first nine months, data users were happy to buy a new sim. The total nine-month free offer coupled with the earlier cheap plans created a perception that as a brand, Jio was cheaper. Today, when Jio is not really the cheapest, the brand perception of being inexpensive persists. And sponsoring IPL year after year helped gain massive exposure
Phew! See the well-thought-out strategy that covered almost all aspects of marketing.
To me, building products and not brands is also the sign of times.
Brands take a longer time to build. Products can come and go. Already Zomato is saying that its revenues from Blinkit will overtake Zomato this year. So, why build a brand when new products can be arrived at. Why worry about brand extensions or line extensions when one can just name a new product and call it a brand.
Avoiding brand building is being lazy. Quick results. Not necessarily in terms of profits. But in terms of valuations, Gross Merchandising Value or even IPOs. Targetting a focused customer is not the deal but targetting VCs is.
So, will the new age products change?
They better. Because the first new age product Google, built a brand and is still going strong. But Yahoo search and many such others built products which just disappeared.
Will Zomato, Uber and Blinkit survive by the time your children grow up? That is the million-dollar question.