MxMIndia

Tag: marketer

  • Taking your brand to the emotional level involves cutting through the clutter to link the 'soul' of your brand with the 'soul' of the people, says Veetika Deoras

    The Anchor: Veetika Deoras on 5 highs of being a marketer

    By Veetika Deoras

     

    1. It’s a ‘soul-to-soul’ job

    To build deeper and richer connections with customers, brands must arise above the rational benefits and build emotional bridges. Taking your brand to the emotional level involves cutting through the clutter to link the ‘soul’ of your brand with the ‘soul’ of the people. This necessitates reaching out to your right brain, as much, if not more, than the left brain. And more often than not, this ends up being a very fulfilling and heartwarming experience.

     

    2. Thinking out-of-the-box

    Overload of communication, multiple media vehicles and an ever-evolving customer, necessitate out-of-the-box thinking and innovation, in both the planning and execution of marketing campaigns. This makes a marketer’s job challenging and ensures that there’s never a dull moment.

     

    3. Proximity to customers

    With customers, brands and the environment changing constantly, there is a critical need for marketers to be in constant touch with their customers. To reach out to customers, and observe and understand their behaviour, with a view to garner deep insights is a highly fruitful and enjoyable experience.

     

    4. The debates

    In some interesting way, marketers have always had the dual challenge of selling their ideas, first to internal stakeholders and then to external stakeholders. The debates make the job most invigorating, the output superior and the victories, sweet.

     

    5. Satisfaction of creating an ‘intangible’, which yields results better than most tangibles.

    How often does one get the chance to say – I have created a ‘perception’, a ‘bond’, a ‘genuine promise’ and this perceptual bond, based on a genuine promise is worth a billion bucks! This probably is the biggest high for me as a marketer.

     

    Veetika Deoras is Head – Brand Marketing & Corporate Communication, Tata Capital Limited

     

  • Marketers should define their category by the way their customers see it, rather than the way the industry sees it, says Suman Srivastava

    The Anchor: Suman Srivastava on 5 Reasons why Marketing is a Creative Business

    By Suman Srivastava

     

    1. The marketer has to define the category he is in:

    Marketers should define their category by the way their customers see it, rather than the way the industry sees it wrote Theodore Levitt in Marketing Myopia. This is true even today. One can argue that a discount airline and a full service airline operate in different categories, even though they both fly planes.

     

    2. Pricing has become an art and not an accountancy exercise:

    Cost plus pricing is dead. Today consumers live in a “free” economy. Musicians give away their music for free from their websites and then make money on the concerts and the merchandize. Printers in the USA cost less than a full set of cartridges in them. Go figure.

     

    3. Marketers increasingly sell augmented products:

    You never just buy the car. You buy the car and the service and the resale value. As products become more commoditized, the pressure is on the marketer to differentiate the product in some other way. Hyundai offered to buy back cars from people who lost their jobs in America. That ensured that it increased its market share in a declining market.

     

    4. In India, creative distribution ideas can truly disrupt markets:

    Cavin Kare changed the rules of the game by launching shampoos in sachets. They started a revolution that has extended from personal care products to telecom (prepaid cards). Sachets could be placed in the smallest of stores and be within reach of the poorest of customers.

     

    5. Advertising doesn’t work as well as it did before, so marketers need to think of unique brand experiences:

    Smirnoff is not allowed to advertise, so it created a series of events where consumers were taught to make cocktails. These were fun events where the consumers left after not just having a few drinks, but also learning the right way to make and serve cocktails. Beats a 30 sec TVC any day.

     

    Suman Srivastava is Founder & Innovation Artist at Marketing Unplugged, a firm that helps firms create marketing innovations