The power of CEOspeak

The Hindustan Times reports:

“We have not and will not lay off no matter how bad it gets, even if recessionary trends get worse,” said Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies.

CEOs have this power. A single statement from the CEO can impact the company’s image in a manner that thousands of marketing dollars may not achieve.

At a time when the corporate world is leaving no stone unturned to cut costs, a statement like this requires courage, conviction and confidence. It sends out positive signals not only to employees, but also to customers and shareholders.

Incidentally, Vineet is one of the few Indian CEOs who blog regularly. Vineet’s blog is a great grazing place for unconventional fodder.

Insurance, get a life

I was appalled to see this HDFC Standard Life Insurance ad on television last night.

Agreed, to sell insurance you sometimes need to take the fear route, but to instill the fear of losing their daddies in children (agar aapke papa ghum ho gaye toh?), and then feeding on that fear to sell life insurance to the parent is insensitive, cheesy, even reckless.

And the timing! Releasing this offensive ad at a time when the country is recovering from a terror strike is as insensitive as it gets. Business mercenaries would of course argue that there's nothing wrong in striking the iron when it's hot.

By comparison, I find the Pepsi "suicide ads" far less offensive.

Testing times for Arjuna

This animation video has been floating around on the web.



Apparently, this is a TV ad made by JWT for Sulekha.com and it has been soft-launched on the Internet "to check people’s reactions to it before releasing it on television,” reports afaqs!

Online Reputation Management or Customer Satisfaction?

Last Sunday, I watched on bemused as three executives from Club Mahindra (a holiday timeshare brand) staged a funny pitch (they call it "presentation"). Will spare you the details, but in case you're interested, it was quite similar to this.

Curious about what people felt about Club Mahindra, I turned to Google and was hit with scores of pages that painted Club Mahindra in the brightest shades (examples here, here & here). However, most of these sites/blogs seemed to have been created by the company/employees.

I scratched the surface and came across a lot of outbursts against Club Mahindra: tales of anger, disgruntlement, disenchantment and frustration, to name a few.

I scratched some more and discovered that Club Mahindra has been sponsoring blogger meets at their resorts. It looks like the initiative has paid off. The invited bloggers have sung praises in Club Mahindra's favour (examples here, here & here).

It looks like Club Mahindra has focussed heavily on acquiring a clean online reputation, especially since their IPO is due. The favourable blogs have actually managed to push down the complaints, as far as search engine pageranks are concerned. However, I still maintain (as I had written in an earlier post) that in today's connected world, people will eventually find out the what other customers feel about your brand. It would help to dedicate time and energy to become more customer-centric than trying to manufacture online reputation. Perhaps it could have saved Club Mahindra this unenviable distinction.

Thoughts are welcome in the Comments section.

"Brand is shorthand for...

the collection of experiences and memories and expectations that people have for what it's going to be like to deal with you the next time."

Two business thought leaders I hold in very high esteem--Seth Godin and Tom Peters--express their views on what a brand is in today's networked world in this video.

Remote sensing

Picture this. An ad that you find terribly irritating appears on TV. You pick up the remote and switch channels immediately. The 'click' on your remote is captured and fed into a feedback system for the advertiser.

This is already happening in the US--albeit in a limited manner--thanks to Google's deal with EchoStar's Dish Network. Google's plans obviously go beyond just a feedback system. The Internet giant's foray into television advertising is a step towards changing the way TV ad inventories are bought and sold.

"Can Google Crack the TV Ad Market?", asks Brian Morrissey in a piece on Adweek.
[Pic credit: Michael König]

(Customer) Happiness is a state of being

"It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy," writes Seth Godin in a blogpost titled Destroying Happiness.

While this seems obvious, in reality there are very few companies who take the job of 'keeping existing customers happy' seriously. Take a look around you. New customers are getting better deals on home loans than the old, loyal ones. "Sales desks" and "Service desks" often present pictures of stark contrast. Many credit card companies promise lifetime free cards to new customers while happily billing annual fee to existing customers.

Companies often rely on ugly "pain of switching" tactics to keep their existing customers from straying, while they go on a wooing spree to get in new customers. For instance, loan providers do it by imposing a steep balance transfer foreclosure fee.

In today's connected world, there's no bigger advertising than referral by a happy customer. No amount of Marcom spin can match that. Keeping customers happy goes much beyond sending them mail-merged birthday greetings. It includes taking a hard look at your business processes to ensure that the existing customer gets more than she expects.

Do you want bad word-of-mouth to negate your advertising? Or positive word-of-mouth to take your advertising to the realm of believability? Take your pick. This or this.

Did you search for a saree?

I don't know about others, but this saree has definitely caught the attention of bloggers. The designer (Satya Paul?) could've put the sponsored links on the blouse :)

Idiot box gets smarter

Targeted ads are all set to hit the television. Not in India, not just yet, but in the US.

Six of the largest cable operators in the US have jointly launched a startup that will use customer data to beam targeted ads.

“The vision is to put dog food ads only in front of customers who have dogs and to give people the ability to push a button on their remotes and order a coupon or a brochure, or buy a product,” says the CEO of the new venture.

Red Herring has the details.

Hip, Innovative, Madonna, Airline, Atlantic...

Apparently these are some of the words that are most associated with the brand Virgin.

An online project by Noah Brier tries to capture brand perception by having people like you and me tag brands with words/phrases that pop up in our heads when we hear the brandname.

Some of the things you can do on the site are:

• View the words/phrases that people have associated with popular brands


• Tag brands with your word/phrase association


• Guess the brand by looking at its tags
  

Go, have some fun at Brand Tags.

Make big promises; overdeliver

"If you can define great marketing in fewer words than that, you win," says Seth Godin.

This is something we Marcom professionals struggle with almost every day. If there is some obvious promise in a product/service, we shout it out from the rooftops. We often end up highlighting the shiny parts of the promise, cleverly 'hiding' the jagged edges using asterisks, fineprint or some such. The result is dangerous--trusting customers turn into cynics, love turns into mistrust and topline turns southward.

Marketeers often think of their roles as getting the customers to the purchase point and nothing beyond. "Our job is to get the horse to the water but we cannot make it drink." The fact is if the horse doesn't drink, everybody will perish.

Real marketing is all about telling believable but remarkable stories and then delivering an experience that takes the story to a new realm of believability. Easier said than done, or as Seth Godin puts it, "Just because it's only four words doesn't mean it's easy!"

Packaging with a twist

Can you guess what these are? Find out here.

[Pic source: TheDieline.com]

Hitting the nail on the headline

My last post was about headlines gone awry. This one is about a headline that hits the nail on the head.

Full-bodied headlines

Headlines like this are proof that we often know what to say but don't know how to say it. "How do you always know when I'll need the supplies?" would have been much easier to process.

Here's a grab from the homepage of the same company. Three font colours, two font sizes and two pairs of quote-marks in the headline just to make the immensely complex sentence at least look processable!!!

Tom Peters doesn't click

...on banner ads.

One way to get yourself heard above the cacophony

...is to hold a conversation. Literally as well as figuratively.

Weekend shoppers in a Navi Mumbai mall are all eyes and ears as MTV VJ Rannvijay engages in friendly banter with Big FM RJ Rishi at the finals of the Reliance World GameBox National Championship

Looking back

Tomorrow is Oscar Night (Oscar Dawn for us in India).

On the eve of the 80th Academy Awards, Movie Poster Addict has compiled the posters of all 79 past winners in the best picture category.

[Pic source: grebo guru, flickr]

Brand Personality--Should it mirror the consumer?

Brands interact with consumers. The brand is not the consumer. Sounds simple enough, but it often gets forgotten when a brand is being architected.

Defining a brand's personality is an exercise agencies and their clients love to indulge in. Everybody knows the theory--if the brand were a person, what kind of person would it be? However, most often the brand personality that emerges out of a quagmire of colorful powerpoints is an exact replica of the target consumer's personality.

Say we need to define the personality of a state-of-the-art tractor brand aimed at the rural prosperous farmer in his mid 40s. My guess is we'd be immediately tempted to assign the farmer's stereotypical personality traits to the brand--hard working, rich, rooted, etc. (albeit only after much heated debate over colourful powerpoint slides teeming with boxes, triangles, circles, arrows and keyholes!)

Slapping the target consumer's personality traits on the brand is not always wrong. In fact, it works in many cases. However, marketers must be open to the suggestion that the brand personality can also be distinctly different from the consumer's personality.

For instance, can the tractor brand be architected around the personality of the farmer's son, who, say, is getting modern education in a leading university? The son is the farmer's window to the modern world and the farmer (and his family) shares a lovely relationship with the son. The typical traits that would then emerge for the tractor brand are--smart, technology-savvy, wordly-wise, etc. Agreed, I'm assuming a lot of things here, but I'm just trying to illustrate with an example.

A brand's personality could include traits that the consumer aspires to emulate, or it could be a personality that the consumer absolutely loves or is pleasantly intrigued by. A brand enters into a relationship with the consumer and two people in a relationship need not be identical. David Aaker has an academic take on this in his book Building Strong Brands (excerpt here).

There are two problems with brands blindly mirroring consumer personalities. One, by creating a brand that is a mirror image of the consumer and nothing more, we stop selling aspiration. Two, we lose out on interesting relationship opportunities. "The consumer will not identify with this" is a much abused statement that branding professionals have to contend with every time they try to sculpt a brand with personality traits that are not exhibited by consumers.

I'm definitely not saying that brands must always be positioned diametrically opposite their consumer personality. In fact, many successful brands colour themselves in the hue of their consumers and yet are roaring successes. However, very interesting brand personalities could emerge if brand managers and marketers pause and think about traits that are close to their consumers' heart and yet are different.

Brands and consumers engage in relationships. At the end of the day, consumers judge a brand by the result of the relationship, no matter whether the brand reflects her personality or not. Surely, brands do not want to end up in a relationship like this.

Indian brands like Kingfisher and Raymond have developed and maintained well defined personalities through the years. Would love reader reactions on what they think are the personality traits of these brands.