Building strong tribe with positive vibe
“It costs much less to build strong community with influencers vs traditional marketing approach”.
In digital first economy, consumers have multi fold increased their search online before stepping into the physical retail world.
Your personal safety is a general recognition and avoidance of possible harmful situations or persons in your surroundings. More than 80% of us have faced personal emergencies in our lives at some time or the other. While most of us take responsibility for our personal safety, the Law of Self Exception “Nothing will ever happen to me, it will happen to someone else” syndrome gives us a false sense of security. Protecting your personal safety revolves around preventative thinking, taking sensible precautions and being aware of your surroundings. There are simple ways to improve your personal safety on a daily basis: most of which only require common sense or following good safety practices.
One of the new categories of Life Safety Services which is now getting globally popular is PERS (Personal Emergency Response Services). Demand for PERS in the global market is fueled by the trend towards Home Based Healthcare with the active participation of Private and Government Players, Mental Health disorders like Dementia, Alzheimer, Child Safety, Pet Safety, Baby Boomers, and Roadside Safety. Ambulance Services, SOS support in emergencies, Counselling Services, especially after Covid-19 and other personal safety needs.
Amidst ongoing challenges gripping us with the theory of lock & unlock we all have been continuously chasing new ways of getting back to live our normal life. Numerous stories on revenge watching(IPL), revenge shopping (The big online sales)
A lot goes as investment to create a product or service. But do you know that between 70% to 90% of these either fail or derail from the pre-decided plan. Either the offering doesn’t meet requirement of consumers or they don’t find requisite value which probably leads to this situation.
“You sell it and they may forget you You serve well and they may remember you always.”
This has been source of great inspiration for me as Sales & Marketing person working to create great memorable experiences in lifecycle journey of customers.
Post pandemic curves coupled with spike in unemployment has led to quite an uncertainty. There has been cuts in discretionary spends and people are more conscious of what to buy and consume.
It was 2015, I was at Chandigarh sitting in a plush office of Mr Juneja. Mr Juneja was the promoter of a hair oil brand Kesh King. The brand was launched somewhere in 2008 and within a short span of 6-7 years attained a turnover of Rs 250-275cr. Mr Juneja believed that it was beyond his means to scale it up further and therefore had put the brand up for sale commanding a valuation of Rs 1800- 2000 cr. It was amazing that a brand worth 250-275 cr could demand such high valuation. But such was the brand strength that all the major FMCG companies were ready to pay that price. (Finally Emami bought it for close to 1600 cr).
So, I was sitting in the conference room which overlooked the cabin of Mr Juneja. Mr Juneja was busy meeting with some people and we were told that they were large distributors who had come seeking distribution of Kesh King and guess what, they all had hefty advarice payments ready with them. I was quite stunned to see the brand power. Typically for a strong company like Dabur, finding a decent distributor was never easy. Here I was sitting witnessing something magical, distributors lining up to take up distributorship. On further inquiry I was told that there are a lot of areas where distribution is indirect through wholesale and for those areas Mr Juneja is finalizing distributors.
A few days ago, I got a message reminding me to recharge my DTH account. While I was recharging, I realized something startling. My package had some 400+ channels. What an amazing amount of clutter.
We live in the age of clutter. Reaching a consumer was relatively easy in 80s when you had one TV channel, few newspapers and a couple of radio channels.
Today there are more than 600 TV channels, 400 Newspapers & Magazines, 300 Radio channels, Omnipresent OOH, 10000 Cinema Halls beaming more than 40000 ads per week. All these ads are full of clichés, benefit clichés (e.g.- all shampoo ads have same benefits being promised to consumers), technology clichés, range clichés, promotion clichés, making them a blind spot in consumer’s mind. Misappropriation of brands is the biggest challenge that a brand manager faces today.
So, the challenge is how can advertising create an impact in consumer’s mind and be persuasive enough leading to purchase of the brand.
“ Why around 80% CMO’s Don’t Make It. What It Takes To Get To The Top”.
The top marketing job in the company is a minefield where many talented executives have failed. While some of this is attributable to the ambiguity of the role itself, its also a function of how a CMO builds consensus among his / her other C-suite peers and looks at his / her department more in terms of the business impact it delivers and not merely a function relegated to marketing activities.
The core principle of Marketing comes from an intersection of science + art + human behaviour. As a lot of you will be starting or planning to accelerate your marketing careers, I am happy to share 5 essential skills that have helped me to be a successful marketer.