Markathon September-October 2010

Dear Readers,

Recently marketing enthusiasts at IIM Shillong underwent their IMC and Brand management courses and learnt quite a few jargons. One such term was Consumer Insight. We were told that a consumer insight is nothing but a latent need of a consumer waiting to be unravelled. It sounds so simple and easy to comprehend. But apparently this is what most companies and brands fail to comprehend. They tend to overlook the necessity to find out consumer insights and try and provide products catering to those latent needs.

Take a look at some of the latest headlines currently in news. “Stallio has been positioned as a stylish bike that comes with the reliability of the Mahindra brand, and therefore, gives complete peace of mind”.“Videocon Mobile Services’ new campaign is the end result of a syndicated research, which established that a majority of prepaid users are worried about running out of talk-time balance when they need it the most.”

What’s common to both these examples? The fact that the consumer insights have been used wisely to end up at a positioning for the respective products.

Mahindra unearthed the insight that Indian women tend to worry, when the men in their lives invest in two-wheelers. I personally am of the opinion that Mahindra has been bang on. This insight is so true.

Similarly Videocon has stumbled upon the insight that prepaid consumers are always worried about running out of talk time at the most crucial of times. This is very true, because majority of the prepaid users are ones who are short of cash, surviving on pocket money, the one living on daily wages and so on. So providing them with plans that give them peace of mind with simple and easy to use tariff plans makes complete commercial sense.

So in this issue’s cover story we though why not cover this aspect of marketing. So we have decided to feature a write up on an integral but often overlooked process of unravelling a consumer insight and that is MARKET RESEARCH.

We have Mr. Shiladitya Sarkar, Consultant to State Govt. of Tripura for IT Implementation on behalf of the IL&FS E-Governance Team, who is an expert in the field of Market Research and has worked with a variety of industries as a guest writer for this issue.

He talks to us about the various tools and techniques that are used in the field of MR, its strategic importance, the challenges and opportunities that the MR industry is confronted with and the variety of career openings this industry provides.

In the Vartalaap section we have Mr S Raghvan, Senior Vice President, Machinery & Industrial Products, Larsen & Toubro Ltd interacting with us. He tells about the evolution of brand L&T, the concept of B2B marketing, the importance of technology in customer relationship management and much more.

As a part of the continuous process that is change, based on reader’s feedback we have made ADdicted, Bookmark, Brand Story and Radical Thoughts bi-monthly columns. So readers will have two columns each month coming from the editorial team of Markathon.

So that’s that. J. Keep the feedback coming in and help us grow from strength to strength.

Happy Reading.

Kaushik Subramanian