“Brands have assumed the role of a mother,
a friend and even a guardian angel”
The changing consumer tastes
A catchy song, some fancy cartoon characters and a story line
that shows them trying foolish steps and ending up
hurting themselves. No, this wasn’t a promo for an upcoming
Disney movie. It was an ad campaign launched
by Metro trains in Melbourne, Australia, promoting rail
safety. The campaign, launched with the theme, ‘Dumb
Ways to Die’ was an instant hit and was soon trending all
over on the social media.
A decade or two ago, who could have thought that those
boring text laden railway safety posters get so interactive?
Perhaps, that’s the beauty of marketing, it gives you
more than expected. The marketers have realized that
their job is not to promote the products but to promote
the utility that their product serves. When Nike launched
its campaign, ’Just Do It’, somewhere in the late 1980s,
it had similar objectives in mind. Before that it exclusively
catered to the sports professionals. But in the 80s, trend to stay fit emerged among the masses and Nike
struck at the right time to gain an edge over its primary
competitor ‘Reebok’. The ‘Just Do It’ campaign was targeted
towards the health conscious people for whom
fitness mattered and were willing to toil for it. It encapsulated
the feeling that they had, when they were
half way down the exercise routine and were about
to give up. But then, somewhere from deep within, a
voice emerged and coerced them to go on. That voice
was ‘Just Do It’. And it still inspires people. Here Nike
didn’t directly promote its brand or product but the
very utility that it served. As a result, its sales shot up
from $800 million in 1988 to over $9.2 billion by 1998.
However, the trends have changed over the years.
Now brands don’t just sell articles that you buy when
you need them but they have assumed the role of a
mother (Johnson and Johnson’s), a friend (Bagpiper)
and even a guardian angel (Max New York). Companies have realized that demand or trend may change but a
relationship lasts forever, that’s why the campaigns are
now addressed in such a way that the customer believes
that the brands care about him. When P&G designed its
‘Thank You,Mom’ campaign for the 2010 Winter Games,
it didn’t had any particular product in mind. The campaign
was aimed to present the brand as the sponsor of
moms who toiled and sacrificed to prepare their babies
to shine at the world stage. As Mr. Pritchard, P&G Global
Brand Building Officer, told in an interview, “We found
a lot of times that when people know a brand is from
P&G they feel better about the brand”, he further added,
“And when they know P&G has all these brands, they
feel better about P&G.” That’s how he succinctly sums
up the shift that marketing has taken now.
Doing it with a rapture
Marketing is about capturing the imagination of the populace.
As the imagination can move forward in leaps and
bounds, so marketing has to keep pace. But the challenge
has shifted to a different level in the twenty first century,
with the emergence of digital technology and social media,
the demarcation between the regions has dissolved
and this intermingling has posed forward a complex situation
for the marketers who now have to cater to a more
informed and an ever more global audience. As Marshall
McLuhan puts it, “Historians and archaeologists will one
day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and
most faithful daily reflections any society ever made of
its whole range of activities.” One of the most remarkable
marketing campaign of 2014, i.e. the election campaign
of BJP stands a testimony to his statement.
Even after all these evolutions, the fundamental principles
of marketing remain the same. The difference
lies in understanding the subtleties and implementing
them in innovative and creative ways. The most successful
of campaigns aren’t the ones which involved some
rocket science, but they are the ones which captured
something so simple that people had kept ignoring it. The
‘Tap Water’ campaign by UNICEF was one such initiative.
Launched on the World Water Day 2007, the campaign
has raised more than $2.5 million till date to support UNICEF’s
initiative to provide drinking water to poor children.
The campaign involved asking people to donate $1 along
with their restaurant bill to help UNICEF provide potable
water to a child for forty days. The idea behind the campaign,
was very simple as explained by Mr. David Droga,
the agency founder and creative head of Droga5, the
agency behind the campaign. The idea struck his mind
when once, upon a casual visit to a restaurant, he was
served a glass of drinking water by the waiter, as soon as
he took his seat. He put on his thinking cap and wondered
that despite so much branding of the water by the companies,
one of the largest consumed water, i.e. tap water,
remained unbranded. He soon brainstormed to find an
idea to brand the tap water and came out with the ‘Tap
Water Campaign’ of UNICEF, where people were asked to
pay $1 for that complementary glass of water.
Towards a digitized ecosystem
Digital marketing has emerged as one of the greatest disruptors
ever, in the field of marketing. The advantage offered
is that the marketers can more interactively engage
with their audience and the scope for targeted marketing
enhances manifold. Digital marketing offers huge depth
and breadth in terms of achievable synergy. Here, the
brands don’t have to invest huge amount of money to get
noticed. If the content is good, the consumers themselves
act as promoter and in the virtual world; it doesn’t take
long for something to go viral. The marketing is usually
content driven here and is almost impossible for a brand
to force something down the throat of a customer until
and unless he likes it. But a thing that necessarily needs
to be there in a successful digital campaign is creativity
and innovation. The ‘ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’ took the
concept to a new level. It elicited donation for the ALS patients through an interesting challenge, which was circulated
through the online world. The participants had
to pour a bucket of ice over them within 24 hours of receiving
the challenge, and if, however, they failed to do
so, they required to make a donation to the ‘ALS Association’.
The campaign saw the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
Oprah Winfrey, Akshay Kumar, etc. participating and the
others like Barack Obama, David Cameron, etc. who politely
declined and chose to make a donation instead.
Collage: self-composed
But along with the perks, the digital world also has its
disadvantages. The dissatisfied customers can badmouth
the company to a much larger extent than they were
previously able to do. Amul was at the receiving end in
one such incident when Ms. Neha Tomar posted a pic on
her Facebook account on 10th October, 2014, showing
a packet of ‘Amul Gold’ milk along with another image
attached with it, which depicted a hardened elastic material
which she claimed to be the same milk, gone rancid.
The matter was soon in public domain with a litany
of comments thrashing Amul, which later came out with
a clarification accusing Neha to have forged the post
and images. Although Amul showed promptness in the
above case to divert a fiasco but this incident highlights
the potential of the digital media to tarnish the image of
a brand by any common dissatisfied customer. A flurry
of outrages happened when Flipkart failed to satisfy the
customers during its mega sales on ‘Big Billion Day’.
Brands have to maintain a constant vigil on social media
to monitor the news, posts and tweets trending about
them. But sometimes this promptness can also be a cause
of concern for the brands and may result in embarrassment.
Flipkart burnt it hands multiple times when it tried
to address the consumer grievances on twitter. One of
the famous trolls occurred when a consumer complaint
that he was facing problems with the payment gateway
while trying to buy an iPhone. When Flipkart asked him
to share the details, he replied that there is no Kidney on
Delivery option that the people keep talking about.
As 19th century US author Ralph Waldo Emerson puts
it, “This time like all times is a good one, if we but know
what to do with it.” The marketing has seized to be an isolated
department in brands and now it has shifted more
towards the overall functioning of the brand. It involves
coherence and a single mistake or non-alignment to the
central image can turn into a fiasco. But at the same
time, it presents an epochal opportunity for the markets
to foray into the segments; they have never gone into before.
Marketing has gone through many changes but the
challenges and opportunities faced in the present time
have been unprecedented. Any reluctance on the part
of marketers to adapt to the changes can be suicidal, like
the Kodak and Nokia case. The twenty first century has
made the marketers realize the intransigency of presence
like never before. The brand can be the leader in a
segment on one day and can be finished the other due to
lack of imagination. So, marketing has to integrate itself
with the brand in such a way that neither the employees
nor the customers can distinguish between the two. This
is going to be the key in the coming times. Because only
in such a case, it will be able to form a long-term relation
with the customer and gain the loyalty, which is much
needed to survive in the long term.
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