Soil markezine Feb

Featured Articles

Reader’s Message Bottom of the Pyramid-Emerging Target To Marketers

Effective Marketing Strategies for Start-ups

Re-Thinking The 4P’S In The B2B World Fight for mindshare of customers

Can brands be Immortal? Crossword

Gamification- An Emerging Trend in Digital Marketing

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CONTENTS

February 2013

Hello Readers!!Team MARkezine is back with the February edition.HUL’s advertising on ‘rotis’ at the Kumbh Mela - ‘ Lifebuoy se haath dhoye kya?’. Isn’t it a fascinating idea to advertise a product?

The world is changing at a rapid pace and so is the Marketing world. And that is how we decided to come up with a MARkezine Edition which will capture the essence of things that are happening around.

We start the edition by recalling the term which was first coined by Dr. C.K Prahalad - Bottom of Pyramid. We see the several aspects put to practice by FMCG companies like HUL. Next, we have pointers for the budding entrepreneurs to engage in Effective Marketing for Start-Ups. Once the Marketing concepts for the Start-Ups have sunk in we see how the 4 P’s differ for a Business to Business scenario.

In the previous edition we have discussed a lot around Brands and now is the time to debate a question like Can Brands be Immortal? Let’s see the ease with which our readers will be able to think through the question. What follows is “Gamification” unveiled.

And this is where we end with a promise to be back with fresh content from the Marketing space.

Happy reading..!!Team MARkezine

Editing and Design:Ishwarya Lakshmi | Sheeza Shakeel | Shivaraj

SCHOOL of INSPIRED LEADERSHIPCMARKezine1

Reader’s Message

February 2013

SCHOOL of INSPIRED LEADERSHIPC MARKezine 2

The phrase “bottom of the pyramid” was used by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in his April 7, 1932 radio address, The Forgotten Man, in which he said “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power...that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”Bottom of Pyramid refers to the billions of people living on less than $2 per day, as first defined in 1998 by Profes-sors C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart. The size of this largely untapped market is Staggering. Four billion people live on $1500 per year or less.

(Source: http://www.phibetaiota.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/economic-pyramid.jpg)

Over the next 40 years the numbers in Lowest Tier (BOP) could swell to 6-8 billion or more since the bulk of the world’s population growth is expected to come from this segment. Poor of today is the middle-class of tomorrow. Yet, this sector has been largely neglected by the corporations. The real challenge is to visualize an active market when what exists is ab-ject poverty. It is almost the equivalent of visualizing a theme park where you see a swamp

One of the best examples to understand the impli-cations of BOP is that of Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), a subsidiary of Unilever. For over 50 years, it catered to the needs of the top of the pyramid. And then a local firm, Nirma, came into picture and soon challenged HLL in its detergent business, by creat-ing a new business system, a new product formula-tion, new manufacturing process, distribution, pack-aging, and pricing. HLL like most MNCs, initially dismissed Nirma as a low end producer. It was not thought to be a competitor in HLL’s “served market.” But as Nirma grew rapidly, HLL realized both its new opportunity as well as its vulnerability. Nirma was attacking from the bottom of the pyramid. HLL has to respond with its own offering for this market -al-tering its traditional HLL business model.

The bottom of the pyramid is not a market that yields high margins. It is rather about volume (since the unit sales are going to be high) and capital

Bottom of the Pyramid-Emerging Target To Marketers“Like the tip of an iceberg, the opportunity remains invisible to the corporate world.” —C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Har

February 2013

efficiency.

Managers who focus on gross margins will miss the opportunity. Managers who innovate and focus on the overall economic profit will be rewarded.HLL then used the learned business principles to create a new detergent market among the poor in Brazil. The detergent brand “Ala” has been a huge success in Brazil. In fact Unilever has adopted the bottom of the pyramid as a strategic priority at the corporate level.(Source- Presentation by John Ripley, Senior Vice President, Unilever, at the academy of management meeting, August 10, 1999)

Before Corporations could convert the poor into a potential customer base, they need to re-examine their dominant logic - the core set of assumptions and practices that are embedded in the firm. The fol-lowing were identified as some of the widely shared orthodoxies that must change:

Assumption 1: The poor are not our target consumers because with our current cost structures, we cannot profitably compete for that market

Assumption 2: The poor cannot afford and have no use for the prod-ucts and services sold undeveloped markets.

Assumption 3: Only developed markets appreciate and will pay for new technology. The poor can use the previous gen-eration of technology

Assumption 4: The bottom of the pyramid is not important to the long-term viability of our business. We can leave Tier 4 to governments and nonprofits.


February 2013


Assumption 5: Managers are not excited by business challenges that have a humanitarian dimension.

Assumption 6: Intellectual excitement is in developed markets. It is hard to find talented managers who want to work at the bottom of the pyramid(Source- Japan External Trade Organization, 2009_BOP_Executive Research Associates)Because of these assumptions the market opportu-nity at the bottom of the pyramid has remained in-visible. It is often treated as irrelevant with no use of products, no buying power, no knowledge of brands and difficult to reach. It is like the well-known story of the person who finds a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Conventional economic wisdom suggests that if the bill really existed, someone would have already picked it up. Like the $20 bill, the BOP also defies conventional economic logic— it represents a large and unexplored territory for profitable growth.

According to Lirneasia research, 41% of the BOP in Sri Lanka owns their own phones and 21% of them are mobile phones. Another 31% is planning to buy a phone. But 28% is not planning to buy, mostly be-cause they cannot afford to buy. This can be a pri-mary market for telecentres in Sri Lanka, according to Prof Rohan Samarajiva of Lireneasia. The growing awareness among the big corporations regarding the profit potential of BOP can be seen in the initiative taken by them lately. Free Energy Europe developed cheap solar panels for the remote markets in Brazil, Kenya and Indonesia. Fiat and Tata are develop-ing cheap cars for the Indian market, that will costs 100.000 Rupees.Unilever developed for the same market Anapurna Salt, salt with jodium, Grameen

Bank and Danone build next year a yoghurt factory in Bangladesh. Hindustan Lever has been investing in a distribution network of women in remote areas to sell soap, toothpaste and washing powder in their villages

All this is based more on mutual benefits rather than what critics ‘assume’ good for the poor. For Instance: USAID wanted to use the Hindustan Lever network to distribute malaria medicines but HLL believe in asking the network first what they needed most. They found that diarrhoea was a bigger problem. Now the network also distributes a cheap water purification product that can deal with 8 -12 litres a day, enough for an average family in the country side. To tap this market managers must first develop a commercial infrastructure tailored to the needs and challenges; which will comprise of Creating buying power, shap-ing aspirations, improving access, and tailoring lo-cal solutions— the four elements intertwined .Inno-vation in one will leverages innovation in the others

(Source- Strategies for the bottom of pyramid: Creat-ing sustainable development_C.K. Prahald, Univer-sity of Michigan Business School)

In this article have just been able to sketch the out-line of what seems to be the biggest potential market

February 2013

opportunity in the history of commerce. It would also mean lifting billions of people out of poverty and destitution; eliminating the root cause of social discrimination, political chaos and environmental meltdown in short fostering sustainable develop-ment!!

“The quality, efficacy, potency, and usability solutions developed for the BOP Markets are very attractive for the top of the pyramid”

Submitted by:Esha GuptaTAPMI (2nd Year)

References: Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: An Alternate Perspective –Anand Kumar Jaiswal

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/

2007-07-13Jaiswal.pdf

http://www.economist.com/node/18863898


February 2013

Start-up built up by the words ‘start’ and ‘up’ where both the words are innovative and creative. It means starting from scratch and rising upwards and reach-ing the zenith. For several people it is the source of their zeal that drives them towards excellence and competence. And to drive their start up towards suc-cess it needs proper nurturing, operations, care and most of all marketing. Unless and until the buzz for the start-up is not built in the market it is difficult to drive them forward. Once it becomes famous and people know of it then the real boom come. Many a times we see that the start-up rise so fast, that it becomes unmanageable and thus the buzz fizzes out soon and the start-up gets lost in the dark. Now in order to reach the zenith lets ponder upon the points that can lead to proper marketing and thus sustain-able success of start-up.

1. Get the Idea Right Before setting up the business one must brain-storm on the idea strongly. For this one must talk to indus

try experts, start-up ex-perts, entrepreneurs. By discussing on the idea they will be able to fig-ure out the nitty-gritty of

the business, understand various small aspects that one needs to take care before starting. The better you know the idea, the better you can connect with your business and thus you can build better relationship with the customers as you will be able to connect to their needs and expectations and your venture.

Some simple questions that one needs to ask one-self is Why this IDEA? Why THIS Business? What DIFFERENCE will it make in the society/market? What PAIN-Points does it solve? How MUCH cost-ing, sales and profits will we achieve? The more you ask business to yourself the more the idea will get re-fined and the more chances are there for its success.

2. Market AnalysisSeveral times start-up fails because they study their market incorrectly and make false assump-tions which later lead to severe consequences. This will help entrepre-

neurs remove their biasness towards their product. All the macro and micro - environment trends should be checked and looked for while doing the research like demographic, economic, technological, political,


Effective Marketing Strategies for Start-ups

February 2013


social, cultural, material supply, etc. Now there are some points to consider

choosing market:i. Market Size: Is the segmentation and targeting done correctly to meet the demographic needs. Are the customers aware of your product?

ii. Market Potential: What is the potential of the mar-ket, will it be able to sustain the needs of the market.

iii. Market competition: Is the competition to fierce that your product might get eliminated?

iv. Value proposition: Is your value proposition strong and unique enough to make its way into the market.

3. Setting appropriate Targets:

Be sure to make the targets objective and achievable. It should be consistent with the com-pany line of thought and product/service. The targets can be set by

benchmarking the product against the competitors so that you can see what all area are going good and what needs improvements. It can be anything that is achievable and clearly defined as in 1000 new sign-ups or new customer in coming quarter. Along with this the short term objectives should be aligned to the long term goals. Also the conversion rate should be measured so that more realistic and aligned tar-gets can be set next time.

4. Create your Brand and start building awareness of it: Now that you know the Point of Difference (POD)that your start-up is going to solve. You establish

your business and start selling your brand. Now the brands can be built on name, logo, idea, slo-gan and design of your company. This is the way to build way into

the customers mind and heart. This can be done by crafting meaningful positioning statements.

Now in order to market the brand you need to decide the key points or POD that you are going to highlight when you are going to build your brand. The Tag-line, logo, name has to catchy that can easily high-light the idea and get the attention of the customers. Here the market research done will help what your customers are expecting, how you can align your product according to their needs. And best of all, it will provide deeper insight how you should advertise your product and services to the target customers.

Being a start-up one needs to start marketing at moderate costs but using the techniques which pen-etrates the market and reaches to customers.

Some of the points that can be considered are following:i. Build public relations: The best way to be known in the market is to be in the market. The more you know and have reached in the market the more you will be able to connect to your potential customers. This can be done through distributing leaflets, brochures, pamphlets and oth-er traditional advertising that makes your product known. Again flashmob is a new and innovative idea to market your product and create a fan-following for your idea.

February 2013


ii. E-mail marketing:

Try to get the list of emails of the potential custom-ers. Through this technique you will be able to reach directly to them. The best way to do it is personalize the idea according to their needs. In order to avoid the spamming of the mailbox one need to take care of the points that are: • Make sure the mail is being sent to the correct customers only else it can lead to the negative adver-tising of the brand. • The subject of the mail should be persuasive enough to attract the attention of the customer while he is skimming through the mail • Always put the unsubscribe link or option in the mail. Also try to get the feedback from the customer at this point in time that why does he want to unsub-scribe and what else he needs to be customised that it makes itself useful in customer’s perspective.

iii. Personalising the product and advertising: If one is launching advertising one should go for two –three types which caters to the personalised needs of the customers and its affluent group.

iv. Discounts, Coupons and packages: These are attractive to induce the customers to pur-chase or use your product. The packages, coupons should be competitive in the market that actually forces the customers to change their brand and pur-chasing habit.

v. Creating a loyalty program: There should be some strong motivation for the

customer to use your product/service repeatedly. For this some scheme or card and other innovative ideas can be put together so that the customer stays with your brand for a long time. It is a well-known fact that it costs more to attract new customer than to retain the existing one. This make the more reasons to cre-ate loyalty program looking at the cost constraints.tract new customer than to retain the existing one. This make the more reasons to create loyalty pro-gram looking at the cost constraints.

vi. Create your own website: With your website you can reach to the customer anytime they want to, can provide the detailed in-formation of the product/service. It can be personal-ised according to the customers want and needs so that greater brand association can be built with the start-up. You can showcase the unique selling point of your product and how it actually solves their prob-lem or meet their needs. Here it can be done in detail what in advertising and other methods can’t be done.

vii. Responding to customer’s feedbacks, queries and grievance asap: As already been told retaining existing customers along with adding new ones should be the prime’s focus of the start-up. To retain the existing one, one need to make sure their loyal customers is never dis-satisfied or angry on the service they are offering. For this they have to respond to the feedbacks, queries and grievance as soon as possible by setting 24*7 call centres, self-help service and others.

viii. Develop partnerships based on mutually beneficial objectives:Being a start-up with limited budgets, one very useful method to promote it will be to develop part-nership and tie-up’s with others so that both sides’

February 2013

mutual benefits can be taken care. Through this one can advertise and promote each other brands and strengthen their ties which can be harnessed later.Analysis

ix. Online marketing: Online marketing in itself is so vast that for a start-up it will be difficult to cover all the aspects. Though there are some important things that one need to make sure are properly covered in all aspects.

a) Social Media: Today the world is rotating around Facebook, Twitter, Google plus. Most of the people are today using social media to connect, in-teract and express themselves to the world. This is not only cheap, but also effective in promoting your brand value. It also helps in creating brand aware-ness and connection with the consumers. You can give the latest updates, offers, products, promotions on the go to the consumers and the persons follow-ing you will be able to follow and like, comment and provide feedback to you upon which one can re-spond instantaneously.

b) Keyword Marketing or Adwords: Whenever we search for any product or service online we use certain keywords like ‘online electronic market’. Now this is where one needs to be proactive and bid for such keywords which are used when searching in search engines like Google, Bing etc. When you pay for the keyword your website appears higher in the search list which in turn raises the chance of hit on your website.

c) Google Adcrawler: Google while creating the index for its search it looks for the meta- keywords associated with the page. For this the pages must have appropriate tags linked to them so that while

searching one gets linked to that page. Also setting up the appropriate analytic tool is necessary to ana-lyse the need of the customer and what we are pro-viding thus providing a way to improve.

d) Content marketing: It is developing interest-ing, creative and relevant content in your website, blogs, social pages which can be used as an effective way to market the start-up. By reading these articles the target customers can associate themselves with the brand.

e) Setting up Blogs: By having up the blogs the reviews, feedbacks and other minor details can be scripted. This is also a way to retain and encourage new customers to use the product or service offered. This can be done by identifying the right content writers which can keep others engaged with the product.

f) Creating a Press Kit: One of the major success factors for the start-up is to keep the media engaged with latest product offerings, promotions and others. This will keep your start-up coming in the news, talks and other events which will help create the buzz with the start-up which in turn will help them to gain new customers.

g) Webinar, Newsletters, eBook/Guides: This can be same as press kit in which you provide the documents and articles to the customers directly which they can access from their websites. This will help the customer know more about the product and create the brand loyalty and affection towards it.


February 2013

Adopting all the above marketing strategies with personalizing those techniques according to the start-up will not help building the brand but also help in new customers and developing brand loyalty to them.

Submitted by:Ravi RanjanIMT, Ghaziabad


February 2013


1. Introduction:It’s time to re-tool the 4P’s of marketing for today’s B2B reality. As a framework for fine-tuning the mar-keting mix, the P’s-• Product• Place• Price• Promotionhave served the consumer markets well for half a century. But in the B2B world, they yield narrow, product-focused strategies that are increasingly at odds with the imperative to deliver solutions.

2. Disadvantages Of The 4P’S Tool From The B2B Perspective:In a five year study involving more than 500 manag-ers and customers in multiple countries and across a wide range of B2B industries, it was found that the 4P’s model undercuts B2B marketers in three impor-tant ways:

It leads their marketing and sales teams to stress

product technology and quality even though these are no longer differentiators but are simply the cost of entry.

It underemphasizes the need to build a robust case for the superior value of their solutions.

It distracts them from leveraging their advantage as a trusted source of diagnostics, advice and prob-lem solving.

3. Introducing The “Save” Model And Its Feature:It is not that the 4P’s are irrelevant, just that they need to be reinterpreted to serve B2B marketers. As the chart below, today’s market demands the shift of emphasis from products to solutions, place to access, price to value and promotion to education-SAVE, in short.

Figure: The “SAVE” Model

Re-Thinking The 4P’S In The B2B World

February 2013


4. Preparing For The Shift:Motorola Solutions, a pioneer of the new framework, used SAVE to guide the restructuring of its market-ing organization and its go-to-market strategies in the government and enterprise sectors. Along the way the firm identified three requirements for suc-cessfully making the shift from 4P’s to SAVE.

4.1. Solution 1:First, management must encourage a solutions mind-set throughout the organization. Many B2B companies, particularly those with an engineering or technology focus, find it difficult to move beyond thinking in terms of “technologically superior” prod-ucts and services and take a customer-centric per-spective instead.

4.2. SOLUTION 2:Second, management needs to ensure that the de-sign of the marketing organization reflects and rein-forces the customer-centric focus. At Motorola solu-tions, this led to the dramatic reorganization of the marketing function into complementary specialities, allowing focus on each element of the SAVE frame-work and alignment with the customer’s purchase journey.

4.3. SOLUTION 3:Third, management must create collaboration be-tween the marketing and sales organizations and

with the development and delivery teams. Motorola Solutions required that specialist teams concentrate on solutions and coordinate their approaches to spe-cific customer needs. This ensured that functional boundaries did not determine the firm’s solutions.

5. Conclusion:B2B marketers who continue to embrace the 4P’s model and mind-set risk getting locked into a repeti-tive and increasingly unproductive technological arms race. The SAVE framework is the centrepiece of a new solution-selling strategy-and B2B firms ignore it at their peril. Firms therefore, should seri-ously think about implementing the “SAVE” model to re-align its marketing strategy in order to cater to the demand of the existing market needs.

Submitted by: Arjyama ChoudhuryMdi, Gurgaon

February 2013


Can brands be Immortal?

The brands, unlike prod-ucts and categories can be immortal and can outlive the corpora-tions. The management

should focus more on brands and build them as a capital and look at them as an intangible asset of the firm.

The balance of shareholder value has shifted irrevo-cably from tangible assets to intangible assets. Intan-gible assets account for a growing proportion of the companies’ market value, as corporate performance and profitability are driven more and more by the exchange and exploitation of ideas, information, ex-pertise and service, and less and less by control over physical resources. Intangible assets include a host of elements like patents, strategic alliances, custom-er lists, employee know-how and other forms of non-physical assets, but in many companies these days, the most important intangible asset is the ‘brand’. In fact, in some sectors, brands comprise up to 70% of the companies’ market capitalization.

Experts consider that the concept of brand life cycle is an old-fashioned and outmoded one. There can be product and category life cycles, with their charac-teristic phases of birth, growth, maturity and decline. But brands, if desired, can be immortal. A company’s relationship with the customer is based upon much more than the functional performance of the prod-uct or the service that the company provides. This makes the brand immortal, while the products and

services can die. Brands have the potential to liber-ate the companies from the limitations of category or product life cycle and its destruction of sharehold-er value.

Given the intense interest in brands developing off late and how to preserve their asset value, the CEOs, CFOs and directors of all companies must appreci-ate with much greater clarity the financial implica-tions of the brand management.

The key role of marketing in this context can be said to reside in managing a company’s customers by identifying, influencing, acquiring, serving, sat-isfying and retaining them at a profit. The product of this process would be the ‘customer capital’ – the company’s customer base and to a large degree, the present and future value of the business, as it is usu-ally its prime revenue generating asset. The man-agement should be keenly aware of, and planning to mitigate, the risk factors for the company in terms of the rate at which it is winning or losing custom-ers and the rising, or falling, future revenues that im-plies. The nature and strength of a brand’s relation-ships with its customers can vary significantly over time and according to factors beyond the control of marketing that may affect either the company or the customer or both. These factors might include the economic climate, social trends, technological ad-vances, product or service performance, competitive activity, editorial coverage and word of mouth as well as customer life stage, employment and personal ex-perience, to name a few.

February 2013

So, the concept of customer capital can be used to build a bridge between the inputs of business and marketing strategy and the outputs of revenue growth, profitability and shareholder value.

One major risk that a company takes by using this concept of replacing the asset of brand equity with the capital item of the customer capital, would be of shifting the role of marketing towards the short term and taking the attention away from the longer-term building of shareholder value through brand equity. Another key issue would be if there is a universal means of calculating the customer capital. This en-tails knowing the value of a brand’s customers and the likelihood of recruiting or retaining them over a given time period, which is a function of the brand’s competitive strength. For companies having a direct relationship with the customers via catalogues, di-rect mail or internet, it is easier. But for brands sold through wholesalers, retailers and other intermedi-aries the calculation is hard to build into a forecast of customer capital but has massive implications for it.

Capitalism has created a vested interest in keep-ing brand alive, and every year as the cost and com-plexity of creating brands increase, this interest strengthens. Thus, the companies’ success increas-ingly depends on the longevity of their brands. But successful brand management would require a full understanding within the company of the value of a brand. Only if the value of the brand is known and fully appreciated will there be less of a tendency to allow it to wither away, a direction would be found to preserve its value and safeguard the historical in-vestment made into it. If this can’t be done, it will be sold off to somebody who can make better use of it, but at a full value and not at the distress value. The problem here is that most companies do not have accurate understanding of the value of their brands, and therefore allow them to decline, while retaining ownership.

The death of a brand through re-branding exercises becomes unavoidable in many cases as the original brand has been allowed to become too old-fashioned or competitive to be sustainable. The rebirth exer-cise is a lot easier in retail due to habitual shopping patterns and the fixed nature of outlets combining to ensure that the new format starts with an inherited customer footfall. It is rare outside retail, but killing off a neglected brand can sometimes be the only way to save the business. Well-managed brands never get to see such a situation.

The few beneficial brand deaths are very much the exception that proves the general rule of the value of brand immortality. More usually the demise of a brand signals the destruction of shareholder value, through a reduction in the intangible asset base of the company. The CEOs, boards of companies, their


February 2013


investors, analysts, advisors and journalists who write about them, all need to take a much closer in-terest in the role of marketing and communication in the creation and maintenance of brands and in the 12% of all shareholder value the account for on an av-erage across all of the world’s stock exchanges.

In his book Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod puts forth a persuasive case for the inevitable mortality of corporations. He draws intriguing analogies with na-ture and extinction of species. He says, that as with human life, good care can starve off the inevitable for a while, but, eventually time catches up with them all. His analysis suggests that there is a continuous extinction of companies at the rate of about 10% per annum, but every so often there is a dramatic peak, during which in a short period very large numbers go out of business, as many as 60% in a single year. Companies also disappear due to mergers and ac-quisitions.

However, on the last page of his book, Ormerod as-serts that almost all brands fail eventually. I would beg to differ here. Why should brands die? Time and time again, we have seen brands who outlive the cor-porations who created them. For instance, KitKat, confectionary bar first created by Rowntree and now made by Nestle, or the Dulux brand which was ac-

quired by the Dutch company Akzo Model, the Cad-bury’s Dairy Milk, Thums Up, etc. Often it is the ex-pectation that those brands may be better off in the hands of another corporation that is responsible for the extinction of the original owner.

Brands are sometimes allowed to die, often justi-fied by the spurious mantra of the brand life cycle. Though it is not possible to rejuvenate every strick-en brand, and within a multi-brand company it may not always make commercial sense, there’s too much grievous bodily harm done to brands and sometimes outright brand slaughter. The brands though indeed have unlimited potential to be immortal, and their death is usually a result of the failure of imagina-tion and/or investment by their owners. A firm must know how to cheat brand death, not just in its old age, but also in its infancy and all stages in between.

One of Damien Hirst’s most celebrated works is a shark preserved in a vitrine full of formaldehyde. The title given to it is, The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. Brands are like sharks, they keep moving to stay alive, and the role of brand managers would be to ensure that they keep moving and in the right direction, at the very least, going with the flow of market evolution, riding the waves of competition and modulating communica-tions in tune with the ever-shifting consumer senti-ment.

of the strategic marketing tools that has uninten-tionally done more than any other development to perpetuate the myth of the mortality of brands is the Boston matrix, with its widely known but little un-derstood categories of ‘stars’, ‘cash cows’, ‘dogs’ and ‘question marks’.

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The application of this matrix to the brands comes with an assumption that at some point of time when the category growth falters, a brand will progress to the cash cow status, and thence fade. But since the tool was for category management and not for brand management, it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that growth falters so marketing support is cut and so growth falters further and so on. A powerful anal-ogy to bring this point to life is that of an aircraft in flight and the plane’s fuel supply is cut off and the engines stop. But the fact is that the place would not fall out of the sky immediately. It can indeed glide for sometime before inevitably hitting the ground. The same thing would happen to brands whose invest-ment in marketing and communications is cut off.

In today’s times, the brands are entering a period of retailer power in which only strong brands, i.e. the brands which are more valuable to consumers than competitive brands and the brands that have added value and would be able to sustain healthy margins. These values are increasingly becoming non-func-tional, and the creation of integrated brand person-alities that unite non-functional and functional val-ues would become essential. This brand personality must be unique and should be constantly develop-ing to stay unique in order to remain salient and profitable.

Jeremy Bullmore has provided with an image of what a brand is and how it is made. He says that peo-ple build brands as birds build nests, from scrap and straws we chance upon. A number of his key conclu-sions are as follows –

1. Products are made and owned by companies while brands are made and owned by people, the public,

and the consumers.

2. A brand image belongs not only to the brand but also to all those who have knowledge of that brands.

3. The image of the brand is highly subjective and no two people however similar would have the same view of the brand.

4. To build a global brand, therefore, is a contradic-tion in terms and impossibility.

5. People form conclusions about a brand as a result of uncountable number of different stimuli, many of which are beyond the control or influence of the product owner.

6. Brands, unlike products, are living, organic enti-ties. However, they change imperceptibly, every sin-gle day.

7. Much of what influences the value of a brand lies in the hands of its competitors.

8. The only way to begin to understand the nature of brands is to strive to acquire a faculty that only the greatest of the novelists possess and that is so rare that it has no name.


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9. It is universally accepted that brands are a com-pany’s most valuable assets, and yet there is no uni-versally accepted method of measuring that value.

10. The only time one can be sure of the value of a brand is just after it has been sold.

11. Brands are not hierarchically inferior to compa-nies, in fact, if companies are managed as brands only then can they be hopeful of success.

One of the key observations here is that brands are increasingly outside the control of marketers. We live in an era when consumers, in the chat rooms and social networking sites of the online world, increas-ingly mould brands, rather than their owners. This isn’t so new, since people have always overlaid their own thoughts and experiences on the marketing-created image of brands which sometimes has had destructive consequences. Co-creation is a very real fact of life for brands. They feed the online and of-fline buzz that shapes perceptions and hope to miti-gate any adverse impressions.

This process is increasingly distant from the old-fashioned view that advertising alone builds the brands, which formed the ‘what you tell them is what they think’ school of marketing. Today, advertising is only one of the influences that may condition the consumer views of a brand, but is likely to work pow-erfully only if it works in tandem with other influ-ences. This realization has led the marketing world into an uncertain field of co-creation and there have been mistakes along the way.

Thus, a clear corollary of Bullmore’s bird’s nest anal-ogy, and his insight that brands exist independently of the corporations, products and services they de-rive from is that brands can therefore outlive them. If

they are well-managed they can as well be immortal.

Submitted by:Bhavi PatelInstitute of Rural Management, Anand


February 2013


February 2013

In the new era of marketing, the marketers are busier in selling incentives rather than products. A study shows that consumers are getting attracted towards a lesser quality product but with some extra incen-tives attached to it than a higher quality without incentivized product. Incentives drive purchase be-havior. It makes one buy more than desired and in-creases level of loyalty for a brand. Gamification is the technique to capture this increasing desire for incentives.

A large number of organizations are using Gamifica-tion techniques now days. Gamification helps com-panies to encourage employees for better job per-formance, crowdsource ideas and even train people. The world is getting filled with Gamification ideas. Attracting customers, influencing behaviors, modu-lating beliefs, in almost every sphere, Gamification techniques are playing its role.

What is Gamification? Gamification is using game tactics in real life scenarios to achieve some prede-fined roles. It includes giving incentives to people, giving them discounts based on points accumulated etc. At the car was station, we get a free car wash for every 10th car wash. When we fly by a particular airline, we get some points with the promise of op-portunity to redeem those points to get some incen-tive. Gamification is reward-participation system. From very small activities like Facebook page likes, blogs, tweets etc to big scale activities like bulk buy-ing, exchange offers, can bring rewards for the us-ers. Rewards can vary from virtual points, discounts on articles, special promotional goodies etc. These rewards are the main attraction for the consumers. They help to increase sales, create brand awareness, brand reputation and easy advertisements. Accord-ing to Gabe Zichermann, CEO and founder of Gami-fication Co, Gamification consists of three Fs: fun, friends and feedback. He says that Gamification is like making everything feel like a game. Siemens, Plantville, SAP and IBM are just a few examples cited by Forbes 2000 that have implemented Gamification techniques and have seen considerable changes in the employees’ performance. A research shows that by 2015, 50% of the companies will be using Gami-fication techniques in innovation methods and 70% of big companies will use Gamification techniques in next three years while small companies won’t. A research by M2 says that Gamification will increase from $100 million in 2011 to $2.8 billion in 2016

Gamification-An Emerging Trend in Digital Marketing


Gamification: Is everything a game?Understanding the user’s behavior, their source ofmotivation and use of techniques to reward them for

doing things that ultimately helps to achieve the aim is the real benefit of Gamification. Every job should involve element of fun. Games are thought of as fun, they include elements of competition with others and with you, and ultimately they result in a win-ner.

Using the techniques involved in games which make them such addictive and successful is the way to pro-vide value to brands. Gamification in social media is not about your brand finding the next Farmville; it is about something more complicated than this, but ul-timately something that should be more successful.

The most critical thing in marketing: Understand-ing what people want to achieve and their behavior when they do so. Gamification uses game mechanics to help people get where they want to get (and in-deed where marketers want them to get) - rewarding and motivating them along the way. Take a simple example: An app on the phone tracks the run of a person sending it to the twitter account, so that peo-ple can see the updates like duration and distance of run.

The person is also told when the distance covered is better than the previous weeks. The upshot is that the person is rewarded for doing well, pressured into

doing better and told about his contacts performanceThe app is using gaming techniques (reward, com-petitions, achievements, progress tracking, challeng-es and the like) to make the person do something. It motivates and rewards as a way of doing something, and it is this element of Gamification that is most interesting and exciting for brands.

Getting the right motivation and rewarding the be-havior marketer wants, give people more reasons to spend time with your brand and to tell others about it. Understanding the

motivation of customer and push or prompt them to buy and to engage them in meaningful ways, re-warding them for the things that they do that benefit them.

Gamification: Not only about offering free stuff, it’s about status

During a statement at TNW 2012 Gamification CEO Gabe Zichermann suggested that companies must first understand what it is about video games that engage consumers.

“It is not just throwing some badges on your website. Although badges are important, they are not the

February 2013

only thing we need.”

The belief among marketers that free stuff drives consumers is wrong. In fact, the critical reward that marketers can offer consumer is status, followed byower over their peers, free stuff and cash prizes.Take

two scenariosIn scenario A, consumer is given a free cup of coffeeIn scenario B, consumer is given the privilege to have the coffee at Starbucks where he/she is given special treatment which will give consumer a status quotient

It is observed that humans who are emotional beings would choose option B anytime. This psychology of offering customers status above their peers develops long term brand loyalty rather than rewarding them with free stuff which is a quick gain.Gamification- Trend in Digital Marketing

Generation Y, which is commonly referred to as “mil-lennial” or the “Net Generation” has grown up with video games. They have special inclination towards gaming techniques in marketing. This means that Gamification has special impact on their life. They expect digital intervention in almost every sphere of life. In workplace, market, social life everywhere

there is engagement of digital technology. So Gami-fication-application of reward structures to manipu-late behavior, plays a considerable role in their life.

There are examples of various e-commerce websites that we come across daily like inkfruit.com, flipkart.com etc, all of these use Gamification methods to in-crease their businesses. Using points system to in-crease sales is a very common practice now a days and it is going to increase as the penetration of digi-tal marketing will increase. Several other examples like small games to earn points and promote the product, games to increase awareness etc are very prevalent now days.

In international scenario as well some very famous services like foursquare, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system are using Gamification techniques. Foursquare uses gaming techniques to encourage people to get engage in very small activities like checking into their locations, creating a network or community of people. BART in San Francisco uses foursquare services to bring a new perspective of public transportation. Starbucks uses its own reward system in digital marketing and is creating a good number of loyal customers. Nike and several other brands are using gaming techniques to increase their presence in digital world.

Conclusion:


February 2013


Gamification is a relatively new technique to at-tract customers and to get hold in digital marketing world. As generation Y has taken the lead, there is a need to provide them the similar kind of action in and outside their work environment and with the ad-vent of digital marketing, Gamification’s importance has increased three folds. So there is a need to imple-ment Gamification techniques in digital marketing to capture the market.

Submitted by:Ayush GulatiGuneet Singh ArnejaGreat Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

February 2013

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