Musings of a Curious Mind

  Adelaide ( 17 th -21 st Dec’20) Finally, the much anticipated Test series got underway. Australia never loses Pink Ball Day Night Matches at the Adelaide Oval. India knows it all too well, and refused to play a day night game last time around. To start with, Kohli does something which he usually doesn’t, win the toss in away test matches. But the first session just highlighted what India’s batsmen were to face for the next 1 month. Yes, in terms of individual wickets they may still not be at the level of McGrath and Warne. But in the last 50 years, in these conditions, you will struggle to name a better attack than Cummins, Hazlewood, Starc and Lyon. India somehow managed to get to a respectable score, and then bundled out Australia cheaply to get a sizeable first innings lead. Nervous expectations began to take shape. It was a Saturday. It was a weekend cricket Lovers across the world was waiting for. The expectation of 2 days of high quality test cricket which would ulti...

Sometimes, the simplest of things yield the best results. In a world of paid search, social media, marketing automation, how can such something as innocuous as picking up a telephone and calling a prospective customer give the best ROI? And what if I told you that any B2C company could incorporate telemarketing into their strategy and the ROI would suddenly look like it is on steroids? It would seem crazy right. But never underestimate the power of the combination of a telephone and an intelligent and empathetic salesperson on one side. At some level, most B2B companies use telemarketing- be it for prospecting, qualifying leads, generating leads etc. That is common knowledge and I am not going to touch upon B2B telemarketing. For B2C companies, the opportunity to improve marketing ROI by incorporating telemarketing is huge. More so in a country like India where digital literacy is still relatively low, and a lot of sales is being still influenced at the point of sale by the reta...

The last 10 years have seen the birth of massive consumer brands across the world. Riding the wave of increased e-commerce penetration and smartphone/internet penetration, these brands grew rapidly. And because of the billion-dollar acquisition of Dollar Shave Club, VC money in the sector wasn’t too difficult. These brands have sprouted across categories- CPG, mattresses, electronics, fashion, beauty- name any sector and you will find these disruptive brands. Caspers, Beyond Meat, Everlane etc are few examples. Closer home, we would have Raw Pressery, Epigamia, SleepyOwl Coffee, Sugar Cosmetics, Wakefit, Bombay Shaving Company, Boat and Atomberg Most of these brands(if not all) are digitally native brands. They are all digitally native omnichannel brands(or will become so soon). In India if you sell only D2C, you limit your TAM massively. Most of these brands today will be doing a revenue somewhere between Rs 10 crores to Rs 100 crores. But would be aspiring to grow 10x in the n...

CEO Factory by Sudhir Sitapati, Executive Director at HUL, provides sharp insights into building bands laced with numerous HUL anecdotes and remarkable management lessons. My key takeaways: Marketing is not about tom-tomming the product a company offers. It is not a creative role. It starts with understanding what a consumer wants, mobilizing the rest of the company into fulfilling the needs of the consumer, and then letting people know about it in the most efficient way. As a marketer/management professional, the most important thing is defining the problem correctly. Brands are shorthands that consumers use. These are trust-marks that have few specific and same associations for many consumers. Quality is a necessary but insufficient condition for a good brand. Start with broad segments and narrow it down only when there is compelling evidence. Holds true for most brands. Better positioned brands are better remembered. Ask 100 people about a brand, and if most of them...

Sheer coincidence that I completed this book just we are in the midst of a horrific global pandemic. Hustling all the time and striving for more & more worldly possessions, we forget the harsh realities and fundamental truths of life. Morrie, a 70 something professor gripped by the terminal and brutal disease ALS with only a few months to live, spends every Tuesday with his former student Mitch, talking about love, self-pity, emotions, family, money, marriage, culture, forgiveness and death. Morrie highlights the importance of being aware of your mortality and appreciating the feeling of being alive. You can do all you want to be as healthy as possible(and you should do so), but your blood, genetics, DNA, future accidents and things like the current pandemic are all beyond your control- whether you are 10 or 70. Stop battling against getting older(you are anyway going to get older). Stop chasing the wrong things. Move away from the over consumption culture. Get mea...

But how many people search for your category’s products online? This used to be first response of anyone whenever someone used to hear that all our marketing efforts are “digital first”. The people with better understanding of consumer products and digital media usually asked the question, “But aren’t all horizontal eCommerce players targeting the same keywords for which you want to bid? And surely you can’t outbid an Amazon for a generic keyword where they are bidding right?” All very relevant and correct questions. Yes, not a lot of people go to google for a generic search to begin the purchase journey for many consumer products. Yes, the Amazons and Flipkarts will outbid you for every generic search for every category they are into. But does that mean that the scope for Digital as a medium is limited in such a category? No, not at all. India is a digitally advancing economy. In today’s day, 15% of all purchases in India are digitally influenced, where as e-commerce accoun...

Forget product, pricing, promotion and your distribution channels. We can keep making marketing more complex and keep adding more Ps and Cs and jargons, but the single most important factor in marketing that will decide the fate of brands going forward is customer experience. A superior product at the best possible price which is easily available to the customer will all become points of parity, if it already isn’t. So, how can brands give a superior customer experience? How will brands differentiate? The answer is staring us right on our face. It is customer service and after sales support. For most customers, the moment of truth comes when something goes wrong with the product/service. And believe it or not, whenever such an issue is reported, the number 1 KPI that is being tracked in most organizations is the cost incurred to solve the complaint. As marketers, we keep looking for opportunities to delight the customers so that he/she becomes a brand champion. And when that opp...

To say that marketing has completely changed in the last decade will be the biggest understatement ever. To say that marketers haven’t been completely able to keep pace with the evolving technology and the evolving consumer will not be completely false. There are new ways to a)        reach consumers (multiple new platforms and devices) b)       track consumers (digital footprints please!!) c)        measure performance with 100% accuracy Point a is followed by everyone. Point b would be explored by any digital marketer/agency worth their salt. But point c, I highly doubt. At least not by 99% of companies. Not yet. Yes, I am talking about multi touch attribution. For every conversion/sale that happened, we should be able to give partial credit to every marketing channel along the consumer journey that helped in the conversion. A possible example I am sharing from our line of bu...

Believe it or not, word of mouth is the biggest driver of sales in today’s world. With 1000s of ads from new and old brands alike on a daily basis coupled with the advent of reviews and social media, people do not trust every persuasive advertisement they see. Brands no longer control the narrative of what they want to communicate. Depending on who you speak to or which reports you read, between 30-50% of all first time product/service sales(only first time because your product/service decides whether it is worth a second buy) are influenced by word of mouth. And yet very very surprisingly, no big brand(whenever it launches new products/categories) or any startup gives this even 10% of attention and budget that it deserves.   And just to be clear, I am not talking about any referral bonus driven word of mouth. In the world of ROI driven marketing, it is no less than a crime. As of today, word of mouth manifests in 3 different ways. Public Reviews: You want to buy a produc...

Comebacks, Champions League, Solskjear and Manchester United. After Nou Camp and Bayern Munich/1999, we have a version 2. Beating 2 goals in injury team to win the Champions League is difficult. But I think Paris 2019 does it. This was as close to impossible as it got. This was football’s version of chasing 500 on a wearing day 5 wicket. 2 nil down at home in the first leg( something which has never been overturned before in the tournament’s history). 10 players out with injury and the best player suspended. The matchups will put the “David vs Goliath” saying into shame. It was going to be Fred/McTominay/Perreira Vs Di Maria/Verrati( modern Pirlo anyone?)/Draxler. It was going to be Smalling vs Mbappe. This was men vs kids. The kids didn’t stand a chance. Or did they? This was PSG. A team whose only legacy in Champions League is embarrassment. And this was United. Solskjear’s United. United of the fame, “Can Manchester United score? They always score”. So the belief was ther...

Is there a country more synonymous with a game than Brazil is to football? Considering parameters like population, global popularity of the game involved, and what the game means to the people of the country, the answer is a resounding “No”. The first image that conjures up when anyone imagines Brazil is hundreds of kids playing the beautiful game in the streets of Rio, in the beaches of Rio, in anything and everything where a round ball can be used to show some trickery. Most Indian football fans( especially from the part of the country I come from) swear by either Brazil or Argentina (depending on when you started following the game). Since I was born a few years after the Hand of God, and grew up just in time to see the original Ronaldo (not the robot with the six pack currently ripping shirts in Madrid) suffering a seizure at the biggest stage of them all and then redeeming himself 4 years later on the same stage, my allegiances were forever sworn to Brazil. And with how thin...

101-2. This is not India’s score after 20 overs. It is Rafael Nadal’s clay court record in best of 5 set matches. At Roland Garros, it is 78-2. No one has ever dominated or will ever dominate a grand slam again the way Nadal has dominated the red clay of Paris. While he is not the greatest tennis player of our generation( Serena Williams wins that crown hands down), Nadal is right up there with Federer and Djokovic when it comes to the GOAT in men’s tennis. Nadal is on the brink of an unprecedented La Decima at Paris this year. And he has hardly broken a sweat. Having already won the Monte Carlo and the Madrid Masters in the clay court season, Nadal was one of the favourites heading into Roland Garros. And so far, he didn’t disappoint. No sets dropped. 29 games lost over 6 matches. If you did not appreciate this fact, re read the last sentence again. In Tennis, you can win a set even after losing 6 games and this man, 12 years after winning his first grand slam, is winning mat...