Making the consumer connect | Business Line

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Making the consumer connect

Dr Erich Joachimsthaler, CEO, Vivaldi Partners: Seek more share of consumers' lives

It's the consumer that holds the key. The CII Brand Summit held in Chennai last week reiterated this. The Catalyst team reports.

A COUPLE of internationally acclaimed speakers, several Indian brand experiences, leavened with an economistpolitician, some sundry bureaucrats and academics thrown in and a dash of strategic management consultants and top advertising honchos bringing in the spice. Round off with a sizzling brand award, which made for a fit finale ... the two-day CII Brand Summit in Chennai last week steamed and simmered with all this and more. It wasn't about the firm or competitive strategy, but the leitmotif was consumer connect, as speaker after speaker dinned it into marketers at the meet that it was actually the customer, stupid, who had to be put on a pedestal. The keynote speaker of the inaugural session, co-author of the best-selling book, Brand Leadership, Dr Erich Joachimsthaler, CEO of Vivaldi Partners, set the tone for the Summit with his emphasis that it is critical to connect with everyday lives of consumers for brands to succeed. The traditional way of communicating the brand message to consumers through mass media advertising is pass. "There are many new ways in which brands can connect with consumers and there is a big change in brand management and brand-consumer connect." His observations may have sounded pretty much a paradigm shift in the Indian context, but these are the major trends sweeping across the developed world. Much as companies churning out great brands like to think so, they actually don't occupy much mindspace in consumers, but revolved around other interests in life. "It's now up to marketers to develop products which fit into consumers' lives rather than develop products which they think consumers will want," said Dr Joachimsthaler. And, not for him such highfalutin expressions like brand stewardship; "stewards are meant to polish grandmama's silver," he said, tongue firmly in cheek. The brand guru outlined three principles that brand managers could follow like the gospel to make the right connect: deeply understand the customer, interact with consumers in their daily lives and thirdly, develop strategies to capture more share of the consumers' lives. Talking of consumers, what animal is he or she? And, why have they transformed today that marketers and brands need to align themselves first with them. Santosh Desai, President, McCann Erickson India, attempted to decipher this new animal for an attentive audience. The old-fashioned, contentment-seeking self-effacing Indian who habitually harked back to the past has now become a vain, self-gratifying spender who believes tomorrow is going to be more glorious than yesterday, was his take. When there is such a sea change in outlook, a number of products and brands get unlocked, he says. "Life is a product, not a condition we are born to, it's a blank we need to fill with achievement, enjoyment and meaning, and time's the canvas we fill with the striving for these goals," elaborated Desai. There's also an ever-mounting need for `more' - people want to consume as much as they can, consume the best, even if it means having to spend a little more. There is a desire to strut on the world stage, narcissistic as the urban consumers are. "This is reflected in the `awards' syndrome - there are awards for everything and everybody and one has to duck being awarded," quipped Desai, which pretty much brought the roof down. On a serious note, he said that for solid insights, marketers should focus on the issues underlying consumer behaviour. The focus should be on uncovering the structure of the transformation, on the process and not just the results, and interpretation of these changes. In a presentation on `mining insights', Madhukar Sabnavis, Country Manager (Planning), O&M, exhibited several instances of his agency's work to demonstrate how consumer insights were gathered and used in advertisements. The fact that adults too loved chocolate but were closet consumers as the product had always been targeted to children was

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Making the consumer connect | Business Line

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used in the Cadbury campaign. It focused on childlike spontaneity, excuses and pranks to show adults enjoying the product. Sabnavis emphasised that marketers had to steep themselves in the consumer and then pull back a little, for that is when the insight is most likely to come through. More on consumers. Strategic management consultant Rama Bijapurkar unveiled a conceptual framework to assess why consumers shift loyalty. Consumers, she said, figure out in their own way what gives them a value advantage. Customers are fickle because value equations are changing - a value advantage today is gone tomorrow. However, she emphasised, it is not the customer who is changing the value equations; the change is from the manufacturer's side. "New competitors are emerging always and existing ones are getting better and redefining the value equation all the time," said Bijapurkar. The shifting value equation is not only is not only due to competition in a single category but also because of what she describes as "category collide." A consumer's value equation for a certain product in a category could be influenced by what he or she spends on a product in another category, she emphasised. R. Balakrishnan, Executive Creative Director, Lowe, had a different take on consumer connect. The best way, he said, a marketer can connect with the consumer is by first trying to connect with himself. "Does the particular feature in the product tickle you, can you use it yourself, do you fancy it?" What's a bureaucrat doing at a branding seminar, most wondered? But, E.K. Bharat Bhushan, Principal Secretary (Tourism), Kerala, came up with an impressive presentation on the branding of God's Own Country, warts and all. Speaking on experiential evangelism, he spoke the right language when he said that it was critical to improve the customer's experience at every `touch point' and to create touch points that will enable customers to sample the experience that could be awaiting them. But, the big one everyone was waiting for was the talk by Prof Venkat Ramaswamy of the University of Michigan Business School who is co-author with C.K. Prahalad of the best selling book, The Future of Competition. Taking the theme of his book forward, Prof Ramaswamy said that companies must involve consumers in creating brands, as there has been a "mind-boggling" rise in consumer-to-consumer communication even as corporates' own understanding of value creation has blurred. Companies, he said, must engage customers as equal problem-solvers. In other words, create channels of communication that will help consumers play a more active role in creating the service experience. His contention was that the Net, along with other communication channels such as SMS and blogs, has meant that customer experiences are shared more rapidly and widely, what he termed a "word-of-mouth" overdrive. With such an explosion of information, consumers are much more in the know about the product and in a position to make comparisons easily and are ready to experiment. On the other hand, with increased convergence, companies have difficulty in figuring out their competitors, which industry they are in and how to gain the competitive edge. Such being the case, companies can engage consumers in a two-way interaction and deliver the experience that they want. Apple, he said, has created an environment for buying and sharing music with its iTunes portal, from which 250 million songs have been downloaded. With its iPod, consumers can `carry' their favourite songs with them. In addition, Apple has opened retail stores. So, the focus is on individual value and experience, he said, with the choice of doing business entirely with the consumer. Co-creation, as the process is termed, also builds trust, he said. After Prof Ramaswamy's stimulating talk, the questions flew thick and fast, ranging from how relevant is co-creation in India to whether the trend is catching on in advertising. He tackled them all, with patience, and it also led to the longest session of the Summit - almost two hours. N. Murali, Chairman of Brand Summit 2005 and Joint Managing Director of The Hindu group of publications said that this edition of the Summit had fulfilled expectations. The objective was to showcase more Indian brands and Indian speakers and draw from their experiences. "Indian brands are coming of age, as this Summit has shown," said an elated Murali. All in all, a Summit of satisfaction.
(This article was published in the Business Line print edition dated February 24, 2005) Printable version | Oct 3, 2013 1:40:55 PM | http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-brandline/making-the-consumer-connect /article2204152.ece The Hindu Business Line

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