Business is Marketing

At the risk of sounding extremely materialistic yet I always tell budding entrepreneurs and future leaders that an education in management teaches one among other things to become an expert in marketing products. It teaches one to understand the needs of the consumers and position the brand in such a manner that the consumer feels he / she needs the brand and goes and buys it. Most of the students of management are quick to learn this and by the time they graduate they are ready to impress the corporate world with their newly learnt skill of ‘marketing’. As david ogilvy once said “a great marketer can even sell snow to an eskimo”. Many management graduates pride themselves upon the fact that they can ‘market almost anything to anyone’, and most of them are actually pretty good at it too. So then all these so-called expert marketers must also be greatly successful in their careers? Surprisingly that is not true. This is because these marketers learnt to market everything and anything bu...

Amitabh Bachchan made his debut in Hollywood with a small but well portrayed role in the film The Great Gatsby. If you have seen the film you too would have been mesmerized by the grandeur of it, but if you have seen it from a marketer’s point of view you would notice how intelligently the film has been made to include well-known brands. It’s actually overflowing with premium products. The top international designers Miu Miu and Prada for the movie designed more than 40 different cocktail gowns. Brooks Brothers designed the lead actor Leonardo Di- Caprio’s clothes. Moët & Chandon provided the champagne used in the film. The top-notch jewellery designer Tiffany & Co. created the jewellery. However, this time it has been done differently. There may be no obvious close up shots that the brands need to depend on to be noticed in the film. This time the brands ‘invested’ in the movie too. Which implies that they have specially created products for the film and in their advertising ...

The big players of TV are a little worried and it’s all because of a small company named Aereo, an upstart which wants to change the way we view television. No wonder all the big firms from NBC, ABC, CBS to Fox have all sued it but its CEO Chet Kanojia ( who incidentally is a native of Bhopal ) is not worried at all for he is absolutely sure of what he is doing. Aereo TV, simply put is an ‘online TV service’. The modus operandi of the company is simple. Kanojia has made very small antennas. Each user is assigned one antenna which grabs the broadcast-TV signals from the air and with the help of a software those signals are aired to the user. Not just this, the signal can be aired to any device which the user opts for – his mobile, his PC, or even his TV set. What this translates for the user is: a) he does not need to pay the hefty cable fees, and b) he can now watch his favourite TV programme anywhere. He could be stuck in traffic and watch it on his mobile, or in office on his PC. Kan...

What do you do if you are a pizza parlour and the neighborhood where you are supposed to deliver your pizzas has people from over 200 nationalities who speak equally varied number of languages? Dubai based Red Tomato found a way to solve this problem – with the help of a fridge magnet. This magnet is connected with the bluetooth of the user’s mobile phone. He just presses the button, selects his choice of pizza online and orders it. Now it no more mattered which language you spoke; you always got the pizza you wanted. Deliveries increased by about 500%! In 2011 IPL used the mobile phone to spread awareness about the cricket series. It used the SMS2.0 service. All those who used this app to send text messages were shown a banner ad of the series. While their message was being sent the banner ad became full screen where the user could see options like check the score, read more, download ringtones etc. The company received more than 16 lakh impressions and more than 35,000 ringtone down...

A simple arithmetic question for you: ‘A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?’ If you answered ‘10 cents’ you also probably are not aware of the ‘less obvious rules of success’. I will try to discuss a few here – the most obvious ones at least. Just as the obvious answer that 90% of the readers gave was actually the wrong answer ( the right answer is 5 cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat ), similarly the rules of success are the ones we most often tend to overlook. Success comes from strange quarters and with strange reasons too. Decades ago, an interesting book “ What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School ” became a best seller. The author had then tried to show how the most obvious things are not being taught, the things that actually impact our careers. Even today, most people are not aware of many similar things. IT’S NOT WHAT YOU SPEAK, RATHER WHAT YOU DON’T WHICH IS IMPO...

The New Year will, as always, bring with it a change. For marketers too it will be a year of looking at business, at consumers, at strategies, at investments, even at job profiles in a different manner. IBM is in the business of computers. Well, so you thought, for it does much more now. This year, it is also in the business of selling what is known as ‘trend detection’ to marketers. The hottest trend in fashion, music, etc this year is predicted to be ‘the Steampunk movement’. Who predicted it? Yes, IBM! It developed a model using proprietary software that studied various conversations happening in various networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc for years and also in the numerous blogs, and discovered that “Steampunk” was being mentioned more and more frequently and hence predicted that this was a trend to stay. It has been proved right as the popularity of this trend is increasing. Even the fashion label Prada launched its new fashion line with ‘Steampunk’ as the them...

It is said that John F. Kennedy was America’s first television President. Barack Obama has shown that he is the nation’s first ‘Social Media’ President! The super fast advancements in technology and the growth of the internet have changed the marketing landscape totally. Its impact was seen the most in the Presidential campaigns of Obama and Romney. This time, Obama’s campaign strategies were totally different from the ones he used in 2008. Yes, he once again used social media, but he used it more scientifically. This time, he had a huge team of ‘boffins’ (data analysts) headed by a new ‘Chief Scientist’ Rayid Ghani, whose job was to scientifically analyze all the data and use it to plan Obama’s various marketing strategies. For example, the team found out that in 2008, it had used the “Sign up now” button to gather followers on Facebook; but changing it to “Learn more” was far more effective in getting people to register in 2012. Each plan was tested, retested, analyzed and then impl...

The term ‘bootstrapping’ is an interesting term. It has a lot of challenge, a lot of drama built into it. The term is attributed to a story written by Rudolf Erich. The story titled The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen is based on a series of tales narrated by the Baron about his travels, with some impossible feats and daring escapes. One such tale is about him pulling himself out of a swamp with the help of his bootstraps as there was no one to help him and there was no other way he could have survived. Today, this 18th century tale has acquired a new meaning; especially for entrepreneurs. The idiom “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is the secret behind the success of many people today. When all else failed, they looked at the end of their own arm and found a helping hand! Just the way when the Baron fell in the swamp and nothing seemed to work and it looked like all was lost, he thought of picking himself up by his own bootstraps. This little boy used to walk barefoot ...

The Olympics are over and forgotten and so is India’s performance. Yes, we did win a few medals, but we did not win a gold. If we had to look at the Olympics from a marketer’s point of view, then once again, there is this one company, which deserves to get the ‘Gold’ for its marketing strategy. If you watched the Olympics, you would not have missed the neon green shoes on the feet of some 400 athletes. Well it’s not the first time that athletes have worn Nike shoes during the Olympics, but it is definitely the first time that they have worn this color. Earlier, Nike used to make shoes that matched the uniforms of the athletes. The shoes ‘matched’, which means that they blended with the uniforms. Nike did not like that for nobody really noticed them. Martin Lotti, the designer at Nike, was not happy just designing shoes; he wanted to be noticed. So he chose a color that was bound to stand out – be it the racing track, the boxing ring, or any other event. He colored his shoes neon green...