CATEGORY DISRUPTIONS

Quite often, when doing competitive analysis and market share reviews, we are busy analyzing direct competitors whereas there is a different category that is slowly eating into our segment, which has not even come into our radar or attention. 

Sometimes, the realization happens quite late and then either you have to live with that reality or go back to the drawing board and change your business model completely. 

Here is a great example of how the #camera industry thought that it would be impacted by the explosion of digital cameras, but it was the smartphone segment that ate up all their revenues, year after year with constant improvement in its camera technology. 

A clear lesson for all the players across industries. It is not about how your market share is changing but more about where is your consumer going with his or her money. hashtag#Netflix sums it up quite well when it says that is not competing with the other #OTT players, it is competing with sleep!

Share Your Goodness – Motto for Life

“Ensure that there are enough seconds dedicated to the product window”.

“You have to show consumption of the product and make it an integral part of the story”.

These are just some of the regular statements that an agency is used to hearing from the client, which the agency calls the client’s rants. 

But these statements hold true when you are doing regular advertising for a product brand where the objectives are the usual marketing objectives of building awareness, generating trials and driving sales. 

And then comes a time, a moment, an opportunity where a company decides to be courageous. It decides to break status quo, go against the conventional route of marketing and advertising and decides to launch a campaign with a thought and a philosophy that makes you sit back and reflect. It takes all the cultural and societal truths and weaves a story around those truths without making the story trivial by getting brands or products integrated into it like a force fit. 

To understand what I am saying, let me share the new film from Nestlé India on their Corporate Campaign #ShareYourGoodness:

                                                               Share Your Goodness Film

The beauty of the film is its simplicity and the power of this film hits one after some time. It makes one realize the importance of food in our lives and how sharing of food is beyond just a gesture. It is an act that transmits feelings and allows forming bonds for life. It makes one reflect on all the times when one has bonded over food and exchanged lessons on life over a plate of dinner or a cup of tea. 

What is truly magical about this film is the fact that by taking food as the medium, this film talks about issues like: adoption, girl child and integrating people from North East into the fabric of a family and all of this is done quite seamlessly. 

A campaign like #ShareYourGoodness would have been incomplete by just making a commercial of this thought. Nestlé India had to bring that thought alive through an act and Nestlé India chose the Mumbai Dabbawallas as a medium to activate this philosophy.

#ShareYourGoodness truly gained meaning when the Mumbai Dabbawallas were appreciated for the work that they do through a Goodness Box in gratitude for their unrelenting and selfless act throughout the year. 

Watch this video to see this activation:

                                                                Mumbai Dabbawalas

Despite being an employee of Nestlé India as well as a marketing professional, I would like to say Thank You to everyone involved in making this film and reminding us that Share Your Goodness does not have to be a tag line for a campaign but rather a Motto For Life.

Does your brand give the SPA benefit?

Marketing is not like mathematics. There is no set formula that will help you in arriving at a final answer and being able to prove that the theorem is right.

Marketing is a lot about trial and error, individual personalities, conviction and confidence, guts and gumption, risks and courage, fundamentals and basics and much more. 

There are enough and more books out there that promise you marketing gyaan and marketing knowledge with each one coming up with their own way of building brands. I have also read a few and I still intend to read a few more. There is no harm in getting to know different views and perspectives that exist out there for a subject as wide and as abstract as marketing. 

But over the years, I have also picked up my own understanding of brand building and what works. Instead of giving lot of theory and corporate jargon, if I could offer you one tip of how to build a brand, then my suggestion would be that your brand can only be successful if it offers the SPA benefit. 

Now stop scratching your head and wondering that if your brand has got nothing to do with salons or massage or SPAs, how can it offer the benefit of the SPA. This SPA benefit that I am talking about is not what you are thinking. 

SPA in this context means:

S – Salience

P – Performance

A – Advantage

Now that I have taken care of your doubt and you have stopped considering me to be talking like a lunatic, let me elaborate on what I mean.

A brand has to offer the SPA benefit to become successful and stay successful. Let us understand this a bit more in detail:

Salience – Irrespective of how big a brand may already be, the brand will lose traction with its consumers, if it does not spend enough and be visible and salient in the minds of consumers. People often ask me why big brands like Coca Cola or Nike need to advertise as everyone knows them and thinks about them when making a purchase. My answer to them is that, as brands stop advertising, they start losing share of mind and that is when the downfall of a brand begins. Share of Mind is a critical aspect as it plays a crucial role in the purchase decision at the store and salience helps in driving share of mind, which leads to share of the wallet of the consumer. 

Performance – You can spend millions of dollars on your brand across mediums, but all of that money is money down the drain if your brand does not perform in line with what it promises. Positioning of a brand has to be chosen after lot of consideration because this positioning that a brand takes, forms the barometer by which a consumer judges the performance of a brand. This combination of positioning and performance then helps in forming the perception of the brand in the minds of the consumers. So it is critical for brands to ensure that they perform what they promise. 

Advantage – It is a competitive world out there and market conditions like a monopoly do not exist anymore. Sectors, industries and categories that see great growth and profitability will always attract more and more new players. Amidst such clutter and din, it is absolutely critical that your brand has a competitive advantage over the other brands, and the consumers should be able to tangibly feel or see that advantage. This will allow you to stay ahead of competitors who will always try to pull you down and overtake you.

So brand building basically starts from identifying the advantage that your brand has over your competition. This advantage should then be converted into positioning of the brand and monies should be spent behind that, to drive the positioning in the minds of consumers and building salience of the brand. This would ideally lead to trials or repeat of your brand and over time, the performance of the brand will help in building the perception of the brand and thereby the brand itself. 

Once again, I would like to conclude by reiterating the fact that you can build a successful brand only if your brand offers the SPA benefit.