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Can You Smile? Thank Marketers For it!

Marketers might not be the most hated professionals by general public. Or so I hope. Politicians, pimps, lawyers, government servants, civil engineers and brokers might be frowned upon more than marketers, I would like to think.

Do marketers deserve to be hated at all? hmmmm. But I do know marketers need to be thanked for a few things. For starters, they taught the world how to smile!

At least when people posed for photographs! No kidding. Let me prove it.

A few years ago, computer scientists at ‘Brown and Berkley’ conducted a study. They gathered around 950 scanned yearbooks from American schools spanning two centuries, 1905 – 2013 to be precise. We are talking about photographs of hundreds of students passing out of school every single year.

Then came the interesting part. Using sophisticated software, the scientists created an ‘average’ face out of the pictures from every decade. In other words, photos of different students, from each decade, were averaged out to create a representative face of the decade. That is the picture you are seeing above. See it once more. I will wait.

Did you notice no one – boys or girls – was smiling in the older photos and they started smiling only as time went by. Go see again. I will wait.

Guess why?

Research scholars have thrown light on the subject. Or should I say, on their faces. Prior to the invention of photographs, people posed while someone painted their profile. Photographs were initially seen as paintings since there was nothing else to compare them to. People who posed for portraits couldn’t hold a smile for hours till they were painted and looked serious since that expression was easy to hold for a long time. And when photographs were invented, they continued to look serious since that’s what they were used to, till then.

Cometh the 40s, camera companies like Kodak were increasingly getting frustrated. People were taking photographs yes, but they weren’t taking too many of them. They were still thinking of them as paintings.

They wondered how to sell more film rolls? The companies went after non-users and tried to make them buy. That didn’t work beyond a point. So, they tried another route. Make existing users take more photos!

Companies wanted to make people take photos and share it with others to show what a good time they were having. How do you that?

Simple. They started advertising showing different people at different times doing different things but always smiling, laughing, giggling, chuckling and what have you. They made it easy by asking people to say CHEESEEEEEEE while being clicked.

The mouses took the bait. And the cheese. They started smiling, laughing, giggling, chuckling and what have you, while posing for photographs.

Bingo! Painting poses became passe. People started to look happy. Film rolls began to roll. And companies clicked all the way to the bank!

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Take your family photos. The older, the better. Arrange them chronologically. What do you see?

Your grandparents look scared in the photos. Your parents look less scared, but look serious nevertheless. Look at the photos taken of you when you were young. You are smiling. Now look at the photos of your kids, if you have one. All you see is their teeth, right?

There you go!

You may hate marketers but realize they are the ones who put a damn smile on your face!

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Hello digital, please put in your papers!

Paper is passe. Digital is the new normal, feel millennials. They may be right. Today’s generation don’t read much. Be it the daily newspaper or a random book. Why paper when screens can do the job better, most feel.

That may be, but new researches across the world are throwing cold water on those screens. Those who think paper is dead, done and dusted should be surprised and stunned by latest neuroscience research.

Canadian neuromarketing firm TrueImpact compared the effects of paper marketing – direct mailers etc – with digital marketing – email and display ads. Researchers used eye-tracking and high-resolution EEG brain wave measurements and supplemented them with conventional questionnaires for good measure. Three metrics were evaluated: Cognitive load (ease of understanding), Motivation (persuasiveness), and Attention (how long subjects looked at the content).

And the findings are……let the drumbeats roll…

Paper mailers required 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital mailers. Which means, paper mailers are easier to understand and are more memorable. Post-exposure tests also validated what the cognitive load test revealed about paper mailers’ memory encoding capabilities. When asked to cite the brand of an ad they had just seen, recall was 70% higher among respondents who were exposed to paper mails than digital mailers.

Oops!

Another study was done at Temple University, Philadelphia. This study used fMRI brain scans to compare digital and paper. It’s the technique widely used by academic researchers and can produce 3D images of activity in specific brain structures.

The most significant finding was that paper advertising activated the ventral striatum area of the brain more than what digital advertising was able to do. A previous study of successful ad campaigns had found that the ventral striatum was an indicator of desire and valuation. Put simply, the part of the brain that drives customers to buy. And paper ads scored a lot more!

Double oops!

Not just mailers, but there’s also enough and more research suggesting that our brains process a book differently if we read it in paper format via-à-vis on an e-reader. A Norwegian study concluded that ‘students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension test than students who read the texts digitally.’

Another study by San Jose University has found that ‘screen‐based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one‐time reading, non‐linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in‐depth reading, and concentrated reading. Decreasing sustained attention is also noted.’

Hello Kindle, are you listening!

If you can take a little more, a study conducted by Bangor University and branding agency Millward Brown used fMRI to study the different effects of paper and digital media. They found that physical material is more real to the brain. It is better connected to memory and involves more emotional processing, which is important for memory and brand associations. Physical materials produced more brain responses suggesting greater internalization of the ads!

There you are. Science is clearly showing paper can be more impactful and memorable than digital. The world may have become binary, but it’s paper content that stays in memory!

Let’s look at it another way. When you wish to look at the pic of your loved one, try holding his or her photo in your hand rather than staring at it on a screen. Which one is more emotional?

Touché! It’s ironic that you are reading this article here – in a digital medium. I wish I could print it and have it delivered to you!

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How To Burn Money And Learn Lessons

When I was in school, the terror of exams hit me only the previous night. As was the case with me always, I sought the services of my grandmother – my saviour, support and solace. ‘Patti, wake me up at 4 a.m. tomorrow so I can study’. She always dismissed me saying ‘Why do Soorya Namaskaaram after losing your eyesight’. The equivalent English phrase, I believe is ‘Why close the door after the horse has bolted’.

That she eventually woke me up and that I did put in last-minute effort and that I scraped through the exams are not the subject matters of today’s story.

A recent news article had got my attention. Unacademy, the edtech unicorn, has reportedly realized it was not making money yet had been burning them in bus loads and had decided to do something about it. The CEO has written to his staff, after firing a thousand of them, that it was time everyone in the company embraced a culture of frugality. Apparently, frugality was never a core value of the company till now but the fumes of burnt billions and the impossibility of raising more money have made them realize. And they are putting in place a whole lot of changes.

No more meals and complimentary snacks in any of their offices. (If you want a career in Unacademy, you better bring your own tiffin carrier!)

No more business class travel for anyone. (If you wish to travel from Bangalore to Bombay, sit in economy, just like the idiots who invested in the company!)

No more dedicated drivers for senior staff. (Of course, you can continue to keep driving the company to the ground!)

The management will take a pay cut. (Never mind if many of them didn’t deserve a job in the first place!)

Unacademy isn’t the first start-up to do this. They are not going to be the last. Expect more to follow.  They will be forced to follow. Not the least because they would realize their follies but because ‘investment winter’ has set it and blind venture funds and squint-eyed investors have woken up and realized their investments are in jeopardy. They have been pouring serious money expecting serious returns only to see their investment in serious condition and the businesses getting into ICU.

With no hope in hell, they are turning off the investment taps and are tightening the screws. Cut cost, slash losses, show profits they say. Unicorns are doing the only thing they can – cut unnecessary costs and unwieldy flab which they shouldn’t have accumulated in the first place.

Shouldn’t they have been conscious of the costs from the beginning? Of course. Shouldn’t they have conserved their capital and spent it judiciously? You bet.

Cost consciousness is not a strategy or a tactic during a downturn. It should be the crux of corporate culture. It is what made bootstrapped companies like Zoho and Gofrugal succeed without investors and investment. The new start-ups are paying a heavy price to learn this simple truth. The price, ironically and unfortunately, is the capital they had received to build their business.

With all their nonsensical spending coming home to roost, spendthrift start-ups are having their inflated egos brought to ground level. Extravagant promoters are being forced to shift from free money to frugality. The investment winter is making reckless businesses go into hibernation. From which, many are not going to wake up.

Would Unacademy be one of them? For the sake of this country, let’s hope the company, along with others, scrape through their toughest exam yet!

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Q-commerce sucks. Marketing 101 works!

Online is a funny place, if it can be considered a place at all. More so, the grocery delivery business that keeps changing by the minute. Literally!

First, it was delivery within 2 days. Then it was delivery within 10 minutes. And as if people couldn’t wait, it wilted to delivery within minutes. In fact, it was not even e-commerce anymore. They gave it a new name, Q-commerce. Quick commerce.

There was this start-up called Zepto. Started by two 19-year-olds who promised grocery delivery in 10 minutes. It even raised $200 million, shall we say, quickly. The startup’s valuation soared to $900 million, taking it closer to becoming a unicorn.

Grofers even went one step further and changed its all-grocery business model to a quick-commerce one and offered a range of other products too. For good measure, they even changed their name to Blinkit.

Not to be left behind, Swiggy got a $ 700 million funding to their Q-commerce venture, Instamart. The company claimed it would lead the Q-commerce grocery space and reach an annualized gross merchandise value of $1 billion in three quarters.

Ride share company Ola launched Ola Dash. You may be surprised Ola even launched a brand in the Q-commerce space.

Remember the last five overs of IPL matches. When even the commentators urged us to order and promised quick deliveries. 10-minute delivery was the in-thing.

The market was abuzz. The investors were thrilled. The start-ups were vrooming. The business press went gaga. Everybody was rooting for Q-commerce. Except the customer. They refused to join the party. They didn’t need 10-minute delivery. Once in an emergency, yes; but daily, no. They weren’t keen paying a delivery fee for it.

Zepto has stopped saying 10-minute delivery. Ola Dash has announced it is shutting down. Blinkit is too numb to speak. Ladies and Gentlemen, Q-commerce is dead. The brands are beating a hasty retreat. The start-ups are changing their business models. No more 10-minute delivery. It’s back to square one. Delivery time that’s reasonable. Delivery schedules that suit customer needs.

The only thing faster than the birth and speed of growth of Q-commerce has been its quick demise. Maybe we should have called it D-commerce. That’s what this concept was always destined for.

One of the many good things about Marketing 101 is its limited syllabus. The rules are limited and, importantly, they are simple.

Thou shall only serve the need of the customer. Thou shall find a customer need and serve it better than others and the customer shall beat a path to your door.

Thou shall not create a need. When you conjure up solution for a need that doesn’t exist, the customer shall beat a path to your door, and close it.

What then explains the madness of investors and their mad rush to invest in start-ups who don’t understand the basics of Marketing 101. Why would they invest in an idea that tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?

When I first wrote about this in ‘Hindu Tamil Thisai’ (https://www.hindutamil.in/news/supplements/vaniga-veethi/800587-quick-commerce.html), there were those who claimed I didn’t understand the new wave. Many felt I was old-fashioned and didn’t understand the millennials.

I doubt if millennials are a new breed, a different race, that they can be manipulated into buying a solution that doesn’t serve their needs. For all the evidence to the contrary, millennials aren’t dumb. And they don’t go that wrong.

But I was wrong on one count. I wondered about the sustainability of the concept of Q-commerce and suspected about its longevity. Even I am taken aback by the speed of its demise. It’s taken less than 10 weeks for the 10-minute delivery start-ups to understand that Marketing 101 still works!

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Make Your Brand Play Second Fiddle

What happens when you put the cart before the horse?

If you are lucky, the horse just laughs at you. If you are not, the horse may kick at an awkward angle and the proverbial ball may not be in your court!

Most marketers do the same thing with similar calamitous consequences for their brands. They believe the secret to winning is launching a new brand in an existing category. They are part of the ‘better products win’ brigade. A handful may succeed too. Never mind the exorbitant cost they pay for it or the enormous luck they may be blessed with.

The smart ones realize the cardinal principle of winning in marketing is in not searching for a new brand but for a new category. You see, opportunity does not lie in brands. It lies in creating categories. In the mad rush to build brands, the smartness in building a new category is often overlooked.

Paper Boat was not just a new brand. It created a new category.

Netflix was not just a new brand. It opened a new category.

Maggie was not just a new brand. It formed a new category.

Paper Boat, Netflix, Maggi et al fashioned new categories and were the first to enter them. Thus, they reaped enormous strategic advantages. For starters, there was no other brand to compare them with. They started running the race alone. Any athlete would tell you the power of a good head start. It gives time to enter the customers’ mind. It helps build a sizeable market lead. Importantly, it gives the brand the luxury of making mistakes and still get away with it!

They say it’s lonely at the top. When you create a category and start running, it’s pretty much lonely at the start too!

More than many research have clearly pointed out to an indisputable fact. Category creators experience faster growth. They receive much higher valuations from investors than businesses that bring only incremental innovations to the market.

Consumers think categories first and then talk brands. You decide to have coffee first. Then look around to figure out which restaurant brand to have it from. You decide to watch a movie first. Then wonder which one to watch. You decide to marry first. Then search for the matrimonial site you need to register in.

Al Ries and Laura Ries put it so very eloquently in their book ‘The Origin Of Brands. ‘Imagine shopping at a grocery store that doesn’t have any signs pointing you in the right direction. Odds are you’d spend a lot of time wandering the aisles until you found what you needed. People want a sense of direction when they’re shopping, and they want to see their options grouped together – whether that’s kitchen tools, breakfast cereals, or winter coats. One way to do this is with product categories.’

In spite of the power of searching for a new category to create than of looking for a new brand to launch, why do most marketers don’t see this inevitable market truth?  

Blame it on research!

Rather, on the erroneous understanding of what the customer says in research. When probed about choices, the consumer articulates her needs in terms of brands. Not in terms of categories. When asked what would they prefer to make in the kitchen when they don’t have much time, they would say Maggi, not noodles. They are just using the brand name to represent what they want. Sadly, marketers interpret it otherwise.

Put simply, categories first, brands next. That’s the path to take in the new product development game. When you are the first to create and enter a category, the consumer sees you first. Buys you first. And makes you first!

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