Lipton Dip n Drown

However, Unilever’s latest Lipton Dip n Win contest seems to come straight out of the handbook of the Seth of a local FMCG. That’s because no thought seems to have gone into the planning of the campaign. Just put up a number of lucrative prizes, promote them like crazy through the media, and lo and behold! You’ve got a great marketing campaign. Whether that works to create any long-term impact and adds value to the equity of the brand is highly disputed.

That’s because when you’re running a nationwide theme like Lipton Dip n Win, and your grand prize is Honda Civic worth more than Rs.2 million, you will have less budget for the other prizes. What all this means is that while the whole nation would get to know about your prize scheme via the aggressive media campaign raising people’s expectations, the actual number of winners will be less resulting in backlash by the millions of consumers who won’t get to win any prizes from Lipton.

And that backlash would be more intense because people consume tea at least twice a day and if they get 2-3 failed attempts every single day for three months constantly with Lipton adding salt to injury by putting up billboards showing the winners and bragging about how many people are dipping vainly to win, you can well imagine how pissed off the average consumer would be.

But let’s put all our theories aside and take the case of a real-life example to understand the impact of this promotional tactic on a consumer.

Lipton Dip n Drown

Just look at the above visual closely.  ‘TRY AGAIN’. This is the image I’m treated to day after day courtesy Lipton. I take tea in my office on an average three times a day and we use Lipton teabags.

My house coincidentally uses Lipton bags as well and our daily consumption is on an average 6 teabags per day. The prize scheme has been running at least for the last two months if not more so and we’ve yet to strike even a speck of gold dust, let alone the whole pot.

So 9 teabags per day X 60 days equals more or less 540 teabags with the dreaded ‘TRY AGAIN’ imprinted on them.

And I haven’t even gone through the ‘failed’ attempts of my office colleagues. In short, what we’re looking at are roughly 2000 empty teabags.

As a consumer I’m genuinely pissed off and my line of thinking is going the same way as any other irate consumer, that the Lipton management deliberately tinkers with the prizes so that only their relatives win them and just to be sure that no one suspects of them of foul play, they’ll make sure they’re distant relatives living in as far flung places as Lala Moosa and Burewala.

What’s more, the mercury shoots up further when I see the new billboards they’ve put up to brag about how many teabags they’ve served since the launch of the prize scheme.

As a marketer I’m tempted to try this hackneyed tactic ignoring my own agitation as just a one-off case but still concerned about the backfire effect.

Here, my line of thinking is more of a herd mentality, that if a top dog like Unilever’s Lipton is spending oodles of moolah on a mere prize scheme, surely they must be minting money out of this tactic. A big brand like Lipton wouldn’t lessen their brand equity knowingly just to sell a few more teabags. They must know something that I don’t.

The following thought-provoking questions come to mind:

1. Do promotional prize schemes really work in changing loyalties or consumption patterns in this part of the world? My family’s consumption pattern has remained the same. Same goes for my office. What this scheme has only managed to do is give us a sense of losing every day.

2. What do you think has Lipton achieved through this campaign apart from giving the brand manager a green star on her CV and her ticket to switch to the next company?

3. Is it better to give a few dazzling prizes or lots of non-dazzlers? Would Lipton have fared better if they kept 18 iPhone 5s or 36 S3s up for grabs instead of one Honda Civic?

4. Do you know anyone who has actually managed to win a grand prize that these brands offer be it Lipton, Tapal, Ufone or Pepsi? Or are these just a sham to induce trial? I  for one don’t know a single person.

To me, if Unilever really were pressed on by the ‘higher’ authorities to run a promotional campaign for Lipton, as Unilever is so famous for,  they should have put prizes in the complete pack instead of individual teabags. That way, someone who drinks as many as 5 cups of tea a day won’t be reminded about his sour luck five times a day, and as the adage goes about shooting the Messenger, Unilever’s Lipton do not get shot down for delivering the bad news day in and day out.

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Cadbury Perk Zombie TVC

No I don’t think the ad is awesome by any stretch of the imagination. But I believe it could have been by just a few tweaks here and there. No, I won’t go into getting the dance steps right or the issue of copying from popular culture.

Btw, isn’t that song copyrighted? Did Cadbury actually pay for using it or is it just a case of Pakistani-copying-Indians and Indians-copying-Pakistani intellectual stuff without giving a goddamn penny to the creator?

And if they did pay for it, then it must have been loads of moolah. In that case, couldn’t the creative come up with something that didn’t jack up the cost of the ad production because of royalty payment?

The gorilla ad was awesome and Cadbury Perk Zombie TVC is not. And only because the creative team hasn’t learnt jack from their past glory.

What was so great about that ad was while some people loved it, it managed to infuriate other people like that girl Farheen who wrote this venomous post, and she got other people talking about it. That’s stupendous for brand awareness and recall. The Zombie ad, people wouldn’t care either way.

When you’re going for humor or even a bit of cheekiness, you’ve got to inject an element of surprise to get the WOW out of the target audience, whoever they maybe. In the Gorilla ad, that was achieved by the sudden transformation of the prospective girl into a gorilla, and no one saw it coming. That got the audience to sit up and take notice. And not just teenagers.

Just imagine if instead of the visual transformation, they had put an arrow on top of the girl with the text saying ‘she has turned into a gorilla now, so imagine it! ‘Wouldn’t have worked, right?

That’s precisely what the Cadbury Perk Zombie TVC has done wrong. Instead of actually showing the actors all made up like ghouls and ghosts, they’ve shown them just enacting the zombie dance and expecting the audience to imagine them as zombies in their mind’s eye.

Yes, ads and movies rely on exaggeration to get their point across, but there’s always an element of believability embedded to get the balance right, especially the human reactions to the exaggerated sequence. Again referring to the gorilla ad, the prospective groom and his family are scared out of their wits when they see the girl turn into a gorilla. Fair enough.

In the Cadbury Perk Zombie TVC, the stern librarian gets scared because her good-for-nothing students who she has reprimanded a while ago start dancing? You gotta be kidding me!

And that also in the same freakin clothes? Couldn’t Ogilvy and Cadbury spare some budget for a change of clothes? Wouldn’t have cost that much, considering that you only needed rags to represent ghouls, might even have snatched them from a beggar.

And if you contend by saying that this ad is made for teenagers for whom it is believable, then I’m afraid the strategy and creative people are out of tune with the average intelligence level of today’s tween, let alone a teenager.

Finally, there’s still something lacking, it’s still predictable even after the donning of ghoulish outfit and make-up – the element of surprise – the real kicker which sets apart great humor from the mundane.

In this case, that could have been the librarian being a real ghost/vampire/zombie herself who shows her true colours right at the climax of the ad. Now that would have evoked a WOW from the audience.

The problem with us is we get carried away so much by our remarkable successes that don’t analyze what went right and what didn’t with a campaign so that we can emulate the success formula. And it’s a national problem that permeates even the cricket team. Remember how Pakistan’s batting crumbled against S.Africa in T20 world cup and because Umar Gul saved the day, the real issues were swept under the carpet, and then they reared their ugly head in the match against India and Sri Lanka.

Ok the bottom-line: yes, the Cadbury Perk Zombie TVC may well deliver the results it was supposed to. But what if with the few tweakings proposed, the ad spewed out awesome results that went through the roof, so much so that instead of a single laughing trip to the bank, it resulted in a constant stream of hysterical visits to the bank by virtue of  Cadbury commissioning Ogilvy to churn out a half-dozen such ads over the next year or so, and other brands getting Ogilvy to do the same. Now that for me is CREATIVITY.

The post CADBURY PERK ZOMBIE AD REVIEW appeared first on Brandasy- Branded Pakistan.

Marketing association of pakistan

The post MAP – One Day Workshop on “Excellence at Work” appeared first on Brandasy- Branded Pakistan.

Marketing Association of Pakistan

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Marketing Association of Pakistan will be holding a seminar on Redefining Leadership – Transforming Pakistan as part of its monthly series – Islands of Excellence – Transforming Pakistan. Dawood Hussain, Chairman Karachi School of Business and Leadership as well as chairman of Dawood Hercules and Engro Corporation will speak about the topic at length.

The MAP Seminar will be held on Wednesday the 18th of July at Marriott Hotel. 

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Marcon Pakistan 2012

Marcon 2012 the premium marketing conference with this year’s theme ‘New Trends and Insights in Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage’ featured a glitterati of celebrities from the marketing world and the corporate sector of Pakistan including, Imran Ahmed- President MARCON, Masood Hashmi – President MAP, Ehsan Malik – Chairman and CEO Unilever, Sakib Sherani – CEO Macroeconomic Insights, Aly Mustansir- Head of Marketing and Brand Management- HBL, Rafiq Rangoonwala CEO Cupola, Afnan Ahsan – CEO Engro Foods, Amir Paracha- Vice President Marketing, Home & Personal Care – Unilever, Naveed Saeed – Senior Executive Vice President Commercial PTCL, Zohair Mehmood – Director External Affairs – Coca Cola Beverages, Tarek Miknas – CEO Fortune PromoSeven Group, Javed Jabbar – Global Vice President – International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Shoaib Qureshy- CEO Bulls Eye Communication Group, Amir Pasha –Country Manager Visa International, Sohail Ansar- CEO, GroupM, Salman Wassey – Chief Commercial Officer- Ufone, Anwar Rammal – Chairman Asiatic Public Relations Network, Masood Hamid – Director Marketing, Pakistan Herald Publications, Mahmood Hashmi – CEO – Orient Advertising and Adil Ahmed – Director Symmetry Group

Marcon Pakistan

The following is the concluding part of the Marcon conference happenings:

Power of Digital for Brands

 Tarek Miknas – CEO Fortune Middle East PromoSeven Group 

Rabia Garib CIO and Tarik Miknas

• Traditional marketing model is fast losing its efficacy.
• Social media is ideal for small businesses that do not have colossal budgets to reach the masses.
• In this respect, the world has changed. Any business can now reach its target market with the controlled marketing budget that they have at their disposal.
• In order to increase sales of their products, marketers need to keep pace with the developments in the world which are happening at breakneck speed and make use of emerging advanced tools along with integrated strategy and proper planning.
• Brands are increasingly embracing the social media model and reaping great benefits from it.
• If you’ve good something good to offer to the consumer, there’s always a good chance your communication would go viral on the social media sphere.
• The ROI on digital campaigns is measurable and far more than anything you an expect from the conventional campaigns.

Today I Will Campaign

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8a_h7uCcN8

Batelco Good Call Campaign

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atydfmOvnmY

Masood Hashmi and Tarik Miknas

Sustainable Marketing – Unsustainable Model?

Javed Jabbar – Global Vice President – International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

Javed Jabbar - IUCN

• Business in Pakistan is flourishing despite all odds. One company has had 70% sales growth year on year for the last ten years.

• London is the most unequal city in the world where the gap between haves and have-nots is great.

• Pakistan is composed of multiple realities but the international media deliberates on only one.

• Newsweek/Times published a cover story that Pakistan was the most dangerous nation on earth and they should be ashamed of themselves.

• Few years ago Newsweek did publish a report that Pakistan was the most hospitable nation in the world but such positive stories in the international media are few and far in between.

• Most people remain the same throughout their life. They don’t change their name, religion or sex.

• Family planning in Pakistan started back in the 1960s. We’ve been saying since that time that ‘Bachey do hi Achey’ but Pakistani people are way too resilient and continue to churn out children at an alarming rate oblivious to our warning.

• Although this state of affairs would wet the appetite of our businesses, having more people in Pakistan to buy their products, it does not augur well for the country at large as there are finite sources.

• Then sometime back we changed our strategy. Instead of advising them on the merits of two children, we advised them to give space between births as this also in accordance with the Shariat where we’ve been advised that the mother should be allowed to feed the baby for two years.

• This advice resonated with the masses and even the clergy who’ve historically opposed our initiatives supported us on this cause.

• We applied this paradigm shift in marketing birth control in 16 districts with amazing results. So finally we’ve found a successful marketing strategy for birth control.

• We’re now searching for a successful marketing tactic to brand Earth.

• The capitalist model is a failure model in the long run as it encourages consumers to have more and more of what they don’t need. If you’ve two cars, you need to have one more. If you have 10 suits, you want 10 more, dictated by the marketing prowess of these brands.

• Man is born in chains and struggles to free himself for the rest of his life.

• We need to move from consumption-obsessed economy to conservation-oriented one.

• We are producing 30 Billion tons of carbon emission causing irreparable damage and they need to be reduced to 4 Billion soon.

• Apart from sunlight which is infinite, all other resources are finite and once consumed cannot be brought back. You use petrol and gas and its gone.

• Going green is not the answer as we’ve discovered. Companies only come up with few green initiatives while the rest of the business goes unchecked.

• We need to focus on growth in value rather than volume.

• If Pakistan is to become like Europe let alone US in consumerism, then it would need two Earths to fulfill the insatiable appetite for consumer goods.

• Pakistan needs to shift to labor-intensive growth rather than technology-intensive in order to make use of the vast labor force.

• IUCN used to run campaigns on how this rat race is destroying species and natural resources.

• Now we’re changing gears, focusing on the childhood memories of first interacting with nature which brought genuine delight out of people.

• Whether this strategy will bring about the paradigm shift as in birth control remains to be seen.

• Even a 4% growth in GDP needs at least 6% growth in energy sector.

Creativity in Marketing –

Shoaib Qureshy- CEO Bulls Eye Communication Group

Shoaib Qureshy- Bulls Eye

• We’re chasing the wrong ideals. Only strategy can make or break a brand.

• Two brand strategies that brand managers love the most and which keep their brands in the land of mediocrity are Bigger n Better and Greater Firepower.

• Most of the brands are in trouble. The brand managers don’t admit in public to save face but in private they admit to it.

• The reason behind it is that they haven’t built a brand. They’re just promoting a product using the same hackneyed methods that every Tom, Dick and Harry is using.

• One brand manager came up to me and said he wanted to emulate the strategy of Tarang. I asked him what was the strategy of Tarang, and he had no idea, telling me to put all those dances and songs that are there in the Tarang execution.

• Sooper was the first soft biscuit in Pakistan similar to biscuits sold in bakeries. Pre-Sooper, biscuits manufactured in Pakistan were all hard type, which you had to really chew.  A mad R&D fellow at EBM came up with this idea which EBM backed and the result: EBM catapulted to the top spot going past the market leader LU.

• Before Sooper, EBM used to come up with one brand at a time and stake all its luck on it. LU was the market leader with top performing brands like TUC, Gala and Prince. After EBM created this new category in biscuits, Sooper’s revenue was more than all LU’s brands combined.

• This is what happens when you bring creativity onto the table.

• Bakeri tried to emulate the success of Sooper with Bigger n Better strategy but fell flat on its face.

• Now Omore is trying to go up against Wall’s Badami with its new launch Desi. You can already tell where that brand will end up.

Shoaib Qureshi -Marcon

• The wrong claims of fame:

1. 90X30 Outdoor
2. 2 crore foreign ad
3. Full page ad
4. 10 crore 360 media campaign.

• All of the above are examples of greater firepower devoid of any creativity.
• We as marketers believe in showing muscles, whereas it is the weight of your brand idea that counts.

• Most brands are in trouble because all categories have been reduced to mere commodities with price-driven competition.

• Whenever Zardari’s government announces a price increase, the consumer doesn’t take a second to leave your brand because you haven’t differentiated your brand or given him reason to love it and stick to it.

• Creativity is the only way to brand success and the reason it is shunned by most is that people are afraid to be creative because our society equates creativity with foolishness. Right from the beginning in school we are taught there’s only solution to a problem, and if we try to come up with an alternative one, we are failed.

• The moment someone says something different, people talk him down, therefore he prefers to remain mediocre rather than be creative and face opposition.

• The internet is the biggest culprit of promoting copy culture. The client finds a number of successful campaigns online and wants the agency to put them together.

• I still use the same tools I used ages ago, my brain, a piece of paper and a pencil. I find it hard to find a sharpener because the pencil itself has become an endangered species.

• Tarang is another success story because it had the guts to break away from the status quo and do something different.

• The packaged milk category is dominated by two brands: MilkPak and Haleeb, both of which about 45% and 40% market share respectively.

• However, in spite of all their Herculean efforts, this category has failed to penetrate beyond the 20% of the total milk market, 80% of which is still dominated by ‘Bhains ka doodh’.

• The biggest reason is that most consumers still view tetra pak milk as tea whitener. Everyday is the real tea whitener but since it is in powdered form, it doesn’t have a very strong appeal.

• However, in spite of this perception being known to all, Haleeb continued with their ‘sub se gaara doodh’ and Milkpak with ‘full cream milk’.

• Tarang broke away from the mold and positioned itself as the first liquid tea whitener, which is what the consumers already perceived it as. It banked on the whitening essence and the effort paid off.

•  In the David and Goliath story, David had no choice but to be creative in order to beat the mighty Goliath. Same goes for Tom & Jerry.

• Who do you root for? The underdog. Everyone loves an underdog. You just need to make an effort to do something out of the ordinary. The world will love you for doing that.

• 9 out of 10 people here will forget or ignore what I’ve told them. The remaining one will be the successful one.

• There’s a difference between a businessman and a marketer. There was this friend of mine at IBA who after graduating joined his father’s business in Jodia bazaar.

• He keeps a close lookout on the latest trends and whatever is in, he would import a couple of containers of that stuff from China and make a huge profit.

• Most of today’s marketers are just like that. They want to make a quick buck by copying a campaign so as to not waste time thinking up one.

• If you want to be like that, you’re better off in Jodia Bazar rather than in the world of marketing.

Adapting to the Evolving Relationship Between Client, Media and Agencies

Moderator: Amir Pasha –Country Manager Visa International

Marcon conference

Can agencies remain relevant in the age of social media?

How clients, media and agencies able to respond to the changing needs of the market?

How has the pace of change shifted?

What can brand managers do to become category manager or director of marketing?

Sohail Ansar- CEO, GroupM:

Accountability for any buck you spend is much more today than it was before.

Brands like Telenor, Engro, Unilever and others are doing great, so it’s wrong to say that marketers don’t have a hand on the pulse of the consumer.

Research is needed to better understand the shifting consumer preferences and plan your strategy according to that.

Salman Wassey – Chief Commercial Officer- Ufone

Agencies are for the large part sleeping. Sometimes the best tactic does come out of the agency. Zong T20 and location-based packages were conceived by the agency.

Businesses are doing well for the large part. Telecom industry earned $3.5 Bn in revenue last year, but they could have done a whole lot more and added more value. The potential was far more than was realized.

Staff is not trained. Agencies need to spend a major chunk of their profit on staff training.

Understand the consumer, don’t treat him as a mobile number.

Marcon panel discussion

Anwar Rammal – Chairman Asiatic Public Relations Network

All ads look the same. I can’t remember any brand from the ads I’ve watched recently.

Training is definitely imparted but is becoming all the more difficult with dwindling agency commission.

Masood Hamid – Director Marketing, Pakistan Herald Publications

The MBAs don’t go work in the agencies but mostly work on the client side. As such there’s an imbalance. Agencies need to attract talent from that pool so that training need not be that intensive.

Mahmood Hashmi – CEO – Orient Advertising

Consumer is ignored.

Relationship between the three parties has broken down. There’s an agency for virtually every function which in the good old days was handled by one single agency. As a result of this, the brand managers have become all-powerful, taking care of the product as well as the communication which is not their expertise. The consequences of this is rampant corruption in MNCs.

Adil Ahmed – Director Symmetry Group

Consumer is much more empowered thanks to social media. Understand and respect the consumer.

One good insight can make or break a brand.

Amir Pasha- Visa International

The post Marcon 2012 Pakistan appeared first on Brandasy- Branded Pakistan.

Marcon 2012

 The  following is a summary of the speakers’ presentation at the Marcon:

Imran Ahmed- President MARCON:

imran ahmed- president marcon

• This conference was organized within a space of few weeks.
• Terrabiz was given the task of taking care of the dirty work of organizing everything to make us look good.
• 600 people from all over the country are attending Marcon.
• There are quite a few firsts for this conference, CNN sponsoring this conference with possible coverage on the channel, strategic alliance with Jang resulting in live webstreaming of the entire event on Geo’s events website. The event is being shown live to numerous universities across Pakistan.

Masood Hashmi – President MAP:

masood hashmi- president MAP

• In spite of the doom and gloom scenario projected by the media, business is prospering in Pakistan.

• Shan, Unilever and many other companies have had 25-30% sales growth. 99% of companies in Pakistan are making money.

• 9 out of 10 biggest brands in the world are American. China Mobile is the only non-American brand in that prestigious list. The question is, are these brands big because of America or America big because of these brands.

• There was a trust survey carried out to find out who people trust the most: their peers, friends, parents or brands. The results were astonishing. Majority of people trust their parents the most and then brands. Sometimes brands take the top slot.

• A young bahoo would gawk at her saas recommending ‘shehed chatayi’ (honey-lick) for the new born. And yet she would give Cerelac to her newborn without a second thought. That’s the power of trust for brands.

marcon 2012 conference

• Once I was travelling by air in Europe. The captain informed us that the fog was so thick that he couldn’t even see the wing of the plane but he would safely get them on ground. When they landed, the captain announced, now comes the tricky part: finding the terminal building.
• Same thing happens with marketing, finding the final destination.

Ehsan Malik – CEO Unilever:

Ehsan Malik- Chairman Unilever

• Pakistan has had the lowest GDP coupled with the highest inflation.
• What’s more the country was ravaged by two floods and one earthquake in the last decade.
• Business in Pakistan has to face an extremely uneven playing field with factors such as piracy, counterfeiting and smuggling making it next to impossible to play by the book.
• For example, 50% of total tea consumed is smuggled. 110,000 tons worth of tea is tax evaded.
• On top of that, tea is heavily taxed in Pakistan at the same level as octra petrol which is only used in luxury cars whereas tea is consumed by the masses.
• Tea in Pakistan is 50% more expensive than India.
• Unilever started operation in Pakistan in 1948. In the last 18 months it has introduced 10 brands, 7 in 2011 alone.
• Unilever had the second highest improvement in gross margin last year.
• Unilever has shifted gears, from a check mode of CSR to proactive initiative for sustainable living.
• For instance, Safeguard is fulfilling the purpose of teaching children all over Pakistan how to wash hands properly.
• Soap is the single most effective disease protection agent. Although it has been around for 125 years, Unilever has leveraged its benefits through brilliant marketing.
• Lux is supporting arts and film industry in Pakistan.
• Likewise all Unilever brands are playing a critical role in the uplifting of societal values.

Pakistan Opportunity:

Sakib Sherani – CEO Macroeconomic Insights

Sakib Sherani

• Have been commenting on the doom and gloom economic conditions of Pakistan both in the print and electronic media for quite long and have decided to change tracks.

• Pakistan has been said to be one of the most resilient countries in the world. Over the past few years, this resilience has come to a large extent from the performance of the rural economy, which has drawn strength from bumper crops and booming prices.

• Ever since its conception 65 years ago, there has never been a contraction in growth rate.

• Most of the problems Pakistan have is due to the fact that it never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
• Pakistan’s demographics alone are enough to wet the appetite of any business owner.

• It is the 6^th most populous country in the world and is expected to reach 4^th spot by 2050.

• 114 million people are under the age of 30 years.

• It has got nine big cities with population of more than 1 million.

• The biggest insight that we’ve verified from two different sources, Dr Durr-e-Nayab’s work and Asian Development Bank’s 2010 flagship report Asian Development Outlook,  is the size of Pakistan’s middle class which is a staggering 70 million – more than the  individual population of UK, France and Italy.

• This is the fourth largest middle class in Asia after China, India and Indonesia, and accounts for 40% of the total population.

• The total spending of this class is $75 Billion. An unprecedented consumption boom has been under way in Pakistan since the mid-2000s.

• The government’s intervention in the market for wheat has poured an additional several hundred billion rupees into the rural economy, propelling demand for cars, motorcycles, tractors, durable goods as well as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). In fact, the FMCG sector has witnessed an unprecedented boom in sales since 2008, which has defied expectations — and gravity.

• According to Asian Development Bank, the size of the elite class- the super rich in Pakistan is 250,000.

• Meekal Ahmed, former senior economist at the Planning Commission and later the IMF (now settled in the US) who came to Pakistan after hearing all the negative vibes about the country from the international media was amazed to find  that the shopping malls are packed and could not get reservation at the top restaurant for an entire month. He like many others are unable to reconcile this reality to the fact that this was the same country that was getting thrashed in the media for having an economy on the verge of failure.

• The data from household surveys tells the real story, and points to two parallel universes existing side by side in Pakistan

• The major drivers of growth are urbanization and demographic dividend.

• Pakistan has the largest contiguous irrigation network in the world.

• 30^th largest economy by 2050.

• In spite of crippling economic indicators, the consumption levels have gone through the roof. Food consumption alone accounts for $69Bn while the hoteling/food service industry is worth $2Bn.

• The total consumption is $198Bn which when you adjust for the all the extraneous factors comes out to be a whopping $285Bn.

• Last 6 years, the local company sales doubled to Rs.300Bn while gross profit doubled to Rs.150 Bn.

Aligning Marketing with the Corporate Business Strategy:

Moderator – Aly Mustansir- Head of Marketing and Brand Management- HBL

How do you align revenue growth, market share, customer bottom line profitability to organizational objective

marcon panel discussion

Rafiq Rangoonwala CEO Cupola:

Marketing plans cannot be made in isolation. A brilliant marketing plan can fail miserably because the different stakeholders did not embrace it. All the departments need to take ownership of the plan in order for its execution to be successful.

It’s all good talking about brand equity, TOM and all that fancy jargon, but at the end of the day, it’s the money in the bank that counts. If people aren’t buying your brand, then all the fancy presentations in the world won’t make a difference.

Growth opportunities are there in spite of all the difficulties in all industries including the banking sector. ‘Bank are laughing all the way to the bank’.

Afnan Ahsan – CEO Engro Foods

Brand equity is important but yes, the bottom-line counts. Most of the Fortune 100 companies of the last decade are no more in this decade in spite of having great brand equity back then. Brand equity doesn’t matter if people aren’t talking about your brand.

Tremendous growth opportunities. Engro Foods blossomed in recessionary times.

CEO panel Marcon

Rafiq Rangoonwala:

Milk and water are no-brainer products that everyone needs irrespective of urban and rural area. Our business on the other hand is urban-oriented and will need time to adapt to the rural landscape. We are however, targeting semi-rural markets and have already opened up our outlets in places like Jhelum.

Size of the business determines the size of the spend.

Marketing department is to blame for not getting the chunk of money from the company’s kitty.  It is the responsibility of marketing head to educate the management especially the CFO about the importance of advertising. Usually it happens that the brand manager tells the CFO that we need to spend continually for the next 3-4 years before we hit the jackpot and the CFO tells him there won’t be a company after 4 years.

You need to put yourself in his shoes and try to speak his language as much as you can. Try to explain to him in terms of profits made instead of consumers influenced.

Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn was the most popular brand with Orville Redenbacher himself a household name. Once a young executive travelling with him on the plane asked him why he continued to waste money on advertising when he himself was a legend known to all. Orville in turn asked him what would happen to this plane if it ran out of fuel?

Marketing thus is the fuel that runs a business.

You can have a long-term strategy but you need to have a plan B and be on your toes all the time. Once a rapper came to Pakistan and asked me about our long-term strategy. I joked to him that we plan for the next five days only as Pakistan unlike Europe and America is one of the most unstable markets in the world where things are bound to happen which you haven’t thought of in your wildest dreams. He didn’t believe me and sure enough in the next five days Benazir was assassinated and the whole country turned upside down.

Afnan Ahsan:

Old spice relaunched three years ago at a budget half of our Olpers budget. So you don’t need a big spend to be successful. What you do need is creativity.

Q. Is media projecting the right image of Pakistan by pointing out its defects all the time?

RFQ: I’ve stopped watching television since the last two years. All they’ve on are talk shows where each pseudo analyst is shouting at the top of his lung. I wonder if they even hear themselves. What happens is that you hear these news of doom and gloom and take that excess baggage with you to the bed. The next day when you wake up you’re tired and depressed. The best way to avoid this state is to avoid television.

Q. Why don’t our local brands go international?

AFN: Yili is a local brand in China which is the largest dairy brand in the world. The world’s biggest mineral water brand is not Peri or any other fancy brand but a local Indonesian brand called Aqua which was acquired by Coke. Local brands have all the potential to set the scene on fire at the international level.

Driving Customer Engagement

Amir Paracha- Vice President Marketing, Home & Personal Care – Unilever:

amir paracha - vp marketing unilever

• Which brand would you sit next to at a dinner party? Will it be BMW, Google, Gucci,
• Your decision would depend on not only how big the brand is but more importantly your affinity with the brand.
• A single powerful idea can make a world of difference.
• Bob Geldoff raised $150 million in one day with just two concerts to help fight famine in Ethiopia. This was back in 1985 when this much money was a big deal.
• Surf Excel soared to stardom based on just one good powerful idea – Daagh to Achey Hotay Hain. It won the Brand Elections 2010.
• The real challenge is activating the idea.
• Brand idea must be people-driven instead of product driven.
• The conventional wisdom in branding has been to ask the consumers what they need or desire and then give them what they want.
• Lighthouse branding is a new concept in which you delve deep into the consumer’s lifestyle to find out yourself what’s missing in his life and then build a brand around that.
• Surf Excel was able to build a brand around the fact that children learn the most through contact with the outside world which gets inhibited by parents. Surf Excel worked towards removing that inhibition.
• A meaningful idea needs a meaningful slogan which has rythym, ties in with the essence of the brand, brings out the character of the brand and gives the consumer reason to remember it.

• A brand should be such that it uplifts the spirits of the consumer.

• Lastly, a brand should have a caring personality. Surf conducted two nationwide campaigns for the flood victims involving the children in a fun way to teach them the values of caring for others.

amir paracha - VP unilever

• While building the brand vertically, moving from functional to emotive and then to social sphere, brand have a tendency to forego of the previous attribute and focus solely on one. This a major pitfall, losing sight of one while moving onto the next one, and if a brand is to elevate itself to the pinnacle of success, it will need to keep all three of them hooked in a meaningful way.

Creating and Sustaining Innovation in Marketing:

Naveed Saeed – Senior Executive Vice President Commercial PTCL

naveed saeed -ptcl

• PTCL is becoming the business hub of businesses.
• Our journey over the last five years has had a profound impact on how businesses deal with people and how people evolve their businesses.

• At PTCL, we have a big appetite for innovation. In the last five years, it has created services that are in line with the consumer needs.

• Pursuance of innovation drives us to perform and each step has brought us closer to our consumers.

• Comprising the ‘PTCL Eco System’, these include Phone, Internet, IPTV, Videophone, Wireless, On the Go Cloud, Tablet, Smartphone and IPTV on Tablet.

• In essence it was the technology that evolved into product which transformed into brand and hopefully convert into falling in love for the consumer.

• PTCL currently has 1.5 million subscribers of broadband. The actual user are much more.

• It’s broadband can be accessed anywhere, even in a jungle. The network is spread over 180 cities and more than 2000 towns and villages.

• Sahiwal has the highest GB download in Pakistan.

• Facebook is the most accessed site in Pakistan.

• A paradigm shift is taking place from traditional marketing to innovative marketing tools.

• Mini Cooper was launched on Youtube instead of traditional media with the traffic being directed to their website.

• Google Analytics is an amazing marketing tool that lets you know in-depth demographics of the people visiting your site.

• The return on spend can be determined much more accurately through the social media tools. I can check how many people in which phase of DHA are watching my ptcl ad at any given time although I cannot know who actually is watching within that household.

• The P-PAD (Pipe Platform Application Device) is an evolution of iPad.

• Storage devices are shrinking at a breakneck speed. Just a while ago you had a bulky hard drive to store 100GB of space. Now a single micro-Sd card holds a staggering 64GB of memory.

Zohair Mehmood – Director External Affairs – Coca Cola Beverages

zohair mahmood- coca cola

• Coke is the third most admired company in the world, first being Apple.
• Coke gives 1.5 Billion servings a day in 200 countries.
• According to Newsweek, Coke Studio was the best thing to come out of Pakistan in the last 10 years.
• Coke Studio Pakistan is the most visited website.
• Coke Studio has been emulated by India and Middle East. Mostly it is the other way around.
• Three times a year Coke dishes out best campaign award judged out of 200 countries. Pakistan has won it thrice.
• Coke has invested $280 million in Pakistan which will reach $400 million mark next year.
• Pakistan is the only country where Coke has shown double digit growth consistently.
• Coke in Pakistan is a result of Coca Cola Beverages, Coca Cola Içecek Turkey and Coca Cola Co. whose chairman is Babar Ali.
• Pakistan is resilient because of its people who are damn good at what they do. Haider Ibrahim is one such example, a young architect from UK who founded the Resettling the Indus Project after the devastating floods.

haider rtindus

• His organization has already rebuilt 10 bastis and countless villages ravaged by the floods using effective architectural techniques and indigenous materials that would ensure future floods would cause the minimum damage.
• His ideas are pragmatic as a result of which a basti is rebuilt in  just a few months time as opposed to years, making use of the affected people themselves as the builders.

haider ibrahim -Rtindus

MARCON INSIGHTS TO BE CONTINUED IN THE   NEXT PART………………………………….

marcon conference

The post Marcon 2012 – New Trends and Insights in Creating and Sustaining Competitive Advantage appeared first on Brandasy- Branded Pakistan.

Ehsan Malik Unilever at Marcon

The following is pictorial representation of the event to be followed by a comprehensive  summary of all presentations.

Marcon 2012 Marketing Conference
By Brandasy  |  View on Facebook

The post Marcon 2012 Marketing Conference – First Look appeared first on Brandasy- Branded Pakistan.

Marketing Association of Pakistan is hosting MARCON on March 21, 2012 on the subject of “New Trends and Insights in Creating & Sustaining Competitive Advantage” at the Marriott Hotel in Karachi. The event features following speakers: ·

Ehsan A. Malik – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Unilever Pakistan Limited·

Liam MacManus – Communications Strategy Director- Asia, Mindshare·

Afnan Ahsan – Chief Executive Officer, Engro Foods Limited·

Amir Paracha – Director Marketing, Unilever Pakistan·

Javed Jabbar – Global Vice President, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)·

Naveed Saeed – Senior Executive Vice President, PTCL·

Rafiq Rangoonwala – Chief Executive Officer, Cupola Pakistan·

Aly Mustansir – Head of Marketing and Brand Management, Habib Bank Limited ·

Sakib Sherani – Chief Executive Officer, Macroeconomic Insights and Former Economic Advisor Ministry of Finance, Pakistan·

Shoaib Qureshy – Chief Executive Officer, Bulls Eye Communications Group·

Sohail Ansar – Chief Executive Officer, GroupM·

Sarmad A. Ali – Group Managing Director Marketing & Advertising, Jang Group·

Adil Ahmed – Director, Symmetry Group·

Salman Wassay – Chief Commercial Officer, Ufone

We believe that over 400 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), GMs/Managers/Team Leaders/Senior Executives who are in charge of Strategic Marketing, which includes the areas of Branding, Marketing Communications, Advertising & Promotions, Customer Experience, Market Research, Business Development & Sales, etc. will attend the conference.

For registration or any query please contact Mr. Ghulam Hussain or Mr. Noman Amin at MAP Secretariat (Ph: 021-32760032, 32729952 & Cell: 0331-8111505) and Mr. Amin Amir Ali (Terrabiz) at 0345-3799661 or send an email at mapmail@cyber.net.pk, khi@map.org.pk, marcon@terrabizgroup.com

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This is the second part of the Transform Marketing Conference 2012.

Brand Engagement: Achieving Higher levels of performance and results.

Salman Yousuf – Brand Manager – Gillete, Braun, Oral-B & Duracell

Salman Yousuf – Brand Manager – Gillete, Braun, Oral-B & Duracell

• A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service.
• Interactions + Feelings = Brand
• Stairway to Brand Heaven & Hell : positive interactions and consistency send a brand on its way to brand heaven like Google, unpleasant interactions and inconsistency lead to brand hell like Vista.
• Brand Engagement is basically a person taking voluntary action with a brand in a way that will drive brand preference and thus purchase.
• BE drives engagement/action which pushes brand to TOM (Top of Mind) which finally leads to consumer advocacy.
• Consumer engagement:
1. Matters to the consumer
2. Serves the brand
3. Need to seed and feed
• Heineken one of the leading beer brands in the world, came up with dual screening campaign during the football world cup whereby people could choose the camera angle as well as predict goals and penalties to win prizes. 
• Nike came up with the ‘Write the Future’ Campaign, a challenge to counter Adidas’ sponsorship of the world cup. This campaign spawned retail space, social media, pretty much everything and resulted in a staggering 7.1% increase in sales in addition to raving reviews from the prestigious publications.

• Domino’s ‘Show Us Your Pizza’ was a successful campaign that ran into problems midway through.
• Domino’s objective was to show that it didn’t use any photoshop effects on its pizza promotional communication, and what they consumers saw in the ads was what they actually got delivered. It showed behind the scenes tricks of how food photography is tampered to give a great artificial image of the food item. It then offered its customers to send photos of its domino’s pizza they bought and win $500 worth of free pizza.
• All these photos were posted by the customers on social media, and to Domino’s horror, some of the pizzas were delivered in appalling condition. In order to recover from this PR damage, the CEO himself appeared in an ad showing one of the spoilt pizzas, apologized and promised free pizzas or refund to these customers.

• Gillete Groomin Gurus was a local campaign launched to increase the penetration of Gillete Mach 3 amongst the youth using Strings as brand ambassadors. The team visited different universities all over the country to impart grooming advice. Moreover, people were given free tickets to Strings concert on the purchase of Mach 3, and the concert itself was organized by Gillete.

Salman Yousuf – Brand Manager – Gillete, Braun, Oral-B & Duracell

Q&A SESSION

Q. Do you know Pakistan has only 10% internet penetration, then how can you expect to reach people through this medium? Why are you only going to private universities, why not to government institutions?  Plus your marketing strategy is such that it ignores the people with beards. – Kashif – Oasis Insights

A.  Who you target depends on your product and its target market. We approached the people that we did because we felt that was our target market.

Neil Christy: That was a very polite way of putting things. The point is, people with beards are not likely to buy a product as Mach 3. As such targeting a segment from where you’re not going to generate sales is just a complete waste of money.

Secondly, the impact of the internet is largely downplayed and underestimated in Pakistan while the top 10 fads/trends to appear in Pakistan in the last couple of years, Sialkot beating, Imran Khan campaign, were largely a result of social media. 

The Power of ‘No’

Shahzad Nawaz  – CEO Shahzad Nawaz Consulting

• Franka Rose refused to sit at the back of the bus just because she was colored.
• 136 people died in Lahore because of the medicine tender going to the lowest bidder pharma.
• Corporate world is in a rat race. And even if you win that race, you’re still a rat.
• There’s a culture of staying late in the office, and employees are afraid to say No to that.
• CEO is the wrong title given to me. I’m not a proper company. I’m just a one-man operation. I prostitute my time when I need to make some bucks.
• No one is free in today’s world. Even the CEO is a servant of the corporation that he works for.
• Billboards is one of the most dishonest businesses in Pakistan. I was the first one to introduce them here, but then when I realized you had to grease so many palms to survive, I got out. People have made billions in this business.

Q. How do you get out from this rat race? Where do you start? Yasmeen Zafar IBA

A. To be brutally honest, resign if you don’t agree with it. However, this drastic step is not always feasible, especially from an economic point of view. Even Islam tells you to stop an evil either physically, verbally or at the very least in your heart. So start with that. And don’t compromise on your values.

Q. Why aren’t our ad agencies churning out good creative ads? Why the same stuff is being copied time and again?

A. That’s because our ad agencies don’t have the guts to say No to client if he wants something nonsense. I left the advertising world back in 2002 because of such issues especially exploitation of women. I only once used a woman in an ad and even then it was because it was the requirement of the strategy not the client. The creative doesn’t bother coming up with something original because they know the seth of the advertising agency would reject it instead of defending it if the client doesn’t like it.  

Neil Christy:

You can afford to say no to people since you’ve already made a name for yourself. But people starting out in their career, how are they going to get anywhere if they say no to everything.

A.  By no I meant, something which is not ethically fit with your values. Don’t compromise on that. The sustenance that has been ordained for you, you will get one way or the other. It’s up to you how you earn it.

Neil Christy:

If I start saying No to my clients, pretty soon I will be sitting outside. You have to listen to your client and give him the brand strategy that he wants. You can’t run an ad agency with more disagreements than agreements with your client.

• A. By brand I meant Life. There’s a Chinese proverb that says Life is like a room with two doors. You enter from one door, spend some time and leave through the other without any trace. Only a few are able to write something on the walls of the room whilst there.

Brand Building in Cultural Tension

Taher A.Khan

Taher A. Khan – Interflow Communications

• I once told Unilever chairman he doesn’t need to hire MBAs to run their marketing. The poor souls don’t have the liberty to provide any input. All the creative templates come from abroad. All that the people on the ground need to do is execute them. And that can be done by any person with a little bit of marketing experience.
• Once I asked their brand manager the reason for blindly following the strategy from India for a tea brand which involved people performing a classical dance which wasn’t going to work in Pakistan. He said that if he rejected that coming up with his own strategy and that didn’t work, he would lose his job. But if he followed the dictated strategy and that didn’t work, he would still keep his job.
• India used to have the same problem. But the Indians have discovered themselves and are shedding their colonial skins. They’ve finally learnt to say No.
• Today, dramatic changes have the potential to occur at a breakneck pace courtesy social media.
• Visited Egypt just a couple of months before the Arab Spring and there was not an inkling of what was coming. Hosni Mubarak was still popular and very much in control.
• There are 6.2 million Facebook users in Pakistan. The largest newspaper in Pakistan has a circulation of not more than 0.5 Mn. The largest English newspaper has an even less at 400,000.
• Marketers still rely on the newspapers by and large.
• Mass media of today is social.
• Ad agencies today have different creative and digital departments which is strange. If a creative doesn’t know how to use digital media, he doesn’t deserve the job. When television first started, the creative didn’t know how to come up with TVCs, but they learnt it fast and today a creative is not considered worthy if he can’t come up with TVCs.
• Marketing has evolved: from a controlling phase to a shut-out phase to a conversation phase.
• Marketers today have to engage customers in conversations.
• Conversation leads to relationship which leads to affinity which results in communities.
• Marketers need to be out there where their target market is. If they can’t sit in a dhaba or ride a bus, they’ve no business being in this profession.
• Rizwan Jamil, one of the Unilever directors once spent three days living with a poor family as part of a ethnography study. He was shocked to see that the family had just boiled water with sprinkled spice along with a chapatti for all the three meals of the day. That was the extent of their poverty, and yet contrary to what we believe, they were all cheerful. They didn’t have the line of thinking that because of our abject poverty we are doomed, as so many of us far better-off than this family think.
• The strategy for the Big Idea is only possible from the intersection of customers insights and the brand’s best self.
• Mountain Dew sells more than Coke in Pakistan. Last month it sold more than Pepsi, becoming the largest selling soft drink in Pakistan.
• In Pakistan, it sells most in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa. Ought to be called the official drink of Taliban.
• Outside of North America, Pakistan is the biggest market for Mountain Dew in the entire world.
• Today on an average, 25% headlines in the world are negative, 3% positive and 72% neutral.
• Azme Alishan is a local brand we’re trying to build to rekindle the spirit of patriotism. It’s brand motto is that Pakistan would be a better place if we saw the glass as half full and not half empty.
• The brand has received some noteworthy success: 80,000 facebook fans, 60,000 youtube views, 600 tweets and 210 followers.
• What Azme Alishan has done is inspire other brands to come up with such uplifting projects. Telenor’s Karo Mumkin was a direct result of that, which was then followed by Mobilink and Cadbury.
• Azme Alishan has spawned many sub-brands including:
• National Song Competition
• Challenge Hai Pakistani
• Manzare Pakistan
• Behtar Pakistan
• Azam Awards
• Cadbury is just one of the brand that wants to sponsor the Azam awards.
• In today’s world, the only way forward for sustainability is a compelling narrative and an engaging dialogue.

Taher A.Khan

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Transform 2012 Marketing Conference

Although the theme given was What’s Next in Brand Management and Generational Marketing, the topics covered were diverse, ranging from personal branding to running a social media campaign.

 Here are the proceedings of the morning session:

Transform 2012 Marketing Conference

Corporate Image Development in a Changing World

Fahad Qadir – Director Public Affairs and Communications –Pak Afghan – Coca-Cola Export Corporation

•  We are living in a world of changing cultures.
• Tahrir Square was a revolution sparked by Twitter.
• In 2002, Netscape IPO was the biggest in history, today the company is no more.
• Facebook has swept the world with lightning speed, becoming equivalent to the second biggest country in the world.
• ‘It takes 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it.’ – Warren Buffet. 
• Actually it takes longer than 20 years to build your reputation. Some of the most reputable companies have been around for more than 100 years.
• Consumers are not attracted by sleek packaging anymore.
• Corporate image is a major part of what sells a company and its products.
• Corporate image building results in trust.
• Coke has been instrumental in helping out with the relief efforts in Pakistan whenever required and goes all the way to help out instead of just writing a cheque.
• Wendy’s Hamburger was one of the most famous burger joints in US, until 2005 when a woman discovered a human finger in her burger. Wendy’s refused to talk to the media while investigating the incident including checking the fingers of its employees in that joint. The woman sued Wendy for $10 million. It was finally revealed that the woman was a conman who pulled such stunts. The finger belonged to her boyfriend. Wendy’s never really recovered from this PR fiasco.
• Tony Howard, CEO of BP went for a holiday with his son in the middle of the 2006 Gulf of Mexico oil spill controversy, pretending as if nothing had happened. He came back and said to the media ‘… I would like my life back…’. He was sacked.
• Toyota in 2010 recalled 700,000 cars which had an issue with the brakes.
• Facebook ran into privacy issues 2010 which they didn’t address properly.
• Iphone 4 had an antenna issue whereby if you kept your hand at a certain point, the signals were lost. No real action taken.
• You could argue that these issues didn’t impact these two giants. Apple is going great guns with $97 Billion in cash reserves alone.
• The point is to stay prepared for the bad times by resolving all issues right then and there.
• Three pillars of Corporate Image:

1. Corporate Politics
2. Corporate Culture
3. Design of the organization

• The golden triangle : Government – Community – Culture
• Jack Welch changed the entire corporate culture of GE, making it one of the biggest American corporations during his reign. He had to take some decision like firing quite a few people but he got it done.
• Coke Studio is a perfect example of the benefits of positive corporate image.
• Coke Studio has done much to improve Pakistan’s image in the eyes of the world, receiving raving reviews on such prestigious publications as Wall Street Journal.
• It is the fourth largest music entity in the world on Google.
• The website receives most hits outside of Pakistan especially from Europe.
• On social media, it has received thousands of views and reviews.
• Interbrand has ranked Coke as the No.1 brand in the world for nine consecutive years.
• Coke is one of three most reputed companies in Pakistan.
• ‘21^st century CEOs will be judged not only by how they changed their industries, but also how well they led their companies to have positive impacts on the world.’ – Hecto Ruiz – Chairman & CEO AMD

Fahad Qadir – Director Public Affairs and Communications -Coca Cola

Q&A SESSION:

• What was the impact of New Coke fiasco? –Yasmeen Zafar - IBA

A.  Somewhere in 1992 our then CEO decided to leverage the Coke brand and come up with a new formula for Coke. After extensive research New Coke was launched while the classic Coke was phased out. People, especially die-hard fans of Coke rejected the new Coke, thousands of letters were sent to the CEO demanding the return of the Red Coke.

• What was the tangible impact of New Coke or even Coke Studio? –Yasmeen Zafar – IBA

A. Both of these incidents affected the bottom-line. I can’t tell you the figures, but it was double-digit.

• You mentioned Coke has indulged in CSR, with the relief efforts and all. Can you give the specifics of it?     -Zeeshan – Owner private firm

A.  Coke was the first entity, even before the US government to not only pledge but disburse $2 million within 24 hours for the 2005 Earthquake. It then gave $3 Mn for the relief of flood victims. Apart from that, Coke initiates sustainable projects. For example there’s one in Nathiagali that has been going for four years, then Women Empowerment through KAAF Foundation since 2 years. All these projects have been devised to be self-sustaining, that at some time we can hand them over to the people to by run by themselves and help the community on their own.

• What has been the impact of negative sentiments associated with America on Coke being an American brand?

A. Yes, Coca-Cola originated in US and we’ve had our fair share of troubles and pitfalls owing to the negative perception of US in this part of the world, but this was 125 years. Now Coke is an entity owned by millions and not by one country. Warren Buffet has the most shares, but that’s just about it. In Pakistan just like everywhere else it is run by the locals. No ‘Gora’ comes here to run the operations, we do it ourselves.  The entire supply chain operation of Coke employs 5 million people. Coke contributes 1.5% of the total tax revenue of Pakistan.

Personal Branding

Yousuf Bashir Qureshi - YBQ Studios

Yousuf Bashir Qureshi -  YBQ Studios

• I thought I was going to be lecturing a group of students. What I’m faced with now is a room full of intellectuals more educated than me. I’m not an MBA. I didn’t have any mentors in my life. I went to cadet college, then I became a food scientist.
• Before my 21^st birthday, I was the most fight-prone person. I just loved to get into a fight. If anyone wanted to pick a fight with someone, he would put me in front. Nothing frightened me.
• On my 21^st birthday party, a female friend of mine much younger than me told me that I was the most afraid person, that I was afraid of what people think about me. All my ego went down the drain. I got angry and threw her out of my party. Later I begged her for forgiveness.
• Our perception of what is desirable and what is not is completely influenced by the media.
• In the 80s, we were told that Cindy Crawford and Brooke Shields were the most beautiful women on the face of the planet. They were mere teenagers and large-frame women as opposed to today’s supermodel definition.
• Then in the early 90s Kate Moss with her negligent chest and hips and a face full of freckles became the darling of the media. All of a sudden, women wanted to grow freckles.
• Further into the 90s, tanned skin and Brazilian hips came in vogue.
• I as a person have no opinion. I’ve to go along with what the media feeds me.
• When a mother goes looking for his son’s bride, the traits used to track down the perfect match are what the media tells you – fair, slim, pretty, educated. The match is finally found and the nuptials tied. The man is congratulated by his peers on getting the trophy wife. The man himself feels proud of having a trophy wife. And yet he goes and has an affair with the maid. The maid is the complete opposite of his trophy wife, of whom he’s proud of, and yet he still has an affair. Why is that?
• I once interviewed a kidnapper, and asked him why did he indulge in this cruel trade. He said it was his family business. Plus he didn’t kidnap the poor people. He only kidnapped rich people who could afford to pay. Likewise the brain can justify even murder.
• You don’t need the outside world to tell you what is good for you or not. The mind, heart and body are enough to make you succeed in life provided that you listen to it.
• Take smoking for example. When you first smoke, the body coughs telling you it’s bad for you. You do it again and again, and the body finally allows you to do it and eventually kills you for abusing it.
• I opened my studio in a small dilapidated alley. People told me who would come here. I didn’t know anyone in Karachi as I had been in the US for 15 years and before that I spent five years in cadet college. I still tried, relying solely on my self-belief.
• Prejudice is a natural fear of strangers and is alright as long as you don’t nurture it which then turns into racism.
• I reinvented my attire, making generous use of pagri, dhoti, and all sorts of non-conventional clothing.
• Initially, I was faced with stiff opposition. People would not allow me into the hotels, thinking I was a worker or something and I would play along with them.
• Once at Heathrow airport, I was standing in the line in all my fashion glory  when one of the attendants approached me and asked if I needed a translator. I said I do if you don’t understand English. She cracked up laughing and got me through the immigration in no time.
• Once I was stopped at the entrance to Sindh Club because of my dhoti. I told the guard that please allow me, the girl who had just entered was wearing a frock that was higher than my dhoti.

Yousuf Bashir Qureshi - YBQ Studios

Q&A SESSION

•  How do you deal with competition and how do you succeed by being different

1. You have to take calculated risks. Without risks, you will go nowhere. Competition will always be there and you’ve to take it all in in a healthy spirit. I’m actually flattered when someone copies my designs. You just need to have unshakeable belief that your Creator will provide you sustenance and then do your own thing.

Marketing to Youth

Noman Asar – Head of Planning JWT

Noman Asar – Head of Planning JWT

• 180 Million people of Pakistan present an ideal opportunity for any marketer.
• This becomes all the more lucrative when you consider that 63% of these people are below the age of 25.
• There are 39 Million people in the age bracket 15-24 years and they constitute 21% of the total population.
• Only 53% of these youth are literate. Females only 42% literate.
• An overwhelming 82% of the females in this bracket are married while only 31% males are.
• The typical ad on youth shows a guy looking out for a date, or going on a date. That is actually not true as most of the youth are married. It is only a typical class that might find this situation relevant.
• Just because 63% of the population is youth doesn’t mean that they are one big segment and can be marketed as such.
• In reality, there are numerous sub-segments within it that require a unique marketing strategy tailored to it.
• The following is a rough break-up of the urban population of Pakistan:

1. SEC A – 8%
2. SEC B – 8%
3. SEC C – 15-20%
4. SEC D,E – Remaining

• A rough break-up of the sub-segments within the youth:

1. Primary – Madressah, Government, Private
2. Secondary – Matric/Inter,  O/A Level
3. Young Executives

• The way to know these youth is to go out, intermingle with them or watch them in their habitat.
• I was once observing a couple of kids from SEC C at a swimming pool when one of the kids said to his friend, ‘Why are you vibrating?’. If I wasn’t there observing them in action, I would never have known that the new word for shiver in this target market is ‘Vibrate’. This shows the extent to which mobile devices have seeped into our psyche.
• The learning can be had via three different methods:

1. Ethnographic Studies
2. Qualitative Research
3. Quantitative Research

• People born between 1987 and 1997 either do not know or have had no affect on their mindset, a number of major events like Lebanon massacre, Zia ul Haq, Fall of Russian Empire, Revolution in China etc.
• This group is more influenced by General Musharraf, Taliban, war on terrorism etc.
• JWT conducted a focus group of the young adults and the following insights were gleaned from that session wrt their traits:
  • Traditional, simple but outgoing.
  • More personal bonding with family.
  • Consider their parents as friends. They are more like their ‘peer-ants’.
  • Independent, however within their tradition and cultural norms.
  • Want to increase the quality of their life and their family.
  • The youth value ‘Me’ time more than the previous generation. While the National average is 2 hours, the youth average is 3 hours.
  • There has been a paradigm shift in the ownership of electronic devices. While at one time it was cassette players and video players, today the dominant device is the cellphone, surpassing even DVD and MP3 players.
  • According to a study, 58% of the youth value Ads whereas just 43% of the entire country.
  • According to a study conducted in August 2011 by Anxiety Index, youth were asked positive or negative reaction about a number of factors including Food and petrol prices. Not a single factor was rated positive by them.
  • The problems of Roti, Kapra aur Makaan that were dominant 30 years ago are still relevant and directly affect the youth.
  • The levels of anxiety amongst the Pakistani youth are one of the highest in the world at 89%, just behind Japan at 90%.
  • What’s even more alarming is the level of pessimism. They feel alienated in their own country. 
  • They were also asked to rate their favorite TVC and from what they told us, we’ve a fairly good idea of what to show in a TVC.
  • You need to create a TVC which is either Escapist, Revolutionary or inspires Hope.
  • The challenge is to come with a campaign which increases your market share in spite of all odds, including the pessimistic state of the state and the target market.
  • Band-Aid is one brand that was able to increase its sales in spite of holding 82% of the market share and having a product that didn’t inspire, and was looked down upon.
  • They did it by hiring the Brazilian designer Alexandre Herchcovitch to come up with innovative designs for the bandage and use it on fashion models during his shows.
  • The result: using band-aids became a fashion statement, with people using band-aids on all sorts of apparels and accessories apart from on their own self.
  • Ford used the popular social networking site Bebo to strike a conversation with its target market in New Zealand for its new Fiesta in an interview style campaign. 
  • Kit Kat in Japan is called Kittu Katsu, meaning ‘Wish u luck’. Because wishing luck is an important part of Japanese culture, and they still use snail mail to send such cards, Kit Kat created a brand alliance with Japan Post Office whereby people could send Kittu Katsu to their loved ones whose wrapper was shaped in the form of a post-card.
  • This strategy created $11 Million worth of free publicity.

• Indian Panga League was a spoof of Indian Premier League created by Virgin Mobile whose purpose was to promote its new call rates during the IPL. The activity went viral on social media.

• Coke Studio’s success was largely due to the digital medium instead of just the TV.

Q. How do you propose marketing to the rural market as social media is still very limited in penetration in a country like Pakistan.

A. TV ads are still very important and one of the most effective ways of reaching the mass market that social media cannot. Having said that, TVC alone cannot achieve your brand goals and it will have to be part of a campaign in which social media plays a big part as well.

End of First Part…….

Transform 2012 Marketing Conference

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The 5th International Power Generation Conference & Exhibition 2012 was held at Marriott, Karachi on the 2nd of February with the agenda ‘Future Energy Mix in Overcoming the Power Crisis’.

Powergen Pak Conference 2012

It was a star-studded event with speeches and presentations from Manzoor Soomro- Chairman Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF), Mian Abrar Hussain, President Karachi Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Tilo Klinner – Consul General Germany, Nasim Khan VC Hamdard University, Saigan Sharif – Additional Secretary of Ministry of Science & Technology, Qazi Kamal – Chairman Fuel, Gas, Power Sub-SITE Association, Tahir Saleem – Chairman IEEE, Zubair Motiwala – Chairman Board of Investment Govt. of Pakistan, Naeem Qureshi – Managing Editor Energy Update, Shazia Marri – Minister for Electric Power Sindh, Junaid Qureshi – CEO SSJD, Faisal Qureshi – CEO 24/7 Online TV, Abdullah Muhammad Yousuf – Chairman IPP’s Advisory Council, Rukhsana Zuberi – Chairperson women in energy, Shaaf Mehboob – CEO Adoptive Solar.

Here’s the remaining part of the conference:

Shazia Marri – Minister for Electric Power Sindh

Shazia Marri

• We need a system where people listen to each other’s point of view and learn from it. Democracy provides this feature.
• When I used to sit in opposition during Musharraf government, he used to reject any point raised against Kalabagh dam and was hell-bent on making that dam.
• Kalabagh dam will provide only a fraction of our energy needs and so much time and money has been wasted arguing about it which could have been utilized  in some useful way.
• The difference between this government and the previous is that we are willing to listen to everyone and diligently work towards coming up with a workable solution acceptable to all.
• Ghazi Barotha project producing 1450MW of power in an environment friendly.
• 3,000 MW added during this government’s tenure.
• Sindh’s target for 2012 is to have 10% of contribution from alternative sources: wind, solar and biomass.
• Power station under process in Nooriabad.
• Sugar distilleries are an ideal source of biomass.
• Austrian company working on a wind power project to be completed by March 2013 which will contribute 500-800MW.

Shazia Marri

Junaid Qureshi – CEO SSJD :

• The total demand in 2011 was 19,400 MW which will swell to 50,000MW by 2022.
• Wind energy costs 13-15 cents per KWH whereas biomass costs 11-13 cents/KWH.
• While wind energy projects become feasible after 50MW, biomass are feasible in the range 1-50MW.
• A 15MW project needs 1,730,000 tons of biomass, the source of which can be a number of things, sugar molasses, animal waste etc.
• Sugar cane produces 11-13% of the main product and 60% of biomass.
• Rs. 322 Mn Revenue/year is possible.
• If 2000 MW of electricity is generated through biomass, it would result in savings of Rs.57 Bn/year and $1 Bn/year saving in imported oil.
• The plant would have to be nearer to the biomass source in order to minimize the huge cost of transporting thousands of tons of the material. In addition it would need a steady supply of water.
• The ideal place for the plant would be rural whereby villagers can aid in the supply of biomass and get benefited from the plant as well.

Rukhsana Zuberi – Chairperson women in energy

• Public sector is the biggest consumer of electricity.
• Solar geysers are a great energy saver. I’ve one installed in my home and my gas bill remains the same in both winter and summer.

Shaaf Mehboob – CEO Adoptive Solar

• The circular debt has ballooned to Rs.400 Billion.
• With this much money, 1600MW of energy could have been generated by installing a solar-powered plant.
• It costs approximately Rs.200,000 to produce 1KW of electricity through solar power.

Faisal Qureshi

Faisal Qureshi – CEO 24/7 Online TV

• You’ve been listening to enlightened views from learned people the entire day and there’s nothing more I can add that can surpass those insights except the fact that there’s a chandelier over my head with over 40 bulbs each at least 40 watts and it’s been on the entire time. If people in this room cannot see this waste of energy, then I’ve got nothing to say.

Abdullah Muhammad Yousuf – Chairman IPP’s Advisory Council

• 30 years ago hydel source contributed 70% of total power requirement whereas thermal only 30%.
• The trend has reversed now with thermal contributing 70% and hydel 30%.
• Cost of fuel to electricity generation:
  • Hydel   Rs.2-3
  • Gas       Rs.4-5
  • Oil        Rs. 12
  • IPP        Rs.40
  • Government is giving Rs.200 Bn subsidy on electricity while it can only afford Rs.80 Bn.
  • That means government is having a deficit of Rs.120 Bn added to it.
  • Rs.26 Million is the penalty charges to the government for non-payment of dues on time by PEPCO.
  • Rs.350 Bn are the receivables owed to WAPDA.
  • Energy crisis costs 2-3% GDP loss.
  • $15 Bn was the furnace oil import bill last year.
  • $32 BN is the expected bill this year.

CONCLUSION:

It was a thought-provoking conference on the energy problems beset by Pakistan and the gravity of the situation. However, this sort of discussion is pertinent to a conference that is being held for the first time. For a conference that is in its fifth year and still not able to generate a viable solution that is embraced by the four main stakeholders: government, consumer, industry and research institutes, that reflects poorly on our state of affairs.

Sure, there were many solutions proposed. But then these solutions have been proposed since God knows when. What we need now is one solution acceptable to all which alleviates at least some of the nation’s suffering. And that this conference was unable to come up with in spite of having the brightest minds present.

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The conference was attended by a plethora of scientists  and dignitaries from all walks of life.

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

It was a star-studded event with speeches and presentations from Manzoor Soomro- Chairman Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF), Mian Abrar Hussain, President Karachi Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Tilo Klinner – Consul General Germany, Nasim Khan VC Hamdard University, Saigan Sharif – Additional Secretary of Ministry of Science & Technology, Qazi Kamal – Chairman Fuel, Gas, Power Sub-SITE Association, Tahir Saleem – Chairman IEEE, Zubair Motiwala – Chairman Board of Investment Govt. of Pakistan, Naeem Qureshi – Managing Editor Energy Update, Shazia Marri – Minister for Electric Power Sindh, Junaid Qureshi – CEO SSJD, Faisal Qureshi – CEO 24/7 Online TV, Abdullah Muhammad Yousuf – Chairman IPP’s Advisory Council, Rukhsana Zuberi – Chairperson women in energy, Shaaf Mehboob – CEO Adoptive Solar.

The conference was organized by Energy Update Magazine 

Here’s  a brief lowdown of what went on in the conference.

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

Manzoor Soomro- Chairman Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF):

• Promote and popularize science.
• Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) signed with all chambers of commerce in Pakistan.
• Reach is not limited to MOUs but to universities and beyond.
• Provide funding to research institutes.
• Enormous potential in both conserving and generating energy cost-effectively, only it needs to be channeled out properly.

 Mian Abrar Hussain, President Karachi Chamber of Commerce

• The energy crisis and resulting loadshedding of electricity and gas has resulted in a staggering monetary loss of Rs.288 Billion per annum. 
• This is a loss of Rs.24 Billion per month, or Rs.857 million per day. 
• This much money could have been used to finance 44 Large scale manufacturing units or serve 10 million unemployed people. 
• $12 Billion is the annual import bill for furnace oil. 
•  30% of energy wasted in distribution. 
• Energy security plan is needed on the same lines as Nuclear Security Plan to safeguard the future of Pakistan.

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

Naeem Qureshi – Managing Editor Energy Update

• Welcomed the participants to the fifth PowerGen Pak Conference.
• Thanked the speakers and the guest for gracing the occasion with their presence, and the sponsors for lending support to this worthy cause.

Dr. Tilo Klinner – Consul General Germany

• Renewable energy is the future of the world due to depleting natural sources of fuel.
• Wind energy percentage contribution to electricity generation in the world:
  • 21% Denmark
  • 15% Portugal
  • 14% Spain
  • 7.5% Germany
  • There’s a 40 MW plant in Gujarat, India run solely on solar power.
  • 17,000 MW contribution by solar power to national grid in Germany.
  • There are large lignite coal fields in Eastern Germany which provide the bulk of the power. However, they’ve a large carbon footprint.

Nasim Khan VC Hamdard University

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

• In 1999, a German company estimated the wind corridor in Pakistan to be worth 50,000 MW.
• Research by an American University put the estimate at 110,000 MW.
• Germany has been able to capture and make use of 17,000 MW of solar energy in spite of the fact that Germany doesn’t get as much sun as Pakistan.
• Due to circular debt, electric companies are unable to afford wind power companies.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qVKkA-dRc&feature=youtu.be

Saigan Sharif – Additional Secretary of Ministry of Science & Technology:

• Karachi to Gwadar corridor has the potential of 7,000-10,000 MW generation through wind energy.
• Nexus needed between government, research institutes and industry for a workable plan.
• Much of the existing problems are due to lack of understanding between the three.
• Government has its own limits and cannot launch projects based on research by institutes. However it can support them in conjunction with the industry.
• Scientists have the tendency to quarrel amongst themselves for who gets the patent to an invention or innovation.

 Qazi Kamal – Chairman Fuel, Gas, Power Sub-SITE Association

• There are 104 Nuclear power plants in US and 70 in France which contribute roughly 20% of total electricity.
• 35% of power in Western Europe is achieved through nuclear means.
• China has plans to set up 40 nuclear power plants.
• India plans to generate 63,000 MW of nuclear energy by 2032 with the help of General Electric USA.
• Pakistan only gets 712 MW of nuclear energy.
• Pakistan has substantial reserves of uranium, 500 times more than gold in various mines all over the country.
• Pakistan also has 5% uranium enrichment capability.
• 2,000MW energy through KANUP 2 and 3 will be attained.
• 8,000MW is the target for nuclear energy.
• The establishment of Pakistan Nuclear Power Fuel Complex will go a long way in attaining self-sufficiency in nuclear energy.

Tahir Saleem – Chairman IEEE:

• Problem with energy usage not energy production.
• KESC has installed capacity of 1260MW but only 600MW of power are being delivered by them.
• WAPDA had planned 40,000MW of electricity by 2010. Hardly 2,000MW have been added.
• 10-15% of energy saving is possible without any investment.
• 22% of energy saving is possible with investment.
• 70% of electrical consumption is by the industry.
• Load lightening devices are available which reduce electrical consumption.
• Government should make it mandatory for the industry to install these devices which will reduce the electrical load on the national grid.
• Co-generation provides 30% additional energy, a strategy which is being used by hotels.

Zubair Motiwala – Chairman Board of Investment, Govt. of Pakistan

Zubair Motiwala

• 22,000 MW is the installed capacity.
• Rs.300 Bn circular debt in July, now touching Rs.400 Bn.
• 12 hours of loadshedding in the industrial areas until 2 weeks ago.
• Pakistan has the fifth largest coal reserves in the world – 173Bn which will last 300 years.
• Thar has huge reserves of lignite coal as determined by research carried out by RW Germany.
• Special incentives offered by Pakistan Board of Investment for investing in Pakistan’s coal reserves:
  • 20% Return on Equity
  • 30 years tax holiday
  • No custom duty on import of machinery
  • Sales tax exemption
  • United Energy, 3 Gorges and Engro are some of the companies interested in this investment.
  • In 2015 the first powerplant using the thar coal would be operational.
  • Pak-Chine energy commission has determined that there’s a 80km wide as well as long wind corridor with speeds up to 800 knots, which is more than India.
  • A Turkish company is already operating wind turbines in Sindh which are producing 5MW.
  • 34 more turbines are in the offing which will raise the output to 50MW.
  • Plans are in place to allow duty-free import of batteries to store wind energy.
  • Break-up of contribution to electricity:
    • 1/3^rd Hydel
    • 1/3^rd  Thermal
    • 1/3^rd  Diesel/captive/nuclear

• Contribution of gas to national grid:
  • Sindh 69%
  • Balochistan 13%
  • Punjab 5%
  • Share of gas:
    • 27% Sindh
    • 17% Balochistan
    • 45% Punjab
    • Total production was 3800 mmcf, now 200 mmcf have been added making to 4,000 mmcf.
    • Sindh gets 1150 mmcf and Punjab 1800 mmcf.
    • There are 2700 CNG stations in Punjab while 800 CNG stations in Sindh and Balochistan.
    • Most of these 2700 CNG stations in Punjab are illegal connections given after 2007 and result in shortage of gas as the network has become so much convoluted.  
    • 40,000 of unutilized hydel capacity in Pakistan.
    • 2,000 MW for 300 years possible from Thar coal reserves.
    • 15,000 MW addition expected from Thar coal by 2020.

 TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT PART……..

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

Power-Gen Pak Conference 2012

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Transform 2012 Conference focuses on delivering the latest cutting-edge innovations, offer winning insights to the customer psyche, and change the way marketing is looked at by the entire organization. Participants will learn from senior marketing and branding executives how to build and leverage brand value, improve brand relationships, manage corporate brands, build their brand with employee involvement and the method of marketing to a specific age group.

Transform marketing conference

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This is the 2nd part of the event coverage:

Transform 2011 marketing conference

Is There ROI in Social Media?

Amer Sarfaraz- Partner & VP Business – Bramerz

• Check what people are saying about your brand online – both positive and negative.
• The world of tomorrow looks more like the world of yesterday than the world of today. Just like people used to congregate in marketplaces likes Soukhs and all in the olden days, people are increasingly coming together in cyberspace with no social or geographical divide between them.
• Four things that matter the most:
1. Ownership
2. Personalization
3. Content
4. Response Time
• Latest Nielsen study shows that only 14% of people trust advertising whereas 78% of people trust recommendation.
• 1% of your audience will create the content, 9% will spread the word, whereas 90% will be influenced by it.
• Brands are increasingly attuning themselves accordingly, finding out the 1% influencers which in most of the cases are bloggers.  Blogger Meet-ups are being sponsored by major brands where these bloggers are lavished with gifts.
• Just like the rest of the world, star bloggers have cropped up in Pakistan with the potential to influence their fan following which runs in thousands.
• Haris Nadeem is one such blogger – a techie who has a large influence on the local social media scene. He’s doing his bachelors and already earning more than 60-70% of people present in this conference.
• Levi’s website is a classic example of observe and absorb behavior. If you visit their website while signed into facebook, the website would fetch upcoming birthdays of your friends and you would have the option of sending them a gift coupon to buy Levis jeans.
• There’s a dearth of e-commerce sites in Pakistan which is a big opportunity. My cousin in Australia wanted to gift chocolates to his friend in Pakistan so I recommended Lal’s chocolate which is the only local brand giving that option.
• What to measure in social media:
1. Volume :
• No. of fans, followers, tweets, status updates.
• Reach and frequency.   
2. Engagement:
• Re-tweets, sentiment analysis, comments, likes, time spent.
3. Actions:
• Leads generated, complaints handled, recruitments, response time, sales.

Brand Driven TV Content – The New Marketing Strategy

Shoaib Qureshy – Chief Strategy Officer – Bulls Eye Communications

Shoaib Qureshy Bulls Eye

• TV ads have lost their edge because of the fragmented media. 20 years ago people didn’t have any choice but to watch just one channel. Even if you came up with a dud ad, it would get noticed and produce results. Not so anymore.
• With more than 80 channels at your disposal, for some even 250 channels, you cannot get noticed the way you want to even with a colossal budget. 

• The diminishing power of TV ads is a result of 5,000 brands on TV with almost 50,000 ads per day.
• You’ve been bombarded with almost 10 ideas per presentation in this conference, I’ll give you just one potent idea.
• People watch TV for the content, not for the ads. Ads are enforced upon them by the marketers.
• Traditionally the 30 second TV spot was the driving force behind which all the other tactics were applied.
• With ‘Hero Banney Ki Tarang’ a reality TV show based on acting, we came up with a program that carried the brand persona of Tarang milk by Engro, and gave the consumers what they crave for – content that is absorbing.
• This way we turned the conventional marketing wisdom around, using the TV spot, billboards and all the other advertising vehicles as support for the branded program and not as the main content.

Q. What has milk got to do with reality TV show that also based on acting? Has that converted into sales?

ü  The problem wasn’t to do with sales. They were already having good sales numbers, but when they did a brand picture survey, their brand didn’t have the essence and the persona that they intended it to have. They knew their TVC campaign wasn’t working and went for this option to project their intended image.

ü  Secondly, the program is in its second season. If it wasn’t effective, they wouldn’t have continued it for a second year around.

Global Accomplishments and Local Possibilities in Digital Media

Rai Umair, Visionary & Director, Maventor, Australia.

Rai Umair Maventor

• In Pakistan there are:
• 5.4 Million Facebook users – 2011 Social Banks
• 22 Million Internet users – 2009 World Bank
• 108 Million mobile and Smartphone users – 2011 Wikipedia
• 1.8 Million twitter users – 2011 Dawn.com
• Customer expectations – rapid feedback and merger of offline content with online.
• Food Connection Pakistan case study presented by the CEO Nauman Sikander Mirza himself:
• FC Pakistan is a food guide of Karachi that was officially launched in July, after having a soft launch in April 2011.
• The website aims to bring all food-related blogs under one roof and has acquired over 28,000 fans on Facebook besides being figured prominently in print media as well.
• In order to generate content, a contest was held through the website and facebook page whereby people were asked to submit pictures of restaurants and their offerings. 26 participants submitted photos over a period of 10 days. The winner who submitted 220 pictures won an Android phone. He was called to the Forum and unbeknownst to him, we gathered 250 people at the mall to celebrate his victory.

Leveraging ‘Rural-Speak’ in Building Brand Equities

Mansoor Nawaz – Chief Strategy Officer – Dynamic Marketing Concepts

Mansoor Nawaz Dynamic Marketing Concepts

• People crave quality content even if it’s just folklore.
• A brand that has a story is that much easy for the consumer to assimilate and has more probability of being endeared to the consumer.
• What we did was take a popular folk tale and subtly embed a brand into the storyline.
• The folktale was that of Heer Ranjha – Jhang – Southern Punjab.
• And Telenor Talkshawk was the brand that was embedded in the Heer Ranjha skit, a skit that was performed across numerous villages across Punjab.
• Although this tale ends in a tragedy, we reversed the outcome, ensuring that our brand was the reason of that reversal.
• Although arrangements for 300 people were made, as many as 900 people turned up in some villages.
• The MNP rate (number conversion from one telecom brand to another) was the highest achieved at any point in time. This was possible because the sales reps of the Telenor were present wherever a skit was being performed.
• This goes on to show people never get tired of the folklore no matter how many times they see its rendition.
• Secondly product features and promotional offers when communicated in the form of a story have an everlasting effect.
• And the same tale can be used in different provinces with little modification. For instance in Sindh it would be Sassi Punnu.
• The concept of using folk tales to leverage brands is nothing new especially in the Western world.
• Red riding hood, Jack in the Beanstalk, Snow White, Cinderella all have been used by major brands like Pepsi, IBM, Coke, KLM and numerous others to differentiate themselves from the competition.
• Our heritage is far more rich in folklore than theirs and hence the opportunity to use this platform for brand immortality is enormous.  

Q- How did you promote these shows, through conventional media or something else?

ü  The dynamics of a village is entirely different from that of a city. In a village you’ve a central marketplace or corner where people congregate at the end of the day for idle talk. We targeted such places in each village, announcing the show one day before with the help of dhols and all, sometimes even handing out flyers.

CONCLUSION:

• Although the entire speaker panel was a glitterati of accomplished people in marketing, media and advertising, quite a few speakers chose to adopt the style of a lecture, teaching the basics of their profession a la textbook style instead of weaving stories and narrating anecdotes that would have conveyed their viewpoint that much better while keeping the audience hooked and awake at the same time.
• The conference was similar to GenMark Conference held last year. 
• Haseeb Ihtisham of Nokia was the only one who innovated with his presentation by making use of Prezi, the new buzz software when it comes to presentations, and the most likely successor to Powerpoint.
• Although Kellog’s was the main sponsor of the event having notable presence through their banners, a shrewd arrangement of their product packaging right alongside the stage, and the presence of their CEO herself who handed down plaques to the presenters, it was Food Connection Pakistanthat stole the show.
  

  Kellogg's sponsorship

•  Although just one of the co-sponsors, FC Pakistan leveraged this opportunity to the hilt by embedding one of their partner companies reps into the speaker panel and then using that opportunity to showcase what FC Pak is all about and what marketing ploys they’ve used to woo in the target market ,   and finally the grand slam, a prize draw for the audience which had the IPod shuffle as the grand prize.And you didn’t just enter the draw by default. To enter the draw, you had to tear the perforated section of the Food Connection card that was given to each participant and put it in the FC box during lunch. So to win something, you had to pick up the FC promotional card and once you picked it you had to read it. Very very clever. Just have a look at the card below:
  

  Food Connection Pakistan

• Yet  another good thing they did was that they had their entire team present at the conference, which tried to make their presence felt by asking questions from the speakers, sometimes just for the sake of asking, anything to keep themselves in the limelight. Kellogg’s could definitely learn a thing or two from these two limelight strategies.
• At the very least, Kellogg’s should have presented something, if they’re not doing remarkable marketing in Pakistan, at least their international marketing campaigns would have been good to see.
• FC Pakistan’s sponsor strategy is a perfect example of how any brand should make the most of any sponsorship opportunity.
• Although FC Pakistan team has proved as shrewd marketers at the tactical level making brilliant moves at the grassroots level, they aren’t the most able brand strategists. This is evident from their choice of their brand name. Food Connection Pakistan maybe a good move from a SEO and keywords point of view, but couldn’t be a worse form of brand name. Ditto for Karachi Snob. Both these websites would do well to learn from Google, Squidoo and Twitter, names that are unique, memorable and most importantly short with no more than three syllables.
• If you’re worried about your brand remaining in obscurity just because it doesn’t carry a relevant keyword for search engines to recognize, you’re selling yourself short and not in it for the long haul.
• Finally, the traditional gift hamper you get at the end of such conferences was an amusing eclectic mix of items. Kellogg’s four-in-one cereal pack, Delve Strawberry custard mix and Shan’s Bombay Biryani Masala.
• Now I’m not sure what the Shan marketing team were thinking in sponsoring this event or handing out this strange, but if they really wanted to make this effort count, this should instead have put a biryani stall at lunch separate from the main dining table from where the participants could taste a biryani made with this biryani masala and cooked by the best biryani chef money could buy. And on this very table, they should have put these free samples of biryani masala for the participants to pick up for free instead of unceremoniously giving them at the end.
• This effort would have paid rich dividends for the brand. Same strategy should have been followed by Delve as well which interestingly is a  dessert brand launched by Shan. 

Transform kellogg delve shan

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(Q – Questions from the audience.)

Transform 2011marketing conferenceTransform 2011 marketing conference

Art of Communication through PR

Zainab Ansari – CEO Xenith Public Relations:

Zainab Ansari Xenith Public Relations

• Public Relation plays the role of a catalyst.
• Bridges the communication divide between organization and target audience.
• PR informs, creates ideas, persuades people and makes things happen.
• PR is not brand management but corporate image management.
• While BM deals with brand identity and management, PR deals with corporate identity and perception management.
• PR delivers credibility, influence and endorsement.
• A survey was conducted by Reckitt Benckiser 11 years ago to determine its corporate image amongst the local populace.
• Majority of the people didn’t know anything about Reckitt Benckiser. The only thing they did know was that Reckitt Benckiser manufactured Dettol, as such their entire perception of the organization was based on how they perceived Dettol. The brand image of Dettol was in essence the corporate image of Reckitt Benckiser.
•  All the PR efforts of Reckitt Benckiser since then have focused on carving out a separate corporate identity.

 Q -  How do alcohol and tobacco companies do PR?

ü  Alcohol unlike in Pakistan is not banned in most countries and as such alcohol companies carry out PR directly as any other company in other industries.

ü  Tobacco has a plethora of stringent regulations imposed on them throughout the world and thus do PR more subtly.

ü  Pakistan Tobacco Company (PTC) does it by focusing solely on corporate social responsibility (CSR) – planting trees, especially those it has cut down for its manufacturing purposes as well as opening schools and hospitals in rural areas.

ü  Now the people who benefit from PTC’s such gestures will not start smoking because of it, but they do form a benign image of the company which is the real purpose of this strategy.

• When Intel came to Pakistan in 1997, Pakistanis were not tech savvy. A survey was conducted across different segments of the society to find what people knew about Intel.
• The overwhelming majority, including even the CEOs and students said that Intel was a box, meaning the CPU on which the ‘Intel Inside’ logo sticker was plastered.
• Today the entire technology paradigm has shifted with even the students owning laptops and Intel has managed to become a household name through concerted PR efforts.
• GreenStar relies a lot on PR efforts to penetrate and get its message across in the rural realm of Pakistan.

Q – How to determine efficiency of a PR campaign in the face of parallel massive advertising. GreenStar for instance promotes its products through songs and TVCs on a mass scale. How can you measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign when the BM campaign is creating so much awareness itself?

 ü  GreenStar came up with a product called EC (Emergency Contraceptive) which was a pill that would prevent conception 17-18 hours after the intercourse had taken place. This product was not allowed to be advertised.

ü  We came up with a PR initiative whereby professionals from across the medical profession were called to take part in a panel discussion. This discussion was so successful and created so much hype on its own that it received prominence in the print and electronic media. In the absence of any other tactic, the PR campaign was solely responsible for the success of this campaign.

ü  Secondly,  advertising per say doesn’t work in the rural environment the same way you and I wouldn’t be effective as strangers persuading the rural follk. The rural women are more likely to respond to the advice of influencers from within their own community, people who they look up to. And this is where PR proves as most effective.   

 Transforming the Brand Experience 

Afzal Shahabuddin – Managing Director – Resource Edge

Afzal Shahabuddin Resource Edge

• Every interaction is an opportunity.
• The conventional 360 degree has changed and every touch point needs to be differentiated to be able to impart value to the brand.
• Liberty Books has started a DIAL-A-BOOK plan whereby books can be ordered and delivered free on a mere phone call anywhere in Pakistan.

Socializing Ideas across platforms

Amin Rammal CEO – The Brand Crew

Amin Rammal Brand Crew

• Our perceptions and perceptive are constantly changing. For instance, no one asks if you get the flu, however if you’ve a heart attack like I did  sometime ago, everyone was inquiring about me. That’s because heart attack is still uncommon especially in a person of my age whereas flu has become a common phenomenon.
• Cancer was once an ominous disease but now people view it with less apprehension because cures have been found and there have been more survival stories now than ever.
• We live our lives in a perpetual state of beta.
• People want to use social networking sites- facebook,twitter, linkedin- anywhere and everywhere, even in offices. No barrier can stop this activity. It’s that ubiquitous and pervasive.
• Hashtags # in twitter is responsible for more breaking news more rapidly than any mainstream medium. I found out about the burning of a café on Zamzama through twitter first.
• I switched from Blackberry to Motorola Android and I still don’t know why although I compared the functions of numerous models and brands.
• 95% of decisions are made on an unconscious level and hence cannot be rationally explained.
• Consumers don’t think in a linear way. Marketers think they can run a campaign and consumers will straightaway go and get hooked to it.
• It doesn’t happen that way. Real value is built over time.
• Volkswagen Canada came up with a brilliant ‘Great Art Heist’ campaign  to promote the new  2012 Jetta GLI whereby improvised art galleries  featuring long exposure light painting  graphs created by Jetta’s car lights at night  were placed in unusual places all over the Canadian cities. The paintings were loosely hung with no security to entice the people to grab the paintings. Afterwards, those who did ‘steal’ the paintings were encouraged to share their experience online through Volkswagen Canada Facebook and Twitter pages under the #VWArtHeist hashtag. While the activity was conducted in the real world, it went viral in the online world.

• The marketing team of Mini came up with an addictive location-based game which comprised of an app which when installed  on your cell  got the user chasing after a virtual Mini on a real map of Stockholm. The way to acquire that Mini was to get within 50 metres of where it was located in the real world on the map. The twist in the tale is that any other user with the app installed can snatch it away from him by coming within 50 metres of him. So the only way to keep the virtual Mini was to physically run away from all the users from coming within 50 metres of his real world location. Anyone who managed to keep the virtual Mini for a week would win a real Mini Clubman.

Amin Rammal Brand Crew

• Pakistan’s own Rozee.pk came up with a social media campaign that was based on the Stockholm Getaway campaign.
• Tesco came up with an app for smartphones for product promotion whereby ads seen through the camera lens of the smartphone came alive with animation and all.
• KLM came up with a real-world campaign to delight its customers who were waiting in the airport lounge waiting for their flight that utilized the power of social media.
• First KLM identified the customer’s presence at the airport lounge through their FourSquare status and tweets. Then their team went to the lounge with a surprise gift that was relevant to the customer. This was identified by going through their social media conversation to know what they like and what was their wishlist. The entire episode was filmed to capture the customer delight at receiving this unexpected gift.

Q- How does wasting your resources on a few customers convert into better image or even sales conversion for the brand? It’s just a marketing gimmick. Wouldn’t it be better if KLM instead focused on improving their overall service for all customers or doing something different that affected their entire customer base? Besides, once other airlines start to copy this activity, it wouldn’t be that effective and customers may instead start demanding it.

• It’s true KLM campaign was just a marketing gimmick. And if your points of parity (POPs) are not in line with the industry standard, there’s no use coming up with marketing gimmicks to create Points of Differentiation (PODs). However, you do need marketing gimmick every now and then to instill some excitement into the brand experience.
• Secondly, a marketing gimmick such as the one used by KLM may wear off its novelty once the other airlines start using it. On the other hand, it may become so common that the customers actually demand it from the entire industry. In that case it helps if you were the first one to start a trend.

Haseeb Ihtisham – Head of Marketing  

Nokia Pakistan and Afghanistan

Haseed Ihtisham Nokia

• Traditional ads have ceased to be effective. Take me as an example. I watch TV at night, changing the channel the moment an ad starts. Most of my office time i.e. morning till evening –is spent connected to cyberspace. The best way to reach and influence me then would be online rather than offline.
• With so many channels to choose from, traditional ads are no more effective.
• The only viable way to cut through the clutter in today’s fragmented media is to cultivate brand advocates who already have a huge fan following across different platforms in the online as well as offline world. Amin Rammal for instance acted like a brand advocate when he influenced all of you by saying he preferred Motorola over all the other brands. Whether he’s a paid brand advocate for Motorola is a different matter altogether.
• Nokia came up with a strategy whereby free E7s personally signed by the CEO of Nokia were given to those brand advocates who have a substantial influence online. These brand advocates were identified through their tweets and facebook conversations. After the handing of phones, their online activity was again monitored to gauge their level of delight and to what extent they communicated this experience to their online followers.

Q.  How can brand advocates be effective especially in Pakistan and how much influence do they really have on the masses? Can the entire marketing plan rely on these people?

ü  I can’t recall a single Iphone ad in Pakistan let alone a campaign and yet iPhones are being increasingly adopted in this part of the world. That’s brand evangelism at its best. And if one brand can do it, others can emulate it too.

• In order to show the real power of the N8 camera phone, a campaign was run whereby eight directors were chosen who were given two N8 phones each to showcase their creativity which was adjudged through a contest online. The campaign generated massive attraction not to mention great quality content proving the worth of N8.

 http://vimeo.com/25451551

• Nokia partnered with Disney for a brand alliance with their movie Tron Legacy. N8 sets custom-made for this movie were made. Then the website of Nokia was shown as to be hacked by the villain in Tron and you had to come up with the code to restore it. The message went viral so much so that people started tweeting in binary codes.
• Nokia also came up with a pink N8 campaign that we weren’t confident would be successful but turned out to be quite a smash courtesy some shrewd online tactics that went viral.

Q. Does all this hype and publicity stunts online really convert into sales? How do you measure that?

ü  Responses are definitely measured but it doesn’t mean we’re only monitoring the conversion rate. A giant screen is installed in the Nokia HQ which shows all the tweets, mentions, likes, comments etc being generated in the social media sphere. So a number of parameters are used to gauge the success of a campaign.

Q. How all of this is pertinent to Pakistan? We don’t have the same structure where a brand advocate can influence thousands of people online.

ü  There’s a guy in Lahore who already loves Nokia and has a huge following we’re going to surprise him by giving a free phone and all the information he needs to spread the word around in his social influence online. It doesn’t mean we’re bribing him to talk good about the brand. The guy already loves the brand. We’re just facilitating him so that he does what he’s already doing even better.

Q. How do you create brand advocates in rural areas? Majority of Pakistani market is rural, how do you apply the concept of brand advocates under those circumstances?

ü  We’re in the process of identifying and creating brand advocates in SEC C,D and E colleges who will then influence their peers. But yes, this strategy has limited penetration and we are looking at different models to penetrate the rural market which is about 80%.

Q. Why hasn’t Nokia Pakistan implemented this strategy if it’s so sure of its effectiveness?

ü  There are certain business reasons I cannot disclose that we have to follow the traditional marketing practices. However, the fact that I’m presenting these techniques to you does mean that I myself am going to follow them. Maybe we’ve already started doing it and my presentation today maybe part of that plan to influence you.

TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT PART………..

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