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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1. Transform 2011- What’s Next in Marketing, Media & Advertising Transform 2011 marketing conference organized by Event Architects was held...

(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………..

No related posts.

Ufone Nokia N8-banner

It seems that Ufone has paid heed to that advice by forging a brand alliance with Nokia, but it has gone one step further by introducing a high-end mobile – the Nokia N8- as the first outcome of this alliance. Brandasy had suggested starting slow with a safe bet like the XpressMusic 5230.

So, would the idea kick off? There’s no question that the idea is going to be a stellar success. However, starting off with a pricey toy like the Nokia N8 would require a lot more effort than would be needed otherwise.

So how can Ufone and Nokia make this work? Well, for starters, Nokia and Ufone would need to hold a couple of competitions just for the sake of dishing out several sets for free to the opinion leaders. Then instead of placing the same print ad announcing the joint venture with the picture of N8, they should create a series of print ads and web banners. Each individual ad would be dedicated to highlighting a single feature or benefit of the N8.

Both Nokia and Ufone have already covered some ground in this respect which is evident from the fact that blogs like Propakistani and Pak Reviews have already written about this deal, not to mention Herald Tribune which seems to be at the forefront of such news.

This is just the bare minimum that Nokia and Ufone needs to do. Free giveaways to select bloggers for word of mouth in the blogosphere, positive videos on Youtube, preferably posted by the consumer, demonstrating the power and possibilities of the N8, these are just some of the tactics these two giants will need to follow.

So, are there any flaws to this deal? About the brand alliance, only time will tell, but the Nokia N8 campaign may not turn out to be as successful as expected. The reason is the hefty price tag. Although the blogosphere is emanating with the news that Ufone is launching the N8 at 25% discount exclusively for the Pakistani clientele, the price still comes out to be a whopping Rs.41,800. Most of the die-hard fans of smartphones have the pocket for anything between the range of Rs.20,000 and Rs.35,000. Anything above that, and they’re gonna wait till the price drops.

And therein lies Ufone’s conundrum. They have the exclusive rights to sell the N8 for only a month. After that it’s fair game for everyone. And before that deadline, chances are slim that bulk of the target market would be able to afford it. So in all probability, this launch has more of a symbolic importance  rather than any chance of worthwhile profitability.

The other reason that N8 may not sell well here is that for this much amount, any discerning consumer will first check with the grapevine, in this case, the internet. And the internet, especially the Pakistani blogosphere is awash with speculations that N8 with its Symbian 3` operating system is not the best option what with the Google Android and company offering more powerful features. Iphone, Blackberry and now Samsung with a number of smartphone brands like Galaxy and Omni are right up there in the same price range. So what possibly can the N8 offer that these versatile brands don’t?

Whatever the outcome, this alliance is a step in the right direction and even if this doesn’t turn out to be a bestseller, would pave the way for further exciting possibilities.

If I’m right, we’ve got another rat race on our hands. What’s next? Zong-Samsung, Warid-LG, Motorola-Telenor?

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But with more foreign universities especially from UK and Australia marketing aggressively in this part of the world, coupled with an ever-increasing group of O/A level achievers, not to mention the deteriorating condition of the country, more and more people are opting to study abroad.

Zainab appears to be pulling the right strings, having been interviewed by Dawn for their Sunday magazine and now even contributing how-to articles to the same. With these effective strategies, she’s fast becoming an established brand. A B.A in Comparative Literature, she also teaches General English at South Shore School of A-Level Studies and a councilor at British Overseas School.

She must have a huge fan following by now considering that Dawn has given her ample coverage and she would do well to collect testimonials and put all of them in her profile online. But why does she need to go to all the trouble of asking her clients for recommendations, and then compiling them in her online profile when she’s already an established brand?

Simply because of this:

”Publicity is a double-edged sword that can slice through the very person it has promoted. Besides, the higher the profile gets, the heavier the burden one is compelled to carry. “

Shobha De

What follows is the recount of the experience one of her customers had with her when he was applying for the Fullbright Scholarship:

“The Fulbright ad mentioned Ms. Sabrina as the person to contact for guidance at United States Education Foundation. When I contacted her, she referred me to Ms. Zainab Khan. Since Ms. Sabrina came across as a credible and trustworthy person, I relied on her recommendation and set up a meeting with Ms. Khan. I called her up and we agreed to meet at Café Fresh the following Sunday. She told me up front that this one session was going to be free and from then on she will charge Rs. 1,000 per session.

She further said that on an average it takes about 15 sessions to churn out an excellent application for scholarship, without knowing what my progress was by then. At the rate she was charging, that would amount to a staggering Rs. 15,000. It was too expensive for me as I had already doled out almost Rs. 30,000 on TOEFL and GRE. I told her that was way over my budget and besides, I didn’t need the full package since I had already done the bulk of the work (Excellent GRE and TOEFL score as well as published work) and only needed help with the essay and personal statement. I also gave her my complete profile on the spot. She flipped through it in few seconds and declared that yes I had done 70% of the work and would require only 5 or 6 sessions which would comprise of writing request for references, resume, essay and personal statement.

I again reiterated that I only need help with the essay and personal statement and that this ought to be covered in 4-5 sessions. She reluctantly agreed at that time when she saw I was having second thoughts about acquiring her services. The truth of the matter is, there wasn’t much I could do other than hire her since only two weeks were left for the submission of application and she had me convinced that she was the right person to help me, boasting of how she had got people into Ivy League colleges. In this session I also found that she had very little understanding of Fulbright Scholarship, its process and requirements. Nevertheless, it was not pertinent as I believed I was hiring her for essays.

However, when we met for the first paid session, she was back to her earlier stance. I gave in, thinking how long would it take for something as basic as writing a request for recommendation. I was wrong.

She made me write like a child word by word the darn request, which stretched for the entire Rs.1,000 hour. Now she may have worked for ultra-rich kids for whom a thousand bucks is nothing more than a single rupee. But for someone like me who belongs to a middle class and has to earn his living the hard way, it’s a huge amount to be spending on a single hour especially when that hour is literally going to waste. I told her numerous times that references wasn’t an issue for me since the people from whom I was going to get it from were close to me and they certainly didn’t need a formal request from me.

But she kept at it. So much so that even half hour of the next session was diligently devoted to this request. Another Rs.500 down the drain.

The next half hour was spent on resume. Even here, she didn’t tell me anything extraordinary. It was basically rearranging the different elements of the resume, that I had diligently built over a period of time, which I easily could have done myself in fifteen minute had she just given me the format which she was holding in her hand. But she refused to do so, claiming that I would copy it all. Duh.

The entire next session was again spent on resume. Three sessions and Rs.3,000 later I had learnt nothing that would help me complete the application. Three sessions, no essays so far. The deadline was getting nearer. I was on the verge of a breakdown.

She finally saw my desperation and called for a 20 minute session which she categorically said was free. We again met at Café Fresh (I was beginning to hate that place) and in that 20 minutes she dropped another bombshell. She said we were on the verge of wrapping up the session and that we need not even meet. I would write the essay and personal statement myself and email it to her and the ensuing discussions would be telephonic. I was completely lost by now.

Right from the beginning she had led me to believe that she would be the one writing the essay and personal statement based on my feedback. No, she hadn’t directly said it but she had implied it all along. And since the time was passing by fast and she was not on the proximity of the reasons I agreed to pay her, this belief got stronger. And now at this critical point she was telling me I had to write it myself. If it was me going to be doing it, why didn’t she just give me the guidelines and let me do it when there was ample time instead of leading me on to the eleventh hour? She knew exactly what my deadline was.

I was on the edge now. I wrote my essay and personal statement myself based on the few guidelines she finally did give me, then called in a friend to polish them. After we both had spent almost four hours fine-tuning the essay and personal statement, I emailed first the personal statement to her and called her to let her know. I was online the whole time, and it took her no more than 20 minutes (remember this was being counted as a Rs.1000 hour session) to ‘edit’ it and send it back to me. The same thing happened with the essay. Within 20 minutes she was done with it. The only thing she did edit was cut short the length of the essay by removing some parts. That’s it. No grammatical check, no nothing.

She called this time asking about the money. In the beginning, she had demanded Rs. 5,000 in advance which I had given it to her. Now only Rs. 1000 was remaining since one session was free. However, when I did go to give this amount, she demanded Rs.2000 counting even the free session. When I reminded her that one of the session was declared free by herself, she just stared at me with growned face. I finally paid all that she demanded, but it was a truly harrowing experience for me and I would advise anyone aspiring to hire the services of these so-called consultants to first check with their previous customers before spending a fortune on their service. A few hours worth of search on the internet would in fact be more fruitful than hiring them.”

Before you decide that maybe this customer was ignorant and refused to acknowledge his weaknesses which Ms. Khan tried her best to correct, this guy is an IBA graduate in addition to being a computer engineer. What’s more, he’s working in an MNC and his articles have been published in the business pages of Dawn and Business Recorder. In short he’s no muck with the pen.

So what can we deduce from this narrative which does sound like an ordeal:

Under promise, Over-deliver, the brand mantra devised by Tom Peters  has been and will always be the best and the shortest possible way to make your brand go from obscurity to popularity and then on to greatness, irrespective of whether that brand is a person, an event or an object. And yet how many brands today are following this simple rule? Some do follow it initially until they attain a certain level of success after which they resort to the reverse of it: Over-promise but under-deliver. This incident happens to be one such case.

With power and in this case popularity comes responsibility, and with her customer base growing, Zainab Khan will have to ensure that no customer of hers gets agitated enough to start a negative word of mouth campaign against her. If she feels that someone is not going to be satisfied with her services at the outset, she should avoid taking him or her as a client altogether. And never underestimate a single customer, even if he appears to be a loner. In the social-media driven world there’s no such thing as a reclusive person. Your reputation can be blown to pieces by even a non-entity on the internet.

In fact these oft-ignored rules ought to be followed by anyone and everyone who’s building a personal brand based on his or her services. In today’s wired world where not the customer but Social Media is always right, you need to be extra vigilant of what the networked realm is saying about you.

Building powerful profiles on the social networks including facebook, linkedin, twitter and of course a blog, is not a luxury but a necessity. And then loading these profiles with testimonials and recommendations is a must.

No matter how careful you are, there are always going to be a few people dissatisfied with your service. So once they launch a venomous attack on your credibility online, the best way to counter it would be the afore-mentioned strategy. And if you have a blog you can even respond to the allegations directly giving your version of the events. And if you really did mess up, the best thing you can do would be to simply apologize to the aggrieved party online.

Whatever you do, just remember this simple rule of thumb by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi from his best-seller LoveMarks:

Jealously guard your reputation:

Built over a lifetime. Destroyed in an instant. Consumers today are ruthless if you let them down. So don’t.

No related posts.

So one fine day, we decided to test Ufone’s brand promise and not surprisingly, Ufone fell way short of expectations, even more so than those telecoms who don’t claim to provide good service.

Here’s what happened:

The most basic package Ufone is offering is for Rs.150 with the option to add the bells and whistles later on. In addition to that, it had launched a subdued version of mobile+connection packages that are so common in the Western market. Currently it has discontinued that package but is still offering the mobile at only Rs.1200.

The only catch: you can’t run the mobile on any other service. So you have to invariably buy an Ufone connection.

Of course you can unlock the code from one of those mobile specialists in the mobile market akin to what people do with the ones brought from abroad, but the cost of this ‘bare-minimum’ mobile from Huawei doesn’t justify going to all this trouble.

Back to the story, I bought one of these Huawei Ufone sets along with a Ufone connection for Rs.1350 from their franchise in Dhoraji. Now this was my first interaction with the Ufone people, and I was met by two sullen fellows who looked even more crestfallen to see me approach them. After buying the package, I asked the guy who was tending to me to activate the sim for me, he curtly replied that I should do it myself by calling 789 from the cell. For some reason, I put off activating the SIM at the franchise and instead tried to do it later on at home. Little did I know that this small action would lead to tortuorous consequences later on.

Now their activation procedure requires you to confirm your CNIC number although you have already submitted a copy of the original CNIC as well as shown the original one to the customer rep.  Calling that 789 number is an ordeal in itself. I called five times the first time before I got through to a CSR.

When I gave my CNIC details, the guy at the other end told me that I need to take my original CNIC to one of their customer service centers for verification as my CNIC had insufficient details. As a consumer, this didn’t amuse at all as I had deliberately bought the connection from an obscure franchise to avoid the hassle of a company-owned customer service centre which is always flooded with people, especially that of Ufone.

So, I asked the guy who had dropped the bombshell on me that why should I again go and show my CNIC when I had already done that. If I hadn’t shown my original CNIC, how the heck did I get the connection in the first place?

The poor chap had no answer to my demands, he just kept repeating the same line which he had delivered previously parrot style albeit with rising crescendo, showing that he was getting angry himself. Seeing that I was getting nowhere, I hung up.

I then tried calling the number again in the hope that maybe that rep was a newbie and didn’t know what was wrong and maybe this time I would be able to get in touch with an experienced one. So I called after two hours.

This time I couldn’t get through even after five tries. Tried the next day at 7am in the morning, 12.30 pm, 2.15 pm, 4.30 pm and finally at 5.50 pm when I finally got through for the second time.

All in all it had taken a whopping 17 tries to get in touch with a rep. Then just as I was telling my CNIC no. to the guy, the line dropped.

Can you believe that? The line dropped when I had finally struck gold after 17 tries!

In utter dismay I tried one more time, and this time got through on the first try. Again I gave my CNIC number but unfortunately the response was the same. Insufficient details on the CNIC data gathered from NADRA and that I had to visit the customer service centre myself with the original CNIC.

The centre closes at 6pm and since I had spent the entire day trying to reach their rep on phone, it was closing time and I had to wait another day to activate the connection.

Next day I did visit the centre at 2.30pm. My turn came at 2.50pm, majority of which time was spent standing since there wasn’t sufficient seating arrangement.

This time around I came across a feisty lady for a service rep. She wasn’t impolite or anything, it’s just that her persona didn’t match that of a customer rep. You got the feeling that one false move you made and she would have devoured you right then and there. The way she was bossing around her male colleagues, she ought to have been their team leader instead of dealing with the customers.

But the bottom-line is I got out of there unscathed with the lady finally resolving my problem after getting me to sign some more signatures along with even more thumb impressions.

I asked her why did I have to go through all this trouble, and she explained that there was some ‘fire’ at one of their centres which curtailed their ability to extract complete data for the NIC. This she said was also the reason for lack of response at the UAN number.

Whether this is true or not is not clear, but in any case the customers should have been informed of this development. Good companies even when going for unscheduled maintenance let the customers know and apologize in advance. This is the bare minimum requirement to be deemed as a good customer service provider. And Ufone is proclaiming to be the ultimate in customer service.

So what does this story tell us? Simply that the brand essence of any brand is determined by the perception in the mind of the consumer and not necessarily by what the custodians of that brand are projecting it to be. Sure that projection can become the brand essence if it is consistently effective over a long period of time. Think BMW. Think Caterpillar.  Think Dalda  Think Hamdard. It took ages for these brands to create a desired essence in the consumer’s mind.

So what’s the brand essence of Ufone? Definitely not customer service, they fail at this brand promise of theirs miserably. Only Zong fares worse at this.

The real brand essence of Ufone as perceived by the consumer is that of a youth-oriented brand that comes up with the most cost-effective and unique packages and conveys them in a humorous undertone.

You can argue that Zong has the cheapest offerings but it doesn’t. The connection fee for Ufone is Rs.150 while for Zong it is Rs.300. On top of that, Ufone is the only provider that is offering service cum mobiles in the Pakistani market and that also dirt cheap. That’s the bottom line and the consumer knows it well, hence the brand essence.

So what can Ufone do about this yawning gap? Stop projecting itself as a custodian of the perfect customer service by scrapping the ten commandments. (The funny thing is, these service commandments are not even on their website. They can only be seen at their outlets in the form of a huge poster hugging one of the walls.)

Yes it can continue to use these mantras internally to ensure that its employees don’t wander too far away from providing good service, but don’t advertise this fact.

Then raise the level of its customer service just a few notches up. It doesn’t need to compete with the likes of Telenor and Mobilink on this parameter because it’s definitely not Ufone’s forte. The thing is Ufone can get away with average customer service if it continues to hammer on its current positioning of unique and cost-effective packages. Instead of offering Blackberry packages to no use, it ought to upgrade its basic connection+mobile packages on the Western market model.

Right now it’s offering the most basic cellphone at Rs.1200. It should introduce better models, maybe even have a brand alliance with Nokia to give those mobiles along with the connection and of course free airtime.

How about a Nokia 5230 customized for Ufone and 150 free minutes for let’s say Rs.14,000?

Or how about a Samsung Corby Pro for approximately Rs. 13,000?

Consumers are increasingly being wooed by the cellphone manufacturers to embrace the touch-screen category and Ufone ought to jump on this bandwagon right away.

Throw in mobile insurance as well for good measure and you’ve set the ball rolling for a paradigm shift in the way  consumers in this part of the world buy cellphones and telecom services. And right now, Ufone is in the best position to induce this behavioral change.

No related posts.

Mahmood Nanji Story of Success

Mahmood Nanji is one of the marketing gurus of Pakistan’s branded world, having served at the forefront of many company’s marketing department, including the coveted position of CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at Tapal.

He was the force behind the TVOne program Brand Power, a one-of-a-kind program on the Pakistani electronic medium. Although it generated a lot of interest, for some reason it was discontinued. He has now moved to Indus News and started a new program Story of Success.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb2f2lALqPY

Tycoon on Express News is quite similar to Story of Success but the host doesn’t have the same aura as Mahmood Nanji to make an everlasting impact.

The lack of interest by the media in this breed of people is probably due to the fact that these people don’t have an onscreen persona which the local media rates as the wow factor in wooing the audience toward their channel. The quality of content especially the wisdom these people can communicate to the audience is not given preference by our local channels. In this sense, Indus News has done a tremendous job in breaking away from the status quo and trying something fresh.

So, going by the famous BCG matrix, will Story of Success go on to become a star or end up a dog?

For starters, Indus News itself is not the strongest of brand in the world of News Channel brands. Geo and Dawn News rule the roost while Aaj, Dunya, Express and Samaa follow close behind. In this cut-throat competition, Indus News has its work cut out. Amazingly, not a single channel from this lot is willing to differentiate itself in some way, not having the guts to break out from the brand clutter. Everyone wants to follow the same red ocean strategy which the market leader has set out and no one is venturing forward to come up with a blue ocean strategy.

Does that mean any program which is on a channel that is not popular itself is doomed for failure? Not necessarily. But it does help tremendously, especially if your media reach goes beyond just the electronic medium.

Take the market leaders. Any program they produce they promote aggressively not only on their own sub-brand channels, but also in their print publications. Geo for instance promotes a new program on all its sub-brand Geo Entertainment, News, Super and Aag, as well as Jang and The News newspaper. Think of the enormous reach of all these communication vehicles combined together and compare it to what Indus can do. If Indus is to use all these modes of communication, it would cost a fortune to it whereas on the other side Geo and even Dawn News can do it literally for free owing to belonging to powerful media conglomerate which is omnipresent in all modes of communication.

Indus News cannot compete with the likes of these giant brands. And any program aired on it faces the same dilemma. So what can ‘IN’ do about this?

For starters, it has to upload all the aired episodes on the internet, preferably Youtube. This was what was done with the program Brand Power whose episodes were uploaded on the website brandsynario.com. This is the most basic requirement in today’s age of media proliferation. With a plethora of channels to choose from, chances are your program is going to be missed by majority of the target market who may be viewing something else at the time the program is aired.

But would that be enough? No. At the very least the program needs to have a strong brand presence on the internet. Ideally it needs to be promoted 360º but since that’s going to cost a fortune, internet seems to be the most viable option.

On the internet, it needs to have a brand identity on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube and Slideshare. It can take a leaf out of Naveen Naqvi’s book who has done a tremendous job positioning her program on Dawn News on the internet. Then there’s Ayesha Alam and Faisal Qureshi both who have done a good job themselves promoting themselves and their talk shows online. They even maintain a blog, which wouldn’t be a bad idea for Mr. Nanji himself.

Although they have come up with the facebook profile, it needs to be constantly updated and spiced up with a few attractions as well. For instance you can offer prizes for winning a quiz which is based on the contents of a particular episode. This would certainly pique the interest of the audience.

There’s a small clip of one of the episodes with Citizen Foundaton’s creator Mushtaq Khapra’s but that’s uploaded by one of the viewers rather than a deliberate ploy by the producers or promoters of the program. Finally Mahmood Nanji’s personal account at Twitter has tried to promote the program but the program needs to have its very own Twitter profile.

That’s the promotion part. What about the program itself? Is it great? Or does it need to improve? Yes it does. While making it glamorous wouldn’t be a good idea, adding some other elements would definitely spruce up the proceedings. This could include pictures from the interviewee’s past highlighting his achievement. A brief look at the business in action during the course of the interview would add further depth to the program. Although this format was followed in the Liberty Books program, it isn’t made the standard format which is a pity.

Story of Success could go on to become a renowned program which inspires millions of people. All it needs is a few tweaks of the format coupled with a healthy dose of some shrewd marketing.

No related posts.

However, in the midst of all this commotion, you would see the youth of the nation having the time of their lives, playing some watered down version of cricket and football and amazingly, helping stranded drivers by pushing their cars out of the way. While the adults sulk and curse at the weather, for the jovial souls it is festival time. Even those little street children with the baneful wipers are extra cheery, dipping their wipers in the water on the road and then forcefully cleaning your windshield with that dirty thing while it’s already raining!

Incredibly, no ad agency or brand, great or small, has had the courage to make use of this glaring slice-of-life to the benefit of their brand, especially when the slice-of-life mania is at its zenith, with the industry having nothing better to offer than a ‘slice-of-life’ spot. And yet they continue to ignore one of the biggest slices.

Yes there have been few feeble attempts at leveraging the monsoons. But all of them invariably present the rosy picture where everything is in perfect order and the rain starts to fall at just the right pace to be enjoyed with no possibility of water getting stranded. There’s no depiction of the ‘rainy’ side of monsoon. A classic example is the Wasim Akram/Zara Sheikh ad of Rite biscuit

So what options are there if you want to go for realism in monsoon branding?

For instance in the case of Mountain Dew, you would depict a couple of daredevils water-skiing in the midst of stranded cars being pushed sideways  by their hapless drivers.

If you’re branding a car, you would depict a lonely car smoothly sailing through a flooded road with cars stuck on both sides.

If it’s a car battery, you would show a car puttering to a stop in the middle of the flooded road. Then when the driver tries the ignition in the vain hope of starting the car again, the battery sends a jolt through the entire engine, drying any water accumulated in the spark plugs and the car whirrs to life.

It could be a biscuit, candy, beverage or any of the innumerable edible brands’ ad where the subject after consuming the brand suddenly starts to enjoy his predicament of stuck in rain and tries to make the most of it.

Karachi downpour

There are a million combinations and permutations that you can create using the same backdrop of bleak rainy condition. One way to add vitality to the whole proceeding is to include a generous undertone of humor.

Due to deteriorating conditions of the civic services, Pakistanis have self-instilled a fear of the rain as a disastrous event rather than a blessing. If some brand comes along and tries to remodel this behavior along the lines of Surf Excel’s ‘Daag to Achey Hotay Hain’ campaign, it would reap rich dividends.

After all, ‘Barish to Lush Hoti Hai’. So bring in the branded rain, sponsored by……….

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To be fair to Honda, they did come up with a stylish City whose front was akin to Accord, precisely what the consumers liked to see. But it didn’t work out the way Honda intended to do. There were two major reasons:

One is the pervasive false notion, ‘We have a great product, and it will sell by itself.’ If that were the case, why would celebrity brands like Pepsi and Coke still be spending billions of dollars on marketing? Why would Unilever be spending a fortune on Lux Style Awards? Why would Toyota launch an aggressive campaign for the new Corolla in spite of the fact that the old model was doing good?

‘Marketing is the battle of perceptions, not products’.   Al-Ries

The best Honda did was launch a subdued print campaign and a direct marketing campaign, which by the looks of the sales figures didn’t do much good.

The second equally criminal reason was to do with a number of smaller glitches that combined to create one big negative impact. This included the look of its backlights, the sort of a pentagonal shape that consumers just didn’t like. A consumer survey beforehand would have rectified this problem in the design stage. Another glitch was the quality of the buttons used on the dashboard. A Honda fanatic fan alleged that the quality of the onboard panel was no better than the Chinese SUV brand GoNow.

If you just look at the sales comparison of Honda City and Toyota Corolla for the month of July last year and the one previous to it, you couldn’t help but gape at the yawning gap between the results of the two. In 2008 in the month of July, City sales were 625 when the old model was still there and last July the sales increased to just 686, a mere 10% growth. Even if you include the Civic sales for the sake of equivalent comparison since Corolla is the equivalent of both City and Civic, the total Honda sales went up from 1025 to 1140, a 10% growth.

Automotive brand-wise sales growth comparison

city-civic vs corolla graph

Coming to Corolla, sale was a mere 298 in July 2008, last year July it rocketed to 3,124 units, that’s a staggering 948% increase in sales!  (All sales figures are courtesy PAMA).

honda vs toyota sales comparison

Honda city vs Toyota corolla sales graph

The last two years’ sales have been analyzed because they present a clearer picture of the before-and-after difference between the launch of the new models.

Such stellar sales performance is unprecedented in the history of automobile industry in Pakistan. Do you really think this unbelievable gap is due to the difference in quality and performance of Corolla and City?

Do you really think that Corolla is that much better to drive than City or Civic for that matter? Even if it is (though I doubt it would be), is there a mammoth 948% difference between the two?

No. Not by a long shot. It all lies in the perception in the mind of the consumer. And the brutal truth is that Toyota was better able to influence the consumer with its marketing effort. The amazing thing is, all this happened without the consumer even test-driving the brand, they were that much awed by the branding communication. Honda on the other hand gave ample opportunities to test-drive the new City and yet the sales didn’t pick up as much as was expected. This real-world example again lends credibility to the adage coined by the venerable Al Ries:

‘Marketing is the battle of perceptions, not products’.

And remember that the new Toyota launch campaign is not a great one by any stretch of the imagination. This just goes on to show how poorly its competitors are faring at marketing their cars.

Toyota has communicated its brand positioning in every Tom, Dick and Harry publication. The other day I received a magazine called Slogan I didn’t even know existed – and right at the back cover is the new Corolla in all its glory. To Toyota’s credit, they have inculcated all the three elements of the Brand Value Pyramid (proposed by Scott) – features, benefits and values. And one of the features is that it is ‘Ipod Ready’! Pretty impressive.

On the radio, they targeted the upscale albeit young segment by sponsoring the Evening Drive Show on CityFM89 and offering tickets to the Cold Play concert in Dubai as prize for those answering a couple of audaciously simple questions. It can be said that the sort of people who actually listen to Cold Play are predominantly the youth segment which hardly qualifies as target material for Toyota. It is thus no surprise that the winner was a young bloke who although would be grateful to the Toyota people for giving him such a fantastic experience, doubt would be rushing to the nearest Toyota dealer to get his hands on the new Corolla. He just doesn’t have the wallet for it. It’s basic consumer behavior fallacy- trying to target those who desire your brand but can’t afford it.

Then there’s a positive review of the car by Umair Mohsin published in AutoMark magazine. Whether that positive review about Corolla is independent or sponsored by Corolla is not known, but this much is known that Toyota did provide the car to the reviewer (the Altis Cruisetronic) for testing purpose.

Remember that whatever has been discussed is entirely based on the positioning of the two brands. No stock has been taken of the actual performance of these two brands – the ‘driveability’ of them. Why Toyota is preferred in rural areas. Is it because its body is almost one foot higher from the ground while Honda is much lower, or is it because the off-road grip of Toyota is better than Honda? All this has happened without the consumer taking into account the flat floor of Corolla at the back due to redesign of the torsion beam or the improved ability of Corolla to stabilize after passing over a pot hole or to maneuver around corners.

There’s also the general perception that the Pakistani consumer prefers the aerodynamic shape more than any other feature. While a segment of the market may prefer that, it’s hard to believe that the overwhelming majority values that feature the most. If that were the case, wouldn’t Kia’s Spectra be selling like hot cakes by now? That car had the sleekest aerodynamic design until Civic Reborn came along. Unfortunately for Dewan Motors, that was the only worthwhile similarity Spectra had with Reborn.

Honda City is sleeker than Toyota Corolla and yet Honda has been unable to command a price premium over it. Delving into the intricacies of the design aspect requires another in-depth article.

Coming to the SUV line extension of the two brands, even here Toyota has done much better by aggressively promoting its rather extensive line of sub-brands, from Terios to Prado to Hi-lux to the new Fortuner. Compared to Toyota’s arsenal, Honda has just one SUV in the region – CR-V, and you would be hard pressed to find the car either in the world of advertising or in the real world as far as Pakistan is concerned. Pakistanis can take a leaf out of their Indian counterparts notebook with regard to their shrewd strategy of placing the Honda CRV in the movie ‘Wake Up Sid’. It’s not a new strategy by any stretch of the imagination as Hollywood has been indulging in these sort of tactics since time immemorial, but they are still effective. What was so admirable about this particular instance was that the car was used by the lead character in having the time of his life along with his friends. What’s more, the character is played by the latest heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor. Although the movie wasn’t a phenomenal success at the box office, it did  manage to strike a chord with the youth.

So when you put two and two together, you get one hell of a cool association for the Honda SUV. Whether this was intentional or accidental is not known, but it sure worked.

This is the sort of subtle advertising Honda Pakistan needs to indulge in. This movie which has been well received in Pakistan as well has already shown which segment to target and what ought to be the brand persona of the SUV.

Let’s have a brief look at the effects (or lack thereof) of marketing on the finances of the two brands.

Here are the snapshots of the profit and loss statement taken from the annual report of Honda and Toyota. Just look at the yawning gap between the two. Why has Honda done terribly bad? A Rs.401.8 million loss when your competitor has reaped a whopping net profit of Rs. 1.39 Billion in exactly the same period and circumstances should cause a pandemonium in the Honda dugout.  And this happened in spite of the fact that Toyota pays more royalty than Honda, about Rs.490 million, while Honda pays Rs.287 million.

honda profit loss statement

toyota profit loss statement

Here’s the comparative analysis of the financial statement.

Honda toyota financial war

But misdirected marketing strategy is not the only reason for this state of affairs. The thing is, Honda is focusing a bit too much on the Euro Compliance. All it’s efforts are directed towards making its brand more environmentally friendly by introducing ever new technologies. The problem is, leading a ‘Green’ lifestyle maybe the ‘in’ thing in the First World, in our part of the world the masses don’t give two hoots about the environment. They want cheaper cars with more gadgets and gizmos. Period.

And Toyota is giving them what they want, while Honda is investing its precious capital in something that does not add value in the consumer’s reality.

So what’s the best thing Honda can do under the circumstances? Well, it’s a bit late for an aggressive launch campaign similar to what Toyota did. One thing they can do to good effect is the use of the blogosphere.

Lately, Honda has been focusing on BTL activities more. There was a press stunt where the members of the press were invited for a test drive of the new City. A good idea. Now they need to turn this good idea into a great one. And the internet is the best place for a viral BTL stunt.

How? First they need to find a blogger who is a popular opinion leader. Whatever he says about some brand becomes the voice of his audience. Then they need to give this guy (or girl) a City to test drive, not for a day, week or month but for at least six months, twelve months preferable. Now give this person free reign to write whatever he wants to about his experience with this car. If Honda is confident about the superior quality and performance of their car over Corolla so much so that they didn’t even bother to have a proper launch plan, then they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Of course, the tester blogger will have some flaws to report about the car, but then no car is perfect. In fact having the opinion leader reveal the flaws (which ought to be few, if the car is that good as claimed by Honda) would convince the consumers that Honda hasn’t bought the blogger and whatever he’s reporting really is the ground reality.

Believe me, the way news spread on the internet, Honda would have an unprecedented viral campaign reaching every nook and corner of the cyberspace in no time. And at what cost? Just the cost of a single Honda City. This much amount is spent on advertising on a full page in a major newspaper, and that lasts for how long? A single day. And even then, not every possible member of the target market gets to see it.

Of course Honda could argue that even with this BTL Blog campaign, much of the target market would not get targeted. And they’re right, to some extent.  And they aren’t for two reasons.

They are right because not everyone with money in his pockets have jumped onto the internet bandwagon lock, stock and barrel. Their idea of the internet is checking mail and checking the KSE (Karachi Stock Exchange) website. Period.

And they are wrong because of the following two reasons.

One, many accomplished executives have not only  jumped onto the blog bandwagon, they actively scourge the blogosphere to find out what other bloggers are talking about. Whatever is happening in that world, they do get influenced by it.

Second, blogs have taken over Google. For some reason, Google just loves blogs. Whenever you search for something on Google, the top ten result Google returns more often than not lead to blog websites. (This narrows Honda’s search to a blogger who’s  popular in the blogosphere).  Now, which search engine do most Pakistanis use for searching anything on the internet? Google.

This essentially means that anyone looking for some information on Honda City will be directed by Google to this blogger’s website who’s writing about his experience using Honda City. Whatever he says about City would become the talk of town in no time.

Remember, it’s just the cost of a City car. This much amount can be spent on a couple of print ads, or it can be spent for generating goodwill about the car on the internet, where it will remain forever for all to see. What more can you ask for?

At the end of the testing period, Honda can either choose to take away the car from the blogger or it can let him keep the car. Choosing the latter option would again result in lasting goodwill. If the strategy achieves the phenomenal success it is slated to achieve, Honda can go for multiple bloggers.

A twist can be introduced by Honda to the proceedings by giving the blogger incentive for praising the car. If the blogger is able to generate substantial goodwill or even sales for the City, Honda would offer him cash prizes or even let him keep the car. This arrangement may be construed to lie in the grey zone of ethics, but in the world of subtle marketing, much worse has happened.

This innovative and rather daring tactic hasn’t been used as yet, (to the best of my knowledge) and it’s effectiveness will last for only so long. Once every brand starts to make use of bloggers as marketing and publicity tools, consumers will slowly lose confidence in the authenticity of it. But for now, it’s a golden opportunity for any daring brand. Can Honda be that daring brand?

Branding. It has been written off by some as a mere abstract concept devoid of any measurable output while some has exalted it to the status of a deity wasting millions in its name (think Pakistan telecom industry).

But if done correctly keeping in mind the immutable laws of branding, the result is a remarkable boost in the sales for the long haul. Corolla’s sales performance, however dazzling it may be, is short-term after all. If Corolla can deliver this result consistently over a period of 3-5 years, only then can it be deemed a successful branding endeavor.

Chances of that happening are not that bright owing to what has already been discussed – Toyota is trying to be everything to all people with just one branded shape. In the long run, it just doesn’t work..

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Instead of trying to be all things to all people, it kept its focus narrow by staying true to its initial positioning. In fact it boosted that image by coming up with unique and innovative programs like News Weakly by Sami Shah, For the love of Food by Aida Khan, Open Frequency, Late Swing, Cutting it,  Techie Watch,  First Blast, Breakfast at Dawn, No reservations, TalkBack by Wajahat S. Khan and a host of other programs all in English. It hired newscasters who spewed out fluent English in foreign accent so much so that sometimes when you weren’t looking at the screen, you were fooled into believing that it was CNN or BBC. And the person spearheading this stew of foreign accents was Saima Mohsin.

Being part of a large media empire that encompasses all media, it promoted itself aggressively whether it be through the parent company’s radion channel CityFm89, newspaper, magazines Herald and Spider or even through Aurora in which only a couple of months ago the interview of DawnNews CEO Shakeel Masud was published in which he claimed that DawnNews had broken the shackles and had audiences now from even the SEC C and D when initially it had from only SEC A and B. The launch of DawnNews in USA and GCC countries had received overwhelming response and plans were underway to launch in Canada and Europe.  It seemed that the channel could do no wrong.

Then one fine day, it was gone. Just like that. Half of Dawn News’ airing time was suddenly relegated to Urdu language news and programs. In fact the prime time from 7 to 9pm was exclusively devoted to Urdu language. And the justification given for this topsy turvy change was some market research which Dawn claims has shown that there’s more demand for Urdu news channels with creditable news and reporting.

Something’s not right here. If what this market research is inferring is true, then there’s a dearth of good Urdu channels with authentic reporting and the consumer is rejecting them and wanting something credible. In reality the converse is true. Urdu news channels are a dime a dozen and the consumer is hooked on to them with no regard for whether they are reporting right or wrong. In fact people love to devour even the talk shows which are proven to be the least credible with hosts and even guests of dubious standing.

For the sake of argument, let’s say Dawn’s market research was authentic and people are really craving for a spank clean Urdu news channel. Even in that case, what would you do if you were a successful English news channel? Common sense dictates you would come up with another channel as a sub-brand with Urdu programming. Why on earth would you slash your successful programming to make room for something which may or may not succeed? You won’t. Unless you were out of your mind. Or your supposedly successful programs weren’t as successful and this was really what the market research unearthed.

But why weren’t they successful? What was wrong with them? Only those with access to the insights of the market research would know that. One reason could be that a very high barometer for success was set for them, probably benchmarking the Urdu programs for them. If this was the case, then it was a sure recipe for disaster, because going by the sheer size of the Urdu-speaking market, the English one can never even come close to it. Even if you take the Dawn Newspaper, no matter how successful it becomes, it can never be at par with the Urdu newspapers. So that could be one reason.

Another could be the fact that the channel is still in its infancy and is comparing its success rate with that of the market leader GEO. If more time was given to these programs with fewer expectations, maybe they would have pulled through as well. In Malcolm Gladwell’s words, these programs were not allowed to reach their ‘Tipping Point’. How do you determine when the tipping point of a tv programs is going to be reached if at all. There’s no research done to estimate a trend. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success says the tipping point for a person to make it is 10,000 hours. After he has spent 10,000 hours practicing whatever it is that he does whether it be sports or software programming, a single small opportunity can tip the fate in his favor big time.

But how much for a tv program to reach the same level of success is not known. To get an idea of how much time and effort may be required to attain the pinnacle of success, here’s an example of a local success story. If you are into listening morning show programs on the FM channels on your way to work or study, then you are probably familiar with the Taza Dum program hosted by Adeel Azhar on FM107. If you haven’t heard, ask around. He has become something of a rock star of radio drive shows, popular even amongst the school-going tweens.

But how did he reach this coveted status? In his own words, he had been doing this show for three and a half years with no luck, he was receiving criticism from all quarters and was just on the verge of quitting when all of a sudden the show shot to success overnight. It’s tipping point had been reached. How much time has Dawn given to its English programs to try to reach the elusive tipping point? Marketing Research can help with a lot of things. This is not one of them. It’s purely a matter of gut instinct of a veteran.

Even those few programs that are still in English are getting affected by the Urdu onslaught. Have you seen No Reservations lately? Ayesha Alam who was doing a good job of presenting in English is having quite a few awkward moments trying to express herself in Urdu. The forced transformation appears to be painful for her.

If you closely look at the day-wise schedule of Dawn’s week, not a single English program is on air from 6pm to 11pm at any day of the week except Sunday which three programs are aired on prime time: No Reservations, Fusion and Beautiful People.

And what’s the story behind Beautiful People? It’s an Indian program with Bollywood celebrity interviews. What was the need for that? Let’s just say that the market research showed that people wanted to see Indian celebrity interviews on a Pakistani channel, wouldn’t it have been better to air something new? The last interview shown was of Deepika Padukone and it was from the time her first movie was released, more than two years old! What’s wrong with Dawn?

The bottom-line is that Dawn’s brand essence is slowly receding. A brand is a single idea in the mind of the consumer. Dawn followed that rule religiously until now. It was following a blue ocean strategy which all brands should aspire to follow, but now it is back to the red ocean strategy, which in layman terms is called the rat race.

“The problem with rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat.”

DawnNews would do well to take a leaf out of its sister concern CityFM89′s notebook which has carved out a wonderful niche for itself purely by being true to its roots. It recognized that it was a niche brand and worked with respect to that positioning instead of competing head on with the Urdu FM channels like DawnNews is trying to do now.

If you want to know more about what went wrong behind the scenes other than the branding failure, check out these poignant posts on a blog called the Cafe Piyala which has the inside scoop on how Wajahat Khan resigned from Dawn News, how people were either shown the door or pays drastically cut. All that is not discussed here because this site is confined to purely branding issues and not workplace politics.

Dawn News started out as a great brand and it ought to revert to its original brand essence if it is to prosper instead of trying to be something which it is not. Dawn already has had a bitter experience with two failed Urdu projects in the form of Hurriyat and Zulfiqar. If Dawn continues its Urdu transmission, history would simply repeat itself.

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There isn’t. What makes one brand stand out from its arch-rival is the perception of it in the mind of the consumer. And what influences the perception of the consumer? Marketing, pure and simple. Without it, one brand just cannot claim superiority over its rival brand. As long as you are hammering the consumer consistently in an unobtrusive way, rest assured that your brand will prevail. Of course the brands being compared need to be equivalent in performance and quality before the marketing effect comes into play. Chinese brands like Geely and Jialing can do all the marketing in the world and still not be able to come at par with the likes of Honda and Toyota.

And what is Honda and Toyota doing about it in Pakistan? These rival brands are following entirely different branding strategies for their sub-brands City and Corolla, based on their brand persona (real or perceived) in this part of the world. While in the rest of the world, Honda and Toyota have the brand essence of ‘the car of the middle-class man’; in Pakistan they both are more of a status symbol for the well-offs. Even between Honda and Toyota, the prestige varies considerably. While Toyota is seen in majority on the roads, and has more of a resale value, it’s the Honda which is considered more prestigious with respect to Toyota. And the launch of the Civic Reborn augmented this perception even more. Even the launch of the new stylish model of Corolla hasn’t been able to unseat the Civic Reborn from its prestigious standing. One major reason for that is that Corolla is trying to be all things to everyone. It is trying to appeal to different segments of the society with just one model. Although the specifications vary greatly from 1.3 XLI to 2.0D to 1.8 Altis, the look and the basic specifications remain essentially the same. Why would someone who can afford an Altis buy it when his lesser counterpart has essentially the same car (1.3 XLI) at a far lesser price? If he’s paying more, it’s not for the superior technical specifications but for the chance to be able to stand out from the lesser mortals who can’t afford an expensive car.

And who would know it better than Toyota who launched the best-selling Lexus but kept the parent brand name Toyota away from it because Lexus was being projected as a luxury car and the makers knew that Toyota name had the brand essence of an economical car. And yet, in spite of knowing this branding principle, they’ve made the cardinal mistake of offering the same car to both the haves and the have-nots. At the moment, they seem to be getting away with it due to even bigger follies of its counterparts. But they are suffering as well as far as Altis is concerned due to this branding strategy. In spite of all the great features –Cruisetronic and all – the models which seem to be riding high are the Xli and the GLi, which don’t have any of the new features. Out of the total Corollas in production, roughly 50% are GLi, 40% are Xli and a mere 10% are Altis. Xli is the least expensive one with the minimum features, and a standard practice amongst the consumers is to buy a Xli, scrap that label and put the GLi label in its place. This is a poignant consumer insight which points to consumer’s aversion to being associated with an Xli as well as the identical look of the two models so much so that you can fool anyone by simply changing the label. Honda on the other hand, has been shrewd at least in the sense of branding according to socio-economic class. They have the City to cater to the middle to upper middle class and the Civic to cater to the executive class. The price of Honda City was traditionally less than the price of the Corolla’s XLI and GLI models. However the new model (the third generation) of City saw prices of this brand soar past its Corolla counterparts. Not a bad move by itself, considering the fact that the new City is many notches above its previous model in terms of style.

Toyota Corolla

Honda Print Ad

Honda City

Honda City

Unfortunately for Honda, the new Corolla model which was launched just a few months prior to the City launch caught the fancy of the target market. This combined with the fact that Toyota really dug into the launch campaign which was aggressive at least by the standards of the Pakistani automobile industry. It encompassed all the media, and most importantly hammered incessantly their USP (Unique Selling Proposition/Point)- the Cruisetronic feature, whereby you could put the car on cruise control at a certain speed without sweating it out yourself.

However, from a consumer point of view, it wasn’t the USP that triggered the chain reaction of sales. It was the similarity of look to that of Camry especially from the front and the fact that the car is designed in such a way that its body appears wider and lower than not only its previous model, but wider than the City and Liana as well, both of whom have focused on stretching the car vertical rather than horizontal.

In reality, the new Corolla is a mere 60mm (6cm) wider than its previous model. Common sense suggests that, considering the nature and width of roads in Pakistan, it is better to make cars that have narrow body but are vertically elongated to create more space within the passenger cabin. This shape unfortunately gives the look of a ‘dabba’ (box) instead of a stylish car. Toyota took a risk with the wider body (or maybe it was based on consumer survey), and the results are for all to see.

The million dollar question is, how did Toyota finally come to grips with the fact that its Corolla is remarkably mediocre in style and all things aesthetic, shaped like a ‘Dabba’ rather than a sedan for the upper class? And how did they know precisely that the consumer wanted a ‘Camry’ look. An educated guess is that they conducted an exhaustive research to gauge the consumer reaction. Although groundbreaking in this part of the world, this is nothing new in the international automobile industry.

Ford conducts (or used to conduct) Style Research Clinics to assess consumer reactions to exterior and interior styling of new automotive designs. What they did was create fibreglass prototype or mock-ups of proposed models. Then by conducting short telephone interviews, they recruited respondents who were then brought to a showroom where the test car mock-up was kept. Personal interviews of the respondents were conducted after they were exposed to the mock-up seeking comments about each and every detail of the mock-up. The results were then sent to the designers in Detroit to streamline the design. Cars such as the Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable and the Jaguar S-type were the direct results of these style clinics. Even Chrysler got in on the act by giving the respondents Gridpad ( a flat 8X10” box, more of a touchscreen) while they were inspecting the new models. MCQs would be flashed on the screen of the Gridpad asking about the aspects of the model and the consumer would answer then and there while observing the new model. One strategy that has become the norm in the West and amazingly missing in this part of the world is CSI- not Crime Scene Investigation mind you, but Customer Satisfaction Index. Although specifically created for the automobile industry by J.David Power III in 1967, it has spawned to include every brand and industry under the sun. And yet in Pakistan, it is applied by not even a single company, not even the MNCs!

That shows the apathy towards consumer interests and rights in this part of the world. But what can CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) do as far as Pakistani autombile industry is concerned? Consider this. Honda Acura dealers in the US festooned the windows of the Integra and Legend with deals reading ‘J.D Power & Associates No.1 Customer Satisfaction Index’ and saw their sales sky-rocket for nearly four years on the basis of just this fact. Nissan was able to compete successfully with its brand Infinity against the might of Lexus just on the basis of its CSI ranking. In short the autombile industry has become obsessed with these ratings because the consumer has taken an avid interest in it. George Borst, the former vice-president of strategic and product planning for Toyota’s sales operations said, ‘Power discovered a niche in the industry many years ago when it wasn’t the top-line issue that it is today, and quantified it. Whether he caused it or caught the wave isn’t important.’ William Pochiluk, CEO Autofacts consulting firm says, ‘ I think Power has changed the auto business forever. There was a time when he was the only guy in the business making these kind of recommendations, and he grabbed the attention of consumers.’

There isn’t a singe CSI in the world right now, but many CSIs depending upon the country. There’s the US version, the UK version , the Japanese version etc, all segmented by industries. However, judging by the Google top results, the US version run by ACSI seems to be the most popular. On that index, Toyota was the reigning champion a couple of years ago with 88 points. Now it has come down considerably to be at par with Honda, somewhere in the early 80s range. The point is, a Pakistani version would go a long way in making brand take stock of their consumers’ satisfaction levels. It would even help those brands who take more care of their customers get ahead of the pack without having to spend a fortune on advertising. Right now, the order of the day in the Pakistani brandscape is that you can get away with murder literally if you have got money to throw on brand communication.

TO BE CONTINUED…………….

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And so car rallies, which were just an obscure sporting event in this part of the world are now becoming the ‘in’ thing to do.

Bird's eye-view- Car Rally

Car rally events have been taking place in Pakistan for ages, but they were mostly held outside the cities and only the die-hard fans participated in them with spectators only a pipedream. Then came Fast & the Furious at the start of the millennium and 10-second races gained popularity in the cities with people tweaking their cars and stuff. The fan following grew as well but even then it was a low-key event shunned by the mainstream media.

But now with all these channels struggling to come up with original content, these car related events have become a lucrative possibility. Their popularity has been further spurred by the sponsoring of major brands that are ever so eager to participate in a BTL activity. The result – while in the past hardly a single car related event occurred in a year, 3-4 events are now held every year.

Dreamworld Car Rally is one of those rare events that are being held every year for the last ten years. Although geared primarily towards the members of the Dreamworld Resort, the event is open to non-members as well albeit at a higher cost. In the last couple of years, the marketing department of Dreamworld is increasingly making efforts to make the event a prominent feature of the city, by not only purchasing air time on TV channels, but also approaching companies for a sponsorship opportunity.

Although the event hasn’t attained the pinnacle of success in terms of fame and popularity, it is an ideal branding opportunity. How?

If you go by the acceptable local standards of what makes a branded event successful, then Dreamworld Car Rally can be deemed a partial failure. The local standard entails that the event ought to be covered by one of the giants of the electronic medium, GEO, Dawn News etc. Then it needs to have a prominent personality as host, and then it ought to be sponsored by a plethora of giant brands like Unilever, P&G and Reckitt Benckiser. Anything short of this and the event is rated below par. And now, you need to invite bloggers as well to adjudge the event and buzz about it in the social media.

So what makes an event ideal for branding endeavor? First and foremost, the event should be a memorably pleasant experience for all the participants. This is the single most important factor for any branded event. You take this out of the picture, and nothing, no matter how big, could make either the event or the brands associated with it favorably placed in the consumer’s mind.

Secondly, it ought to be sponsored by major brands, but not so many as to induce brand clutter, something which is witnessed with regularity at Dawn’s Lifestyle Exhibition. Dawn’s Lifestyle Exhibition is a classic example of frills without the thrills. There are so many brands participating in the event that unless you have the capacity to dish out a couple of million rupees to highlight your brand at the event, it’s better to stay away from it. So many brands make the mistake of jumping on the Lifestyle bandwagon as if there’s a gold rush, and end up just throwing their money away with negligible enhancement to their brand equity.

They do have a plausible reason for participation. There’s this principle of consumer behavior that if you place your brand in the presence of popular brands, some of their popularity will rub off on your brand. And it does work. But not when you have a gazillion brands good and bad vying for the same thing.

The second major reason the Dawn Lifestyle exhibition has ceased to be a great branding opportunity is the sheer size of the traffic it generates.  With such a huge crowd cramming the once spacious halls, it becomes a struggle even to breathe properly let alone walk or shop around. Most of the time you spend getting nudged from all directions which may be a memorable experience alright, but for all the wrong reasons, especially the female visitors. In fact this time around the rush spilled onto the main road as well just outside the entrance to the site. The entire flyover over Hasan Square got choked because of the cars trying to enter or leave the premises, so much so that there was an accident as well between a car exiting and one going straight on the main road. What can be more unpleasant than that?

Coming back to the Dreamworld Car Rally, it is as near to a perfect branding opportunity as you can get in this part of the world. The biggest reason for that is the format of the event. It is designed in such a way that every member of the family participating has a rollicking time throughout the day filled with adventure, excitement and of course food and drinks for a very reasonable amount.

The format is that each participating family is given an initial set of clues at the starting point which they have to make sense of to discover the next check point where they receive the next set of clues and so on until the end. While the head of the family drives, the rest of the family solves the clues so that everyone stays riveted to the game. The checkpoints are distributed throughout the city while the finishing line is at Dreamworld Resort.

In that sense it is not a car rally per se since the emphasis is not on speed but brainpower.

This alone is reason enough for any brand to sponsor this event. But it is not the only reason. PSO, Pepsi, Dominos, Nelson, AGS, Red Bull, TV One, City FM89 and Shezan. Sound like big brands? Sure does.

Therefore it has got the big brand factor covered perfectly to the hilt because although big brands are sponsoring, but there aren’t that many as to cause brand clutter.

PSO, it has to be mentioned, has been the main sponsor of this event for the last seven or eight years. They must be attaining some substantial ROBI (Return on Brand Investment) so as to be sponsoring this event every year.

All this raving review of Dreamworld’s Car Rally doesn’t mean it was a picture perfect event. It had its share of follies, but these were more to do with the coverage of the event rather than the event itself. For instance, the event was to receive substantial coverage in the social media via Facebook as well as traditional media via billboards and mobile vans. In fact these tactics were to be applied prior to the event to create some hype. Dreamworld didn’t implement this strategy properly. Secondly, although the coverage of the event was comprehensive enough, something went terribly wrong in the editing room so that the final production was below par. For starters, the entire two episodes aired on the tv channels had majority of the focus on just three families selected before the event on God knows what criteria. 90% of the air time was allotted to the treasure hunt foibles and antics of these three families, 8% of the time was given to the starting point activities and a measly 2% was given to the closing and prize distribution ceremony.

What should have been done was to allocate at least 40% of the time to the starting and ending activities, 20% of time on other contestants and then 40% of the time could have been given to those three families. 

Even if  Dreamworld wanted to give as much coverage to these families as it did, it should have at least ensured that they had some on-screen presence. The families were not comfortable before the camera, having no idea how to behave, whether to act naturally or dramatically. If Dreamworld had planned to bank so much on these families for the success of the program, they should at least have picked those who could carry themselves gracefully in front of the camera.

The bottom-line is that the brands that not only spent big money on the sponsorship but invested considerably in the activities on ground as well (like Shezan and Red Bull provided the participants with Red Bull, Atlas Battery’s AGS conducted free battery check-up) should have been given sufficient time on air as opposed to less than 30 seconds they received. Was giving a minute or two to these brands such a hard task? And the incredible thing was, the main sponsor PSO didn’t even get a single second!

If Dreamworld is to popularize this concept with the brands so that they invest more for it, they need to provide better coverage for them. No doubt Dreamworld has come up with a unique event unparalleled in this part of the world, and if they can just rectify the fallacies of this year’s event, it has the potential to become a mega event of the country.

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First, a little about the ‘The Second Floor’. The Second Floor now rechristened as the T2F 2.0 is the brainchild of Sabeen Mahmud, a sort of a social entrepreneur. The brand is positioned to be a haven for intellectual pursuits, from book-reading to Singing workshops to Entrepreneurial seminars, it aims to be in the thick of creative endeavors of the city.

This session was coordinated by Jehan Ara, the president of PASHA in the absence of Sabeen Mahmood.

Here are the highlights of what transpired at the event:

(Shahjehan kicked off his presentation with the famous social media video that has become the norm at all such events:

• How many users are there on Facebook in Pakistan?
• About 1 million and the numbers are increasing exponentially.

• That’s the paradigm shift in cyberspace. With the proliferation of social media platforms, news spread instantly, virally and exponentially.
• I can try any brand and then blog about it and hundreds of people would know about it right away.

• A product can make or break by a single post from the user because everyone is connected to everyone else.

• Social media has stirred changes in publication in the following way:
  • Publish:  Infinite as opposed to few
  • Comment: Feedback as opposed to Monologue
  • Share: Viral as opposed to limited distribution

• If HBL for instance provides unpleasant customer service to just one person like me, I can spread negative word of mouth in the online arena and within no time HBL will have a serious problem just because of one disgruntled customer.

• However, you just cannot write something about a brand or a person and get away with it. When you are writing for a publication in the real world, credibility is neither established nor wiped away instantly, but online the entire world can comment on your article and everyone else can see what the others have said about it. So credibility is quickly built up or destroyed virally solely by the commentators of the article who themselves may not be the experts.

• As an entrepreneur if you are thinking what am I going to say to my customers online, then you are asking the wrong question. What the customers are saying about you is a more pertinent question.
• How to create enormous value for your business at virtually zero cost is a real possibility and ought to be the ultimate aim of any business aiming to use social media.

• T-Shirt Wars (Showed the video on Youtube) is a video made by a couple of budding entrepreneurs on a shoe-string budget and yet it has been able to generate enormous interest, having 4 million views to date.

• In contrast brands like Mobilink and Telenor spend crores to generate the same level of interest.

• The new mantra is to create an experience around your brand to engage the consumer instead of just communicating the message which is a fundamental flaw of marketing of today’s era that communication wins customers.

• The fundamental mistake of advertising is that repetition works. Of media is that content is king.

• Offering a platform to the consumer to interact and engage in the brand, generating his own content along the way is the new age strategy.

• Facebook is most effective in spreading information because of the news feed feature. Anything one person updates or writes about gets permeated to all the connected people. But the new itself ought to be enticing enough so that people pass that down to their connections.
• Coke Studio was a culturally relevant product which appealed to this connected world, becoming a mega-hit in the social media sphere and not because it was produced by Coke.

• In networked markets where there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, e-zines and what not on every topic under the sun, the commodity which will be the most scarce is Attention. You get the attention of the consumer and you’ve made it in the new world. Hence this is the age of Attention Economy.

• The best way to get the attention of your target market is to engage them in something that excites them. Threadless, a small start-up was able to do just that by offering customers the opportunity to design their own shirts which threadless would then manufacture.

• Daily Fashionist is doing well on Facebook having made 70,861 fans.

• However, as a small start-up don’t expect to reach this number anytime soon and that also without spending money. If you want to be popular on Facebook having a large number of fans, you need to advertise on facebook.

• And without a huge number of fans, you cannot expect to create a viral campaign. Just don’t expect to create a facebook page, put all your friends on it as fans and expect to go viral any news you put in your network no matter how good it is.

• Until and unless you have at least thousands of fans for your brand, you cannot create a viral campaign on Facebook.

• The good news is that advertising on Facebook in Pakistan is extremely cheap. For just a $100 or so, you can generate a lot of fans provided you advertise the right way. Instead of directing your target market to your website, you should direct them to your facebook profile and urge them to become a fan. That way you can stay connected to them and entice them with good offers as opposed to making them visit your website where they’ll just visit once and forget about it.

• Also while creating the ad campaign on facebook, choose the CPC (Cost per click) instead of CPM (Cost per impressions) because by choosing the former you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. In the latter option you would have to pay for every impression generated which is a waste of money because if you bid too low, facebook won’t show the stats of the impressions that your ad got.

• Also while choosing the target audience, don’t choose the sex. For instance if you choose female, chances are you’ll end up with a very low turnout. It’s best to choose all options under Pakistan. That way you’ll have the maximum possible reach.

• On an average expect to pay Rs. 3 to 10 per fan. But that can wary enormously depending upon a number of variable. For instance a brand about fashion and style is going to generate a lot of fan following because these are the topics dear to the Pakistani heart especially women.

• Facebook advertising in Europe and USA is very expensive, and if the same rates are applied here as well, then you would be better off using the traditional modes of marketing.

• Remember that fans on facebook do not necessarily translate into sales. You have to engage the fans in a meaningful way for you to cajole the fans into buying your brand.

• Twitter although an effective viral tool in the world is not so in Pakistan because not many people here use it. You need to have a critical mass on a particular platform for it to be effective. Until more Pakistanis embrace, it won’t.

• The same goes for Youtube. Do a search for Pakistani videos on Youtube and you would be hard pressed to find a single meaningful one. That’s because Pakistanis are not that active on Youtube and most of the videos they themselves refer are foreign videos.

This was just a brief account of what Shahjahan presented at that talk.

Now, the brand valuation of the brand that is Shahjahan Chaudhary. Shahjahan is one of those budding entrepreneurs that are specialist in a field that didn’t even exist a few years ago. But he’s sensible enough to know that promoting yourself the traditional way in the real world is still the best possible strategy. Giving presentations and interacting with people face to face still reigns supreme, and he’s capitalizing on that to build his personal brand.

However, he does need to spruce up his presentation style. Nothing wrong with his delivery or confidence, it’s just that his presentation sounded more like a lecture in the university rather than an allusive speech on social media. Captivating the audience for two hours straight is no child’s play, and to capture their attention even for brief moments of time within that time frame is no mean task. He was able to do it for small bouts interspersed in dull passages of time, which was evident from the audience’s body language.

To be fair he did manage to engage the audience in the dying moments of the workshop and ended on a high note. Plus he was candid enough to state the ground reality about facebook instead of raising it to the altar of invincible success. He was forthright about the pitfalls and limitations of facebook and other social media tools which most other ‘social mediapreneurs’ won’t tell you about. He even explained about how to advertise on facebook on your own instead of seeking his help.

What he needs to do is instead of just explaining things like ‘being honest is going to be effective in the social media sphere’ or giving hypothetical examples, give concrete examples. The shirt wars and threadless were good examples. He needs to inundate his presentation with such examples, giving an example for each point he’s making, preferably even giving examples from his own experience. People warm up to you when they hear about your own success or failure story.

Shahjahan got off to a good start showing the famous social media video, but then he launched in a sort of monotonous lecture devoid of real-world cases. Even the slides were bland at most.  The slideshow is available on slideshare. Judge it yourself.

The thing is, if you lose your audience in the first five minutes, you’ve lost them forever.

To Shahjahan’s credit he managed to recapture his audience to an extent. And every time he piqued the interest of his audience, it was either due to a real example or a pragmatic way to boost up their business, and that’s exactly what he should be doing for majority of his presentation.

The most mindboggling thing about this whole event is its lack of coverage, let alone mainstream media, even online. The most amazing thing is that there’s no post-event review even on the organizers’ websites, t2f 2.0, PASHA or on Jehan Ara’s blog even though she seemed to be filming the whole event. There’s no video on Youtube.  Then there were quite a few people from the media side including Dawn and Synergizer yet no one bothered to cover the event online.Maybe there is some sort of mention of it in the dark recesses of the net, which is as good as non-existent.

Then Shahjehan has a blog of his own by the name of Billion Dollar Workshop which he seems to have abandoned after just a single post more than two years ago. If he’s not going to be using it anymore, he ought to completely delete it instead of letting it stay in a state of limbo because it’s showing in the search results. You don’t want any material floating around that doesn’t augment the brand image that you are trying to project, not if you can help it.

Bottom-line: You need to capitalize on every available opportunity to promote your brand even if it’s just a presentation in the real world or a blog in the virtual world.

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To become a great brand, it will have to do a whole lot more than what it is doing right now. Let’s first see what it has been up to. If you want to get a feel of what sort of goodies they are offering, head over to Restaurants Uncut analysis.

There’s no doubt that Studio Café is far ahead of any café or restaurant in Pakistan in terms of its marketing endeavors. Except maybe OPTP (One Potato Two Potato) which has actually come up with an app for Facebook which enables it to conduct contests and offer prizes in terms of OPTP goodies.

Studio Café has a presence on Facebook, and a favorable one but it hasn’t gone to the extent that OPTP has done. But it sure is able to generate quite a following there with a whopping 1,227 fans and counting. And the reason it has been able to do that is because it keeps itself relevant and updated to the latest happening. Come Valentine’s Day, it tailored itself to that. Then when the U-19 Pakistan cricket team got to the finals of the World Cup, it offered a cup of free coffee per table if Pakistan won the Finals, and it communicated this with the help of a poster on Facebook. Someone asked whether it’s one cup per table or per person. So it would have been better had they offered one cup per person. That would have provided more motivation than just one cup. I mean it’s only coffee and not one of their main entrees. And anyway, Pakistan didn’t win and so the offer didn’t materialize.

By and large people on Facebook seems to be quite happy with what they are offering, so Studio Café has a real time feedback system and should be able to tell them if they do something horribly wrong. That does not mean they shouldn’t have a feedback card in place at the café which they don’t. People will usually not remember any small foibles by the management enough to comment on it later on facebook but they may well remember it in their subconscious, enough not to come back. That’s one area where they need improving.

Then although they have created a Twitter account and they have not written a single Tweet since the place opened shop on 6^th December. Can you believe that? Twitter has become one of the most effective viral tools on the net and Studio Café is just keeping it dormant. They need to focus on it more. But what can they do with it? Same thing they are doing with Facebook. If they have a special offering, they should tweet it. Although they seem to be having seven followers on Twitter, on closer inspection you will notice that at least five of them are just spam accounts. So it needs to ensure that it has proper followers on Twitter.

The wisest thing Studio Café has done is promote the brand on karachisnob.com. Karachi Snob is fast becoming the online hub of eating houses both for the restaurateurs and the consumers. Not only that but if you Google any restaurant, chances are its going to be mentioned on the top 10 results courtesy Karachi snob. And Karachisnob does do a great job of promoting a food joint, taking brilliant snapshots of that place to create a virtual tour which it showcases along with the general description as well as the menu of the restaurant.

They even have a presence on Youtube, but a five second clip containing a solitary image does not make for a good Youtube video by any stretch of the imagination. And this was uploaded by them as part of the publicity hype before the opening. They need to add more material there. But what?

It could make a video clip showcasing the portraits that they have taken, taking permission from the people whose snapshot is taken of course. Nine times out of ten people will be eager to be shown on Youtube looking their best. So that shouldn’t post much of a problem.

Studio Cafe

The biggest shortcoming of Studio Café to date is the absence of a website of their own. Sure they have a tremendous presence on karachisnob but karachisnob only offers this focus for a limited time and it costs money each time you want to be highlighted. Once that period expires, you are left with nothing, like it happened with The Original Crepe Factory. Sure there is facebook but facebook cannot compete with a proper website in terms of reach. Studio Café needs that badly before the arrangement expires on karachisnob.

Then if they can manage it, a blog to go with the website providing the details of the latest happenings as well as any new product they are introducing, what were the challenges they faced in coming up with that product and how great they think it’s going to turn out. They can even propose a free sampling of the new product, say between 7 to 8 pm only on a specific Monday. That will not only catch the fancy of the target market but ensure it doesn’t cost a fortune by severely limiting the free period range.

Which brings us to their menu. They have a pretty limited menu compared to the competitors, but it’s a good thing. Branding laws state that you can never be everything to everyone so why waste the energy? Instead of trying to offer everything under the sun, offer just a few items but focus on making them the best stuff the customer is going to taste that part of the town.

But this does not mean they should keep the menu static. Far from it. They need to keep coming with new and innovative dishes which they can promote on their blog, website, facebook and most importantly, within their café.. They could either put it on a blackboard or make a small plaque advertising the new hot stuff. It’s nothing new, most of the big brands like Copper Kettle and Arizona Grill indulge in it, and it’s worth emulating. You need to make the customer coming back for more by tempting him with new exciting recipes.

Studio Café is taking maximum advantage of the promotion on karachisnob by including the product of their studio section as well along with the food snaps. But the snaps are almost all wedding portraits, which gives the impression that they only offer wedding portraits. What they need to do is show off a couple of casual photographs as well to show that you don’t need to snap a photo only on a wedding occasion, but you can make every occasion a memorable one and savor it by getting your group photographed.

And they would do well to showcase their studio packages as well on karachinob just like what they have done with the menu. In fact they need to showcase these to the diners as well who come to the place, especially the first-timers. The management is assuming that whoever walks into the café is already aware of the three different offerings of the place. Never assume, especially in this business.

What they can do is create a master menu which offers the three services: dinner, sheesha and photograph, and then have individual menus for them. In fact, give all the three menus to the customers so that while they’re indulging in one service, they can be tempted to try the other two services as well.

We for instance didn’t know about the different offerings of the place and just stayed at the diner lounge because that was where we were seated by the waiter in the first place. During the course of our stay, no one from the management approached us whether we would like to get our group photographed. And that is a serious blunder. Don’t pester the customer but at least let him know what other things you’re offering and what are the price points, then leave him to decide on his own.

All in all, Studio Café has done a good job of promoting the place especially online. Just Google it and you would find the top 10 results not only mentioning the place but highly in favor of it. But, and there’s always a but, it needs to further jazz up its marketing especially in the first two years of its life. Remember the happening café Caffeine near MacDonald Sea View which used to offer pretty much the same things as Studio Café minus the photography part. Well, it’s no more.

Another rumor doing the rounds is that the whole Khayaban-e-Shahbaz strip on which Studio Café is situated is jinxed. Grapevine has it that quite a few restaurants opened on this strip, did roaring business for the first three months, and then all of a sudden ceased to exist. Studio Café will have to guard against this trend, even talk to the previous entrepreneurs who opened shop here to find out what precisely what went wrong with their business.

Getting off to a rollicking start is a good measure of whether the place will survive for long. But it’s not an absolute measure as Caffeine cafe found out the hard way.

If you want to get a feel of their sumptuous factor, head over to Restaurants Uncut.

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• The brand I’m representing belongs to the other end of the spectrum of Nokia and Djuice when it comes to media omnipresence.
• Most people are not comfortable with the sanitary napkin ads and would change the channel if another family member is sitting around.
• Females spend less than 35 seconds in the aisle for sanitary napkins as opposed to more than 1 minute in the hair product section. They don’t want to be seen in this section by anyone including any male member of their family with whom they have come to the shop and want to grab it and be done with it.


Bushra Iqbal - Brand Manager Always

• It’s infinitely more difficult if it’s a Kiryana store because the girl don’t want to ask for the pad from the shopkeeper especially if there are other people around. She would risk coming later again rather than buying it then and there.
• To work around the problem we have started a 360 campaign that is customized for the target market.
• Since TVC is not the most effective medium in bringing home the message we have targeted those media where the girl is going to be the most receptive.
• Web surfing is largely a private activity so we have created a website www.alwaysgirl.com.pk where she can stay informed and be influenced without any fear or hassle.
• Then we have gone to the schools, educating teachers to educate the girls about the benefits of using Always.
• We have branded the washrooms and the canteens of a lot of girl schools especially in the public sector.
• We have put billboards and branded bus stands en route to girls schools and colleges.
• Then we had the branded TV show hosted by Marina Khan in which a select group of girls were asked to compete in a number of activities that tested there mental, physical and emotional response under duress.
• There was a worldwide market research to determine what women want the most with reference to the subject ‘ See the brighter side of your period with Always’. Different countries yielded different answers. In India it was empowerment, and since both India and Pakistan are very much alike we have adopted the theme of empowerment as well.
• Always is branded as Whisper on the eastern side of India and here as well. In India a campaign was launched with the Whisper brand in association with MTV India.

Questions from the audience:

Bushra Iqbal - Brand Manager Always

Q. You can’t empower women just by asking them to be bold enough to go out there and buy Always on their own. I have fourteen year old daughter and I buy this stuff for her and not she herself. That doesn’t mean she’s weak in any way.

A. By empowering we are exhorting the girls to accept their feminine side and to turn one of their weakest moments of the month i.e the period into something not only bearable but a springboard to something greater in life.

Opinion. The women you have shown in your ad represent roughly 1% of the Indian women. Most of the women have empowerment as the last thing on their mind considering the conditions they live in. Secondly there was a study conducted in India which found a steep rise in the sale of Always in one particular region was due to the farmers using the pads on their necks to absorb sweat rather than female population using it.

Instead of focusing on women, you could come up with a campaign which targets men and their attitude.

Marketing Pakistan to Youth –Qashif Effendi – CEO 180 degrees

• I’ll be talking about the brain drain that is occurring at an increasingly alarming pace in Pakistan. If all the bright minds are pulled away from the country whose going to run the country?
• I recently attended a conference at the Governor’s house in which heads of all major educational institutions of Pakistan were present. If these are the people who are going to be running our institutions in the future as well, then God help our country.
• We prize on sending our people on scholarships. Recently the HEC proudly announced that they had sent 560 people on scholarships. Only 60 came back.
• A student of mine told me that he was going to Australia for higher studies. I told him I was disappointed to hear the news. He was amazed I was the only one who was unhappy about this news.
• I’m working on a project to reverse this process and as part of that project recently persuaded five Pakistani luminaries – all esteemed Ph.Ds to come back to Pakistan and serve their country for a while.
• The problem with persuading the youth to stay back is what we are giving them here to make them stay. We don’t have gas, sugar, electricity and yet we want them to stay back.
• There’s a complete breakdown of law and order, inflation is soaring high and jobs are scarce and yet we want the youth to stay.
• Then they don’t have any role models. When I was young, Imran Khan was our role model and to me he’s the only real role model we have had in the last 50 years and yet what we have done with him. (shows a snap of Imran khan dragged away by a youth gang).
• Is Junaid Jamshed a role model? I last saw him recording a song for ARY, singing ‘Gori Bahain’. Something about a religious man with a beard singing that song just doesn’t cut it.
• We need institutions and role models to create an environment where the youth will be motivated to do something for their country by staying in the country.
• Two solutions I offer you. One read the book ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins. This should be your number one priority. The book proves with the help of empirical evidence how some modest companies with humble leaders were able to deliver sustained performance consistently over a 15 year period, and not one of these companies was amongst the Fortune 500 companies or had a hotshot leader.
• The book is based on a research and one of the insights accidentally discovered during it was the Level 5 leadership. One of the qualities of Level 5 leader is that when faced with success, he attributes it to his team and when faced with failure, he owns the responsibility.
• This characteristic is unheard of either in the corporate world or public sector of Pakistan. Pakistanis are prone to do the opposite and hence the dilapidated state of our affairs.
• The second thing I want you to do is read the last sermon of the Holy Prophet (SAWS) again. Apart from just two lines exhorting the ummah to pray, give alms and perform hajj, the entire sermon is focused on human values.
• We are failing as a nation because the laws enshrined by God are being violated by us with impunity. You break the laws of God and there’s a price to pay which we are paying on a regular basis.

MARKETING TO ADULTS

Amjad Shahabuddin - Change Manager Shell

Building Brand Affinity – Amjad Shahabuddin, Change and Engage Manager, Shell

• It is imperative that you know your brand’s trade route to market. All the branding won’t help if you don’t know the touch points along the way.
• You should have a proper chain for delivering the brand experience.
• Focus on the emotional and rational triggers to change and retain, the biggest being the heart and mind.
• Involve the target market as much as possible.
• Equip your marketing around the following factors:
  • • Share success stories
    • Focus on right levers
    • Use the buzz
    • Build confidence
    • Living in the market
    • Scenarios building
• Training is crucial, and so is repetition.
• Use a game of ‘Chinese Whispers’ to deliver the brand experience through the trade.

Question from the audience: Why Schumacher was used to endorse Shell Helix? How many people know about him in Pakistan?

A: Shell Helix is a new synthetic oil selling at a premium price and targeted towards the premium segment. So the target market we are trying to reach has every chance of knowing about him.

Aly Mustansir – EVP and Head of Brand Management HBL

Aly Mustansir -Brand Management Head HBL

• What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear adult marketing?
• A guy was trying to sell tickets for a movie show but was getting nowhere. Suddenly he had an idea and wrote something on the wall. Immediately there was a rush and in no time he had sold all the tickets. He had only written ‘For Adults only’ on the wall.
• Marketers tend to treat adults as adults in their marketing communication focusing on the rationality of it all.
• In reality, adults are living in a dead serious world with overly serious issues and stuff and the only way they cope with it is through fantasies.
• A myth breaker – the average age of a Pakistani online gamer is 33 years.
• 70% of Generation X(27-44) and 44% of Baby Boomers own a PS3, Nintendo WII or Xbox.
• Reality Shows are the reverse of that. They are actually FRE (Formatted Reality Experience) geared towards facilitating fantasy role playing in adults.
• All the Reality Shows like ‘Big Brother’, ‘Survivor’ and all fall under this category.
• In short adults need fantasies to cope with  the real world.
• (Showed Lynxjet ad and then the documentary of its phenomenal marketing success which offended one of the females in the audience)

Q. Not offended, but how does what you are showing relevant to Pakistan? This is something tailored to what the Western male wants?

A. Males are basically the same irrespective of the country or nation. All males desire a hot sultry woman which they yearn to get without sweating it out, even more so in Pakistan where the male has to gulp 10 times before even thinking of approaching a girl. Even in a seminar such as this, there would be many males who would have eyed an attractive female in the audience and then for the rest of the day they would try to come up with ways of approaching her. They’ll try to muster courage to do it in the morning tea break, chicken out, then lunch break,chicken out, finally they’ll promise themselves to ask for her email at the end but by then she would be gone.

So men are universally the same. The Axe Effect ads by Unilever were based on this insight. So were the Impulse deodorant ads, which were the female equivalent of Axe, but more subtle. Having said all this, yes there are restrictions to what you are allowed to do in line with the cultural constraints. You have to take into account how the consumer is going to react to it. There was this coffee ad made in India which showed a couple fooling around and then having that brand of coffee afterwards. During a focus group post-ad, one woman was asked whether she’ll buy that coffee. She said no way, what would the shopkeeper think about me that why is she buying this brand of coffee? So the sexual connotations of the ad were proving to be barrier in the buying decision for the females.

• Ensure that you have a good looking person in your ad otherwise it’s better that you don’t make the ad. The entire ad, especially the model reflects upon the brand.
• Most brands suffer from the short life of the marketing director. The average period a marketing director spends in a company is 22 months. I have already spent 4 years at HBL after having spent 12 years at Unilever so I’m the exception to the rule.
• Getting useful insights out of focus groups is extremely difficult. We were once doing a focus group for Feast in which the participants were women. For some reason the question came up that what you do first thing in the morning. one of the women replied that the first thing she did was offer Fajr prayers. The next one said she prayed and then read the Holy Book before anything else. It became a chain reaction and I was certain the next one would say I go all the way to Saudi to perform Umrah and then come back to perform my other duties. Suddenly one of the women remarked after seeing the Feast ad we had shown to the group that the guy’s body was great. And that was the insight we were looking for.
• So what holds back brands? No real insight, lack of creative thinking, playing it safe.
• ‘Most clients …. think the rational appeals for their products are much more important than the consumers thinks they are.’  Hal Riney O&M
• Piyush Pandey, the advertising great of India is credited with breaking away from the norms and bringing excitement and fantasy to the adult marketing genre, carving out such hit ads as the Cadbury one. He’s not much liked by the Hindustan Levers brand managers for he has rebuked them for playing it safe.

4E’s – Taher Khan- Chairman Interflow Communications

Taher Khan-Chairman Interflow

• I’ve got the graveyard shift and to maintain the excitement generated by Aly’s juicy presentation, let me narrate first a couple of Meera bloopers.
• Meera once said appeared on an TV show and when the host asked her how she was doing, she replied she had just arrived from America and was hijacked (instead of jetlagged).
• Then once Meera smsed me telling me that when I called she couldn’t ‘hear my vice’. Then another time she smsed me informing me that she had ‘sinned on my papers’. It’s a good thing that my wife is very understanding and knew the smses were from Meera otherwise she would have thought what a pervert I was.
• In today’s world consumers are ahead of marketers, therefore the traditional four Ps have become obsolete.
• Instead of 4 Ps, we now have the 4 Es: Experience,Everyplace, Exchange and Evangelism.
• You have to create a customer journey like Dove has done with the Beauty Shopping  Journey and Hershey has done with their store at Times Square.
• Hershey was looking for a giant billboard on Times Square when they got the idea to instead open a branded store in its place.
• The place basically sells nostalgia to adults and has the highest sales per square foot in the entire world.
• Then there’s the story of red paper clip, how a Canadian blogger and economist Kyle Macdonald started off with a mission to trade a paper clip for a house. He posted his progress on his blog, trading the paper clip for a fish clip then that clip for something bigger and so on. His blog following increased manifold as he traded bigger objects so much so that he became a celebrity, getting invited to talks shows and meeting Hollywood stars until finally he got the house.
• Lego went a step further in consumer interaction when it invited people to design for the brand. This strategy resulted in a staggering 200% increase in sales.

All in all, GenMark 2010 was a great success considering how seminars are  managed in this part of the world. And the credit goes both to the organizer, the sponsors and the presenters. One of the biggest fallacies of any such seminar in Pakistan is the deviance from the topic at hand. Many times it has happened that the presenter had no idea what was the essence of the event and he would go on talking about something entirely different. Not in this event. Most of the presentations were crisp and relevant to the theme.

The sponsors did their part with FM91 and TVone providing attractive branded pens and notepads for the participants to use. FM91 also provided gift packs which were given at the end of the seminar. However they were limited in quantity and not all the participants got them.

One opportunity Total communications did miss was before the start of the event. When the delegates were just sitting waiting for the event to get underway, FM91 theme was being played over and over again, which became monotonous, not to mention frustrating after a while. What they could have done is make a promo of the company highlighting all the events that they have organized or helped organize and then intersperse the theme of FM91 or whatever brand is sponsoring the event within that. That would have been far more effective and entertaining as well for the delegates.

Pakistan’s branding fraternity needs a lot more of such events to grow and blossom like their Indian counterparts have done.

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1. GENMARK 2010 – The Art of Marketing to Generations-1 GenMark 2010 was a marketing seminar organized by Total Communications,...

GenMark 2010

GenMark 2010

Marketing to Kids

Numan Nabi Ahmed – CEO The Brand Partnership and Cartoon Network

• I have been in this industry for 15-20 years.
• We are the ones who persuaded cartoon network to come to Pakistan.
• We organized T20 cricket matches in Canada and this year again in September we intend to repeat that.
• Kid marketing in Pakistan is mostly superficial, the marketers confining themselves to just pester power.
• On the international stage, there has been tremendous research in this arena. Those researchers are focusing on mother-child relationship, how the mother seeks the opinion of her offspring for her choice of perfume to how she looks.
• Pakistani marketers have gone nowhere. They don’t have the guts to promote durables on cartoon network when it has been proven that kids have a large say in major buying decisions.
• Indian research has shown that kids influence even car-buying decision from the color right down to the make of the car.
• My own personal experience has shown this to be true. When I was intending to buy a Prado, my son persuaded me not to buy it because it gave the impression that you were a Wadera. I brought a Surf instead. My line of thinking as in any father’s line of thinking is, if my kid is not going to enjoy sitting in this car with me, what’s the use of buying it.

• Then many years ago when I was going to buy a Honda Civic, my younger daughter persuaded me instead to buy an old Accord. In those days the Civic didn’t come with the sunroof whereas the Accord version had it.
• Even travel decisions are influenced heavily by kids. You may want to go to Thailand but your kids want to go to Malaysia. Again you reason that you are taking the vacation for them. If they are not going to enjoy it then what’s the use.
• A new category of kids has been identified which seems to have a major say in buying decisions –Tweens – kids aged 3 to 12.
• This was known by the Pakistani marketers back in the 60s and 70s as well which resulted in classic ads such as State Life, Binaca and Naurus all which employed a kid as the focal point of the ad. Now insurance is something which is not understood even by adults, so the rational of using a kid to star in a State Life is not apparent because kids are not the target market for it. Yet their influence reaches even a serious issue as life insurance.
• Kid in the age group of 7-9 years observe and absorb the most from their surroundings and they have strongest aspirations of all kids. This is the time they seek and identify with a role model. It can be anyone, from a blood relative to a distant cousin to something shown on TV.
• Brand Activation is bullshit in Pakistan. They don’t know the difference between activation and on-ground activities.
• I have identified four pyramids which encapsulate the domain of kids marketing.
• The real power of the kids’ influence has been realized by brands like Safeguard and Lifebuoy so much so that they have changed their brand positioning by 180% to take this factor into account.
• Commander Safeguard was not so successful in the Philippines but it has met with resounding success in the Pakistani region. This forced Lifebuoy to change its 30 year old positioning.
• According to New Generation Research, a comprehensive research on the tweens of this region, when kids were asked to name any brand they remembered, Safeguard got the highest spontaneous recall at 19% even though it’s not brand that they buy themselves.
• There are 48 million tweens out of a population of 170 million in Pakistan. Out of these 28 million reside in the urban centres.
• About 19 billion rupees are spent by kids.
• There’s a perception amongst Pakistani marketers that the average pocket money of kids is just Rs.5 and thus they are confined to that amount. What they don’t take into account is the fact that when the father goes out in the evening to buy groceries, the kids usually accompany him on this trip and get him to buy a number of goodies for them far exceeding the Rs.5 amount.
• Marketers need to come up with characters that kids can look up to and then build their brand strategy around that.

Audience Questions:

Q-  What do you have to say about the ethical implications of using kids as a marketing material?

There’s nothing wrong with it. Unless I’m marketing an illegal or harmful product, it’s perfectly alright. Even in the tea ad (shown earlier), the kids are not shown drinking tea like an adult, they are just used as a theme. What’s wrong with that? They are, after all, used by marketers as objects in marketing products for the kids.

Q. I agree with him that marketers have a responsibility towards what they market. Blue Band was found to have plastic content, how can you market such products?

Ans. So sue them. It’s not the responsibility of a marketer to check for this. By the time the product reaches the advertiser, it is approved by all the authorities with respect to its quality. If it does not meet standard requirements, then prove it instead of rumor mongering.

Dos and Don’ts – Miftah Ismail – CEO Ismail Industries

• I agree with Numan that a manufacturer has everything to lose if one of its brands is sub-standard. Lays is a major competitor of ours and yet I myself assert that it is a Halal product.
• There are only two types of activities possible in school – education and wasting time.
• You should be clear what sort of value proposition you are offering to the target market.
• Kids love colors and change. When they go to buy a candy, they desire it to be wrapped in different color packaging.
• Rio made brilliant use of this insight when they changed the vanilla flavor in their sandwich biscuit category to two flavors – vanilla and strawberry.
• Despite the fact that there was no real innovation in it, kids loved it and the sales of this brand shot up.
• Kids are completely open-minded and they will try a new thing everytime. But they have their own value system and they have the intelligence to see through your deception if you try it.
• On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to get adults to try anything new. Almost 20 years ago, I tried selling a new shampoo and there were no takers. There was this 40 year old woman who didn’t want to try the shampoo and yet she gave a new brand of biscuits to her kids to try.
• In 1992 went to Germany to attend a confectionary exhibition. At that time our bubble gum was selling for 50 paisa like all the other brands. Their I saw a tattoo feature that would have added 10 paisa to our unit cost. I rejected that proposal and went to USA but my brother got this technology implemented and sold the bubble gum for Rs.1.
• It became one of the biggest selling bubble gums despite the doubling of the price. The moral of the story is that kids will go for new features even if the cost is high.
• Have tasted failure as well. There was this lollipop Funny Bunny which we used to sell for Rs.2. Out of stupid arrogance on my part resulting from the fact that we had no competitor, we jacked up the price to Rs.3.
• Although we had conducted research before the price, asking kids if they would have the lollipop even if the price was increased to Rs.3 to which there was a consensus of yes, the strategy failed badly. Out of the blue JoJo industry in Faisalabad and one other in Karachi started making and selling lollipops at Rs.2 and our sales went from 18,000 units to 3,000 units.
• Even if these competitors hadn’t cropped up, kids could have easily switched to some other category. It’s not a cancer drug that you absolutely need to have it.
• This also shows that you got to be careful when conducting market research where there are children involved. They don’t lie but they don’t necessarily tell you what they want or will do. You may ask them if they will buy an expensive candy and though they may tell you they will, they will never act on it.
• Fanty candy was one of our biggest success stories. Fanty used to be priced at 50 paisa. We increased the size of the candy and priced it at Rs.1 and since then there has been no looking back.
• We created a simple ad for it with a simple jingle that kept repeating. Never use minglish words in the jingle because they tend to confuse the audience. You can use them in the ad however.
• Check whether the name of the brand is something which can be easily pronounced by everyone, including the sales team. We named one of our brands Giant. Giant is a simple English word and yet most of our sales people pronounced it as ‘Gheeant’. So ensure that everyone is at ease with the name of the brand.
• Try to invest as much as possible in the ad creation. The better looking the ad, the more sales it will generate.
• Hilal doesn’t spend much on the creation of TVC but they spend a lot on the media placement. Their distribution is not that strong so they usually rely on their branding efforts to make inroads into the market.
• After Cartoon Network, Star Plus is a big market for advertising candies and goodies for kids because most nights of the week, the children have to watch this channel because their parents are hooked on to it for the Saas Bahu dramas.
• Billboards is a medium I’ve always opposed in my own company because I don’t know how to measure its effectiveness.
• Adultism is the new jargon which refers to discrimination against the kids in the sense that they are looked down upon and not given respect as an individual. As a marketer, it is imperative to never indulge in it otherwise the brand suffers.
• In fact never show a kid losing out on something, always show them as winners.
• Kids in general love music, excitement, silly humor in ads. Boys in general love slapstick and wicked humor. They born built in with the stupidity gene so that while an adult may sympathize with a person slipping on a banana peel, a male kid would laugh at it.
• Bisconni grows by 40-50% per year in terms of units sold.

Marketing to Youth

Zeeshan Misbah

Changing Youth – Zeeshan Misbah – Brand Manager DJuice –Telenor

• Today’s youth can be termed as the digital native youth.
• He may have 53 friends in the real world but that translates into millions of them online. That’s how connected he is to the rest of the world.
• There has been a paradigm shift in the consumer behavior of the youth.
• In my days I used to remember going to concerts and all. Today’s youth want their own  jamming sessions.
• Coke Studio is a great example of how a brand can reach glory through the power of the social media.
• Harley Davidson is a classic example of a brand staying relevant to the youth culture in spite of the fact that the average age of a Harley Davidson owner is 47 years.
• What today’s youth likes and wants doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of the population will want or like. For instance the sms thumb ad we ran was disliked by majority of the people but none of these belonged to the active youth segment.
• In reality the campaign was phenomenally successful. So are you aware of what your target market really wants?
• (Showed the interview clips of a number of teenagers revealing their aspirations and desires. Then showed the text excerpts of some youth interviews both from Pakistan and the US)

Question from audience: What was the insight behind the thumb ad?

Ans: It was based on an insight gleaned from an international study that a thumb was sitting in a bar and blabbering.

Q: Which SEC are you targeting within the youth?

A: We don’t define the segments in terms of SEC but rather in terms of lifestyles and behaviors.

Challenges & Opportunities- Afzal Shahabuddin – Marketing Head- Nokia Pakistan

Afzal Shahabuddin

• There are 75 million consumers in Pakistan in the age bracket 16-30 which is a bigger market than UK, Italy and Thailand.
• In 2007 Nokia was a market leader but it was not the leader in youth segment who considered it as a reliable brand but not cool.
• Nokia then repositioned itself focusing on music as the key to the hearts of the Pakistani youth.
• Nokia identified and used new touchpoints to leverage with the youth.
• Nokia took to the top 10 cities of Pakistan, conducting concerts and carrying out extensive BTL activities there.

Questions from the audience:

Q. What are the similarities and dissimilarities between urban and rural youth?

A. The similarities are that they love to listen to music and watch cricket. By way of dissimilarities, one of the insights we got from the rural lot was that they liked to listen to cricket commentary and music as a group, therefore in line with this insight we launched a new model which didn’t require the use of headphones.

Q. What’s the next step?

A. Touchphones are the next step. Nokia is increasingly focusing on apps on its Ovi store to make owning a Nokia brand a fruitful experience beyond just the features available on the device. Pakistan lack accurate and detailed maps of its cities because of which the Map app cannot be leveraged. But once maps are developed, navigation through mobiles would become a whole new ball game.

Q. There are many dual sim mobiles available on the market and apart from Samsung most are unbranded. Why hasn’t Nokia tapped into that market as yet?

A. Yes it is an opportunity and one which Nokia recognizes. However it’s not that big an opportunity as you are projecting. But Nokia is working on this and hopefully will come up with something to cater to this segment.

To be Continued in Next Part……

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