• 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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