• 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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