Transform Marketing Conference 2012 -Part 2

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

Brand Engagement: Achieving Higher levels of performance and results.

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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzW3rAxN0bY

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xopZOaBci50

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

 

Q&A SESSION

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

The Power of ‘No’

Shahzad Nawaz  – CEO Shahzad Nawaz Consulting

 

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

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

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

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

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

Neil Christy:

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

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

 

Neil Christy:

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

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

 

Brand Building in Cultural Tension

 

 

Taher A. Khan – Interflow Communications

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