Handle with Care When it comes to Marketing

Marketing is like fire when smartly handled, it can destroy your enemies, but when not it can burn you. – Anonymous

When the British ruled India, many Indians accepted to work under their policy, and they did not try to rebel against the British for their presence in Indian lands; They recognized the benefits of British rule. What was the factor that made Indians accept the British government? The perception about British-policies (about trading, pay-scale and positioning in the military) had been done through various marketing channels in such a way that it brainwashed people of the nation and many were ready to accept the British. So the Marketing is like fire when smartly handled, it can destroy your enemies, but when not it can burn you.

Marketing is to design and develop a pathway from product or service to the customer through a promotional strategy. Marketing depends on a variety of parameters which can be classified broadly boiling down to vital three. These are ‘What type of customer are marketing team is focusing on (based on gender, age, location, customer-class) (W1)’, ‘What are Product Specification or Applications you need to bring in front of customer (W2)’, ‘What is your Product Promotion flow path (W3)’, ‘How much time it takes to convey product information to customer (H1)’. These criteria are what I call ‘3W1H’ forms. These basics need to be taken care while developing a marketing strategy for the upcoming product. However, are they sufficient? No. There is one more parameter called the Feedback mechanism (FM). Generally, machines use the feedback mechanism to check output generated is as per input is given or not and if it is not, the input is corrected to get the required output. When it comes to human beings, he/she is surrounded by multiple products on a daily basis through social media, TV advertising and so forth. Slight uncertainties on either side in observation can make a positive or negative impact about the product on the consumer’s mind. In the feedback mechanism, the marketing team needs to answer only one question “What kind of product image built in the customer mind through promotional activities?” If product image not built as per expectation, then management has to review and work on 3W1H as per discussed earlier. So let’s elaborate how 3W1H approach works along with feedback mechanism.

After deciding the customer range, you can work on other activities. Since the customer is conscious about purchasing the product and when the product promoted, the first thing the customer will check is its usefulness and if his/her answer is ‘Yes,’ then the customer will start comparing with similar alternative products in the market. Therefore one should present the product along with some unique thought and express the product in such a way that its image imprinted into the consumer mind. For example, the polio campaign in India. The government had taken the initiative to make India polio-free by spreading awareness through all types of social communication mediums, in which Television played a vital role. Legendary cinema actor ‘Amitabh Bachchan’ was selected as an ambassador for this campaign. Initially, the advertisement published in which Amitabh pleaded people for vaccinating the children within a fixed schedule. The advertisement circulated throughout the nation, and no stone was kept unturned by the government to make this campaign successful. However, much to the surprise, advertising failed miserably to attract a deprived community in polio booth. This promotion failure was because of non-consideration of the customer (W1) and how advertise impacted its application on the customer (W2)? So after analyzing failure,experts recommended changes in their marketing campaign like, to focus on major customer (Here mainly village woman who generally spend their time in home by watching TV), type of impact on people (People who watched TV during that era, had an image of Amitabh as ‘Angry young man’). So the campaign improved their advertising by bringing out the same angry Amitabh instead of his soft-image which used in the earlier campaign. So in a very next polio campaign number of people in polio booth suddenly increased and when feedback taken from people about such a sudden change, they replied that we don’t want to watch ‘Amitabh sir’ getting angry because of us. ⁽¹⁾

In W3, we have to focus on what kind of path we use to attract the customer. Currently, there are a lot of platforms available by which you can market your product. The main agenda you should keep in mind is that how effectively you can engage customer through marketing, at very first, if you make an impact on customer then only he can show interest in your product. For example, changes in launching trailer of the upcoming films. Till 20^th century Television and newspaper were crucial factors, but now along with television, marketing team take help of internet resources like Youtube, Facebook, introducing an article on the pre-trailer phenomenon. Increasing the range of promotional devices, broadcast formats and publishing platforms provide a broad range to promote the film and choosing right platform may lead to a massive hit in the box-office.

For the last factor (H1) time, the obvious question that comes to mind is that ‘Is time for advertising matters?’, While watching the TV when an advertisement appears, many times we change the channel instead of watching the whole advertisement or ignore it altogether. You do have an option of ‘Skip ad’ when you watch anything online, so one must decide how much time is required to deliver product information during its promotion? Providing product information in less time, creating the possibility that the customer will be willing to watch it and may result in attracting the customer. However, as one must have guessed it, this will not work at all the time. Other factors like the cost of the product, application range, type of customer can also affect the H1. For example, the customer would be more conscious while watching higher priced product broadcast compare to the lower priced one. So it would take more time for the marketing team to convince the customer to buy the costly good than the lower priced one.

After implementing marketing strategy as per 3W1H, we need to work on a feedback mechanism in which organization has to collect information about product image generated in customer’s mind through dealers and using feedback-form. Not using the feedback mechanism may lead to failure in achieving ‘product sales target’ and can make the situation even worse. Take the example of ‘THE TATA Nano-MAKING OF WORLD’S CHEAPEST CAR’ which was mind-blowing one-of-a-kind project in Indian automobile industry. From the first phase of a marketing campaign, TATA Nano was on so much continuous limelight that this project was pleased by former American president Barack Obama. ⁽²⁾ The curiosity about the product was so high that the sale of then-leading car model Maruti-800 was dropped by 20% immediately after unveiling the Nano. ⁽³⁾ However, while marketing the product, an organization built “Affordable, Garibo Ki Car” image in customer’s mind, which made customer conscious about what will be their status-quo in society after buying Nano? Thus, they started giving preference to two-wheeler’s over Nano, During the same time; some instances of Nanos catching fire came into focus which worsened the situation. This case even exacerbates when the team did not work on the feedback mechanism and hence, was not able to change customer perception about Nano. Later, when Nano fire problem was technically sorted out but even then the marketing team did not make any impactful effort to market the improved safety of the car. Therefore, customer’s negative perception remained stuck and the organization did not even come close to achieving selling figures of Nano. If the organization had used feedback mechanism, it would have been an entirely different story.

So 3W1H can be an essential factor while developing a marketing strategy for the product along with a reversible FM method. This method can help us to monitor Product marketing throughout the phases and can help the marketing team to change strategy whenever it goes into the wrong path.

 

 

 

 

References-

(1) https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/when-amitabhs-voice-did-the-trick-to-make-india-polio-free/article6257123.ece

(2) https://www.businesstoday.in/obamas-india-visit/nano-catches-worlds-most-powerful-mans-eyes/story/10144.html

(3) https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/nanomania-overwhelms-indian-car-market

 

What Acts of upholding freedom can counter the shrinking space for dissent & tolerance in society?

अब वही हर्फ़-ए-जुनूँ सब की ज़बाँ ठहरी है

जो भी चल निकली है वो बात कहाँ ठहरी है

This is Faiz Ahmad Faiz giving us the exact idea of how freedom works. I’ll come to this later.

What Acts of upholding freedom can counter the shrinking space for dissent & tolerance in society?

The question that we wish to find an answer to would not have been significant if ours were an ideal country. The answer is obvious: any act that is committed with honesty and is in the ambit of basic humanity is an exercise of freedom and hence an act of upholding freedom.

Then why waste our time thinking about this fundamental question when we can simply share memes on Facebook, feel bad about Syrians, curse Pakistanis, feel proud about UNESCO declaring India’s national anthem as the best national anthem, binge-watch episodes of friends on weekends and go back to sleep?

Well, we are bothered because ours is not an ideal country. Of all the countries in the world, India can never become an ideal country because of its very nature. Because of a plethora of definitions of an ideal country available here.

I am not denigrating India. I would never do that. Not because I am a patriotic bharatvaasi but because I neither have resources nor patience to defend myself against a sedition charge in court.

So, let us say ‘hypothetically’ that ours is not an ideal country and try to deconstruct the question.

First, what do we mean by act of upholding freedom? Like darkness can only be defined by the absence of light, freedom can only be defined by the degree of un-freedoms (a term used by Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom). Only its absence can be felt, not its presence because the realization that you’re free begets the possibilities of certain un-freedoms you might be subjected to.

For example, a student who has left his hometown for the first time realizes that he can do whatever he wants without the fear of his parents. This is his first degree of freedom. But this realization comes with the baggage of morals that chain him from doing something that is considered ‘bad’ in the society.

So, is it even possible to be absolutely free? Not at all. We would not have been social animals if we were absolutely free.

We carry with us the responsibilities of our society that behoves us to follow a certain set of rules. For eg: don’t break the traffic signal, don’t litter, don’t try to run your car over people sleeping on footpath etc. If we take humanitarian obligations out of the equation, all these rules are nothing but chains of ‘unfreedom’.

So, if it is not possible to be absolutely free, why do we bother even talking about freedom? Because we choose not to break any traffic rules, we choose not to litter and most of us choose not to run our cars over people sleeping on footpaths.

You might say that this is because law prohibits these actions but aren’t we the ones who choose to follow the law of this country? What if we don’t follow the law of this country? Aren’t we the ones who directly/indirectly elected our leaders to frame the law for us? Aren’t we the ones who chose to follow the constitution of this country? The word choose is important here because it adds one extra degree of freedom to our thousands of unfreedoms. That extra degree of freedom is what is worth defending and fighting for.

Now let’s come to the second question. Is the space for dissent and tolerance in our society shrinking?

Unfortunately, yes. If not directly then indirectly. Fali Nariman in his speech once said that it is not the freedom of speech that matters, it is the freedom after speech that we should be concerned about. We have Gurmehar Kaur amongst us and we all know what happened when she tried to express her opinion on social media and she was talking about peace for God’s sake.

A simple act of expressing your honest opinion is seen as an act of hostile political motives. Every comment you make will be seen in terms of black and white. But the space for debate and discussion lies in the grey area and we all, who want to uphold freedom, should understand it and avoid falling for any trap of extreme opinions.

To avoid that trap, I have a set of commandments for you. I know this is ironical. On one hand, I am asking you to avoid extremism and on the other hand I am trying to profess in the worst possible manner i.e. commandments but bear with me.

First and the most important one is: Make good lawyer friends. Section 124A of the penal code is a reality in 21^st century India.

Second, question everything. Everything! Even the act of questioning everything.

But question to seek answers. This should be clear. It is very easy to fall for ‘whataboutism’. What about 1984, what about 2002, what about this, what about that etc. This line of questioning is dangerous as it sucks the humanity out of the argument. And who wants to be a twitter troll anyway!

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not asking you to be cynical. Seeking answers and questioning for the sake of questioning are two completely different things and we should understand this difference.

Third, if you disagree with someone, make sure that he/she knows that you disagree with him/her.

 Start with your family. A society can only be called free if its people are capable of handling disagreements and this cannot be achieved in a single day. It will take time. It’ll take practice. It’s disheartening for people to know that their arguments are worthless and this is what drives their violent instincts in most of the cases. This is true only for people having a limited capacity to think. But this should not hold you back.

Tell them that their argument is worth a heap of dump but also don’t forget to tell them the importance of dump. Dump exists because we exist.

But make sure that you do not commit any violence in this process. There’s no need to slap your friend just because he happens to be a BJP supporter. These days it’s not wise to slap a BJP supporter anyway!

This brings me to my next commandment: Listen.

Keep your eyes and ears open. Listen to the arguments of even those who are against freedom of expression and you’ll be surprised to know that there are many. If you’re professing freedom, by no means should you not allow the opposite party to express their opinion.

Counter them with fierce arguments but never ask them to shut up. You have no right to.

Fourth, and the most difficult commandment to follow: try not to be afraid of anything

I’ll go back to Faiz Ahmad Faiz now:

अब वही हर्फ़-ए-जुनूँ सब की ज़बाँ ठहरी है

जो भी चल निकली है वो बात कहाँ ठहरी है

It is impossible to supress anyone’s desire to express himself/ herself. The only instrument that can make this possible is fear. Fear is something that is not in our control and yet drives us to do most of the things we do. We all are afraid of something. Ghosts, God, cockroaches etc.

We should try not to be afraid of at least expressing our opinions. Even if you make the perpetrators of violence realise that you’re not afraid of speaking up, you take away the only instrument they have to suppress your freedom.

This is where the role of government comes into play. Do you feel secure enough to express your opinions? If you do, speak up. If you don’t, you have all the more reason to speak up.

Jim Morrison once famously said:

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”

I know this is easier said than done. Not everyone wants to be a freedom activist. People want to lead their normal life. They want to go to work, come back and sleep to wake up again to go to work without exploring the meaning of freedom. How to make them explore the meaning of freedom?

This brings me to my final commandment: passionately follow any form of art that is accessible to you.

Be it cinema, poetry, literature, music, painting…anything.

This will allow you to explore what is beyond normal. Something that is not a part of your day to day life. It is only when you are exposed to new ideas that you get to know what freedom is by peeling off the quotidian unfreedoms you never realised you were subjected to.

Artists show you the limits of freedom by exercising it fiercely. When we see the likes of Salman Rushdie, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Toni Morrison, Bob Marley, Tasleema Nasreen and numerous others, we realise that life can be something beyond ordinary and it is possible that their examples make you explore your extent of freedom.

Virginia wolf once said:

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

and your mind can only be free when you eliminate fear from it and that I believe is the only way in which you can counter the shrinking space for dissent and tolerance in our society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Movie Review – Forrest Gump: by Srinavya

This movie is based on the book by the same name written by Winston Groom. The movie is about a man named Forrest Gump and spans across several decades of his life who witnesses many historical events in the 20^th century of United States like pop-culture, civil rights movement, Vietnam War, Watergate scandal and many more. The leading man character was played by “Tom Hanks”, whose characteristics were of a slow-witted but kind-hearted and sympathetic man with an IQ of 75. The movie is a mixture of both comedy and drama which jells well so perfectly that neither of those feels as extremities, at the same time balances each other. The lead actor who is known for getting into the skin of the roles that he plays doesn’t disappoint this time either. He not just adapts the character but also gives a new dimension and meaning to the character which makes us look at life in a different way. His character has a blissful ignorance and warmly embraced nature which was never shown before. Tom Hanks plays the character so well that even after decades the future generation will remember fondly. The background score and writing go together so perfectly that neither makes it feel out of place. The supporting characters Jenny Curran, Lieutenant Dan Taylor Bubba Blue and Mrs Gump played by Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Mykelti Williamson and sally field respectively has given a breath-taking performance. The screenplay was written so well that the movie flows more fluid like than water.

There are some memorable moments in the film like when Jenny comes to the rescue of Forrest and asks him to run when a man calls Forrest stupid and his mother tells him that ‘stupid is as stupid does’ and the heartwarming moments between Forrest and his lieutenant.

It is a very sweet and heart-warming film after watching which will leave a smile on your face and heart filled with emotions. All in all, the movie is a sweet box of chocolates.

Manali – Leh mountain bicycling : by Rohit

Manali to Leh cycling expedition is a scenic ride traversing through some of the highest passes in the world making it one of the most challenging rides to beat. Cutting across beautiful trails with the Himalayas serving as the perfect backdrop, one can cross Tanglang La, the world’s second highest Motorable pass standing at 5280 m before entering Manali. The route from Manali to Leh is straightforward with the roads either being completely dirt or tarmac.

In the Manali, Leh cycling tour explore rougher dirt tracks while making some tough climbs along with gut-wrenching descents. Every day the distance covered ranges from 40 to 80 km traversing altitudes over 4000 m. Not only will this invigorating route comprise cycling from Leh in the Indus Valley to the alpine Kullu Valley covering a total of 475 km, but it also cuts across three mountain ranges of Zanskar, main Himalayas and Pir Panjal Range. Altogether one exceeds 29000 feet in altitude crossing passes like Rohtang La, Tanglang La and Baralacha La (4890m).

1) A durable mountain bike

2) Full length hand gloves

3) Durable sport shoes

4) Wardrobe essentials: Fleece and Woolen clothes, Water and Windproof jacket, Water and Windproof trousers, Warm jacket, Warm thermals, Warm Gloves or Mittens and Woolen socks, Raincoat or Poncho

5) Small light weight bottle

6) Bicycle Helmet

7) Painkillers, dim-ox, Anti-inflammatory pills, Antiseptic (Iodine or Beta-dine drops), Bandages, plasters, medical tape, a course of antibiotics (check with doctor for advice) and Personal Medical Kit

8) Bicycle spares such as tubes

9) Glucose and electrolytes

10) Mineral water, chocolates, dry fruits

Other Inclusions:

1) Support vehicle

2) A well-marked route

3) Mechanic support

TACKLING THE MALLYAS OF THE FUTURE : by Rhythm Aggarwal

The government is pondering to make amendments to the Passport Act to prevent economic offenders who pose a serious Financial Risk to the country from fleeing. A committee headed by Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar was formed recently to tighten laws to prevent loan defaulters from fleeing the country. The committee panel also comprised members from Ministry of Home Affairs and External Affairs, Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, Intelligence Bureau and Reserve Bank of India.

The shift is of great importance as India is trying to bring back loan defaulters like Vijay Mallya, Mehul Choksi, Nirav Modi who fled the country before the law enforcement agencies could act against them.

The recent amendments would ensure that whenever there is a financial risk to the banking sector, defaulters get asked to participate in the resolution of the loan. The amendments would prevent an offender from leaving the country by issuing a look-out notice. Passport details of those people who have borrowed over Rs. 50 crore would be mandatory from now on-wards.