GoogleLense

The squabble at Davos, Switzerland when marketers in the US get antsy was indeed a display of egos, acquired by each in their own rights to fame. Egos aside, is there more to it than what meets the eye?

I chanced to see and hear the adland's senior honchos Maurice Levy and Sir Martin Sorrell, at Medill. Well, fortunately not together on the same platform. I fondly remember how creatively Maurice Levy took us through his concept up of holism in integrated marketing. And the comment Dr.Frank Mulhern made on Sorrell soon after his amazing speech, “Here is a walking Economist (the magazine)”, extolling on how he engineered WPP to the challenger spot it’s in.

Be terse truisms like ‘frienemy’ or ‘froe’ as they may. Simply put, it is how we envisage things the way they occur to us. And how our views and prognoses conflict with time - and place. We do that all the time in our daily lives. Just that it’s getting reinvented in the Google paradigm. I call that GoogleLense.

In a customary evening chat with my son when he was five, I had a subtle glimpse of the shape of things to come. Back from his day at school in kindergarten, he told us about the cool firefighters who came in to share and tell what they do. There on we had this typical discussion, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We meandered through the few options in his little mind until he swiftly quipped, “I want to be all that. Each day I will become someone different”.

Perhaps the marketing world may be morphing into being that way. It is a function of functions. In many a case, perhaps less admittedly, it is the business of business. The perspectives we bring to the table are like search results on Google. What it mirrors is not necessarily what we are, or what we were, but what we choose to be. They are dynamic and in perennial metamorphosis.

Down memory lane

I have lived many lives
Some of them my own ......

In school, I played ping-pong. Not the ding-dong battles of ping-pong like what I play now. It was a lot more serious affair with the yearning to play national level. At my college interview, my Principal told me, “You are into sports. You should not take science. Let me give you a day more to think about it. You have the scores and are eligible, but I don’t think it makes good sense for a sportsman to take science. Rest assured your seat is not going anywhere. Just sleep over it. Let us hope wisdom dawns on you. See you tomorrow”.
Honestly, I didn’t spend much time thinking of anything other than science. I went back and insisted on science. The Principal wasn’t too happy and kept murmuring, “You don’t get it boy. You don’t get it”.

Out of business school, I accepted an offer from what is now O&M, a much coveted job in my mind. I switched after a very brief stint in IT to work in Bombay (now Mumbai), the mecca of Indian advertising. I called my Dad, a lawyer, to announce hopefully a triumph in his trials and tribulations of bringing up three sons. I put all that ebullience in me to incite him, coax and cajole him. C’mon Papa, “Aren’t you happy?” I asked. After a brief silence he mutters, “Yes, but did you have to study all that much to get into advertising”?
He didn’t get it! Or so I thought.

Scene: MDP classroom in Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad – the 1990s. Where I had some close encounters with Prof. T. Madhavan, the quintessential statistics professor on marketing metrics. He went on for almost an hour showing me how I could pursue the thought and link the intangible to tangible assets. The session continued at the Cafeteria and if I recall it right, it was Prof. V. Raghunathan who elaborated on game theory and behavioral economics - the application of this hybrid discipline in marketing. I just kept nodding. Soon I realized they were rather oblivious of my presence. That was a different world, theirs.
I didn’t get it.

A decade later, I left a plum job to come for a full time program at Northwestern, to me the mecca of marketing. Went to school at Medill and Kellogg and by the time I got out, I was weathered in Chicago in every sense. And here I am ever since, in an integrated marketing communications company. By now, my Dad who had seen his other son and my little brother in the field pretends that he gets it. Or so it seems.
But my wife doesn’t get it.

I walk home after a long day. The wife is rather exasperated and I figure that she has been struggling with the Home PC when she says, “It is almost an hour that I am with this now. I am trying to get into my office server and it takes forever .... the Explorer just doesn’t load up”. The son enters the scene. Looks at it for a while and decides to take over. The wife steps out to get me some tea, as usual. In a jiffy, the son is down with us. The wife asks, “What happened?” and the son says, ”It works now” and walks away. Incidentally, the wife is an engineer and the son is in Grade 5.

I don’t get it.

Google Sense and Sensibility

Recall those days you spent in a small organization or a smaller branch of a large organization and wondered if you were coming or going. Or how much the silos in larger firms curtailed your power to have a dream? Most marketing organizations, not to mention the others, are having a day of that life in theirs now.

Marketing jobs and careers are also to be viewed with GoogleLense. Times are changing and so are our workplaces. We bring in to work our edge competency to position and manage ourselves beyond a living fossil. For all of us there is something to pore over - what Seth Godin references to the dip and the cul-de-sacs in his the dip.

It is all about edge competence within a core competency, if you will. Both matter.

Did you say, "I don't get it"?!

The new Nano Avatar

The iPhone launch featured in the top 10 business stories in 2007. Yes, Apple had a banner year in 2007. The stock more than doubled thanks to strong sales of the new iPhone, revamped iPods, and updated Macs.

But that was last year. Rocked by the January roller coaster, can Apple live up to investor expectations for 2008? With that in mind, the world will be paying a lot of attention to what Apple Chief Executive Officer, Steve Jobs has to say during his keynote address at the company's Macworld show on January 15th.

The people’s car, Tata Nano is the new Nano Avatar. This is an interesting twist to innovation. Professor C K Prahalad calls this process of “constrained innovation” as working within the Innovation Sandbox. Priced at US$2500, this is the world’s cheapest car.

There is a worldwide applause – see how the world sees the Nano. We have seen several examples of marketing driving introductions across the world. Perhaps here is an unprecedented mass market driving product - an embodiment of constrained innovation and design credited to Girish Wagh. Which makes me think of it as a hallmark innovation, a new year gift from Ratan Tata to the people of India, not to be easily dislodged from its pride of place in the annals of product innovations making a dream fortune at the bottom of the pyramid come true.

Can Apple eclipse this marvel? I doubt it.

Because the Tata Nano acts a catalyst to attract a section of existing two-wheeler owners, currently estimated at about 50 million, to upgrade to a car. Because Tata Nano pushes the envelope for the others in the revolutionary bandwagon like another Indian manufacturer Bajaj, the biggies like Renault, Nissan, Volkswagen, Skoda and Fiat in the race to build low cost cars. Given the shape of the income distribution in India, the new price point of Tata Nano translates into a 65 per cent increase in the number of families that can afford a car.

Another feather in the cap of incredible India.

“Can the world afford it?” is a mere rhetoric when we recognize this as a breakthrough innovation. Tata Nano is Made in India. Made for India. It has already proven to be an “innovation platform” promising a huge potential for several breakthrough innovations to follow suit. This is probably another reason for the people of India to celebrate that business and a booming economy will mobilize necessary civic focus to expediently act on the infrastructural needs. To me, this is such a enchanting innovation that will catapult infrastructural development and social transition in India, way beyond the much discoursed demographic dividend and the neo-statistical architecture of India. This is serious innovation that warrants the molting off of a best practice mind set. As Rama Bijapurkar writes in her “Winning in the Indian Market”, the question to ask of the Indian market is not “When will the Indian market be ready for my global best-practice strategy?” but, rather, “When will I be ready to create the next-practice strategy for the Indian market?”

Well founded on such a platform and born out of a constrained innovation, it would serendipitously garner enough muscle and improvement to roll out in due course to other emerging markets in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa within four years, per plans. Environmental "nightmares" will also be cradled in sleep.

That said, I am curious to see if there is a distinctly differentiated marketing approach to Tata Nano - a next practice strategy. On the day of the launch, the Tata Nano ad was:

It's here. The new Tata Nano
To end all speculation, debate and talk!

The news paper headlines and copy were, to me, a lot more engaging than the Tata Nano ad or its tatapeoplescar.com website:
When you have such a mega innovation in Product, the elements in the marketing mix ought to be holistically derived (see an interesting framework).

It is reported that Tata Motors will initially produce 250,000 cars and expects to sell almost a million cars annually. Estimates from analysts are that the profit per car will be around US$100. That warrants a non-traditional approach that generates a return on marketing investment (reported budget of US$1.25 million this year) that is consistent with this business model. With such a heroic product, marketing communication cannot be prosaic ads, announcements and typical TV spots. Nor can it be a routine website. I see some ad agency "creatives" in India peppering some thoughts on How to sell the Tata Nano.

Did Tata Nano that hit the headlines in almost all mainline newspapers warrant announcement advertising? Doesn't this deserve an equally smart and innovative marketing approach? A rehashed media plan or a typical ad campaign is not the answer to this unique opportunity for marketing to create shareholder value.

The marketing strategy of Tata Nano will be integral to its performance in the market place. The financial imperative on marketing the people’s car is explicit. Morphing the marketing strategy to enhance the consumer experience and engage the car’s people is implicit.

WORK IN PROGRESS