Category Archives: Advertising

Branding in simple words is connecting a name with a product. Companies take various approaches to attain this task. One of the most fascinating approaches is to go for subtle branding. To put it simply, subtle branding is to take on a bigger issue and go after it with your brand in the background. The intent is to identify a purpose and make your brand the driving force behind it which would lead people to associate your brand, consciously or sub-consciously, with that larger-than-product purpose.

Using a creative approach, you can make almost any product to fit the bill. If you are in business of selling bags, broaden the horizon and link it to tourism. If your product is nicotine tablets, make anti-smoking as your purpose. If you are a retail bank, subtle brand it by picking up money management initiative. The basic idea is to expand the canvas. Every product has a purpose…it is there to solve a problem.

A necessary ingredient for this kind of branding effort is persistence. The idea here is to develop trust. You cannot expect people to instantly link a brand to a purpose. Like in any other case, building that trust requires time and a continuous effort.

What’s the most important thing to keep in mind while doing subtle branding? It’s the authenticity. If you are associating your brand with a purpose, make sure you put the purpose before your product. Faking purpose-driven branding is not possible in the long run. Your customers are too smart to identify the fake and such attempts can lead to a permanent dent in the brand image. An authentic subtle branding has a strong impact in developing your brand image, and above all, it will help you as an organization fill in for your social responsibility.

Nike, BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama are the iconic brands we talk about all the time. When we develop marketing plan for our product, we leave several marketing ideas by categorizing them as the ones that work only for iconic brands. This brings about a very important question: how did these brands become iconic? Were they born iconic or the way they were marketed and developed made them iconic?

In 1964, Philip Knight, a track athlete and his coach founded a company named Blue Ribbon Sports that operated as a distributor of a Japanese Shoemaker selling shoes at track meets out of Knight’s automobile. A couple years later BRS opened its first retail outlet and few years after that launched its own line of shoes. In 1978, 14 years after first starting business, BRS renamed itself to Nike. In 1980s Nike expanded its product line through in house development and acquisitions, launched its legendary campaign “Just Do It” (1988) and gained major market share. It took more than three decades for Nike to become “Nike”, the iconic sports brand.

Nike was not born iconic, neither were BMW, Starbucks, Apple, Obama and for that matter any other company. Starbucks started with one store in Seattle’s Pike Place market, Apple was just another start-up in Silicon Valley in early 1980s and Obama was about 30 points behind Clinton days before Iowa democratic primary. But all of them worked their way through to reach to the top and become iconic. They were able to do one thing perfectly,  and that is linking an idea to the product. They were able to brand themselves as the first choice for a cult, gather a group of mavens and enter mainstream with their help.

So next time when you plan a campaign, try to go for something that can attract a group of dedicated mavens, try something that can help you define a cult around your brand. Nothing out there works only for iconic brands, but there’s a lot out there to help you make your brand iconic.

So you got it all, who’s your target audience, what’s your message going to be and where and when you want to reach them. The last pillar, which in a way brings it all together and at the same time is dependent on all these, is selecting the right medium that fits you the best to have the most impact.

When trying to figure out how to do targeted marketing, advertising plays a significant role. Let’s talk about advertising on traditional media like television, radio and newspaper. Targeted advertising on these mediums can be done by linking your target audience with the target audience of the medium at a given place and time and delivering your message blend in with the medium. Irrespective of targeted advertising, there’s a growing concern about the diminishing impact of advertising on traditional media with the advent of new technologies…be it TiVo on television, satellite radio and Internet music services (like Pandora) on radio and blogosphere on newspapers. Moving on to other mediums for advertising, you can do targeted message delivery on the world wide web, most effective ones being next to search results and other contextual content. Mobile devices are also evolving as a great source of targeted advertising by utilizing the location information for the audience along with other pivots like time of day and interests of the individual. Targeted advertising is gaining traction on new mediums like Internet and mobile due to the ability of marketers to nail down the appropriate individual and delivering their message to them instead of a broader segment as in case of traditional media.

But when you know who your target customer is, what impacts their buying decision and where and when to locate them, you can reach them much deeper than just by targeted advertising. You can leverage this information and latest technologies to communicate and collaborate with your customers. With the growing influence of social media on the people around the world, marketers can participate in the the social communities to interact with their customers. To add the much needed targeted component to this exercise, they can create communities to gravitate people of similar interests.

Marketers need to take a broader perspective when creating these communities. For example, if you are selling nicotine tablets to help people quit smoking, your community should be a network of people trying to stop smoking. The community should motivate people to quit, act like a support network for people and help them stop smoking. This in turn will provide you an avenue to take customer inputs on how to improve your product and will act as the best place for subtly marketing your product. These social communities when used appropriately are in fact the best way to do targeted marketing. Here you have (or can gravitate) the right audience, you can stir the communication to get the right message across and you can interact with the audience right when they are willing to and with their permission…that’s taking care of all the pillars of targeted marketing, or you can say it’s targeted marketing at its very best!

Now that we have identified the right set of audience for our product, we move on to figure out the right message that will have the most impact. When we speak about the right message, it is not just the message that we broadcast while advertising for the product. It is the message that is part of every communication the company has with its customers, directly or indirectly. These communications can vary from a press release where the company defines its plans to go greener or a community participation where the company address the broader cause addressed by its products.

When trying to figure out the right message, we need to understand the things that influence the buying decision of the target audience set. One information that can help in doing so is the psychographic profile the customer. Psychographic profile is based on IAO variables (Interests, Attitudes and Opinions). It provides basic information about the target segment for our product. Using this kind of information, company can make sure it effectively communicates with its customers.

Another thing we should consider while we talk to the customers is the cultural code that links the product to the customer. Customers differ from each other. One such differentiation is cultural which is influenced by the society a person grows in. American culture is very much different from European and Asian. So when we plan the message to communicate to the customer, it should be adapted accordingly. Clotaire Rapaille explains the culture code for everything from shopping to love for America in his book The Culture Code. He briefly compares these cultural codes with the ones for France and Japan to show how different these cultures, and hence the codes, are from each other. Using these culture codes and going local with the marketing efforts can have a bigger impact on the target customers.

There’s no golden recipe to have an effective communication with the customer. The general pattern that derives one successful campaign after another is to focus on the customer, talk their language and feel their problems, or in other words focus on the customer more than the product.

This post is first in the series of exploring targeted marketing.

It is very important to identify the right set of audience you got to tap in for your product. Simply putting, if you are opening a steakhouse, advertising to vegetarian audience will not serve the purpose. You need to identify who is most likely to use your product.  Targeting the product to the demographic which is most likely to be your customer will lead to greater impact.

Few other factors come in picture while determining the right audience. One such factor is the current stage of the product. Are you launching a product, or the product is already there in the market for sometime? If you are launching the product, you need to identify the mavens in your industry and target all your energy in winning their support. Mavens are the community experts. They are the early adopters. Pitching the product to mavens and gaining their support is as vital as anything else. If you as a marketer are able to sell the product successfully to mavens, you have in a way recruited the best sales force out there to market your product. These passionate users serve as consultants in the market whom the masses look for before making a buying decision. If the product is already accepted by the mavens and you are looking to cross the chasm, provide tools to the mavens to push you across. To accelerate the growth, shift focus to the larger set of audience in the right demographic who normally go for the tried and tested products.

Nailing down who your target audience is fundamental for the success of a product in any market. Who element not only shapes the marketing, it shapes the product itself including the pricing of the product, the look and feel of the product and the product placement.

Who, What, When, Where and How: the four Ws and H every company needs to cover while developing the marketing plan for a product.

You might have the best software solution for customer relationship management in the world, or for that matter the best baby soap, but till your customer knows it, and believes in it, it’s of no use.

No matter how big or small your marketing budget is, if you are not targeting the right audience with the right message, at the right time and the right place, using the right medium, it is of no use. In the next few posts I will share some thoughts to explore each one of these rights.

If we were playing Jeopardy, the right answer would have been: “What is branding?”

Beijing Olympics 2008 is one of the classical examples of branding at a global scale from the recent times. China spent north of $40 billion to link the idea of progressiveness and development to the country. The infrastructure improvements, the pollution control, the massive ceremonies and the security arrangements apart from a list of other things linked the idea of progressiveness and development to the product known as China.

Similarly, when a company tries to brand a product like face cream, they link the idea of beauty to the product. That sense of beauty is exposed in every bit of the product right from the formula that’s used to develop it to its packaging to the advertisements of the product. Everything together tries to deliver the same message to convince the customers.  

Whether you are branding the most populous country in the world or a face cream or just water, it sums up to the simple process of linking ideas to product (or service). The logo, advertisements and customer service, all have their own roles to play when it comes to branding.

I believe there are two main purposes of branding. First is creating trustworthiness. Trust plays a major role in any decision a customer is making and that is one of the big goals behind branding. The second purpose behind branding is to create a community to back your product. Ideas are not attached by marketers alone, they are attached by consumers as well. And when consumers attach an idea with your product, it speaks much louder than you doing the same. So the goal here is to provide enough buzz and space for the mavens to pick up your product and take it from there to create more trust in the community and build your brand equity.

The basic idea behind any marketing or advertising effort is to create a connection with the customers. The success of your campaign depends on how well a customer can identify with your product. And when it comes to identifying with a product, connection at a regional level plays a very important role. You can define a region at any level, it can be a country, a state and in some cases, even cities.

Let’s talk about going local in a country. In the world today, you got to consider the global marketplace which is full of diversity. In order to link to their customers in this diverse global market, companies try to adapt their stories to make it compelling for the people in a particular geography. Consider India as an example. In India, there are many global brands which are so well connected to the local community that people end up thinking them to be local brands. Vicks (Procter & Gamble), Maggie noodles (Nestle), Bata footwear, Cadbury Dairy Milk (CadburySchweppes), Lifebuoy soaps (Unilever) and many others fall in this category. The reason being the way these brands have established connection with the people in the country. The product itself is localized in many cases, followed by localized advertisements, packaging, slogans and what not.

But this concept of going local is not limited at the country level. In many states, companies use local branding strategies to connect with the customers. For example, while Ford slogan in most parts of USA is “Ford Built Tough”, in Texas the company goes local with its campaign slogan: ”Ford is the best in Texas”. The goal is again very simple: connect with the customers in Texas, and if it can be done better with a local slogan, let’s use that.

I believe when a brand goes for local connection, it generates a much higher level of trustworthiness with the customers. It makes the customers feel important and increases their loyalty towards the brand, in-turn making the local connection work.