Mr Partha Sinha is the Director and the Chief Strategy Officer at Publicis South Asia. He is a marketing and communication professional and has worked in various renowned organizations like Citibank, Ogilvy and Mather and Zee telefilms. Following extract is drawn from his session at Commward.
“The job of the marketers is not to sell but to make people want to buy’’
Mr. Partha Sinha started his session with the outstanding remarks that all the communication contents of majority of the famous brands provide the same reward moment. The same aesthetics and same scenarios prevail in the industry. The communication materials talk about the same conventions, benefits and ethnicity. So, simply put every marketing approach is seeking the ‘easy way out’.
So, what are the reasons behind such fallacy of communication?
The first major reason is our tendency to follow the same process. Every communication starts with consumer insights and ends with consumer validation. But the problem is you can’t ask the same type of people the same question in exactly the same way; because every time you will get the same answer. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.
Oversimplification Complex is another problem.
There is a distinction between simplicity and simplification. In reality, consumers love a balance, a balance between simplification and complexity. So, marketers need to find that right balance.
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He then talked about the tyranny of consumer insight. Too much importance has been given to focused groups which often lead to unfocussed findings. This is because; companies and agencies are always going to the middle category of customers in order to take account of the outliers. But by doing that they are losing the focus from the main customer group who probably lie within those outlier zones. This is because, “Category follower” and “Category leaders”-both types of customers can give better inputs.
So, what are the ways to come out of this vicious cycle of codification and looking alike?
The first is gathering meaningful insights from multiple sources. For example, there are brand insight, category insight, consumer insight, communication insight, product insight etc. Insights from multiple sources create the ownership of a point of view and a better and meaningful understanding of the product.
He then went onto talk about building conviction brands rather than convention brands. For this, a brand should have three essential ingredients; vision, innovation and dynamism. Being a conviction brand is utmost important because this is the only way to leave permanent imprint in the mind of the consumers. Along with creating a brand, recognizing the consumers is also important. This is due to the fact that not all consumers are created equal. It is a pyramid; there are leaders, there are followers and then there are the rest. Brands need to identify and target the leaders because followers are cheaper but less valuable.
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He carried on with his solutions by stressing on the importance of test marketing, but in the right context. He pointed out that testing should be done in the market, not in the test-tube.This is because; the tests for persuasion, relevance and credibility in a controlled environment would not necessarily produce expected results; rather, going to market and run a beta test might.
His last bit of solution was about avoiding information paralysis. He reminded the marketers about the 40/70 rule and warned that actions should be performed at the right time with the right amount of information; otherwise, procrastination in the name of reducing the risk actually increases the risk.
He ended his session by poising a question to the aspiring marketers and agencies. “What do you want to become? Where do you want to see yourselves, in the Vanguard or in the Guard’s Van?” Despite knowing the answer most of us often end up being in the Guard’s Van.
