And here comes June! Ending the anxieties and taking the excitement of the MBA newbies to an entirely insane level. As B-schools open their gates to the incoming batch, a flow of assignments, lectures, presentations, submissions, evaluations begins. And not to forget, the haunted business formals. Amidst all this, we the Marketing Club, bring in some fresh ideas through our June edition of Markathon, specifically catering to the Marketing domain which will, not only enhance their practical skills, but also will act as a creative treat for the voracious readers. The growing adventure tourism market in India is now pegged at US $25 Billion. With free flow of information and the rising power of internet, more and more places are being explored from the perspective of adventure tourism. While in the earlier days, the destinations were restricted to a few hill stations such as Shimla, Kullu & Manali, etc., the youth today desires to explore the unpredictability and riskiness, in order to experience the thrill which shall provide value for money. This month’s cover story aims to highlight this aspect, specifically underscoring the growing trend of domestic tourism as opposed to greater number of international tourists in the past. We congratulate Nagashree & Nagapriya, the winners of our Perspective section for their article on ‘Chumbak – The Desipan’. In the special edition of Vartalaap section this month, we have a tête-à-tête with Mr. Rajesh Pandit, Managing Partner at La Hoya Business Accelerators and a visiting faculty at leading IIMs. Mr. Pandit specialises in the B2B marketing domain and shares his views on the ca-
reer opportunities in the sector, useful for the budding marketers. With his phenomenal first hand industry experience, his value pointers are of incredible significance to anyone interested in this field. Not only this, the Addicted section of the magazine tries to capture our view on two of the recently launched ads– a Catch and a Miss. In the section, the Brand Story, the journey of ThumsUp is carefully penned down. The readers will be amazed to read that how this giant softdrink brand was sold by its owner brand to a company that tried to end its existence. We also read about the various factors responsible for the rise of ThumsUp and how its unique positioning and valuable campaigns have always been successful in strongly putting it up against Pepsi and other competitors. Lastly, we would like to thank all the people who sent in their valuable contributions for the magazine. This is what inspires us to continue to do what we love. With so much exciting stuff lined up, flip through the pages of the June edition of Markathon and do write to us on markathon.iims@gmail.com regarding any suggestions or feedback. Happy Reading! Cheers Team Markathon
The Markathon Team Editors
Daksh Bhagat | Harsha Daga | Piyush Jain | Sharad Srinivasan | Shubham Shukla
Creative Designers Astha Kabra | Akshay Seth
Markathon
june 2016
Contents
Look out for Fun Facts & latest Market Buzz in the magazine!
Perspective Chumbak : The Desipan Nagashree V. & Nagapriya V | Christ University & Leadics
Specials
1
Big Data & Marketing Archishman Bandyopadhyay | SIBM Pune
5
India’s Growing Appetite for Adventure: an insight into the ‘thrills’ industry Akshay Seth | IIM Shillong
9
Vartalaap
Tête-à-Tête with Mr Rajesh Pandit ‘Careers in B2B Marketing’
Interviewed by Harsha Daga & Piyush Jain | IIM Shillong
17
AD-dicted Astha Kabra & Sharad Srinivasan | IIM Shillong
18
Brand Story Daksh Bhagat | IIM Shillong
19
Fun Corner Akshay Seth | IIM Shillong
21
Social Media Day
22
Digi - Tally
13
22
Eye 2 Eye
Does Sponsoring huge events get the required ROI for newer brands in the market (For E.g.: VIVO sponsoring Indian Premeir League)? Abhinay Saxena | FORE School of Management & Ishita Verma | IIFT Kolkata
16
18
3
14
MARKATHON
11
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
Chumbak: the ‘Desipan’ By NAGASHREE V. & NAGAPRIYA V. CHRIST UNIVERSITY & LEADICS
E
thnicity, vibrant colours and beautiful Indian designs are the few things that comes to a person’s mind when they think about Chumbak. An Indian Life-style brand, founded by Vivek Prabhakar and his wife that started off in 2010 as a small business to sell refrigerator magnets, has now grown into a superior brand name that even Facebook and Google have chosen it as a potential business case study.
Business Model They operate both online and offline with 85% of their business coming from offline mode. Due to their great products
MARKATHON
1
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
resorted to Facebook and Google Adwords for selling its products. Facebook:
and an even greater marketing strategy they managed to operate at break-even within five months after which great profits started pouring in and now planning to expand it to other countries too.
• 25% of the online revenue comes through Facebook. What makes their Facebook page so effective? If one goes through their Facebook page, you will get to see that they have left no stone unturned to utilize the page completely to engage the customers. From having the lively cover pages, exciting profile pictures, informative content to regular campaigns , it’s just perfect. • When I went through their Facebook page I noticed that they regularly update the page with fresh informative content which is aimed at educating the customer more than selling their product. • Effective use of facebook to regularly update their customers about their new products, sponsored adds, desktop news feed and pages publishing. • Facebook was a tool to send information across to people about their new products.
MARKETING STRATEGY
Google Ad-words:
We see a plethora of products entering the market almost every day. More than selling the product, it’s very essential to build a brand image, customer loyalty and mindshare which would help the business to survive in long run. Chumbak has great products, but having mere good products won’t help. Vanilla Coke, Subhiksha are a few which have failed because of bad marke t i n g inspite of bei n g great products. Here are the same takeaways from C h u mbak-
• One of the earliest companies to utilize Google Adwords to the fullest. They had a different approach when it came to optimizing their search engine. For eg. If they wanted to show up on a person’s screen who wanted refrigerator magnets, they would add the word like an auto or elephant as an adword which were the designs. In this way they could be in a whole lot of places than just a f e w places.
Market Research Even before they started the business the founders made a thorough research of the markets, studied where similar companies failed, what customers wanted etc. Even today they constantly have customer surveys to study the present needs of the markets. Early in 2010, Chumbak was one of the few companies that
MARKATHON
2
It worked off-course! Twitter /Instagram/Pinterest: Influencer marketing, engaging the customers with contests, hashtag marketing, offers, blog links are the ways used to engage the customers here. Shopping is done through Instagram.
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective Content Marketing:
all channels and ultimately re-directed to Chumbak website where customers will be further engaged to be con• Today if you have the right content, your half way through verted into leads. in converting your visitors to customers. Chumbak in that • User Generated Content-is another great technique used where the the customers create content and crowd-source ideas. Eg.Testimonials .This helps in creating more trust and brand image than the company posting stuff. Companies like Urban ladder have grown only because of this.
way has some great content. They keep updating their content, publish it across various social channels. • Chumbak Weekender guide every week guides you about the events, flea markets, concerts, cafes and what not to getaway during weekends. • This is a great way of in-bound marketing to keep your customers engaged and at the same time
make them build a trust for the brand. Also they further call to action the visitors to the blog to post their views on twitter and Instagram. • Basically there is a Chumbak website and the contend developed here is shared across
MARKATHON
3
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
cated Chumbak stores now. Marketing however for all its products are done only online. Offline presence has helped the online.
Opinion • We feel Chumbak has been very successful in building a brand for itself by targeting the right type of audience i.e younger generation who love their vibrant designs and also they maintain the Indianness in all the products (Great Indian Wedding,Mad Madhubani etc) which the USP OF CHUMBAK. • Through various campaigns and contests they have made loyal customers who have in-turn become loyal ambassadors for the brand. According to us, this is the ultimate success of any brand.
E-mail Marketing: Constantly new products and newsletters are updated through this medium. Campaigns and Cross-Marketing: Campaigns across social media have been very successful for Chumbak. Many a times they have cross-marketed with various brands that have led to win-win situation for both. Offline Presence:
• They keep refreshing their stocks every 2-4 weeks and instantly respond to customer’s queries • Very consistent in terms of theme and vibrant visuals for past 6 years. • It’s a great learning from Chumbak , how to perfectly use the social media to promote their business both offline and online. Being consistent is very important in Marketing. Chumbak is a winner in this!
Chumbak has taken calclulated risks here-initially started with distribution channels like retail outlets to pop-up stores in malls to dedi-
MARKATHON
• They also constantly engage the customers and make a good use of all the marketing techniques like inbound, influential etc .
4
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
Big Data & Marketing By ARCHISHMAN BANDYOPADHYAY SIBM PUNE
consumer data collected a decade ago, “ Theis greatly dwarfed by data collected today
“
M
arketing as we once knew, has been undergoing some tremendous transformation. From an art that relied on the creative aspect of individual ideas that were refined through trial & error based on qualitative results churned out by a continuous feedback mechanism driven by market forces, it is transmuting into a careful science, leaning heavily on the balance between the creative aspect of big ideas and hard facts substantiated by quantifiable data points. The agent that can be attributed as the primary catalyst for bringing about this metamorphosis is Big Data. Big Data; a term first coined by Michael Cox and David Ellsworth in October 1997, in an article published in the proceedings of the 8th IEEE conference on Visualization [1] – refers to data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are rendered inadequate. Big
MARKATHON
5
Data, or rather the ability to efficiently harness its potential has long been heralded as the harbinger of the next major leap in Human kind’s industrial & technological evolution. Many marketers often quip that the data they have traditionally handled - point of sale transaction records, responses to direct campaigns & promotions, etc. has always been ‘big’. Though this argument cannot be summarily rejected, the fact of the matter is, that the consumer data collected by businesses a couple of decades ago, is greatly dwarfed over by the consumer data collected today – whether it be in the form of online transaction records, click-through rates, virtual interactions, mobile device usage or geo-spatial data, among a plethora of others. To put things into perspective, we have to consider the facts that over
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
marketer’s biggest nemesis, today she is practically faced by an information overload. The challenge today isn’t so much in gathering consumer data, as in sorting out the data that matters from the junk & identifying avenues of incorporating the insights gathered from analysis of this data into the organisation’s strategy to ensure the optimum returns on the allocated resources. One of the foremost avenues of utilising Big Data analytics is to use it to optimise the Return on Investments on Marketing expenditure (MROI). John Wannamaker, the father of modern advertising had famously lamented that - “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. A solution to this age old problem had been proposed in a 2013 Mckinsey report that suggested that an integrated marketing analytics approach can save $100-200 Billion on global annual marketing expenditures (that amount to nearly $1Trillion) [5]. The consumer decision journey as she considers, evaluates, purchases & reviews a product or service generates an enormous amount of data. Careful analysis of this data can enable a marketer to better understand the targeted consumer’s buying behaviour & identify the incremental business leads generated at each stage & plan the resource allocation for the corresponding channels accordingly. By tracking a consumer group’s online behaviour & response to various promotional schemes, a marketer can adopt targeted marketing schemes for focused groups that yield much higher returns than
90% of all the data in the world was created in the past 2 years [2] & that today, every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time until 2003 [3]. This deluge of data consists of both structured data (stored in enterprise databases) as well as unstructured data (that includes raw machine-generated data from end user applications as well as mixed-media data from social networks, blogs, etc.). As per a 2012 report by 360ui titled “The CMO’s Guide to Big Data”, ‘Consum-
ers spend almost $300,000 a minute shopping online; brands receive 350,000 “likes” per minute on Facebook; and Twitter users send more than 600,000 tweets per hour. Six hundred million more people in the world own mobile phones (4.8 billion) than own toothbrushes (4.2 billion). [4]. Geo-spatial data from various mobile & wearable devices, as well as rich unstructured data from the annals of social media, are a constant source of invaluable information about consumer behaviour. While a couple of decades ago, data collection was a
MARKATHON
broad-based & often wasteful tactics like spams. Advanced analytical approaches such as MMM (marketing-mix modelling), heuristics such as RCQ & attribution modelling can be used for data driven
6
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective & informed resource allocation to different channels & touch-points that yield the highest returns. Traditionally, marketing efforts have been hard to quanti-
players use their existing customer data to power their recommendation engines. Amazon generates 35% of its revenue by cross-selling products using its recommendation engine while 75% of Netflix users select movies based on the offered suggestions [6]. Content personalisation not only helps in direct sales but also yields long term returns by ensuring greater customer satisfaction. Organisations that successfully manage to integrate Big Data analytics into their core strategy formulation framework can go a step further & harness its power to create products & services specifically tailored to the customer’s myriad preferences instead of merely devising channels & strategies for pushing the existing ones. Netflix o n c e again stands out as a pioneer in the use of this disr u p t i ve strategy. T h e y h a d used the viewership data gathered from the millions of hours of content viewed by their huge user base to bid $100 million for the rights to the TV series ‘House of Cards’. The
fy in terms of impact on revenue & have been measured in terms of intangible metrics like ‘brand sentiment’. This challenge has given rise to multiple data driven analytic techniques like ‘Content Scoring’ that help in tying singular marketing deliverables to their desired impacts on revenue & thereby quantitatively judging their efficacy. These processes use marketing automation & CRM data to track the various pieces of individual content that ultimately culminated in successful lead conversion, thus enabling the marketer to focus on the individual content types that resonate with the consumer & discard the rest. Predictive modelling is yet another powerful marketing analytic tool that crunches conventional marketing data to accurately predict future consumer behaviour & determine the best course of action based on this information. Another major way that marketers use the power of Big Data is for retaining & upselling existing customers by Content personalisation. Almost all major E-commerce
MARKATHON
7
IIM Shillong
june 2016
perspective
at large. Furthermore, user-level data is often subject to noise that has to be judiciously eliminated to make proper sense of the data without diluting the insights derived from them. Unfettered access to users’ online behaviour can also lead to certain ethically questionable decisions that may ultimately end up harming an organisation’s interests in the long run besides eroding consumer confidence. The decision to draw the line between understanding a customer & impinging upon his privacy while handling PII (Personally identifiable information) ultimately lies with the marketer & must be taken in the light of her moral, ethical & legal obligations.
high degree of confidence they had shown on this decision based on their data analytics paid off & the show ended up ticking off all the right checkboxes with the audience & was a runaway success. Several Taxi-hire, food delivery & other logistic dependent start-ups that are today valued in millions of dollars h a v e practically developed t h e i r go-to market strategy around the pillar of geospatial data analytics.
To conclude; Big Data isn’t an end in itself – it’s a tool, a very powerful one if used wisely, that can help create a highly informed & effective marketing team that an organisation can leverage in today’s data driven economy to outflank & outperform its competition. But, will Big Data turn a loss making venture into a profitable one or drive up lead generating content in multiples overnight? Probably not. Data can only help in making smart & informed predictions & creating new hypotheses & validating existing ones. The ultimate decisions have to be taken by the men & women driving an organisation & the risks have to be borne out by them. Big Data analytics is just the torch lighting up the labyrinth of Marketing data, the real onus still lies with t h e o n e bearing it.
E v e n though Big Data A n a l y tics can arm a marketer with a set of immensely powerful tools, it is not a panacea for all her challenges & there are certain caveats that cannot be overlooked. The biggest gap is the fact that user data is fundamentally biased & seldom provides a complete picture. There is an inherent danger in blindly assuming that insights drawn from a focused pool of users apply in entirety to the consumer base
MARKATHON
8
IIM Shillong
cover story
june 2016
Cover Story India’s growing appetite for adventure: I
By
Akshay Seth
IIM Shillong
an insight into the ‘Thrills’ industry
ntroduction
India’s current generation has been brought up on a staple diet of packaged tours & standard tourist spots. An age where Shimla, Manali & Mt.Abu was on the check list of every once in a year vacationer & taking a packaged tour was seen as both economically viable & safe. But the current generation doesn’t want to settle with safe anymore. With rise in disposable income & stressful urban lifestyles, the post liberalization generation is taking steps to spice up their vacations with an extra dose of unpredictability & adventure. Manali & Dharamsala is out of their itinerary, headache inducing high altitude Ladakh is in. Even then, flying is not the fashionable option anymore. People now want to drive their own vehicles over the high passes.
Tourism in India Sample these facts by the Investment & Technology Promotion division of the Ministry of External Affairs. Indian tourism & hospitality industry has emerged as one of the key drivers of growth among the service sector. The sector contributed US $187.9 billion or 12.5 per cent to the GDP in 2014-15. It also grew the fastest at 1.7 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over the period 201112 to 2014-15. Tourism in India has significant potential consider-
MARKATHON
9
IIM Shillong
cover story
june 2016
ing the rich cultural and historical heritage, variety in White Water Rafting, Paragliding, Motorcycle tourecology, terrains and places of natural beauty spread ing, Hot air Ballooning, Parasailing, Sky diving, Snoracross the country. Tourism is also a potentially large keling, etc. The regions which are the most popular for these activities are: Leh & Ladakh, Spiti (Himachal Pradesh), North East India, Manali, Uttarakhand, Goa, Rajasthan,
Factors behind the growth
employment generator besides being a significant source of foreign exchange for the country. The number of tourists arriving on e-Tourist Visa during the month of October 2015 reached a total of 56,477 registering a growth of 1987.9 per cent or 21 times as compared to 2,705 tourists in October 2014. A significant percentage of this percentage are tourists who are interested in adventure sports. Currently, the foreign tourists who land up in India are more interested in adventure sports than domestic tourists.
Social Media One of the undisputable reasons behind this recent spurt in adventure tourism is the advent & growth of social media. Social media as everybody is aware is the progenitor of majority of trends which are popular with today’s generation. The same is the case with adventure tourism as well. Sample this case. Individual A travels to Shimla & posts pictures of his trip on his social media network, Facebook. Now Shimla is the same old when it comes to tourist destinations. It is not going to elicit the “wow� response because chances are that majority of his network has already been to this destination. Now Individual B visits the
Adventure Tourism Any tour or travel which has an element of unpredict-
ability & risk can be qualified as adventure tourism. This type of tourism caters to a primarily younger crowd within the age group of 18-40. Also there is high possibility of the traveler being from urban India. There can be multiple activities said to qualify under the ambit of Adventure tourism. These can be trekking, caving, Rock climbing, Bungee Jumping,
MARKATHON
Everest Base Camp & posts the pictures from his trip on Facebook. Now the never before seen pictures definitely carry the wow factor & hence will elicit a much bigger response. Assuming B has a friend circle of more than 1000 individuals. Major chances are that more than 20 individuals (> 2%) will begin thinking of visiting the same place. Thus adventure tour-
10
IIM Shillong
cover story ism carries the wow factor & thus is growing much faster. Free availability of information Earlier information was restricted. Few good tour operators would maintain a monopoly over the information required to organize a tour. That is no longer the case. Now with the advent of the internet there is free availability of information for all netizens. There are also multiple forums now which manage to create a freer flowing knowledge base for the use of enterprising individuals. All you have to do now is go online & plan out your itinerary. Because there is an intrinsic need for travelers to share stories from their travels, there are multiple blogs who create a bigger knowledge base. Furthermore websites like Tripoto.com, TripAdvisor allow less serious bloggers to share their travel stories with the worldwide web. Availability of equipment With demand comes supply & with easy supply comes demand. Earlier suppliers of specialized equipment required for indulging in adventure activities were few & far between. Only places like
june 2016 U.S. to travel down to Nepal. When the clientele shifted locations Major equipment manufactures like
Lafuma, Marmot, etc. opened their retail chains in Nepal. When they started seeing demand from India they started opening their stores in India as well. But still majority of the products they sold was imported & followed a copy-paste based method. It was actually customized as per foreign requirements & body shapes. Along the same time, liberalization happened a major trend started. Indian companies entered the market & started making produce strictly for Indian clientele. Example would be Wildcraft, Woodland, etc. With enablement of FDI & local importing norms (30%) foreign companies started making their produce in India as well. Quechua, a French company, today manufactures quality equipment in India & distributes through the multi brand retail chain Decathlon.
Promotion & Advertising Brands associated with adventure tourism have traditionally been promoted simply through word of
Kathmandu could cater to the need of intrepid traveler who wanted to buy quality equipment like Tents, Sleeping bags, etc. This was only because Kathmandu was the base for treks to Himalayan regions around Annapurna & Everest. This pushed major foreign tourist traffic from Europe, Japan,
MARKATHON
11
IIM Shillong
cover story story cover
june 2016
mouth. Let’s take this scenario for example. Sanjay is an individual working in Bangalore in a major IT
are still limited to the online space. Because of being a niche industry still, there remains to be any promotion on traditional mainstream media.
Growing Popularity: The future
company who has been interested in doing a major trek for many years. Because it’s his first trek he simply books a seat with Trek organizer Indiahikes.in. All he has to do is travel to the Railhead of the trek & all other needs will be taken care for by the trek organizer. During the trek he uses a lot of equipment like Tents, Sleeping bags, Trekking poles, etc. Now after the trek gets over, Sanjay wants to continue trekking on his own. He decides to purchase some equipment for his own use. Now the equipment which has top of the mind recall value is the one he used during his previous trek. He can also under the quality better as he has used it personally. Hence, newer brands like Quechua & Wildcraft used similar tactics like selling equipment in bulk to major trek organizers like Indiahikes to penetrate into the market. Major brands like Wildcraft have also devised whole marketing campaigns to promote their brand. But these campaigns
MARKATHON
12
Out of all the major adventure activities, trekking & rafting are the ones which are seeing the major demand. The domestic tourists have been increasing at an annual rate of 40 per cent while the number of international tourists is growing at a rate of 7 per cent per annum. Although the starting base is small, the growth rate is exponential. According to the Association of Adventure Tourism the industry is expected grow by over 200 per cent in the coming days. But there are also a lot of pressing issues which need to be solved before we go ahead with the industry. One of the major pitfalls apparent is the lack of clear safety standards. In the absence of such standards, unscrupulous operators flout the rules & hurt the image of the industry as a whole. Also India does not allow satellite phones near the peaks close to the border. Satellite phones is a necessary equipment where there is no mobile network. In such areas there no way to call or help other than using a satellite phone. India’s poor record in women safety is another factor which pulling down the industry. Although India has 73 per cent of the land area of Himalayas under its border, its neighbors are taking as larger share in the pie because of such factors. But India is also gaining a lot of traction in the world of Adventure tourism. One of India’s only Bungee Jumping location is almost entirely manned by operations for outside India. This particular enterprise close to the Holy town of Rishikesh is so heavily booked that interested people are being turned away. It is now a highlight of not only the town but the whole state.
IIM Shillong
vartalaap
june 2016
VARTALAAP Tête-à-Tête with Mr Rajesh Pandit This month, as a part of special anniversary edition, we at Markathon wanted to do something different. So here we have excerpts of an interview from the 'Top Gun' of the Business to Business (B2B) marketing space : Mr. Rajesh Pandit, focussed on
Careers in B2B Marketing Mr Pandit has worked at iGate Global Solutions, Fidelity Investments & HP Pvt. Ltd. He is currently a managing partner at La Hoya Business Accelerators & is also a renowned visiting faculty at various IIMs
MARKATHON
13
IIM Shillong
june 2016
Markathon: What are the different roles that a management student can opt for in the B2B sales and marketing domain? B2B sales and marketing involves intense effort across all stages of selling. There is a huge front loading of the effort in market sensing, analyzing mines of information to identify the segments where our offering fits and choosing the target market. Following the same sales cycle enters more important phase of opportunity pursuit wherein proposals are created, submitted and presented persuasively. After qualifying through several rounds of evaluations, fierce negotiation ensues leading to hopefully a successful outcome in the form of an order. Having won a contract is only the beginning for a marketer in B2B. Selling into an account continues throughout the contract period. In this context, opportunities are abundant in B2B for a Sales and Marketing professional. And, the roles are across the board. One can start in a Strategy division of an organization, a business unit or geo unit where arena of the
“
External analyst relationship management is another role one can look for. External analysts have a significant role in influencing buying decisions of customers in B2B. Pre-sales unit offers several roles like presales program lead, solution lead, presales analyst which require knowledge and skills for creating and presenting capability literature, developing proposals, organizing trials for customers and client visits to the plants which are typically considerable influencers in the evaluation process. Sales stream offers two streams of roles in the form of hunters and farmers. Hunters acquire new customers while farmers sell into an existing client account. Farmers are also titled as key account managers. In addition, depending on the channel strategy, a firm can have roles for managing Channel (Dealer, Distributor, Reseller) relationships. Within Key account management, there are several next level roles that assist a key account manager. Above roles are from Supplier or Service provider perspective.
There is a huge front loading of the effort in market sensing, analyzing mines of information & much more
chosen market, offering to be taken to the arena, modus operandi to play in the arena and creating an edge over competition through differentiation are decided. Roles in Lead generation phase include designing and managing promotional events, targeted conferences, trade shows, exhibitions and establishing strategic sponsorships.
From the customer organization perspective, roles in purchasing divisions and vendor management units are additional possibilities. Markathon: What we as management students can do to improve our skills and what does a company look for in a management graduate in the B2B sales and marketing domain?
“Having won a
contract is only the beginning for a marketer in B2B” MARKATHON
14
IIM Shillong
“
vartalaap
vartalaap
june 2016
“
dustry experts, leaders and thought leaders are invited. Wealth of knowledge can be accumulated from Industry journals. Students forming industry focused interest groups and collaborating to gain knowledge in groups can go a long way in building this knowledge base in a relatively short span of time. Companies look for something additional from MBA grads from reputed institutes in comparison with their peers without the immersion in a management school. Students after having undergone rigorous curriculum are expected to bring comprehensive and multi-disciplinary perspective in solutions.
Look for roles that will give you wider exposure to industry.
MARKATHON
Markathon: How does a role in B2B domain differ from Industry to Industry?
“
As students of management looking for a career in B2B, it is important to gain skills that are aligned to a few roles. Strategic thinking is vital to the success of any role in B2B as every client situation has a unique nuance wherein once aptitude, knowledge and skills can be applied to create a positive impression in the mind of a customer and deliver superior customer experience. Extroverts can look at roles in Lead generation and client facing activities in Pre-sales and Sales phase. Others who would like to play the role of an individual contributor can look at roles in Strategy department that requires deeper analysis of mines of information, application of concepts and frameworks taught in the management schools, creation of sales and marketing literature like capability literature and development of case studies which require intelligent people but are performed in the background. Roles in Pre-sales related to proposal creation and opportunity pursuits often require the ability to work with multiple divisions and service lines. Interpersonal skills become far more important in such roles as well as Sales and post-sales roles. Interpersonal skills can be developed and hones only by practicing. Therefore, self reflection to understand the current capabilities, designing and executing an action plan in a disciplined manner are some of the important aspects. For a successful career in B2B, excellent industry knowledge is paramount. Therefore, students should identify couple of industries in which they would like to build their careers and focus on core subjects or electives that can contribute to this journey. Existing and new events held at the institute should be aligned to these ambitions so that appropriate in-
Industry nuances do have an impact on the structure and the activities carried out by B2B professionals. The process of marketing and selling remains similar if not same. However, customer’s purchasing behavior, relationship play etc varies from industry to industry and even one geography to another. Markathon: What are the factors that a management student should keep in mind while choosing a role in B2B sales and marketing? Look for roles with big fat salary (Smile). On a serious note - While decent amount of pay is important to sustain life in a world driven predominantly by economic model, look for roles that will give you wider exposure. Every job has its own share of mundane part. However, whether the role has a few windows to a wider field will decide the quantum of exposure it can offer. Wider and deeper experience is sure to bring tremendous reward both in terms of fulfilling roles and fat cheques over a period of time.
15
IIM Shillong
eye2eye
june 2016
Does Sponsoring huge events get the required ROI for newer brands in the market? (For e.g. : VIVO sponsoring Indian Premier League) ISHITA VERMA IIfT KOLKATA
ABHINAY SAXENA FORE School of Management
Corporate sponsorship has become an effective marketing tool for promotion to connect better with consumers. For staying in business, company needs to develop acceptability of their products and services among their customers better than their competitors. Big events have wider range of audience having people under different age groups, lifestyle, culture etc. Newer brands in the market have less market share. By sponsoring popular events, newer brands may gain competitive advantage over the existing brands and build a In rural areas, people buy Chinese phones owing to their strong customer base. low prices and wide reach. But, in the urban areas where all a lot of brands are competing for the same set of cus- A well planned and strategic sponsorship can help the tomers with almost similar prices and specifications, such new brands establish goodwill and increase visibility in the crowd. It offers wide range of advantages in branda huge investment becomes a bit improbable. building:This is apparent in case of XIAOMI smart phones that sell 1. It will help build trust and establish rapport with custheir products at a very low margin without compromis- tomers. Newer brand will stand out in the crowd. The auing on quality and rely more on social networking sites dience which is crazy for the event may start developing and online community where any minor defect can be their liking for the company’s product and service. 2. Events will have a certain mix of people. While sponeasily rectified. soring an event, company should focus on the audience In terms of ROI, VIVO still hasn’t increased its sales as and see if their product is relevant for such a crowd. If the projected after sponsoring IPL. Indian market is more audience fits well then the event will give the business an of a price conscious market, where if a product is good, opportunity for highly target marketing. people will communicate to each other but if they don’t 4. Company’s logo will be placed in flyers, brochures, ticklike it, they will defame it in front of a greater number of ets etc. This will increase brand awareness and recognition. people. 5. Company can test the customer’s response to its prodAs previously mentioned, the statement is partially true uct before investing in a major marketing campaign. because if we focus on the FMCG sector, where adver- Company can give trial offers to the audience in exchange tisements speak, we observe that if the product is of con- for their honest feedback. sumer’s taste he/she keeps repurchasing it, even if it is priced a bit high, so therefore here ROI becomes accept- Thus, newer brands get a platform to make long term association with their target audience. able at a later stage. I partially agree with the statement that sponsoring huge events gets the required ROI for the newer brands in the Indian market. Indian market has always been inclined towards the word of mouth marketing where people are more interested in letting others buy first before they buy and VIVO sponsoring IPL wants to create the same impression. But, in case of mobile phones where market is so competitive, this is not the case, as VIVO is targeting price conscious customers.
Topic for the next issue: “Is Social Media Marketing a necessary ingredient today in the recipe of success?” Your opinion (view/counterview) is invited. Word limit is 250-300. Last date of sending entries is 10th July, 2016. Include your picture (JPEG format) with the entry. Winners will receive a prize money of Rs. 500 each!
MARKATHON
16
IIM Shillong
AD-dicted AD-dicted
december june 2013 2016
By SHARAD SRINIVASAN IIM Shillong PRODUCT: Surf Excel : Ready for Life
PRODUCT: Jabong : Be You
POSITIONING: Sharing helps kids get ready for life
POSITIONING: Show your true spirit to the world
CREATIVE AGENCY: Lowe Lintas
CREATIVE AGENCY: Bates CHI & Partners along with Harvey B Brown
CATCH
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjPrQzvE9E
CONCEPT: The video begins with a mother as the narrator. She speaks of her son’s passion for football. But even with his love for the sport, he is unable to make the community team. The mother goes on to talk about how this never disheartened her son who continued practicing. One day, he comes home announcing that he has finally been selected to be part of the team. The mother keeps her promise & buys him a new pair of shoes. To her astonishment, she spots him on the sides, cheering on the team rather than playing for it. The shoes she bought him, being worn by another kid on the field. When the lady confronts her son, he tells her about his friend who got into the team but couldn’t afford the shoes. She hugs him and signals to give his friend the pair of shoes. The scene ends with a voice over saying, ‘Surf Excel believes sharing helps kids get ready for life.’
R
By ASTHA KABRA IIM Shillong
YouTube Link:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHQfnW 6OnB8
MISS CONCEPT:
The advertisement, which hit the television screens on 1 June 2016 begins with a man fixing his gold nose ring. Following this shot, various people with their own sense of fashion are shown on screen including a girl with boxing gloves, plus size models, men wearing dhoti pants, men wearing skin fit T-Shirts, girls with rainbow painted eyelashes, men and women with bindis decorating their eyes in different ways and the rest. The background music is a mix of a contemporary Indian song with a modern remix along with a voice that says ‘I am not a match, I am not a catch. Your mom won’t call me suitable.’ and ‘You don’t have to call me pretty, You don’t get to call me ugly.’ The TVC ends with the strong ‘Jabong.com - BE YOU’ caption
VERDICT: Catch
VERDICT: Miss
With growing urbanization, maintaining work-life balance is one of the significant challenges. Surf Excel has tried to target this particular aspect of Indian family life by integrating ‘value building among children’ into their brand positioning. The brand’s partners, Smile foundation & Helpage India, which will enable kids to share celebrations, sports kits, enhance the ecosystem the ad campaign is trying to create. The progression from ‘Daag achche hai’ is evident which attempts to say that if kids get dirty in the act of doing good, then dirt is good. To sum up, Markathon believes Surf Excel has taken the right step forward with their ‘#ReadyForLife’ ad campaign.
Markathon believes that even though the advertisement tries to convey a very strong message of every person being unique and using fashion to depict themselves truly out to the world, the TVC ends being more of a depiction of rebellion. The idea is to connect with the youth of the country. However the TVC misses out in aptly implementing and showcasing the thought behind the TVC. Markathon believes that a subtle description would have been much better recieved by the audience. With online fashion retail trying newer ideas to connect with audience, Markathon believes Jabong could have really used its well known ‘BE YOU’ campaign to entice its audience.
MARKATHON
17
IIM Shillong
brand story
june 2016
Brand Story DAKSH BHAGAT | IIM Shillong
T
humsUp, also known as the national cola of India, has emerged as one of the most resilient brands of Indian origin tracing its roots back to the 1970s. The brand faced several challenges such as change in ownership, plans of discontinuation, stiff competition, etc, but it has still been able to capture the largest market share in the Indian cola market. While many other companies pump loads of money in order to their products attain iconic status, ThumsUp has been able to do that with minimal fanfare. It turned out to be the brand that refused to die. Let’s look at what is it that has kept the ‘Toofani drink’ alive and going. ThumsUp was introduced in 1977 as the flagship product by a company called Parle Agro that aimed at filling the gap created by the unanticipated exit of Coca-Cola from the Indian market. During that period, many companies like IBM, Coca-Cola etc were asked to exit as a consequence of the introduction of Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) which demanded them to reduce their equity stake to 40% in their technical and administrative units. The critical strength in case of any soft drink industry is the network of bottlers and the various distribution channels, made available to a brand. The major bottlers for Coke were Chauhan brothers of Parle in Western India and Sardar Charanjit Singh and his company, Pure drinks in the North. When Coca-Cola left, they decided to enter the industry with their own bottled drinks. While Parle introduced ThumsUp alongside its other brands Limca and Goldspot, Pure drinks launched Campa Cola. ThumsUp came up with its first of a kind lifestyle oriented campaign with the line “Happy days are here again”, promising the customers, the unique refreshing taste of Cola back in their lives. It was launched with a logo showing a red Thumbs Up hand gesture with a slanted white typeface, while the name was intentionally misspelled owing to the directive of the food laws stating that an FMCG product name can’t be a word listed in the dictionary. ThumsUp’s taste profile resonated well with the palette of the Indian consumers which has been developed around spicy flavours. In contrast to Coke, which was prepared on a lemon base, ThumsUp was prepared on an orange base and was much more tangier and fizzier. It clearly became the market leader in the Cola industry in India, and used all sorts of promotional activities that a Cola drink would do such as sponsoring cricket matches, building associations with music, etc and tried everything possible to reinforce the aspirational, young, lifestyle image and tried making cola a normal part of
MARKATHON
eating out. One of the campaigns of those times, used the tagline – “Food, friends and Thums Up” and showed Thums Up being enjoyed with typical Indian snacks like samosas and dosas and surpassing all the local competitors such as Double Seven, Duke’s McDowell’s Crush and Double Cola, amongst others. For many years, ThumsUp faced no competition from any of the international brands and was growing significantly. The first threat was felt when Pepsi entered the Indian market in the year 1989. The launch of Pepsi was marked by the presence of Juhi Chawla and Remo Fernandes, in order to create an impression of a new generation platform strongly inclined towards the music and entertainment industry. In response, ThumsUp fought back on all possible fronts, advertising spends, sponsorships and even an interesting change in its bottle size! What changed things and built the long term foundation for ThumsUp was the courage to stake out a clear turf for the brand that went beyond just better and more glamorous lifestyle advertising. The platform was built on the basic product characteristic of ThumsUp, which it had greater fizziness and was less sweet than Pepsi. Things were all good until Coca-Cola re-entered the Indian market and purchased ThumsUp from Parle. Coca-Cola attempted a flawed strategy, wherein it literally tried to kill ThumsUp, only to realize later that this move rather benefitted Pepsi more than it would benefit Coke ever. Therefore, Coke decided to use ThumsUp in order to ambush Pepsi, which became a legendary step in the cola markets. In the year 2000, ThumsUp used a reversal of the Taste test used by Pepsi to challenge the latter. This was a successful move as it indicated that people actually preferred the taste of ThumsUp between and were actually able to differentiate it as being the stronger one. ThumsUp has always been associated to celebrities like Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan, owing to their macho personality, positioning itself as the drink for youth who want to be treated as adults. The latest ‘taste the thunder’ jingle has already arisen a lot of thrill in people who thrive for courage, adventure and zeal. It is a perfect example of a brand success amidst all the odds being against it.
18
IIM Shillong
fun corner
june 2016
AKSHAY SETH IIM Shillong
MARKATHON
19
IIM Shillong
social media day
june 2016
We celebrated Social Media Day by reminiscing the good old advertisements of yesteryears. Take a look here
MARKATHON
20
IIM Shillong
digi-tally
june 2016
Our Facebook page has been buzzing all month. Check out some of our posts here!
MARKATHON
21
IIM Shillong
digi-tally
june 2016
MARKATHON
22
IIM Shillong
digi-tally
june 2016
https://www.facebook.com/markathon.iims/
https://twitter.com/Markathon
https://in.linkedin.com/in/markathon
http://iims-markathon.blogspot.in/
www.issuu.com/markathon
Articles are invited
“Best Article”: Nagashree V. & Nagapriya V. | Christ University & Leadics They receive a cash prize of Rs.1000 & a letter of appreciation We are inviting articles from all the B-schools of India. The articles can be absolutely anything related to the world of marketing but it should be an original work that is not published elsewhere. The articles can be specific to the regular sections of Markathon which includes: •Perspective: Articles related to development of latest trends in marketing arena. •Productolysis: Analysis of a product from the point of view of marketing. •Strategic Analysis: A complete analysis of marketing strategy of any company or an event. Apart from above, out of the box views related to marketing are also welcome. The best entry will receive a letter of appreciation and a cash prize of Rs 1000/-. The format of the file should be MS Word doc/docx. The last date of receiving all entries is 10th July, 2016. Please send your entries marked as <ARTICLE NAME>_<SENDERS’ NAME(S)>_<INSTITUTE> to markathon.iims@gmail.com.
MARKATHON
23
IIM Shillong