Why Are The Basics Of Marketing So Complicated In India?
Digital marketing options have muddied the marketing waters.
Branding has become about design. Advertising and marketing have become interchangeable terms. The decades-old practice of focus groups remains the most prevalent form of effective user research in the digital era.
When everything is seemingly accessible at your fingertips — user demographics, interest buckets, online shopping history, and much more — it’s easy to stop innovating beyond simple data manipulation.
However, no amount of data science and data contextualisation is ever going to be able to disrupt the basic principle of branding. This has been proven time and again since 2016, when the Jio Revolution brought the Internet to regional India.
Before we can dive into how going back to basics is the best marketing strategy for regional India, we have to first define what those basics are.
The Basic Principle Of Branding
When Mel Karmazin, then President of Viacom, walked into a meeting with Google in 2003 and claimed that programmatic advertising was “f*cking with the magic,” he was only half joking.
The invention of view-based and impression-based advertising was just the market balancing out. No longer could advertising agencies charge what they wanted, without quantifiable results-based comparisons with competitors.
And, yet, advertising is not just “magic.” Advertising is a carefully cultivated skill that is absolutely essential to the growth of large companies — whether you are B2C, B2B, D2C or any other combination of acronyms.
Most companies find themselves in one of two situations; either they are in a competitive market and need to stand out, or they are filling a market gap and need to educate their potential customers.
Both situations have the same solution (through different strategies, obviously); branding. Branding is the glue between customers and businesses. Branding is the reason why a customer gives you business over your competitor.
The basic principle of branding is to create an emotional connection between your product or service, and your customer.
This principle is proven to be the most effective in fulfilling the two main goals of marketing; brand recall and brand acceptance. Customers choose products and services that they can remember, and that they believe are good.
Marketing vs. Advertising vs. Performance vs. Branding vs. Design vs…
There are a lot of terms thrown around the marketing departments of the world. Due to the increasing complexity of the jargon, and the seemingly increasing simplicity of digital marketing, a lot of these terms blend together.
Marketing and advertising are synonyms. Branding and design are synonyms. Confusingly, branding and marketing are also synonyms, but advertising and design are different. Performance and persuasion are used interchangeably, but are rarely mentioned outside the context of digital marketing.
Stick with me as I lay out a quick glossary of what each of these terms mean.
Marketing — The big daddy of the industry, marketing is the overall term covering most of the following functions. Marketing is the entire department focussed on product-market fit, from user research & market research to design to branding to advertising and even pricing. What is your product, where does it fit in the market, who will buy it, why will they buy it, how do you reach potential customers, how do you appeal to these potential customers, how do you price your offering, and many more questions come under the umbrella of marketing.
User Research — Who are your potential customers? Don’t confuse this with potential market size. A bank’s potential market size for depositors is everyone whose monthly salary is large enough to save a percentage. A bank’s potential customers are those living in clusters where it makes financial sense to set up up a bank outlet, and to educate the residents of why banking facilities are an advantage. Obviously, this was altered by the policy of demonetisation in 2016!
Market Research — Market research is essentially the act of understanding how your offering differs from your competitors. What makes it stand out, and thus, how do you need to change your price point to attract the right customers. Good market research is focussed on coming up with the right price point for customers, not on internal costs.
Branding — Once user research and market research is complete, marketing teams must decide what message and emotion to associate with the company and/or offering. Nike’s Just Do It is iconic for its simplified call to action (no pun intended!).
Design — Once the brand message is decided, it must be created. From product design to advertisement design and press releases, everything must be geared towards promoting the same message to the customer. Design entails the unified management of this message creation.
Advertising — Once the message is created, it must be shown to customers. Advertising is simply the distribution of a message. Digital advertising entails the distribution of a message via an online method such as Lokal (had to have at least one call out to my job!)
Persuasion — As described in a previous article about branding versus persuasion, marketing comes in two main forms. Branding is about building a connection with the customer, and creating demand for your offering. Persuasion is about driving sales after demand has been created. Persuasion marketing can include coupon offers or credit card discounts on particular items.
Performance — Performance marketing is simply persuasion marketing that can be quantifiably tracked. Most performance marketing stems from the Google’s attempt to “f*ck with the magic.” View-based and impression-based marketing prices on search engines and social media sites are the most popular form of performance marketing.
Essentially, the flow of marketing is simple. Research leads to brand position, which leads to messaging design, which is distributed through advertising platforms. The effect of the adverts will lead to further research, and the cycle starts again.
Within this cycle, you can choose to pursue brand or persuasion marketing, depending on whether you are looking to establish demand, or exploit established demand, for your offering. Most large corporations run both brand and persuasion marketing simultaneously.
What About Regional India?
There are a few myths about regional India that bare repeating, purely to put to rest.
They are cheap and only look at value for money offerings. If this were true, products such as lux soaps would not exist. It is just that their version of luxury is not a Cartier watch, but a slightly more expensive essential.
Tier-III and Tier-IV India are open marketplaces ripe with opportunity. Again, if this were true, the bigger existing players would have already moved in. The reason fin-tech opportunities exist is because access to the Internet means that loss-making storefront banks were no longer needed. Anyone that can replicate the service online has an opportunity, and no major bank had that capability in 2016.
They will buy anything online that is discounted. If that were true, online electronics sales would be taking over. However, as we’ve noticed at Lokal, users check online prices, then go talk to their local vendor to buy the same product the cheapest the vendor can afford (which is often more than the online e-commerce site!).
They don’t trust the Internet. Okay, this one is not really a stereotype — but it is true. If you want to sell something to regional India, you need to overcome their distrust of the Internet. There’s two ways to do it — either build credibility yourself, or lean on the credibility of others.
Are you unsure of how to build credibility for yourself in regional India? Please reach out to me at tarutr@getlokalapp.com, or at malhotratarutr@gmail.com.
If you are uncomfortable talking to me over email, you can DM me on my LinkedIn page or my Twitter profile. I would love to talk to each and every one of you personally!
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