AaramShop - digital marketing solution for CPG.

Rapid change in technologies and way the consumer interacts with and consumes media using various technologies has had a profound impact on the way brands use communication & marketing tools. However, this is just the start. 

Brands will need to re-think their current strategies and would need to augment their current brand marketing strategies with web, social networks, mobile & whatever else comes along the way. 

Delivering a seamless and an integrated experience across all consumer touch points represents a tremendous change, challenge and opportunity. 

Brands will need to adopt their marketing to being relevant locally. They will have to think more broadly in terms of opportunities for a given brand or store format and more narrowly in terms of consumer needs in different communities or groups of consumers. 

The biggest challenge is for brand thinking to become channel agnostic. The transformation of where shoppers are touching your brand – from how they research you, how they buy the brand, whether it is brick and mortar, mobile based commerce, web based commerce, social network commerce – means you need to have the capacity to ship your product from anywhere to anywhere as a true multi channel retailer. 

That’s where AaramShop intents to offer a solution rather than advice – as a hybrid retail platform, it will enable FMCG / CPG brands to be present across the consumers path-to-purchase and encourage an effortless purchase at any of the touch-points.

This seamless inter-operatability between channels is what will allow shoppers to purchase brands irrespective of where they are.

Related articles

• Enabling Social Shopping on AaramShop

Wikiwisdom.

I am smart because of wikipedia and wikipedia is smart because of me (and people like me) - welcome to the smart world of collective wisdom. 

Re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto after ages and realized that it has been bang-on over all these years and now more relevant to marketeers and brand owners than ever before as the networks have got much better organized over time.

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Commercializing a disaster - the Youtube & CBS way.

The earthquake and the tsunami in Japan have thrown up heart retching images and videos of folks caught in the disaster suffering, loosing property, life and hope. 

The coverage of the disaster re-enforced two things;

1. Traditional news media is dead. The traditional field reporters are now completely replaced by the common men and women who are the real eyes and ears. In fact almost all the feed that runs on networks like CNN and BBC is from the social networks. And the newsprint – they are really of no use – they are just a dying habit. 

2. Commercial interests seems to have taken over the new media as much as the old media owners. It is an unfortunate though everyday practice to have the TV coverage of a disaster like the above  interrupted by TVCs. I always found the positioning of these TVCs strange from a “brand positioning” perspective (I have just seen someone’s home being washed away, now let me view a shampoo TVC). While I had come to expect this from the traditional media vehicles, I am very surprised that the new media owners, who otherwise follow all the virtues of social media, are unfortunately following the same strategy.

High on that list is Youtube (read Google) CBS Channel, which is putting up adverts at the start of all uploaded videos – making the viewing experience quite pathetic. 

And the viewer reaction has to be noted and of course respected.  Following were some of the reactions and you would notice that the highest rated comments are NEGATIVE;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj58NpanX3g&feature=related

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The modern trade vs The brands - the saga continues.

I read with a lot of interest the series of recent articles carried in Economic Times on the ongoing and perpetual battle between the brands at one end and the modern retailers on the other. It started a few days back with the news that Reckitt was keen on reduction of margins for the modern retail outlets (by about 2% or so).

It followed today with the news that Future Group is "cleaning out" Reckitt from it's outlets. 

What made it particularly interesting for me was that about 2 years back (thats when modern trade was really modern in India), I had a longish meeting with the then brand custodian of one of the Reckitt brands who was spending majority of her marketing funds on "creating"a category for her product at the modern trade. We discussed issues around eventual private labeling, shrinking margins, cost charged towards display,  lack of traditional trade focus etc. however, perceived higher and better quality of consumer engagement ensured that she stuck to her decision of pouring very serious monies in modern trade to create a category - irony was that the largest amount was on the Future Group. 

While modern trade currently represents only 5% of the FMCG trade in India, the writing on the wall is very clear - the FMCG brands will need to take a good hard look at their own shopper marketing strategies and step back to embrace the traditional grocer / kirana store.

If the brands don't - they will be constantly on the receiving end - today Reckitt got taken off the shelves, yesterday it was Frito-Lay and Kellogg's. Tomorrow who knows. 

Another example of AR

AR is the "engagement" which has long been missing in the digital marketing space, though, I am still to get conversion data to back the use.

ANDES TELETRANSPORTER

Part of the Cannes Promo Shortlist.

I thought the creative thinking on this was quite sharp and based on a simple yet universal insight on young men in bars vs their girl friends. Installing a teletransporter in a handful of bars would create enough buzz and engagement even amongst the folks who have not experienced it. 

The Cannes Re-look

Have shared my reactions to the various shortlisted entries at Cannes Promo Category, however, since there have been a number of requests for the entries to be on this blog, I am putting them up here along with my views.

Behavior transformation can be driven by fun activation.

I know that this is old and it is not really brand centric, however, this is a great example of how good activation can be the tool to transform behavior of the TG - here the TG lets go of the convenience to experience fun. 

Little or No Mobile Strategy in Most Companies

Image via Wikipedia

The above quote is part of the Foster Research, and it is bang on from the experience which I have had with most organizations.

"57 per cent of organisations either do not have, or are in early stage development, of a mobile strategy; 10 per cent have had a fully operational mobile strategy for less than a year; a third of firms have had a mobile strategy for more than a year."

With India turning into the largest cellphone market in the world (or the 2nd largest if you take out the duplicates :-)), it is indeed sad that there have been hardly any significant mobile brand campaigns. The mobile strategy seems all outdated as the pic above. 

The report offers a snapshot of where companies are in their mobile evolution. It notes that brands in media, travel, and financial services are the most likely to have the most mature mobile strategy. Mobile is seen as a way to increase customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, not generate direct revenues: 52 per cent of firms see increasing customer engagement as their number one mobile goal.

Please read the full report here.

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Wish you all a very happy Christmas!

Our super social life!!

Why Big Brands Are Dominating Social Media

In the pre-web days, unless you had a budget big enough for expensive mainstream ad vehicles, like TV, print or radio, it was hard to reach a significant audience with your message. Big marketers had a built-in advantage, and the big got bigger at the expense of the small. The emergence of the web, and especially social marketing, now means the highway to success now has many more "on ramps" for smaller companies.

So why is it, then, when we look at some of the most effective forms of social marketing, big marketers are vastly out-performing smaller ones?

Read the full report here.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

One of the most inspiring talks I have ever heard.

1. Why, 2. How and then 3.What

We spend the last two months, covering this aspect of emotional vs rational marketing methods in the new digital scenario - and then I come across this 19 minute talk which covers almost everything that we did in 2 days.

Recommend that all brand marketters listen in to Simon Sinek who has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?"

Implementing CRM

I loved this post and can relate very well to it. On too many occasions have encountered clients / brands in a big hurry to start the "effective use" of CRM without undertaking the rigorous set-up process. Read more about best practices on CRM here.

The future (& Present) of Advertising.

If you are in the business of Advertising or Marketing, this article is a must read. Danielle Sacks has got the state of the industry and the generic thinking spot on. Read the article here.

"The ad business became an assembly line as predictable as Henry Ford's. The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency's account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel -- radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV -- to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium -- and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made."

Social WAVE Report.

Universal McCann has has released their 5th Social WAVE report with almost 40,000 respondents globally. The report focus on how the growth in social media is opening avenues never seen before by brands, and show insights on how brands can look to use social to it’s maximum potential.

You can read more about it here or on slideshare.

Wave 5 the socialisation of brands - report

View more presentations from Thorsten Linz.

Statistics: The Growth Of Mobile Into 2011 | Digital Buzz Blog

Statistics: The Growth Of Mobile Into 2011 | Digital Buzz Blog

Very good read.

AR - another interesting example.

The humble "visiting / business card" can be made to amazing things. Here's a superb example of Augmented Reality, which brings a simple thing like a visiting card alive. 


I suggest you visit the site and take a print of the sign and then use it with your webcam on to "EXPERIENCE the introduction with the business card"