The Marketing Practice

On 14, December 2017, I attended a talk by Mr Vikas Gupta, co-founder of 9.9 media organized by TiE Chennai. Vikas has a rich marketing background and he was sharing his experience on working in the corporate world in the marketing area.

Nirma vs Surf vs Ariel

While he was working with Procter & Gamble, he was part of the team to promote Ariel washing powder, which they had adopted from a Japanese technology. Nirma and Surf were existing players and were spending heavily on the promotions. Below is the Nirma commercial, that was shared by Vikas.

To compete with the newcomer Nirma, Surf was promoting that nothing has been changed and Surf is good enough to make the clothes clean. Below is the ad that was used by Surf.

Ariel had a pricing issue, Ariel was priced at Rs 30 while the other two were not priced beyond Rs. 15. Ariel through their market research found that an average household buys both washing powder and washing bars and was spending Rs. 30 per month, the exact price Ariel was planning. Ariel’s value addition was the elimination of washing bars and the washing made easy as it involved soaking in the Ariel mixed water and just rubbing off the dirt in the collars and cuff. During the market research, the housewives, who warned Ariel executives that if they showed Ariel makes washing clothes very easy, they wouldn’t buy it. The reason was that they didn’t want to be seen as a lazy housewife who buys stuff to make works easier. So Ariel positioned itself as washing powder, which eliminates washing bar.

One of the audiences, who earlier worked in the sales channel, asked if Ariel initially positioned itself as a replacement for washing bars, why it later introduced washing bars, which actually made selling. Vikas said that even though he left P&G, by then, he kind of hypothesized that are a segment of customers, who are very keen on using washing bars and Ariel had to cater to that market as well. He was saying that a brand should be flexible enough to cater the customer needs.

Key Learning from the case study

• Put yourselves in customer’s shoes
• Look your offering from your customer’s perspective
• Find the intangible needs of the customer
• Never have ego in marketing

Hightlighting the price – Coca – Cola vs L’Oreal Paris

The Rs. 5 Coke

Coca-Cola had positioned its price very strongly at Rs. 5 through the below commercial, where the shopkeeper was charging Rs. 6 and Amir Khan makes him give back Re.1 to the consumer.

However, the next year, the sugar prices had gone up and the price had to be increased to Rs. 6, facing a huge backlash. Coke had no option but wait for the people’s memory to fade away.

The L’Oreal Paris way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhMUUiVCDeo

Both the ads had an information on the prices, but L’Oreal explained about the benefits, while Coke highlighted only the price.

Key Learnings

• When highlighting the price, highlighting the benefits may take a take a backseat, so it is important to couple the benefits with the price
• The emotional attachments attached to the product should be highlighted

The Thumps up Way

When Coke wanted to position Thumps Up, they found that Pepsi had positioned itself as brand attractive to the kids and Thumps wanted to position itself as macho figure targeting the youth. So they came out with the following commercial which Vikas claims, has led to the downfall of Pepsi sales and increased the sales of Thump up. Later they had to take off the commercial due to some ethical complaints from Pepsi Co.

Before they actually launched this ad publicly, they had a focus group discussion where the participants were college students who were voluntarily sating they were a fan of Pepsi. They showed this ad to them. After the focus group, 8 out of 10 in all the focus groups said they love Thumps up and felt ashamed to be a fan of Pepsi.

When thums up wanted to project themselves to youth, they were advertising in prime television channels, which were costing a lot. They wanted a cost-effective TV advertising campaign and they reduced their number of advertisements in prime channels and aired advertisements in niche channels like discovery, National Geographic, MTV, which were widely seen by the target audience. The cost of advertising in all the niche channels was same as the cost advertising in one prime channel. They were able to attract the target audience, get brand recognition and brand recall as they advertised in both prime and niche channels. Their advertising costs were also effective

Key Learnings

• Reduce cost and increase profitability at the same time.
• Identifying the right customer helps in achieving this.

The curious case of Vicks

In a particular year, the sales of Vicks tablets had grown 10 times more than that was achieved in the previous year and the entire team was claiming credits and looking for promotions and salary hikes. But the MD, while appreciating the team, had was fishy about the 10x growth and asked the team to investigate. On investigation, it was found that the growth had skyrocketed in Andhra Pradesh and the reason was a belief that taking a Vicks tablet before consuming alcohol would help in getting high very quickly. This was the sole reason for the huge sales in that region.

Key Learnings

• Find out the actual reason for a success or failure, especially when successful.
• Had Vicks not studied the actual reason, they would have made projections for the whole country for the next year based on the success and would have failed miserably.

Digit.in

Vikas runs an online portal called, digit.in, which reviews mobile phones and related accessories. This space has a huge competition and Vikas claimed that they had the highest engagement in the social media and 40 million unique visitors per month. To grow and overtake competition, digit.in has forayed into several vernacular languages as the majority of the Internet consumption is from the vernacular audience who could not read or understand English.

Overall, the talk was very insightful and helped the entrepreneurs to plan their marketing strategies.