Consumer is still the king!

For all the advertising, brand promises and marketing budgets, if the marketers don't get their fundamentals right, their beloved brands are bound to get screwed in the long run. What marketers fail to understand is that just by spending zillions of dollars on advertising won't get them near to their targets. All the marketing efforts go in vain if the end consumer is not satisfied.

Few days back, I saw Aegon Religare Pension Plan's latest TV commercial. For all the clutter and undifferentiated offerings in the category, the brand actually took a very fresh and innovative approach. I immediately SMSed the customer care to get in touch with me, so impactful was the communication. Fifteen days down, nobody called me. The bubble got burst and I decided not to engage with the brand anymore.

A marketers' interaction with the consumer can be divided into three stages: Pre-Sale, Sale, Post-Sale. Unfortunately, the entire marketing thrust is on Pre-Sale and Sale and the Post -sale period is completely or partially ignored. Probably, the concept of Customer Lifetime value is not an exciting proposition for them. Just a lil bit of 'Hi-Hello' with the consumer after receiving the cheque from him could go a long way. After all, the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than the cost of a new customer acquired through referral by an existing customer.

Advertising Pfaff

A planner's point of view on advertising....

Freakout Virgins :)

Just saw this new Burger king campaign - Whoppervirgins (www.whoppervirgins.com) ...Simply mindblowing. Before this, Burger King had done another viral campaign- Whopperfreakouts (www.whopperfreakout.com) which was a huge hit within few days of its launch. Have a look.

Enjoy!

Adultdost vs Gajodhar

In this post, I have tried to analyse two virals that I came across this month. TataSky, in order to promote its Active Darshan pack, launched a viral microsite called as http://www.adultdost.com/.

Interesting...isn't it!! The reason why I found this interesting was due to two reasons:
1) For a company as traditional and conservative as Tata, associating itself with something which suggests a pornographic gateway was a bit (in fact a lot) risky.
2) Promoting the Active darshan pack by making use of a completely contrasting way from a content of view.

The moment I saw this viral, I immediately showed it to my colleagues and they passed it on further. Such impactful was the viral. Suddenly, the marketer inside me began to analyse the numbers involved with the viral. The making of the viral including the development and creative would have cost 20k at max. From the ROI perspective, I would rate this viral as one of the best that I have seen in recent times. Brilliant!

Another viral that I saw was Gajodhar (to promote http://www.oktatabyebye.com/) which was nothing but a spoof on Aamir Khan starrer 'Ghajini'. To be honest, the first few frames put me off completely and the reason - Webchutney. The moment I got to know that this was a Webchutney creation, I told to myself, 'Not again' :(

However, I continued watching the viral till I realized that I had once again wasted my precious 5 minutes on a stupid Webchutney viral.

There are tons of reasons for not liking this viral:
1) I have seen similar brainless, stupid virals before
2) Taking advantage of opportunity is fine but creative banckruptcy is not
3) I didn't bother to viral it!!!

Creating a viral just for the heck of it I believe is nothing but fooling around with clients money. Virals from a marketers point of view give a better ROI, however, in the long run, brand can't be sacrificed for ROI.