Starting this weekend, Bookmarked, a new weekly segment, will bring to you excerpts from the latest books that delve into every possible facet of business, introducing you to one new idea every week.
This week, we will be looking at Made In Future by Prashant Kumar published by the Penguin Portfolio. Also, do not forget to read right till the end as there is a list of newcomers in the business section of Amazon’s bookshelf waiting to greet you.
With evolving technology and constantly shifting digital and media landscapes, the idea of what sells and how brands sell it have seen a sea of change. In his new book Made In Future, author Prashant Kumar, a seasoned advertising and marketing professional, presents a bird’s-eye view of the developing marketing story. “This book is a humble effort to put in place some building blocks of this new marketing, going beyond both shallow digital evangelism and cynical traditional naysaying. The truth, after all, is in the deep and more often than not in the middle,” says Kumar.
Here is an excerpt -
About 90 years ago, Henry Ford, who had just rolled out the Model T, quipped that you could have any colour you wanted, as long as it was black. Model T was for everyone, and it was black, take it or leave it. However, somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, wise marketers discovered that in order for a brand to be successful, it couldn’t be all things to all people. Just as it is for a normal person, so, too, for a brand, it’s important to be known for something, and depending on what that is, it would appeal to one segment of people more than the other. About half a century after Ford’s famous quote, the concept of segmentation was discovered, followed within a decade by the concept of brand positioning. The two concepts have been carved into the cornerstone of marketing for half a century. But today they lie challenged at the altar of technology and data.
The truth is, different people may buy a product for different reasons, and they may choose or not choose one brand over another for reasons that may be very personal to each. So, while some people may prefer a Mercedes-Benz over a BMW because it looks more elegant, another set may prefer the brand because they perceive it to be more reliable; for a third set, it may remind them of childhood memories of rich people; and for yet another, it may stand for people who are generous and kind, for example, and so on. Most of the time, the reason people choose one brand over another has less to do with what the brand offers and more to do with their own unique context, needs, wants and influences in life. And just as there may be a huge number of drivers of preference for a brand, when aggregated over a population, there may be a huge number of barriers to a brand.
In the era of mass marketing, the dominant wisdom was to look at the marketplace, analyse who is good at what, then find a gap in the market where you could have an advantage among a large enough segment of people and then focus there to build your shares. However, this way of thinking was based on a simplified view of the market suited for the times. For instance, when marketers mapped the competitors, they basically focused on certain associated perceptions generally shared by people—sort of a lowest common denominator.
This airbrushed the greater truth that each individual was unique and even in a market with a limited number of choices, there were scores of constituents with varying specific needs and perceptions within the larger picture, many of which mattered a lot more than the lowest common denominator.
To Each Their Own
In fact, even in the mass era, brands that involved in-person selling always tended to be many things at once, with their mass image projection often quite broad in order to allow for in-person customization. In categories such as life insurance, wealth management, properties and B2B selling, brands would always seek to cater to individual wants that could be highly diverse. A smaller role for mass media allowed one to avoid inefficient generalizations.
One of the great promises of the dot-com revolution was to minimize wastage in marketing. Evangelists, dot-com entrepreneurs and their groupie media persons interminably repeated John Wanamaker’s famous quote about advertising wastage promising to fix the wasteful part. This promise still is the single largest driver behind the rise of the great media giants of our times—Google and Facebook. Also, because of the lean-forward nature of consumption in the new media and dropping attention spans of the new generations, quality user experience required one to be a lot more relevant and hence, less annoying. This made the spray-and-pray approach of mass-segment targeting even less tenable. Players like Google punished businesses with higher prices by lowering their Google-quality scores for being irrelevant.
The dot-com promise is premised on the fact that digital media allows for individual traceability and records the data foreach and every activity of the surfer. It means that a brand can talk to an individual one on one. Also, since by looking at this data, there is a lot a brand can know about the person, a brand can mostly reach out to those who are real prospects— who it believes have a fair chance of buying it. In addition, with the information it has on the prospect, it can customize its message to improve its chances of converting the prospect into a customer.
In that sense, the real big opportunity that digital brought is not just in terms of minimizing media wastage (which is less relevant if you are truly a mass brand—say Coca Cola, since you anyway want a huge number of people to see your message), but in being able to micro-target with highly relevant messaging. So, if someone is googling ‘Beat Saber’ (an extremely popular VR game), you know there is a good chance he or she (or they) may be a prospect for a VR goggle ad. Or, if someone has been watching videos about ‘pregnancy rashes’, you know she might be an apt target for a premium formula milk for would-be mothers that uniquely helps with allergies. In fact, if her location is an affluent locality, that improves the odds that she can even afford it. This hyper-relevant micro-messaging is the real holy grail of digital media. This is the conceptual justification for almost half a trillion dollars in digital spends each year and growing by leaps and bounds. Yet, it’s also an area that is deeply underleveraged and in fact, often forgotten in the marketing ecosystem today soon after the hype and hyperbole of the digital sales pitches are over.
(Excerpted from Made in Future - A Story of Marketing, Media, and Content for our Times By Prashant Kumar, published by Penguin Portfolio, May 2022)
New Books On The Block
Take a look at what’s new in the business section of Amazon’s bookshelf
Ujwal Kalra and ShobhitShubhankar
Packed with insights from 15 top entrepreneurs in the country, the book talks about what it takes to build and grow a successful start-up.
Tony Fadell
After seeing his fair share of failures, the author, inventor of the iPod and iPhone, pens down his views on what works and what needs to be done to build iconic products.
Tripp Mickle
What went down at Apple after the passing away of boss Steve Jobs? The author tries to answer that question through employee interviews, research and more.
Shiv Shivakumar
Through the words of some well-known names in the business world, the author gives the readers a new perspective on management.
Nick Maggiulli
The author, a finance blogger, tries to answer the tough personal finance questions while showing his readers how to build wealth efficiently.
